Recent TTRPG posts of interest

Some recent links from around the 'web

DM David's history of the astral and ethereal planes - https://dmdavid.com/tag/the-astral-and-ethereal-went-from-interchangable-to-overcomplicated-how-can-dd-fix-them/

The Angry GM rants on attrition - https://theangrygm.com/you-dont-get-attrition/

The Monsters Know What They're Doing re spelljammer tactics - https://www.themonstersknow.com/tactical-considerations-in-spelljammer/

d4 Caltrops lists hints for magic treasures - https://blog.d4caltrops.com/2023/05/d100-tells-for-magical-treasures.html

Papierundspiele on distances in original D&D, using inches as derived from wargames - https://papierundspiele.com/2023/05/19/ranges-in-yards-or-feet/

The Alexandrian's latest on megadungeoneering - https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/49541/roleplaying-games/re-running-the-megadungeon-part-3-the-players-take-charge

 

Encumbrance: Shifting the Burden

Character encumbrance has long been a hot-button issue in tabletop game design circles. Part of this is because in our time-starved modern lives, players have a bias against bookkeeping of any kind.

Another part, I suspect, is mis-calibration of stakes (the short version: tracking encumbrance necessitates genuine character choices and can result in more interactions with the game world, e.g., through hiring and managing porters and mule drivers, rewarding players for considering ship passage for long journeys, and so forth. But it doesn't do much more than that).

Once you're past the 'should we even bother to track encumbrance?' stage - and to be clear, I think tracking encumbrance benefits all but the most rules-light of roleplaying games - you come to the 'how do we track encumbrance?' stage. And there are, as far as I can tell, two main approaches here.

The first, default, approach is to use weight, summing the weight of each item carried and comparing the total to rules for maximum weight or weight penalties. It's simple, but it's a lot of (also simple) maths, which can be a deal-breaker for some even in the age of omnipresent computing. It also doesn't model bulk, and requires the GM to constantly adjudicate the exact weights of new items.

The second approach is to use abstract item slots, often as a proxy for both weight and bulk. You can carry N significant items, where 'significant' is loosely defined, and N is fixed or character-dependent. Most frameworks further prescribe that particularly heavy items take multiple slots, light ones stack into a slot, and so on. This is both easy and plausible, and requires less GM adjudication.

I think the second approach is better, but that there's something fundamentally missing.

An aside about bulk

Consider a really long wooden plank, say a three-metre-long 'two by four'.

• A bundle of five such planks would weigh about 15 kg, and you would struggle to perform basic movements while carrying them. Forget being able to quickly turn or catch a ball, let alone vault a fence or climb a wall.
• Compare a mail hauberk and coif, which also weighs about 15 kg. With the right belt and straps to support its weight, you barely feel that weight. It makes almost no difference to movement.
• Per the the US Army Field Manual (1990), the recommended load for an American soldier (who we might consider as our 'fit and healthy character' default) is 31 kg (69 lbs), including what they're wearing. In practise, this rises to more than 50 kg (110 lbs) in the field. So it should be trivial to wear 15 kg of mail armour; at the same time, it should be extremely awkward to carry 15 kg of long planks, and make many tasks essentially impossible.
  
• Lots of tabletop games can involve carrying awkwardly shaped items from time to time: polearms, long guns, ladders, wizard staves, downed comrades, big coils of rope, small creatures, the occasional piece of looted furniture.

So bulk has to be a factor. Why doesn't the abstract-item-slot work, then?

Encumbrance means two things

When we're talking about character encumbrance, we mean two different things.

• Over long treks, encumbrance is how much weight and bulk your character can carry without becoming fatigued.
• In short bursts of skilled exertion (like fights, climbing, avoiding traps, and so on), encumbrance is how much weight and bulk your character can carry without being impeded.
• (There's also the separate question of how much you can lift and carry over short distances/periods if you really have to, but games usually do include specific rules for this)

Long/strength/fatigue encumbrance and short/quick/impede encumbrance are very, very different.

Over long distances (say a day of walking), a moderately robust character can carry 15 kg in a backpack and another 5 kg of clothing and miscellanea, no problem. The exact same character, in a fight or keeping their footing on a ship in a storm or otherwise needing snappy movements, ought to be severely disadvantaged compared to one not wearing the backpack. And disadvantaged compared to a character wearing that 15 kg as armour.

Ask a HEMA practitioner about fighting while carrying something big enough to change your centre of balance (especially if it raises it or moves it laterally away; a backpack does both). It's a nightmare to deal with!

When it comes to both long/strength/fatigue and short/quick/impede encumbrance, the difference between your typical fantasy character and a medieval knight on campaign is that the knight has a coterie of dedicated servants to haul things around for him: pages, squires, swains, manservants, sarjents, standard-bearers, chamber servants, etc. Not to mention having a warhorse, a riding horse, and a packhorse, as well as possibly some pack mules or donkeys. The fantasy character has the same amount of stuff and, in most games, carries it personally and fights with it on their back.

So a game needs two subsystems: one to deal with how much you can carry over long distances before tiring (long/strength/fatigue encumbrance), and one to deal with the impact of equipment load on tasks that requires speed, agility, balance, and deftness (short/quick/impede encumbrance).

 

Do you really need both subsystems?

Most games will let you have a backpack (or the fictional fantasy medieval equivalent of a modern backpack) that you can remove and drop when you need to move quickly. A common house rule in practice is to go as far as to assume that you always drop your heavy load in appropriate circumstances with no words exchanged(!), and because of that, you're never penalised by it(!)

But there can be situations where that's not possible, because you're flying or carrying an unconscious comrade or suddenly ambushed or whatever. Those situations aren't even that uncommon. So there's a need for rules to cover them.

Also, in general, shrugging off a load takes time, even if you have a fictional fantasy medieval equivalent of a modern backpack, and that's time you could otherwise spend acting.

Also also, dropping your gear creates a new target (unattended equipment).

Also also also, there are some common tasks which I suspect are being done 'fully loaded' even though they really should be affected by short/quick/impede encumbrance: sneaking, searching for traps, defending against surprise attacks, fleeing, posturing against a possible aggressor, etc.

 

What I'd like to see, part one: Bulk vs weight

Awkwardly sized and shaped objects need something to set them apart from heavy objects, even if it's just a multiplier to their perceived weight (2x effective weight for awkward objects, 3x for really awkward objects?). This certainly applies to quick, deft movements, but arguably also to carrying things long distances, so the multiplier could be a general one: bulky and awkward items just 'count as' a greater number of items.

15 kg of worn mail is trivial in almost every circumstance. 15 kg of long planks (or bundled spears, or sacks of coins) is all of your attention and all of your arm strength, all of the time, and a sacrifice of your ability to do anything by reflex other than 'dropping these heavy objects'.

 

What I'd like to see, part two: A separate subsystem

Encumbrance systems in the current zeitgeist, such as abstract items slots, work really well for the question of endurance, i.e., for long/strength/fatigue encumbrance. But those systems range from 'far too generous' to 'entirely inadequate' when it comes to impeding movements during short bursts of skilled exertion, i.e., short/quick/impede encumbrance.

Carrying more than you can physically bear should make you exhausted and sore over hours of travel, i.e., convey a physical malus. And carrying enough to impede you should make you clumsy and slow at those moments when you need to be deft and fast, i.e., convey a malus to many task outcomes (such as a penalty to certain dice rolls).

From the point of view of verisimilitude, a character ought to be stacking more and more penalties the more weight and bulk they have on them. In the interests of smooth gameplay, though, you're probably looking at having a few 'bands' of acceptability or detriment, where the 'default' in a fantasy setting would comprise armour, a couple of weapons, and a bandolier or belt pouches; you would then adjust based on deviations from that norm:

• You should get a hefty bonus on most physical tasks if stripped down to basic clothing (so a rogue takes just their clothing and a small pouch of tools to climb roofs and break into houses; a fighter best shows off their prowess when fencing with sword, buckler, and jerkin, but it's not in practise it's not worth the risk of going completely unarmoured).
• You should get substantial penalties if you're carrying even a portion of your full 'travel load' (bedroll, a week's food, toolbox, belt lantern, backup weapon, bow, spellbooks, and so on).

And crucially, the maximum load a character can comfortably carry long distances must be far higher than the maximum load which they can carry while moving in quick bursts without penalty.

 

Consequences

I haven't tried playing like this, but I'd like to.

The consequences I predict are a greater sense of verisimilitude, an amount of grumbling from players commensurate with their not getting any in-world benefit out of it, greater attention to base camps and supply caches, less 'we buy one of everything' at the first treasure windfall, much more hiring of hirelings, and a rise in value of extradimensional spaces, levitation, all-terrain vehicles, and other utility gear.

 

Addendum 27/05/2023: The above of course applies to traditional roleplaying frameworks. I think that in games which veer away from "roleplaying game" and into "collaborative storytelling", rules like "you are carrying whatever is dramatically appropriate, if reasonable" (or more structured variants of that) are perfectly good solutions.

Scattered thoughts on old-school play

I'm always interested to read about the roots of the modern tabletop roleplaying game. It usually leaves me speculating how things might be if history's quirks had tilted in a different direction.

    QUESTIONS

What would modern games look like if Arneson hadn't been developing Civil War / Napoleonic naval wargames and thinking about ironclad ships having an armour 'class' against guns? A player being upset about their character getting one-shot by a troll gave us the concept of 'multiple hits', and thence the nearly-ubiquitous 'hit points'. Even there, except for another quirk of history, the default might still be the original Arnesonian system where hit points are fixed and characters only get harder to hit. Or maybe we'd have wound systems, something GURPSy, something WFRPy, who knows?

If Braunstein games hadn't been deemed a 'failure' by their creator, would tabletop roleplaying have sprung from there? If Kriegsspiel had become a big civilian fad, would tabletop roleplaying have developed from that, a hundred years early? If 'player character' wasn't a term of art, would it be 'avatar' or 'incarnation' or 'paper man' or 'general'?

If the Outdoor Survival board game hadn't come out when it did, would early gaming have used hexes at all? Would we expect gritty cartography and actual navigation, wargames style? Or a higher level of abstraction than hexes?

What if we didn't have Hammer Horror imports, and a ton of Christian motifs over a paper-thin veneer of polytheism? What if Gygax hadn't changed the "curate" class to "cleric", or "cunning" to "wisdom"? What if the thief hadn't become the fourth character archetype?

    THINGS LEFT BY THE WAYSIDE

It used to be that fighty characters (fighting men) developed superpowers that were social in nature. There was just SO MUCH advanced play based on retainers, hirelings, kingdoms, armies, that is unusual in modern tabletop gaming. In fact, a brief rant:

For the last few decades the big roleplaying games have made combat the focus of play at all levels, and have usually made combat mechanically complex, so it takes a lot of time at the table. The consequence is an imperative that all characters be equally good at fighting. I'm sad to see the fighting man's initial niche gone. I'm sadder to see their higher-level niche - all the charismatic leader stuff - wither on the vine too. Did players stop enjoying that? Did GMs not enjoy running that? Or was this change led by designers dropping frameworks that seemed non-essential to play?

So now any default fantasy game is full of mages who are exactly as good in a fight as the mundane fighting specialists, and then have a wealth of straight-up magical powers and things to do outside fights. (I realise this is not a modern complaint.)

There are some weird dynamics in (many) modern games. A lot of the big, sweeping differences between character types have disappeared. In the big name games, an enormous ecosystem of small quirky differences have sprung up, alongside a focus on the character rather than the experience of play (some people have some derogatory names for this). Your typical character can do a dozen well-defined fiddly little magical/mystical/supernatural things from backgrounds and races and classes and feats and archetypes and so on. I play a few games and hear about many more, and almost never encounter a mundane fighter. Certainly not one whose shtick is military command. Funny to think that the 'Loyalty Trait' was an integral numeric score in original D&D.

So was 'Ego', come to think of it. Magic intelligent weapons were a big deal. Mostly swords. Swords with alignment, swords that cast spells, swords that spoke more languages than anyone else in the party. Swords with more (or more meaningful) tiers of intelligence than player characters had.

Everything is subject to fashion, I suppose. Reference frames shift. Standard modes of play shift. What was 'The Dungeon' is now 'A Megadungeon', and not just because a roomful of monsters is ten times more likely to be approached with combat (which in turn takes ten times longer).

    SEEMINGLY MISPLACED FOCUS

I am puzzled by a trend in modern roleplaying games publishing. I keep seeing them focus and double down on two things that are very specifically NOT a roleplaying game's forte:

1. In many games, writers try to make narrative, story arcs, linear plots, character beats, etc, a huge deal. This is an import from non-interactive media that has never made sense to me. It's harder to have them than not have them, and there's no payoff for that: it makes things less fun for the players (in my experience, at least). People have complained about 'the railroad' for close to fifty years yet I still see it loom in every other published adventure.
2. Many tabletop game designs develop complex mechanics and dice maths, the kind that a computer would handle really well, and then focus on squeezing and contorting all roleplaying situations to have the GM use those mechanics and math (exactly like a computer game would do). Arguably the tabletop role-playing game's only advantage over other games and interactive media is that it is fundamentally adjudicated by a human referee, yet there seems to be so much drive towards treating GMs like machines. Maybe I've had bad luck with what I've been reading lately.

    SETTINGS

Whenever I read old-school play notes I'm struck by how much of a classic medieval-Renaissance-saga feel they tend to have. Not in the sense of being actually authentic to any particular time period, but they don't seem laden with modern sensibilities that I see baked into games and settings.

Modern defaults for a fantasy setting which I regularly notice:

• There is a market economy, everyone uses coins, and every settlement has shops selling many ready-made goods
• Many leaders rule by the will of the people, not by force or threat of force
• Some kind of competent police force exists
• Everywhere is cosmopolitan, and people are upwardly mobile
  
• Every settlement or person in a game has to be something to be interacted with, and if it's not then it's a 'misdirect' or a 'red herring'. Even though it's verisimilitudinous to have three dozen villages between a town and the next point of interest, few GMs mention those, possibly because their players would for some reason feel obliged to explore them for hours and hours
  
• The average person (let alone player character) has all the freedoms of someone in a modern industrialised western country, and few of the responsibilities or obligations common in a less libertarian society
• People value the kinds of things they value in modernity
• Large towns nestle up against tracts of wilderness that would be useful farm land. Corollary: settlements are scattered everywhere, far apart, relatively undefended from monstrous threats, magical disasters, and banditry. If you read about some of the lengths people went to historically when faced with the 'threat' of mundane wolves, people being blasé about ogres in their environment is jarring
  
• Religion seldom comes up in every life, rather than being central to absolutely everything, despite most settings having plenty of evidence of real afterlives and divine powers

Obviously not all these elements are strictly modern notions; obviously we're talking about fantasy to begin with; obviously plenty of games and settings DO try to evoke a pseudo-historical feel, but it's still striking to me.

It's convenient to have these notions baked into a setting. It makes it easier for players to get into things. I wonder if that's the reason, or if players and GMs are just unaware of what things are like in an era without mass communications, powerful centralised government, widespread secondary and tertiary industry, etc.

    FINAL THOUGHTS

...On the other hand, tabletop roleplaying games are bigger than ever this decade, and I am as pleased as punch that the gates are wide open. It is my genuine hope that people are finding games and styles that work for them.

As Dave Arneson wrote shortly before he passed, "Work with what works for you."