Reviewn June 13: The GLOG

Every few days in June I’m picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.

It's finally time for The Goblin Laws of Gaming (GLOG) by Arnold Kemp (Goblin Punch). So far I’ve read the GLOG rules (Version -1.0) plus Goblin Guts: The Martial Classes (Version -1.0) plus Death, Dismemberment, and Insanity (Version 23). Together that’s a lot of rules compressed into 24 pages.

Calibrating expectations

I’ve dipped into the GLOG before, in the form of Lair of the Lamb. To quote the source blog post:

Everyone has a homebrew ruleset, and everyone wants to show it to other people, or at slap it around until it's presentable.

But no one is interested in your fantasy heartbreaker.  This is because everyone is up to their ascending colon in retroclones and besides, they're busy writing their own.

It's like trying to tell other people about your dreams.  No one cares.  Give them content, not another retroclone.

I know these things, and yet here I am.

The post collecting these three bits of the GLOG refers to it as a “painfully incomplete ruleset”. That’s true, and important for the reader to understand. The GLOG is (a) incomplete, (b) unpolished, (c) sprawling, and (d) assumes knowledge of classic D&D-like systems; if you are looking for a whole finished game, you are not going to get that.

Incomplete - There are plenty of missing bits, including whole subsystems (NPC Morale) and tables (‘roll one random item’). The game mentions things in passing without defining how they are meant to work in the GLOG, such as critical failures and misses on a natural 20. Various class abilities key off rules that the GLOG doesn’t include: falling, jumping, and wall running; surprise rules; situational bonuses on attack rolls (for surprise, elevation, etc).

 

Unpolished - The text has a brusquely informal tone. There are terminology disparities, like class features with two different names, or a ‘Trauma Point’ being conflated with an ‘Insanity Point’. Some of the rules the GM needs are buried in the character classes, like wandering monster rules appearing within the ranger class. There’s assumptions that monsters variously have HD or levels.

 

Sprawling - Finding the right order to present information is always difficult in TTRPGs, since pieces of systems interlock. The GLOG does it fairly well, but there are a few gaps where things like starting skills are scattered about. Entire novel mechanics are buried in bullet points in the skills system and never fleshed out. Shields are nowhere near the armour/defence rules. The GLOG itself is a collection of documents rather than a single work. (In fairness, there might be a collated GLOG somewhere, but a quick search didn’t turn one up)

 

Assumed knowledge - The GLOG isn’t for a beginner GM. There are plenty of assumptions, e.g., shortenings for ability scores. Things like ‘standard action’ and ‘round’ aren’t defined, only tacitly constrained in meaning. Phrases like “modified by Dexterity” are ambiguous without TTRPG familiarity.

So the GLOG is best treated as something to hack a gameplay experience out of.

The core system

There are design notes, which I appreciate. The GLOG is meant to be low-powered, semi-generic, and favour ‘simplicity over realism’. The design is meant to prevent players achieving system mastery, which goes against my expectations so hard that I think I must have an entirely different understanding of the phrase.

The GLOG is a d20 system, mostly defaulting to a +/- 2 modifier, which is a good chunky number. It’s organised around subtractions, which takes some getting used to, and the players make almost all the dice rolls. Usually systems which do that take the opportunity to make the maths asymmetric, e.g., by giving monsters more abstract characteristics than PCs. The GLOG doesn’t: characters and monsters instantiate essentially the same mechanics, but then there’s an extra layer of interpolation to have the players roll attacks against static monster defences but roll defences against static monster attacks. It seems more complex to do it this way, but maybe it’s something that you just need to get used to.

My impression is that everything is trying to stay compatible with other old-school/OSR with minimal effort. There are ability scores, and they're only slightly different, rolled with 4d4. Compared to the classic 3d6, the probability distribution looks like this:



4d4 results in a slightly lower average ability score and a tighter spread, with proportionally more characters having average or near-average scores. You also can’t roll a PC with an ability score of 3, 17, or 18.

One of the things I like best about the GLOG is the handling of character advancement. After level 4, you mostly switch to found advancement (‘questing’), which is a concept I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

Characters ‘test’ a stat per level to try to increase it. Because it’s easier to level up worse stats, there could be a drive for PCs to become generalists or risk ‘missing out’ on stat increases (but I don’t think there will be enough total opportunities for that to be a problem).

There’s a claim that stats “don’t matter much”, but I’m somewhat sceptical. The dice roll is not only affected by the whole stat, rather than the smaller ability score modifier, but it's only affected by the stat, whereas a system like D&D 5e adds a flat level-based proficiency bonus. Also, note that a level 1 character with great Constitution has the same HP as a level 8 character with terrible Constitution! Because HP is useful [citation needed], and most of the built-in character progression has petered out by level 8, Constitution seems extremely important.

The GLOG makes Wisdom more useful by keying initiative off it. It also rewrites the meaning of the word ‘Charisma’ to cover ‘willpower’ and ‘destiny’, so that it can be the basis for all saving throws / magic resistance. Without that redefinition, I think Charisma is the least appropriate stat for a generic saving throw; conversely, without giving it this role, it’s a dump stat. I suspect having it at all is just for the cross-compatibility design criterion.

Overall, the GLOG core mechanics have an appealing simplicity.

Skill system

GLOG skills are quite open-ended. The text spends a long time on what a skill isn't (by implicit comparison to other games). I like the idea that “since no skills give a clear tactical advantage, players will have to be creative if they want to use their skills to gain an advantage.” It makes it clear this a RPG, not a maximise-the-numbers game.

The GLOG sometimes has to contort to fit everything (stat checks, saves, attack rolls, defence rolls, initiative, opposed rolls) into its roll-equal-or-under-target-on-d20 mechanic. So it’s strange that for skill checks, it switches to a relatively more complex roll-equal-or-under-target-on-the-absolute-difference-between-two-d12s. The 0/1/2/3/4/5/6 skill ranks could instead be 2/4/6/8/10/12/14/16 and then use the established d20 mechanic for a mathematically very similar result! The GLOG version does permit a smaller ‘critical skill success’ chance than you can do with a d20, but there aren't actually any rules provided for critical success.

I really like that there’s the chance to improve skills with actual use in play as well as ways to improve it in downtime. It strikes a very good balance of ‘fun game aspects’ and ‘plausible simulation aspects’, more than I expected to get given the ‘simplicity over realism’ design principle. Players might end up vacillating over whether they have better odds trying to improve a mid-ranked skill in the field (testing via a skill check) or in downtime (testing via a stat roll). It’s another reason to hack the skill system to use the d20 mechanic.

Character gear

The GLOG uses an inventory slot system, in which negligible items are those that are “small enough to put inside your closed mouth”, which is oddly specific but memorable. Wealth expectations seem lower than for other old-school games; coins and gems never take up any encumbrance, and 230 gold coins will get you from level 1 to level 5 (if the table is meant to be cumulative, it’s even less – 100 gold coins). If you start as a noble character, you are in debt to the value of your decrepit city mansion, ~250 gold coins.

The GLOG’s homebrewish style sometimes results in a fascinating mix of the specific and broad. Weapons and armour are just categorised by light, medium, or heavy, but there are specific details like that slings can “share an Inventory Slot with up to 3 stones”. There’s a surprisingly complex system for when and how weapons and armour can break, and the consequences when they do, but no rules for repairing them.

Armour is doubly encumbering, both taking up slots and giving an encumbrance penalty directly. There are optional piecemeal armour rules which work very neatly with both the armour breakage system and the encumbrance system (but need repair rules otherwise they're strictly better than the default armour).

Combat and injury

The combat system is fairly conventional. I like that the penalty for (loosely-defined) combat manoeuvres is orthogonal to their overall success or failure.

There are classic restored-daily hit points, and in the GLOG they’re overtly luck/stamina points, which I respect. Arnold K also thought about the ensuing problems with magical ‘healing’: actual, non-HP injuries take a much longer time to heal and applying magical healing for N hit points also reduces the healing time of an injury by N days. I love it, very elegant. I’m not sure about the rule where magical healing can’t completely remove healing time; if powerful magic is being expended, it’s a bit lame for your leg to be left a bit lame. I might have that last day of healing require an extra 10 HP worth of magical healing, or something.

The text says “I think it's fun to sometimes start with 1 HP”. In fact, if you roll minimum Constitution (4, for a modifier of –2), your PC will have 0 HP at level 1. Fortunately, in the GLOG, being stuck at 0 HP just means that you have no buffer before you risk lethal injury.

The Death and Dismemberment table is great. Weapon(-like) damage has hit locations, and more ‘elemental’ damage affects the whole person with special effects. The consequences are heavily penalising (you can’t wear armour if you’re burned, etc). There’s an implicit possibility that permanent injuries will accrue, resulting in tough decisions. Do you keep playing a fighter who’s lost an arm? What about a leg? How much permanent ability score loss is too much?

I’m unsure of how serious a ‘fatal wound’ is meant to be: on the one hand, a fatally wounded character dies after three rounds without treatment. On the other hand, literally anyone can try to treat a fatal wound as a single action, with no interaction with the skill system, and on success the wound simply disappears. And there’s a small chance that a fatal wound just disappears. The whole thing feels surprisingly like being at 0 HP in D&D 5e.

There are optional insanity (‘Trauma’) and morale (‘Doubt’) subsystems, always a tricky thing to impose on player characters. I do like the idea of angels striking directly at your resolve, which you could interpret either mystically or as an extreme morale effect. Too much Doubt results in either the loss of your character or just a change in one of your Convictions. The Trauma subsystem is a bit heavy-handed for me personally, but it would make a serviceable backbone for a mythos-esque horror game (note there’s no provision for reducing trauma and madness).

Convictions

Characters have personality traits called Convictions, somewhere between GURPS flaws and 5e inspiration in that they give a spendable dice roll bonus when a character pursues them to a negative outcome. The text contradicts itself a bit here, for example going back and forth on whether you get points just for following Convictions or when they get you in trouble.

I’m not a big fan of meta-currencies which don’t map onto anything in the game world, because it leads to players having to reason at the system level instead of roleplaying. In the GLOG, for example, you can only acquire one ‘point’ between your two Convictions, so their effect on gameplay disappears once you have an unused point. Worse, you need to reason about which one of your Convictions you’re going to fall prey to, because the point gives a greater benefit to (or only works for; it’s ambiguous) a dice roll related to that Conviction.

The martial classes

Goblin Guts provides ten character classes: the acrobat, assassin, barbarian, fighter, knight, noble, ranger, ‘really good dog’, tactician, and thief. One of these things is not like the others.

Classes play the game in different ways. “Fighters track their kills. Rangers only track their biggest kill. Acrobats have a once-in-a-lifetime ability. Assassins can use a storygame mechanic to vanish so thoroughly that not even their player knows where they are.” I was hyped by that introduction, and I found the implementation to be good, too.

I like how character abilities mostly build upon the relatively simple GLOG rules: characters might have particular skills which always improve when tested, or get free combat manoeuvres, or have extra capacity for Conviction, etc.

I’m not a fan of non-magical powers which have arbitrarily limited uses rather than a chance to succeed. There’s a few of those: the acrobat has a daily escape, the fighter a daily parry, and the tactician a daily rally. Having established that HP is a luck/skill/stamina sort of thing, just make them cost HP!

I can also take or leave the story-game abilities. Almost all of the classes have one of these, like the ranger drawing the terrain map for where an encounter occurs, or the tactician inventing an 'opportunity' they or another PC discover against an enemy. I think people who are into this kind of thing would really like the GLOG ones, which are simple, focused, and likely to spur experimentation. Conversely, they’d be easy to replace if they’re not to your taste.

• The acrobat and assassin are very reminiscent of the old D&D classes, although much simpler.
• The barbarian is a bit silly, but not much more than it is in other game systems.
• The fighter has a customisable skill-tree-ish feel, which I think will really speak to some players. It’s refreshing for the martial class to be the one that needs to track extra stuff!
• The knight is a zealot; the class feels like a paladin without the magic powers. I think it would be interesting to role-play.
• The noble stands out as having various abilities which seem like they’d be cheese-able, in a way that the GLOG definitely doesn’t intend. I like the flavour though.
• The ranger and thief might be my favourites; they're good simplified implementations of their oldschool D&D equivalents. GLOG ‘pets’ have major downsides, such as infighting and requiring actions to direct, so the ranger’s otherwise-weak powers over them should be game changers. The thief's story-game ability is the kind of ‘quantum equipment’ ability that you see occasionally in games; fun, but might harm immersion.
• The ‘really good dog’ class creates a bit of tonal dissonance. It has a very silly feel, and such complex abilities that the font goes down a size. Its powers are somewhere between overt magic and sappy-film-logic: its fur is almost as strong as chain mail; its lick heals the dying; it detects magic by smell; its proximity buffs its best friend. It has much more implied setting than any other page: all dogs speak Canine, there are Dog Barons and Cat Princes, organised Dog Clans roam the cities, etc.
• The tactician class at first glance appears to be a specialist fighter, but is really a dedicated support class with non-magical buffs, which is refreshing.
  

Overall, a great set of classes.

Thumbs up from me

I feel like this is a case where I got really enthusiastic about what I was reading and ended up well in the weeds writing thousands of words picking at little aspects of the design. If I’d liked it less, I would have just reported a few of the best ideas and then moved on. Taken on its own merits, as a messy incomplete system with lots of community content, I enjoyed reading the GLOG a lot! I'm definitely going to check out more GLOG-related works.

 

Minor text quibbles:

I mentioned some contradictions and terminology slip-ups in the text. The GLOG also switches between addressing the GM, the player, and an abstract third person. It has a big dose of textual errors (it’s / its, you / your, comparible / comparable, see below / see above, burgler / burglar, amount / number, etc). Nothing that an editing pass couldn’t fix.

My favourite bit:

The active character abilities. For example, the acrobat and thief can escape from restraints including “grapples, lynchings, and awkward social situations”, and the acrobat eventually acquires the chance to escape death once in their lifetime.

Where to get it:

At https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-glog.html