Discworld RPG: The setting

In this Octobereview, it's another look at the thick tome that is the Discworld Roleplaying Game (powered by GURPS), by Terry Pratchett and Phil Masters. Last time, I talked about the magic system.

This time, I'm reviewing all the setting stuff (pp 220-366)! Lands, environs, NPCs, scenarios, and so on.

I mentioned when I cracked this book open for the first Octobereview that there's really no winning in TTRPG book layout. To wit, this book splits its setting guide into a hefty Part 1 (in case you're unfamiliar with Discworld) and then comes back to it in Parts 6–11 (in case you're only somewhat familiar with Discworld). It's an inelegant split, but better than any alternative I could think of.

A lot actually happens from the start of a given Discworld book to the end, and although the chronology is muddled, there were substantial overall changes to the setting over the course of the series. The Discworld Roleplaying Game does a pretty good job of accounting for all the different points in time which players might play in.

Part 6: Life and Lands

I think PTerry had a particular Theory Of History And Society which shone through in his work. It's been interesting to see the GURPS authors' take on it. I think they do a pretty good job, with some exceptions.*

* For example, I wonder if re-framing dwarf vs troll conflict as being about 'vertical real estate' as the 'source of the problem', p. 228, was meant to have the undertones it has.

This chapter, p 220-267, is 'Life and Lands' information: a fairly thorough Discworld physical/cultural geography primer with very little game-specific content, just a minor 'adventuring lens'. It's all Discworld and not much game, so it's hard for me to evaluate its usefulness to the average GM.

All this could have come straight out of the Discworld Companion, and maybe it did. The book has diamond trolls emitting light (p 230), which I think is a misunderstanding. My only other note here is that the similarity of the phrases 'Octarine Grass Country' and 'Ultraviolet Grasslands' left me thinking about a crossover for a while.

Part 7: Ankh-Morpork

This continues being more 'setting overview' than 'gameplay aide'. I don't have much to say that wouldn't just reflect Discworld itself.

One rough spot shows on p 257, which lists a watchman's equipment. The GURPS rules say the watch officer will necessarily be at Light encumbrance or higher; the book takes pains to point out unencumbered PCs can therefore just run away from the watch. It advises that if they do, they can be penalised by running into specific Named Characters. The bottom line to me is that it's true of this fictional world that a watchman can't catch a fleeing perp (PC or NPC). That's a broken mechanic and the authors just chose to slap a crude patch on it.

I also spotted the very first typographical error after 259 pages of quite dense text: an extra comma in the 'orphans' box.* I used to be a copy-editor; that's a frankly superb hit rate. The whole book is very professionally made.

*A missed opportunity to do some extremely rare and on-the-nose grammatical irony.

A few other slips in the section were, I think, American writers not quite nailing British English, e.g., 'gasoline' for 'petrol' (p 270).

Part 8: Supernatural wotsits

This section offers a bit more advice about magic and its uses, including keeping PCs in line. Like the 'watchmen can't catch you' problem in Part 7 I think some of this should have been solved at its source instead of having a patch slapped on top.

There's discussions of gods and so on; not much in the way of game mechanics. A serviceable chapter.

Part 9: NPCs et al.

With NPCs we return (p 305) to the really GURPSy bits for the first time in a while. Here we get, for almost every major character in the series, either some abbreviated character attributes or a full GURPS character stat block.

We also get some advice for using canon characters in play, which amounts to "don't overdo it". Of course, it's damned-if-you-do,-damned-if-you-don't: the Disc books and humour are extremely character-driven. But as the Discworld RPG points out, hitting the right tone for a well-established, well-loved character from a different form of media is necessarily going to be difficult for pretty much any GM. If you're going to try it, this book is determined to give you 45 pages of stats to fall back on!

Part 10: Critters

We also get stats for Discworld animals – including the Disc 'versions' of regular animals (superintelligent camels, occult cats, sapient dogs) – and monsters.

There were some interesting choices about which beasts to include. Of the classic swords-and-sorcery slash-em-up monsters which show up in Discworld, very few are mentioned. Basilisks, yetis, ice giants, and the avatar of Bel-Shamharoth aren't statted up, to name a few. But some one-note, one-book, harmless and uninteresting creatures like curious squid are there.

Side note: It's always interesting to see how much an RPG values a horse. Especially, say, a warhorse vs a riding or draft horse. Historical warhorse sale prices / valuations are notoriously all over the place, even in similar places and times, often for reasons that weren't preserved in the historical record.

• OD&D: 3-7× the price depending on weight
• D&D 5e: 8× the price
• J M Davidson's "Universal Price List"*: 46× the price

* Which I remember getting a lot of traction in the TTRPGsphere back in the day

In the Discworld RPG, an "expensive" warhorse is just 2× the price of a draft horse, waaaay at the cheap end of the scale!

The creatures, like the NPCs and the setting guide, are in the necessary-but-not-intrinsically-interesting box for me. By contrast, the final section of this massive book is the juiciest part: the methods for actually running a Discworld RPG game. I write about it here!

Discworld RPG: Doing stuff and casting spells

Another Octobereview! We're looking at the Discworld Roleplaying Game (powered by GURPS), by Terry Pratchett and Phil Masters. Last time, I read the hefty character creation rules.

This time, I'm reviewing Part 5 of the book (pp 164-219), which is all about doin' stuff and castin' spells.

Part 5: Doing stuff

These chapters have a running example of criminal mime cultists in over their heads and summoning a horrible Thing. I quite like it. I doubt PTerry had much if anything to do with writing this book,* but it feels really right for the canon.

* The first version of the GURPS Discworld book was back in 1998, but I don't know to what degree he was involved to begin with, and then to what degree any of that text got passed on down the lineage of books to this one.

On p 164-191 we get that standard GURPSy core of the rules. It all seems solid; nothing jumped out at me as being Discworld-specific. Then we get to...

The magic system (messin' with reality)

I'm a sucker for reading and comparing magic systems. The Discworld RPG magic rules (p 191-217)  seem like about the softest magic system that a crunchy rules engine could have. Spells aren't codified by default, and the Skill/MP/power guidelines are very vague compared to the rest of the GURPS framework. The GM's rules/rulings balance shifts dramatically here!

The chapter structure is a little messy, going from 'general magic rules' to 'wizardry rules' to 'general magic rules' again to 'witch rules' to 'general magic rules' a third time.

This order is, I think, due to the designers' decisions to make witchcraft and wizardry ultimately the same kind of spellcasting, with surface differences.*

* Mostly just whether they name their spells (p 210).

I like this magic system as a TTRPG component. I'm sure it makes things easier at the table, too. But I don't think this is a particularly good fit for Discworld.

Witches and wizards

On the Disc, witch magic and wizard magic are very different. The canon is inconsistent over the course of the series, but generally...

• Wizard magic is formulaic and codified (spells are mostly named, are discrete entities, and wizards have specific magical rituals). Witch magic mostly isn't (spells are completely improvisational, with the exception of 'tricks' like Nanny Ogg's man of straw).
  
• Wizards need skill, but they and/or their staves also have expendable 'juice'. Witches don't have any resource like that (apart from a few examples with broomsticks early in the series).
• For witches, casting a spell is a matter of skill and consequences and unstated costs, and is such a big deal that Not Using Magic is essentially the entire apex of their art. Witches use very little magic, very sparingly, and almost never do some 'big' work of magic. It is very unusual for them to do anything like casting a spell.
  
• For wizards, casting a spell is, if not something they do every day, then something close. It's still unwise to use much magic, but there's nowhere near the level of aversion that witches have. The main risk seems to be the Dungeon Dimensions.
  

Even this book admits that there is a fundamental difference in kind, e.g., regarding the Dungeon Dimensions, "Witches are also tempting, but their magic tends to be subtler and less prone to making holes [in the fabric of reality]" (p 269).

The witch rules (p 196) just don't capture the idea that a witch's capacity and willingness to perform magic are tied up in costs, personal accountability, and consequences. A generic spellcasting flub table doesn't cut it here. "Not all magic is magic" is a Discworld trope, but it shouldn't apply to the actual spell rules as this book tries to. The bits in the series about the importance of the hat, tradition, style, disposition, and so on clearly refer to the overall art/trade of witchcraft, not to the relatively tiny bit of witchcraft that is 'casting spells'. It's a mismatch.

The other bits of witchcraft (medicine, community, herbalism, headology, respect, fairness, narrative, social work, etc) are much more important to them than magic is in the canon. There's a box for Headology on p 274, but apart from that, the book misses the mark. It has all these detailed rules for medicine, socially influencing people, knowing about bees, influencing narrative, etc, but it doesn't seem to understand that those things should be 95% of being a witch and only 5% should involve magic, whereas being a wizard on the Disc is probably 50% magic at least. In GURPS terms, almost none of a witch's points should come from magic skills.

This RPG mentions some of the witch "spells" we see in the books (delay a cut; draw heat from a bonfire to melt snow; cast a spell by putting in a lot of exacting research witchcraft work; make tiny changes). But it doesn't draw the right lessons from them.

And 'Riding the narrative' as a rule for witches to specifically get MP back just doesn't map onto the books at all. It's never been about running out of numeric mana.

Discworld witches aren't generic RPG spellcasters.

What would I have liked to see? The magic system as presented is fine for wizards (perhaps it could be more codified). Witches, though, should have something else: a system where you can't get something for nothing, where you have to be the fulcrum, where you get occasional opportunities to make a difference with subtle bits of magic and you still have to decide whether or not to make use of them. Enormous magical effects aren't necessary; actual full-on witch spells* are such outliers in the series that the book could have just ignored them and it would have felt "right".

* Like the big one in Wyrd Sisters.

If you're going to say witch magic can create the same major effects that wizard magic can, then the main thing is that there needs to be some huge specific disincentive for a witch to use more than the faintest trace of magic.

Could you make that fun? I don't know. But it's necessary for a Discworld feel.

Other bits of the magic system

There are lots of additions. Simple rules for using HEX, for witches' cottages, and so on, all of which I like just fine. I think it's a bit of a cop-out to say that a wizard's staff can be mended quickly just by sort of pushing magic into it, though.

It's interesting that there are only a few general magic constraints on the Disc (iron being unaffected, and needing to know a true-name). Both of those get mechanical support in the rules. But we also know that witches need solid bedrock under their feet to do magic; no rule is provided for that.

Counterbattery Magic (p 199) lets spells collide. It's a great rule and is supported by the books (Sourcery, The Light Fantastic).

Overall the magic system seems more powerful and useful than I would have expected. GURPS has translated magic into an effective tool in many situations, instead of something to be avoided. Later on, 'Uses and Abuses of Magic' (p 273) advises about adding layers of punishments for players who want to use that tool widely.

Gameplay

Page 218 provides pretty good basic running-the-TTRPG advice.* I don't really like the notion that "players don't have to know the rules, but it helps", especially with a system like GURPS that dumps so much stuff onto the character sheet; I guess it works for some people. It's always going to happen sometimes, but I don't think a rulebook should be encouraging it.

* I think the authors' definition of railroading is a bit off, and as a result the corresponding advice isn't as helpful as it could be.

It does state an important notion: "A strength of tabletop RPGs is that they aren't computer games; the GM's brain is more powerful than any computer and should be capable of adaptation and adjustment, even on the fly". I'd go one step further. The only absolute advantage that tabletop RPGs have over all computer games is that the GM's and players' brains are more flexible and creatively adaptable than any computer. That's why it's an important aspect to lean into!

The remainder of the book could be summed up as "all the setting stuff". I write about it next time!

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).

In the next part: Doing actual game stuff, and extensive thoughts on the magic system.

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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.

In the next part, I discuss parts 2, 3, and 4: the character-building bits.

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