Quality and Quantity of Player Choices

Just some brief design musings.

Player choices are perhaps the most important component of TTRPG play. They're certainly one of the very most fundamental parts of any game.

We know that having more, and more compelling, choices means more fun when it comes to (for example):

• Spells or powers that are one-use, very limited, or come with a dramatic cost
• Systems where combat is dangerous and clever play gets you a huge edge
• Traps, in the style of play where traps are fundamentally puzzles and roll-to-disarm isn't an option
• Exploration, in an environment where there are (a) resource costs + (b) threats + (c) a goal which can (only) be accomplished here + (d) no clear-the-whole-map expectation

So a natural question to ask is: Can we improve certain game loops by adding more, or more compelling, choices?

Some areas come immediately to mind – places where many RPGs, big and small, have struggled in the past.

• Researching and investigation. In some games these are a simple matter of GM fiat, or just an in-world-time commitment plus a few dice rolls resulting in binary success or failure.
• Social relationships. In the (unfortunately common) absence of mechanical support and game structures, the need for these puts a burden on the GM. Social relationships ought to have mechanical impact on gameplay and emotional impact on the player... but all too often you hear them relegated to meaningless flavour. Some games don't really even ask: how do you live your character's life?
• Wilderness journeys. These can sometimes become somewhat performative/menial resource juggling or a matter of having the prescribed One Combat Encounter.
• Trade. When it comes to selling loot / buying equipment, some games skip past it, make it abstract or automatic, or reduce it to a haggle mechanic. Playing out the 'social encounter' with every trader isn't any better, if it doesn't involve compelling choices!
• Dying. Why not give a dying character things to do with their last breath? Or offer a decision between a slim chance to survive and using one's last strength to attempt something?
• Hacking archetypes/minigames. My impression is these often have a poor reputation even in otherwise-good games.

Some of these certainly could be improved with a greater centering of player choice.

More choices; more compelling choices

It's far from trivial to solve, of course.

Adding player choices may actually make things worse unless you meet the criteria for quality, which I would say at a minimum are:

1. The choice is interesting, urgent, or otherwise compelling to players
2. The choice has enough risk or potential mechanical impact to be worth the game time
3. The choice can't just be resolved with a straightforward calculation in terms of concrete or absolute costs, preference ordering of relative outcomes, etc
4. The choice is presented alongside enough grounded detail for the players to actually make informed decisions

Worth thinking about.

 

TTRPG art on a shoestring budget

Here's a little general advice for indie game creators who can't afford all the art they want.

Stock art

If you have a little bit of money to use, stock art is cheaper than commissioned art and it's way easier to find what you need compared to trawling through commons (more on that later).

Understand and abide by licenses!

Artists license their art in different ways, with drastically different conditions. If all your art comes from one or two artists (or is all under particular licenses, like CC-BY), you'll save some headaches when it comes to complying with licensing terms and laying out credits.

An aside: I have found several pieces of licensed art where artists specify how they must be credited, and then the provided credit line has a spelling mistake or grammatical error. Should you fix it? I wouldn't personally risk it. I'm not a lawyer. I follow instructions.

I'm assuming you're not using AI material. Stock art creators are increasingly (and understandably) forbidding use of their work alongside it. Note that stock art websites don't do a very good job of tagging and filtering this stuff out!

• Some, like Adobe Stock, are moderately diligent for mediocre results: exclude generative AI from a search and maybe one will slip through in ten pages of results.
• Sites relying strictly on self-reporting, like Pixabay, are pretty much all saturated in untagged AI images. They've become practically unusable; you're basically reduced to searching in older time periods or within specific artists with a consistent, identifiable style.
• DriveThruRPG also relies mostly on self-reporting, but I haven't seen many AI images passing themselves off as handcrafted.
  

Stock art directly from the creator

If there's a specific look/type of art you want, Patreon is one of the better sources, because you can support currently-active artists on an individual basis and at reasonable prices. I can't speak to whether or not it's better for the actual artists (I know they hiked their cut a little while ago).
 

An aside for Patreon artists: Please provide something like an actual license! It doesn't have to be long or detailed. It just has to make me feel confident that I am permitted to use your work for commercial purposes, can or can't advertise with it, won't be infringing on your moral rights, etc.

Open-sourcing your game art

So, on to doing it yourself! Lots of indie game makers have achieved great results by sourcing, compositing, and laying out their own art. Expect it to take a lot of work.

You'll probably have looked into public domain art. Specifically, works that have lost copyright status due to the amount of time that has passed since the death of their creator. If someone tells you a hard and fast rule for establishing this, they are wrong!

• The "falls into PD" age differs between nations, there are all sorts of carve-outs, and even a photo reproduction may or may not be transformative. Don't rely on anyone but your lawyer for legal advice.
  

A lot of sites purport to collect and curate art "in the public domain". They almost always mean "in the public domain in the USA", and even if that's fine with you, they might be wrong, and even if they're right, they might not be conscientious. Check your sources!

Where can you get free-to-use art? Well, there's tons of places. Start with Wikimedia Commons, which is huge and usually quite accurately labelled with regards to sources and licensing (...but I have found errors before. Check your sources! Check your sources! Check your sources!).

Other sites for free art include: OpenGameArt, Pixabay, Pexels, Adobe Stock, various open clip art creators, and museums and libraries like The Met and the NYPL digital collections. All have their own foibles.

Understand that "free" doesn't mean "obligation-free".

I mentioned stock art licenses earlier. Learn what the various Creative Commons licenses do. CC0 (essentially a PD dedication) is the most generous, but fairly rare in the wild. As well as the license requirements, learn about and respect creators' moral rights. Credit people even when you're not required to by the license terms.

A lot of old PD art is unfortunately physically degraded. There are great pieces made unusable by age. Too bad. Don't waste time on things that are too small for your DPI, too faded or blurry, or too palimpsest'd. Understand that entropy is mostly irreversible. Or try tracing.

And know the value of your time. If you spent a hundred hours sorting through public domain art trying to find suitable works, and you didn't enjoy the process... would you have been better off just working for money and using that to pay an artist?

Good news

Anyone can be a competent collage artist by compositing, cropping, tweaking, and laying out PD / open license art. And digital tools stratospherically expand what the word 'collage' means. Have fun testing things!

The more you try things out, the more neat combinations you'll find. Sometimes even a very simple effect can make a serviceable piece of art out of something stylistically inappropriate.

For example, I had this old black-and-white John Batten illustration saved:

 

I wanted to use it as the Nuckelavee demon in my current monster compendium (https://bit.ly/ancblasph). But it's a bit cartoonish, there's no colour to make it pop, and the solid white won't work against my backgrounds. It only takes six or seven trivial image operations to get something a bit more atmospheric:

I'm not much of an artist, but if I spent a bit more time on it, I could use more masks and curves and things to make this into a really crisp, vibrant piece.

Software

What tools should you use for image editing? I love FOSS in principle, and the people striving to make it work, but you do tend to get more or less what you pay for.

GIMP is perhaps your best free option, but it lags behind Affinity Photo (having no proper CMYK support, for example). APhoto in turn is cheaper than Photoshop, but lacks a few of its features.

You can do pretty much everything in a suite like Affinity Photo or Photoshop. But there are specialist tools for TTRPG-specific things (hexographer, inkarnate, etc), and their narrow focus may make them easier and more convenient than doing the same thing in an image editor.

Using these tools

What do you need to learn? I would say the ten basic concepts to familiarise yourself with are:

• colour level/curve manipulation
• selections
• non-destructive editing
• filters/adjustments
• brush tools
• geometry tools
• perspective tools
• touch-up tools
• layers and layer modes
• masks and clipping

There's plenty more, of course.

What do you need in terms of meta-level knowledge? Mainly, where to go for help. The internet is awash with tutorials. Start by reading/watching one of those, and then turn to searching/asking in the forums for your software.

Concluding thoughts

I started this by addressing those "who can't afford all the art they want". Again, don't forget that your time on Earth has value. If you have some exact image in mind, and it takes you 50 hours to assemble a pretty good version of it from diverse sources and painstaking image manipulations... then maybe you were better off paying an artist.

Except.

You're gaining skills as you go, and that alone may be worth it in the end. You're trying new things and making stuff.

Assembling other people's work in new ways is itself an art form, and constructing things from publicly available works may lead you to explore other ways to create.

There are side benefits, too.

Once you have the basics down, you can make your life easier by using your image manipulation tools to do mockups and visualisations. For example, I spent ten minutes this morning pairing up different candidate typefaces against different grungy/distressed visual styles in a scratch-built design, as in this snapshot:

Art, like everything in life, is a learning process. You'll find that you can cut some corners and not others.

And finally, if none of the above works for you, you could always Learn To Do Art Using Raw Materials yourself. I hear it can be very rewarding!

Monsters of the Month: Otherworldly Aberrations

The sky ruptures along some philosophical faultline and the sun splatters across the horizon like a dropped egg. There comes the distant dull crack of the cosmos breaking. Aberrant things begin to drip out of fissures in reality.

Fluorescent vermin with odd limbs come to graze on the verdant quiddity. Abominations fall from the flickering stars, and the world turns to mismatched bone and metal as they crawl by. There is something striding across the upper atmosphere, spindly legs higher than any tower. Space itself breaks open, and things feed on its viscera.

Introducing the first in what should be a series of monster books for Dungeons & Dragons! This one is all about extraplanar and interdimensional beasties, like the Treader: an infinitely-long spindly leg dangling from the sky and traipsing about the landscape.

Inside this creature compendium, you'll find

•     38 pages of bizarre monsters from CR 0 to CR 16
•     Tactical advice for each monster
•     Creatures crafted with modern D&D 5e design principles
•     50 variant monsters for different environments and themes

Available now on DriveThruRPG!

Discworld RPG: Concludium

In this Octobereview, I wrap up the Discworld Roleplaying Game (powered by GURPS), by Terry Pratchett and Phil Masters. Last time, I talked about the setting chapters.

This time, I'm reviewing the remaining parts of the book (pp 367–408), all the juicy running-the-game stuff!

This is probably the most important section to me. Although the 'GURPS rules' parts are necessary for running the game, and the 'Discworld review' parts are necessary for understanding the canon world, this is where the authors are handed the reins to really extrapolate, develop, and get creative.

Part 11: Bad food, no sleep, and strange people

We start the section with Running for your laugh, guidance for game/campaign management. There's some good general structural advice here. They also managed to get a chuckle out of me (p 368):

If anyone really wanted, they could use the setting for an old-fashioned game in which heroes and wizards beat up monsters and take their treasure. Or they could create gloomy sagas about angst-ridden vampires on the streets of Ankh-Morpork. There's no obvious reason to do so, but nothing to stop anyone, either.

The authors talk about managing tempo and pace (p 369). This advice is generally good, but some lines jumped out to me here: "a fight that lasts mere seconds in the game world can take much of the session to run [...] The GM should avoid combat if the current aim of the game is to get to the next important plot point quickly." Emphasis in original.

I must admit, this – and some similar language scattered throughout the book – rubbed me the wrong way. It practically admits that the underlying engine is too slow to be useful. It also suggests a view of the GM as fundamentally a linear storyteller, which might be appropriate if this was, you know, a story-telling game, rather than a traditional TTRPG with a smattering of story-telling elements.* Pesto and chocolate milk are both tasty, and maybe you could find a recipe to combine them complementarily, but it's been 368 pages of rules for chocolate milk and now I'm being told to sprinkle pesto on top.

* The implication, here and elsewhere, is that the GM's role is to decide "the next important plot point", disregarding choices and rules to shepherd the player (character)s towards it. I'm not a fan.

The text goes on to add, "In general, Discworld games should run fast and light. [...] A roleplaying game, humorous or not, is a cooperative project, and if the GM takes too much power from the players, they'll ultimately become frustrated. Everyone should be allowed input." Again, this sentiment seems out of place for a simulation-heavy TTRPG

"Everyone should be allowed input" ...into what, exactly? This pretty clearly doesn't just mean the truism, "don't take away for non-diegetic reasons the exactly one way players can affect their environment in a classic TTRPG, i.e., their power to make their characters' decisions".

Even with a generous reading it seems to mean, "import story-telling-game elements into how you run this TTRPG, by having aspects of the world/outcomes decided by an unspecified collaborative process with the players." And in 408 pages there are no rules for doing that, and little to no advice for dealing with the dissonance of players having to break out of the making-decisions-as-if-they-were-their-character headspace to make decisions about the world as if they were its creator. Shrug.

One little thing that caught my attention, on p 371, is that "The Colour of Magic contains several RPG references". This surprised me; maybe I need to read it again.* It definitely contains a lot of references to the sort of 1960s-70s pulp adventure and sci-fi/fantasy fiction on which early D&D was built, but if there are direct TTRPG aspects, I never noticed them.

* The game the gods play throughout has miniature tokens representing characters and creatures, but I remember it being in much more of a "European boardgame" style.

Sample campaign setting

The book's main sample setting (essentially, pirate adventure in the Brown Islands*) is quite good! It covers a region that sits largely outside of the Discworld canon, and it hits a lot of the right notes in terms of descriptiveness and usefulness to a GM. The islands are presented as a sort of semi-policed melting-pot wilderness borderlands, which is an excellent background for RPG adventure.

* A pastiche of Hawaii, mostly.

I'm pretty sure that Llapffargoch-Wokkaiiooii is meant to extend the Hawaiian pastiche to include some of the Pacific Islands and New Zealand, which (as a New Zealander) feels a bit forced, but that's pretty much always going to be the case when you're reading an outsider's view.

I've got to say, the idea of hiring the PCs to "break into an enemy's home or workplace and rearrange the furniture to bring bad luck" is great. That's completely outside of the classic RPG scenario space, and I'd love to use it some day. (The book also gives it pretty thorough mechanical support.)

The Discworld RPG presents several other settings in short form, and all of them seem like they could be a good time. For example, there's advice for a Fourecks "road warrior" setting.* I should note that this book is somewhat old-fashioned in places, but it could be worse when it comes to things like colonialism and female empowerment. The Brown Islands is run by foreign governors... but the indigenous people don't much care what they say. There's a Klatchian setting with a harem... but the women are comfortably running the town. Et cetera.

* I was expecting the waterless regatta from The Last Continent, given this book's reluctance to extend canon. I suspect road warrior was chosen just for the cart wars / car wars joke.

Sample scenarios

The book presents three adventure scenarios; two about fruit and one about herring historical justice.

In "Lost and Found", the PCs investigate a banana shortage and discover a magical jungle lab emitting reptilian monsters. In "Full Court Press", the PCs get involved in the succession politics of an apple-growing duchy. In "Sektoberfest in NoThingFjord", the PCs set out to rescue a skald (storyteller) from a huge troll and probably end up settling a historical injustice.

I want to say off the bat that the underlying ideas are great. I'd run a scenario based on the first or third scenario without hesitation. 👍

And the implementation of those ideas is mostly good. 👍

Unfortunately, the presentation of the scenarios is undermined by two major issues.

Issue 1: Failing to help the reader

The authors commit one of the cardinal sins of RPG scenario design: presenting the adventure as a fun little mystery for the GM to be puzzled by until they've read to the end. None of the important parts are explained up front. The authors want the players to feel like they're experiencing a story? Sure. Writing the scenario as if the GM trying to read the thing also has to experience it as a story? Excruciating.

So in Lost and Found, the GM reading isn't told why there's a banana shortage, which is the entire basis of the scenario. Without a precis sketch up front, they won't find out for many pages. Long after they encounter a text box which says: "remember that the problem lies hundreds of miles distant, and is somewhat peculiar, with a certain amount of unconventional magic involved." The reader can't "remember" those three things. They haven't been told any of it!

So the GM who just wants to know if they like this adventure enough to study it and run it has to read the whole thing through to find out, then reread it with the basis facts required to actually plan how to use the scenario. It would have been trivially easy to provide the necessary information in a text box or paragraph at the start.

In Full Court Press, it's worse. The scenario writers simply didn't finish their job. Who killed the old duke, and why? What do the various described activities indicate? Well, it "depends on what the GM has decided about the true history and motivation of the NPCs" (p 394). "Matters should culminate in the revelation of some truth".

This is a cop-out, and one which particularly stings because not only does the text lack a disclaimer up front ("this scenario is incomplete"), it actually claims a GM can use the scenario "as is"!

If the problem was space, why not just write even less of the adventure and put it with the other incomplete scenario ideas at the end of the book?

The "failing to help the reader" issue comes up somewhat in Sektoberfest in NoThingFjord, too. The PCs are in a cave complex chasing after an abducted skald (p 396). They hear a deep voice relating things that happened in the past (something a skald does), and then they see the abductee. Seven paragraphs and a section break later, the reader discovers that it's not the skald who's been talking! I'm fairly sure this was just sloppy editing rather than a deliberate mystery, but again, a paragraph at the start sketching the overall scenario would have avoided the problem.

Issue 2: Implied culture of play

The other issue I'll freely admit is subjective: The scenarios advocate for a culture of play which makes me uncomfortable. It's similar to the problem I had with some of the tempo/pace advice (above).

We're told that the GM should just veto a PC's advantages from putting points in Wealth (p 386). The GM should fudge dice results and move things behind the scenes and ignore creature traits (p 391) so that things happen as they envisaged. There's this expectation for the GM to have an idea of "the way things ought to go" and covertly change things to make that happen. Is it railroading? It's at least railroading-adjacent.

Reading Sektoberfest in NoThingFjord, I started to believe that the authors just fundamentally disagree with what I would consider the deepest TTRPG loop: mentally simulating a world, seeing what the characters try to do, and then arriving at plausible outcomes using rules + good judgment + knowledge of how the world works.

• Instead of referring to rules for light, it's "reasonable" to "penalise" explorers for not taking equipment such as lanterns.
• Instead of referring to rules for navigation, "there's only a limited amount of fun to be had by getting them lost, and having them completely lost and starving to death is dull. But the players might pay more attention if they sense that the GM is thinking about that possibility."*
• Players get to "make IQ rolls to grasp the subtleties of" an issue once the GM has described it, instead of engaging their brains.
• After the script says a troll gestures at the wall, "visitors should make Per rolls to notice the general shape of the walls on the far side of the cave." Implicitly, characters can't notice a secret until the "right" story beat, no matter what they do.

* There are numerous references throughout the book to the GM feeling "kind" or "sadistic".

Again: The Discworld RPG has very few story-telling-game mechanics, and the ones it has (like Riding The Narrative) are limited and optional. But there are all these little asides telling a GM not to run the game as the crunchy traditional GURPS TTRPG it has been built as.

I understand that occasionally a GM might end up with the donkey up the minaret, and have to choose between (a) cheating to create a fun play experience, or (b) letting the chips fall where they may. But note that this is a choice.

If you play it without cheating, yes, you might have an early TPK or an anticlimactic ending or have to split a session because you run out of time. Yes, it might be less fun.* You at least won't be teaching the players lessons like "the PCs can't lose" or "the PCs can't win early with cleverness" or "there will be x amount of conflict per game session no matter what" or "the GM doesn't care about the rules of the game".

* But you don't know for sure.

If the GM finds that they need to cheat to "save" a fun play experience, something brought them to that point. It's almost certainly down to a failure of the system, a failure of the scenario, or a failure of the GM. Two of those things were within the purview of the authors to fix, and in a book of this size they could have advised on the third. Instead, they keep calling for a thumb on the scale within the scenario design. My personal opinion is that it's a bad look. Rant over; my apologies.

Other scenario possibilities

Fortunately, we don't have to end the review on a sour note! The final part of the chapter ends with a half a dozen scenario seeds, for a GM to take and run with. These are all very ideas-dense and a great fit for the canon, and I enjoyed reading them.

If I were to run the GURPS Discworld RPG, I'd pick one of these to start with – probably Plumbing the depths. If PTerry hadn't suffered his health disaster, I think we were cued up for a book about the Undertaking in Ankh-Morpork, and this offers a chance to explore what that might have been.

Remainder

There's some end matter, too! It consists of a slightly absurd glossary of Disc terms, the inevitable Discworld + GURPS bibliography (which sums up the books fairly pithily), and a comprehensive index which almost never just redirects the reader to another index entry (D&D, take note).

Final thoughts

I began this book as a Discworld fan and GURPS outsider. By the end of it, I had a better grip on GURPS and an itch to go back and read through the Discworld books. I consider that a win!

I'm also backing the new Modiphius game, Terry Pratchett's Discworld RPG: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork. I can't wait to see the difference in approaches to this large (and for many reasons difficult-to-translate) corpus of creative material.

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.

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.

In the next part, I 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.

Reviewn June: A Brief Retrospective

A month ago I had the idea that I should spend my free time in June reading and publicly reviewing various things languishing in my TTRPG library. The precommitment was meant to spur me to read more of these resources than I would normally have, and that certainly worked.

I reviewed fourteen works, which was about what I had placed as a pessimistic estimate of one every other day, and somewhat short of what I'd hoped. It's, at a guess, five to ten percent of the unread part of my library; continuing to read at the same rate might take more than a year to get fully caught up.

My approach to Reviewn June was “if you don’t have something nice to say then don’t say anything”. There were a couple of resources I read which didn't make the cut, so I didn't review them. I also read one game which got me fired up on a specific game design question, and the review I was writing quickly turned into an essay that was only referring back to the game as a running example, so I ended up cutting that too (and might come back to it).

Personal lessons learned

1. I've worked professionally and semi-professionally as a couple of types of editor, and it was impossible for my eye not to catch on what seemed like obvious fixes, usually a few times on every page, for almost everything I read. This was more frustrating than I expected it to be, and including a 'minor text quibbles' part in each review was a useful outlet for that.
2. At a rough estimate, I invested 30 hours in Reviewn June. It was usually 2 or 3 hours every 2 or 3 days. At least half of that time was writing! My main take-home is, if I do this again (Octobereview? Febreviewary?), I should place considerably less focus on the actual review part. A fixed formal four-paragraph structure might help: introductory paragraph, discussion paragraph, quibbles paragraph, my-favourite-bit paragraph.
3. It was gruelling, but overall rewarding, to do. I picked up a few specific inspirations. I'm hoping it's building towards a habit of more reading. This blog doesn't have many readers, but the reviews did see some traffic, so some people wanted to see them. And in the end, writing practise is writing practise.

Finally, it's already borne some fruit: my gaming group ended up filling in a last-minute cancellation with a free-form riff on Coincackler Well, which wouldn't have happened without Reviewn June.

Thanks for reading!

Reviewn June 14: GLOG Wizards

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.

I'm rounding out Reviewn June and finishing up with the first chunk of the GLOG at the same time. Today it's The GLOG: Wizards, by Arnold Kemp / Goblin Punch. This is 21 pages of novel magic system for use with the GLOG – but, as the author points out in the source post, there's lots of content that could be excavated for use with another system.

Everything I wrote about the GLOG rules in terms of approachability also applies here, so I’ll mostly leave it out. (One example – The GLOG: Wizards assumes a certain amount of TTRPG knowledge. It’s informed heavily by what came before – the only reason to spend more than a sentence on scrolls and spellbooks, given that they’re functionally identical in the GLOG, is that other games make them instrumentally different things.)

I worked hard to write less this time! This one was a really enjoyable note to end the month on.

How the magic system works:

The text begins with a fairly short, fairly cohesive metaphysics that ties in magic spells to the rest of the supernatural. I appreciate that, as the GM can use it to infer a number of answers to player questions without having to worry about coming up with and then remembering something consistent.

The GLOG uses slot-based magic. There’s a nice old-school feel to everything, and rules for all the usual peripherals (magic item identification, transporting spells, etc) get quickly laid down. The actual spellcasting rules deviate a fair amount from other D&D-likes. It's based on a dice pool, and there’s a risk/reward tradeoff and therefore important decisions offered to the player. Having, essentially, points to invest creates some good affordances for the GLOG system, in particular the spell keywords ‘Splittable’ and ‘Sustainable’.

Investing more power (dice) in a spell increases the risk of a Mishap (minor penalty) or Doom (major penalty which eventually destroys the character, unless evaded through a quest). Mishaps and Dooms are specific to schools of wizardry. Schools of magic have perks and a spell list that goes up to twelve, but also have restrictions.

There’s a simple uncertainty mechanic; you’ll never be able to predict exactly how many spells you can cast each day (but you’ll have a fair estimate, and bounds). I like that. Another novel improvement is that wizards aren’t penalised for wearing armour (a restriction I’ve seen a hundred explanations for, none of them particularly good, and many of them nonsensical if you know anything about armour). Instead, in the GLOG a magic user is incentivised to choose to forego armour in favour of a magic robe, which increases their available power. No in-world reason given why you can’t wear armour and a robe, but for that, at least, solutions suggest themselves.

One bit confused me. The rules about scrolls on page 2 say they’re not remotely like OD&D scrolls, they’re just variant spellbooks. The rules on page 3-4 talk about casting from spells like they’re OD&D scrolls (but ones which also power the spell up). Text on page 7 might help resolve the contradiction, implying wherever the page 3–4 rules say ‘scroll’ they mean ‘scroll or spellbook’, with the exception that a scroll gives an extra casting die but a spellbook doesn’t. This implies you can burn up your grimoire in a last-ditch effort. It also means someone else can get into your tomes and destroy all your unmemorised magic by casting it. It still doesn't work, though: page 7 also includes a team ability which lets you “share spellbooks as if they were your own”, implying pretty heavily that spellbooks actually don't work like scrolls, because those anyone can pick up and use.

Wizards get access to their spells in a particular order, lightly implying an escalation of power, but generally what matters is number of magic dice in the pool. There are legendary spells. Some of them are missing their spell description. From the ones included, I’m not sure that legendary means ‘better’, just ‘not on the main spell list’.

• The Orthodox wizard has no casting restrictions, and on their final Doom, loses the ability to cast spells. Could be a lot worse.
• The Illusionist’s restriction is that they can’t cast spells unless they can currently see all six primary colours. This would be a nightmare to adjudicate (properly), but fortunate they begin the game with rainbow-coloured gloves, which reduces the question to whether the illusionist still has their clothing and can see their own hands. A Doomed illusionist becomes nothing more than an illusion.
• The Necromancer’s shtick is expending corpses and shunning magical healing. They get cool gross spells like ‘Raise Skin Kite’. Their final Doom (besieged by 3d20 undead) sounds fairly survivable, with luck and preparation.

Those are the only wizard schools included in the document, but I’ve seen others in the glogosphere.

Wizards also get team abilities, advancing a design concept I don’t think I’ve seen in a TTRPG before: “I want to encourage more mono-classed adventuring parties. A party of wizards sounds cool. So does a party of thieves.” Team abilities are meant to offset players increasing their capabilities by diversifying classes. They are little synergies that apply whenever two or more characters have the same (main) class.

Juicy content:

Everything is flavourful and hardcore:

A wizard’s number of spell slots “is limited by their ability to flex their brains into mindscapes that better accommodate the spell they wish to lure into their brain-trap. It is not knowledge that achieves this, but rather visualization and self-delusion.”

A wizard’s memorised spells disappear from the encoding in their spellbook. Therefore, to learn spells from a dead wizard, you might acquire whatever was in their spellbook unmemorised, but getting at the ones in their head involves “bisecting the wizard's skull and balancing it atop a golden needle. The memorization of spells causes the brain to carve grooves on the inside of the skull, and the skull now moves over these grooves like an Ouija board. With a compass, water clock, and brain almanac, these movements can be deciphered.”

The Wizard Vision spell can have permanent effects, both good and bad. “You suffer a permanent loss of 1d6 Wisdom (as you reject the impossible reality you are looking at, and go a tiny bit insane) or 1d6 Charisma (as you accept this transcendental truth and become forever alienated from your fellow humans, who will never understand the truth).”

You might escape a particular Doom by eating the heart of a high elf, or by journeying to hell and cutting a deal “with the Underpope or one of the Satans”.

The GLOG spells:

The spells are designed to “lend themselves to clever uses”. To this end, they are mostly adaptations of old-school spells – broader and more powerful, but my impression of the system maths is that wizards won’t typically be able to cast as many spells in this system.

I like the spells, especially the deviations from the classics. The implementation of False Life makes it an interesting tactical tradeoff. I love that the (Diablo-inspired?) Explode Corpse spell works on undead creatures, working particularly well on friendly ones. Revenant only works on dead PCs, turning them into a temporary resource. Fade seems to let a target walk through any solid barrier (which might not be intended? But it is a legendary spell).

I'd modify the necromancer spell list to include Speak With Dead, given that one of their first spells is  Essential Salt(s, sic), which is only useful with Speak With Dead.

There's a missed opportunity in that none of the listed spells actually use the ‘Sustainable’ keyword, even though some would have been a good fit. The wording of ‘Sustainable’ does mean you can just end the spell before going to bed and then wake up with your dice refreshed, so maybe there was a concern that it’s too powerful? That said, it's not quite a no-brainer to use on every spell which permits it: there’s a 50-50 chance that each dice invested in a spell comes back immediately, so if you don't need to extend the spell's duration, you're better off with the chance of getting some power back.

Minor text quibbles:

Various grammatical errors (‘off of’); various typos (‘calss’); various terminology errors (‘MP’ for ‘casting dice’).

My main plaint is that spell names like ‘knock’, ‘entangle’, and ‘illusion’ don't get any emphasis when mentioned within a sentence (not even an initial capital), making the text unnecessarily hard to parse.

My favourite bit:

There's lots that's great, and it's hard to pick. Even if you don’t use The GLOG: Wizards in play, it’s inspiring from a design standpoint. If I have to choose just one thing, it's Dooms which wait at the end of every wizard's career. “Every apprentice knows that if they travel down the road of wizardry long enough, their doom will eventually claim them.”

Where to get it:

https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-glog-wizards.html