Hints at an Upcoming Fantasy TTRPG Project

If you happened to be designing a life path system for DnD 5e, with say 300 steps, then you might determine the following.

The average ability score is 12.24 using roll-4-drop-lowest. Picking an ancestry usually gives you an overall +3, or a +0.5 per ability, for 12.74 total.

If each character has six steps on their life path to determine their background, then each step must give them about +3.75 ability score.

There are about 25 meaningfully different tool proficiencies, so if every other life path step offers a tool proficiency, each tool will be represented 6 times in a set of 300 steps.

Similarly, there are 18 skills, so by having life path steps typically offer choices between several different skill proficiencies, each skill can be represented at least 15 times in a set of 300 steps.

Common languages can be represented ~12 times and unusual languages ~8 times in 300 steps.

A character starting their life path should be at least teenaged, and a character starting play should be an adult, so six life steps should each confer at least 1 year of age on average (adjusted for ancestries with different lifespans and ages of majority).

Finally, something you might notice while writing 300 meaningful situations a character could find themselves in on their way to level 1 is that the 5e SRD list of tool proficiencies is quite incomplete. You would probably want to add at least miner's equipment, and you would be tempted to add tools for needlework, more specific metalworking crafts, and animal processing like butchery, chandlery, and soapmaking. You would certainly add more features relating to service roles!

Melee combat abstractions: Time

Games necessarily use abstractions. Abstractions are neither good nor bad, although there can be good or bad implementations, and when choosing levels of abstraction for different elements, there can be good or bad choices.

Some things true of pre-modern armed combat which might not be obvious to everyone are:

1. When combatants are in reach/measure, strikes can be delivered very fast, and 
2. Combatants can spend a lot of time out of reach/measure, sizing each other up.

Many tabletop game designs get this backwards. There is almost never an incentive to stay just out of fighting range. And strikes in reach are either

1. Modelled individually, in which case the system almost always permits too few of them; or
2. Modelled abstractly/collectively, which usually works better.

But in both cases, game systems tend to neglect the necessary corollaries.

What do I mean by that?

Strikes modelled individually

Go and watch a video of HEMA sparring or historical fencing and count the attempted strikes. For a competent fighter using plausible weapons and trying to defend at the same time, you will see upward of two strikes per second. For a skilled fighter using a quick weapon like a one-handed sword, you will easily see four per second.

GURPS at least comes close to getting this right (depending on choice of rulesets). But its one-second-action time scale is still not fine-grained enough to properly model individual strikes!

Strikes modelled abstractly/collectively

A lot of games use one resolution mechanism (like an attack roll) to model a section of combat, summing up a series of attempted strikes.

Games like modern DnD and its various clones and pseudoclones claim to do this: one attack (or two or three, for skilled fighters) in six seconds represents a more complex section of combat. The claim doesn't hold up, though.

If an attack roll represents a series of attempted strikes, there are at least four important corollaries, which apply even to unskilled combatants:

1. It must be possible for on-hit effects like poison or sundering to be delivered multiple times per turn, even for an unskilled combatant;
   
2. It must be possible to (sometimes) hit multiple different foes in one turn, and increasingly likely for larger power disparities;
3. At a point in battle where a character finds themself in front of multiple helpless foes and no other threat, it must be possible to stab all of them - certainly at least six per turn;
   
4. Where a magical item or something similar delivers an effect on an object it hits, it should do so numerous times for every attack roll, to represent all the parries.
   

In general none of these are true for 5e and comparable rule sets.

(As an aside, the one attack roll representing numerous attempted hits clearly doesn't apply to ranged attacks, where one piece of ammunition is consumed per shot; there are other bigger problems with timing there, at least in modern DnD, where a windlass crossbow can somehow be shot and spanned in six seconds but throwing two throwing knives that are already in your hands takes twelve seconds.)

Is there a solution?

At least three that I can see. You can have an even more abstract set of rules so that none of these things even come up. You can change to a preposterously fine-grained time resolution. Or you can model multiple strikes with a single resolution mechanism but take pains to get all the corollary rules right.

I personally favour the last option. Abstract semi-tactical combat is fun. But it's really common in fantasy gaming to have a blade-breaking sword, or be faced with magically incapacitated foes, or be playing an extremely skilled fighter against a very large number of very weak foes. These kinds of cases should be supported!

Kickstarter ending soon, and design thoughts

There are just 24 hours left on my first Kickstarter: A Fistful Of Curiosities.

Something I discovered in working on this project is that certain elements are always useful for small self-consistent curiosities.

Those elements boil down to: reasons for the thing to (still) exist, ways in which the thing is discoverable, and something to make player characters interested in the thing.

A weird medieval fantasy setting in turn shapes what those elements will tend to look like. In particular, for the ten curiosities I'm publishing, there are:

• 4 instances of undead creatures
• 6 instances of old location-based sorcery
• 4 instances of huge monsters
• 5 instances of dwellings
• 4 instances of natural terrain features
• 4 instances of catastrophes
• 5 instances of cyclical or continual processes
• 4 instances of old foreboding stonework

 

Fantasy setting peeves: Coda

All too often in audiovisual media covering a historical or historical-fantasy setting, peasants are depicted as wearing ill-fitting, ragged, crudely-made clothing to show they're poor.

But this is a world before automation. That means four things: labour is cheap, people make and repair their own stuff, more stuff is made locally, and stuff is expensive to produce.

...So there's no reason for peasants to be wearing ill-fitting clothing. Cloth is expensive - having loose-fitting clothing (pleats, gathers, ruffles, etc) is a sign of wealth, not poverty!

...And there's no reason for peasants to be wearing ragged clothing. Nobody is so pressed for time that they can't have ragged edges repaired, when it's all but guaranteed that there's someone who stitches within spitting distance. Tears tend to get worse, wasting cloth, and again - cloth is expensive.

...And likewise there's no reason for peasants to be wearing crudely-made clothing. A ton of people are going to be competent in simple tailoring. Even when the economy is relatively monetised and goods are traded at market.

It shouldn't take more than ten minutes of thought - or a quick phone call to a domain expert - to get at least a veneer of verisimilitude. This is low-hanging fruit!

A Fistful of Curiosities: Kickstarter

Our new project, A Fistful of Curiosities, is now live on Kickstarter!

It's a collection of ten small, self-contained location-based fantasy mysteries. This toolkit will be great for game masters running fantasy role-playing games with pen-and-paper or at a virtual tabletop.

By backing the project before publication, you brighten our day and incidentally get the resource at a special reduced rate compared to later publication!

The Kickstarter runs for 15 days. You can check it out here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/periaptgames/a-fistful-of-curiosities-game-masters-resource

Four kinds of fantasy setting peeves

Personally, our peeves when it comes to the tropes in fantasy books, TTRPGs, and shows can be reduced to four categories. Our favourite works are those that are careful about all of them.

Category 1. Yes We Are Super Pedantic.

Armour made of interlinked rings has a name. It's 'mail', not 'chain mail'. If you want to be period-appropriate, you might say 'maille' or 'mayle'. Armour made of thin lames of metal has a name. It's 'lamellar armour', not 'splinted mail'. The preposterous place we're in with pervasive fantasy armours that are mis-named or just plain stupid can be traced back to Victorian antiquaries and burgeoning medievalists like Grose and Meyrick. They chose to use 'mail' to mean 'metal armour', contra its historical meaning, and invented a bunch of armours (banded mail, tegulated mail, splinted mail, etc) that are historically unattested!

A gorgon is a mythological monster or demon from ancient Greece with a visage that turned people to stone. Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa were the names of the three gorgons. Medusa, and in later stories all the gorgons, had serpents for hair. Medusa was the only mortal gorgon. Having 'medusas' and then unrelated 'gorgons' is like calling countries 'australias' and then saying that the word 'countries' means 'sports teams'.

Historically, alchemy has been more about enlightenment, spiritual refinement, and purity of the self, than it has been about mystical proto-chemistry.

Necromancy means getting information from the (spirits of the) dead, not animating dead bodies.

...And so on.

Category 2. No Thought Given to Consequences.

'Fantasy' doesn't mean 'anything can happen at any time without underlying rule or predictable reason'. That's a description of a dream sequence, or certain strains of postmodernism. Sometimes we get peeved by encountering medieval facades with no real thought given to the consequences of having magic and monsters.

Even something as seemingly essential as the towering stone castle is the product of social and political forces: castle building is a consequence of a fractured state that lacks strong central coordination, instead delegating power to local or regional leaders willing and able to use violence to maintain control. Those leaders build castles (i.e., fortified residences of local elites often used for administration including taxation) to (generally) shore up their vulnerabilities and (specifically) as a vital defence against their nearby peers, in a context where land is wealth and the central state isn't powerful enough to police them.

Castles exist in those conditions as long as there are the resources to make them, and as long as there aren't technologies that can trivially defeat them. Note that castles were replaced by star fortresses in the era of powerful artillery. Lots of common fantastic elements can defeat stone walls at a distance or under cover of stealth: flight or levitation, rock-to-mud or other transmutations, giants or other really big creatures, instantaneous travel, earthquakes, and powered-up versions of mundane siege attacks, like tunnelling, throwing big rocks, or inflicting plague or demoralisation. Such elements entail fewer castles - or none, if they are sufficiently available. Maybe star forts are the way to go in this particular fantasy setting. Or bunkers. Or enormous moats. Or maybe magic is the only defence that works.

Of course, if fantastic elements make it easier to build castles, that provides an impetus in the opposite direction. If good permanent masonry can be conjured by any town magician, then yes, castles might be everywhere despite being permeable to magic... but also, every town will be furnished with multiple curtain walls, aqueducts, tall stone buildings, stone roads, and so on.

In general, every fantastic element in a setting needs to be considered in terms of: how does this affect the overall milieu? If every other mage can send a magical message a hundred miles and every town has at least a couple of mages, what does that imply for a ruler's ability to receive information, wage war, and administer the state at a distance? Because it's sure not governed by the speed of a messenger on horseback any more.

Category 3. Assumptions Based on Modern Culture.

Writers all too often take for granted that some aspects of a free, capitalist society will just show up in a setting: a cash economy, an absence of individual obligations to people higher in the pecking order (or a lack of a pecking order), freedoms of speech and movement and so on, and a modern sense of morality where things like 'don't torture animals' and 'don't execute prisoners' are obvious rather than a weird joke.

Obviously some of these things are desirable to have in a setting just so that readers or players won't be icked out. And obviously if a game or novel requires its audience to pursue a comprehensive course of historical/sociological/economic study before they can engage with it, that game or novel is limiting itself in a pretty major way. But if a setting has these things, it should have a reason to have them. It's not actually that difficult to do - 'gods literally exist, they desire these things for a reason X, and they have worked to implement them by means Y' gets you most of the way there in one sentence. Our peeve is when the world is 'modern Western civilisation with the serial numbers written in Blackletter' and that's just ...how it is. The average powerless pre-industrial commoner can go where they want, choose where to work, says what they want to who they want, has money and spends it, doesn't live in fear of the powerful, and is a devout utilitarian ethicist. Without any of the necessary structures to enable that.

Category 4. Maladaptive Feedback Loops.

There's something that's happened since the dawn of TTRPGs. Game masters - or players - excise the parts of the rules they don't like or don't see the need for. The least popular rules get ignored, popular house-rules spring up and pass on, and in the worst case, poorly-laid-out rule books result in certain good ideas just never making it to the table. Popular voices spread their own gameplay changes through the hobby - first through magazines, then blogs, now social media - and widespread changes in gameplay result.

Later generations of designers create new editions of old games, or make their own new games, based on the way they remember playing or the way people seem to want to play. The feedback loop completes. Some innovations are for the better, but useful material is also lost.

And so you get big successful games about delving into dungeons with whole books oriented towards game masters which somehow forget to teach said game masters how to properly run a dungeon delve. Or sections on realm management which boil down to 'wing it', where bygone editions had exceptional rules for that baked in. Or wilderness survival rules so brief and generous that choosing the right starting character negates any possible wilderness survival gameplay.

Well, so what?

In our own work, we like to put together material that bears all these things in mind. We said 'peeves', but really, it's about forming a cohesive, interesting whole that won't turn off a reader who knows too much and doesn't expect too much out of a new reader/player who's coming from a different genre, style, or expectation.