Listen to the Rain

I've been thinking about running a game of D&D, to the point where I actually bought some 5E sourcebooks. But not official sourcebooks--third party ones that overhaul the magic and combat systems called Spheres of Power and Spheres of Might, because I really don't like D&D's magic system and if I run a game I'd want to totally overhaul it. I write a lot about tinkering with the magic system, like in this post about Dark Sun's magic vs. psionics or this post about deciding between different magic systems for a homebrew game, but I've never really done a post about my problems with D&D magic, so this is that post.

( This post causes 1d4+1 damage per two caster levels )

I wrapped up another RPG game!

There's a couple blog posts about it in the Warhammer RPG tag, but I haven't written that much about. I took schoolpsychnerd's wood elf treesinger, oddsboy's Arabyan [note spelling] warrior-poet, and aaron.hosek's innkeeper-turned-berserker from a prison underneath an apple-farming village filled with cultists, to a small Imperial town under siege by goblin bands, to a roadside inn under attack by bizarre creatures in the swamp mists, to glorious Middenheim, where the PCs went through the original WFRP 1e corebook adventure and then through a modified-to-unrecognizability version of Ashes of Middenheim, foiling a cult's attempt to taint Middenheim's water and mutate large parts of the city and then skipping town in search of the wood elf's sister and hoping that the remaining conspiratorial factions didn't burn the city down while they were gone.

The Warhammer tagline is up there in the subject, but there wasn't really that much that was grim about this game. I did play up the uneasiness that the humans of the Empire treated wood elves, especially ones with tattoos on all visible skin and feathers braided into their hair, but I didn't have the nobility or cops harass the PCs, I didn't get them thrown out of anywhere for being miscreants, and I didn't play up the disadvantages of a wandering lifestyle. Part of that is because the game took place after the Storm of Chaos, so the roads and Middenheim were packed with refugees and heavily-armed vagabonds were more the norm rather than something that the nobility would want to stamp on right quick, but the other part is that the PCs were very lucky.

The dice favored them in nearly all circumstances, and when they weren't getting good rolls, their opponents were failing too so it didn't matter. WFRP is famous for the critical hit tables, but the PCs suffered two critical hits over the whole game--both of them hit the innkeeper, and one of them was a critical to the head that stunned him for one round. The other was a critical to the leg that cost him half his next action. No flying limbs to be seen, at least on the PCs' side, and this despite the fact that I'm not sure the innkeeper ever rolled a defense during the whole game.

And while one of the oft-discussed problems with nonhumans in RPGs is that it's nearly impossible to maintain their mystique when humans have to play them, the dice were so good to the treesinger that the other PCs started introducing her as "Tallana Deathdealer" for her skill with a bow. She repeatedly succeeded in Ride rolls to do horse tricks with her horse familiar despite not possessing the Ride skill, and as for her treesinger skills, she won the final cultist battle almost singlehandedly with a casting of A Murder of Crows that did maximum damage, summoning a flock of aetherial bird-spirits that descended on the cultists and started pecking at their faces.

I've said I learn something from every game I run to completion, and what I learned from this Warhammer game was--don't force a mood. I bet you'd find a lot of people online who would say I'm playing Warhammer wrong, that we should go back to D&D, blah blah blah, but we had a ton of fun with our Comedic Game of Reluctant Adventure. I've seen it said that there's no point in a GM adding humor to a game, because the players will provide plenty of it no matter what the tone is, but here I think it improved things. It turned out a lot better than if I had artificially tried to make the game more grimdark.

There's another of the games I've wanted to run for years down. Next up, I do an actual short playtest adventure of Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom!

I realized recently that while I write a lot about RPGs I want to run, or RPGs I'm tinkering with, I write very little about RPGs I'm actually running or playing. Other than the Flight of the Phoenix AP posts I did and a single post on Fallout, I can't think of any. But I just finished running my Warhammer FRP group through The Oldenhaller Contract (PDF warning) the last two game sessions, and that's at least worth a post.

"The Oldenhaller Contract" was the adventure included in the first edition of WFRP, and has a somewhat mixed place among WFRP fans because it's a basically a dungeon crawl against cultists and a lot of people like WFRP for its tendency to deal with creeping horror and intrigue. "The Oldenhaller Contract" has a mine cart ride fleeing from swarms of ravenous rats, a three-sided gang war, a cult of the Lord of the Flies, and a sewer level. Not exactly subtle.

But I think it all went pretty well! The PCs managed to avoid the worst of the gang war, showing up after the aftermath. They successfully bluffed their way past the surviving gang and followed the trail of blood left by the murdered leader, leapt onto the mine cart and escaped the rats, arrived at the area where the cult ritual was taking place under Middenheim, killed the cult leader with a couple well-placed arrows, avoided getting hit by the summoned daemon, killed most of the rest of the cult in melee combat after scaring the daemon away with their torch (there was a note in its stats that fire causes fear, and despite a high Willpower it failed its roll when they beat it around the head and shoulders with a torch), then shot the daemon from a distance with arrows as it advanced on them again and banished it back to the realm of Chaos. schoolpsychnerd is playing an apprentice wood elf treesinger, so she managed to notice the aura of corruption around the gem they were sent to retrieve, preventing the other characters from handling it too much and thus contracting Neiglish Rot. Also, one of the PCs suffered the first PC-side critical hit in the game...and it was a "stunned for 1d10 rounds" against someone who had the Iron Jaw Talent, so it only ended up being a one-round stun.

Overall, the PCs got really lucky. Even the Arabyan duelist poet, who kept failing all his attacks against the daemon or the cultists, still made almost all his defenses successfully. I could easily have seen a couple Fate Points being needed if even a couple more attacks had landed on the PCs, or if the daemon had hit them at all. But they got away easy. This time!

I had to modify the beginning of the adventure from the one listed in the book, due to moving it from Nuln to Middenheim and due to the PCs being given the hook by a mysterious hooded old man in an inn. It was cliche, but I justified it by making the man a Bright Wizard trying to stop a threat to the city in the wake of the Storm of Chaos and having him seek them out specifically because I'm pretty sure they've bragged about their exploits to all and sundry in every single tavern they've been to so far in the game.

If I were to run it again, I'd probably tone down the daemon. As written, it's nearly a TPK situation--it has a permanently Toughness-reducing aura (which I didn't notice until after they had killed it, so I didn't retroactively apply it), has a chance to cause Neiglish Rot on every single attack (effectively Save or Die), and has as much damage reduction as a dwarf in full plate. Several of the PCs attacks did no damage at all, and coupled with being outnumbered by six cultists I'm kind of amazed the PCs did as well as they did. They were saved by that well-timed failed Willpower roll, by me ruling that having all cultists fight to the death is idiotic and making some of them flee, and by the elf having a Ballistic Skill of 48 and hitting with every single arrow she shot. I think the smart choice is to run if the cultists successfully summon the daemon, but nearly everyone I've ever run for or played with views running as equivalent to defeat and will fight to the death against overwhelming odds, so that was pretty unlikely. The arrows banished the daemon right as the two PCs with zero Wounds remaining were running back into combat with it, as an example.

Next up is a heavily-modified version of Ashes of Middenheim with almost all the silliness I complain about there stripped out and it turned into a more mundane power struggle. Or is it? I haven't actually done much reworking yet, so I guess I'll find out!

I was going to do more on the subject of sandbox vs. plotted games, but I can't organize my thoughts properly, so this one goes first.

One thing I often say about my GMing style is that every game I run turns into a horror game regardless of what it started out as. But that's just based on the fact that I like Lovecraft and like including cosmicism, the insignificance of humanity, vanished pre-human races, and creepy monsters with tentacles, not really based on the mood my games are trying to evoke.

The problem is that invoking a horror mood, as opposed to just using horror tropes, is really hard and almost entirely relies on player buy-in. In a passive medium, it's easier to evoke the kind of dread that horror requires because the narrative is entirely under the control of the author, but that's not the case in most RPGs. The addition of the dice means that it's harder to maintain a consistent feel, barring GM intervention. Sometimes the axe murderer gets a lucky hit. Sometimes the player gets a lucky hit. In a book, it's easy to put the protagonist in continuous danger without actually killing them, making you worry about their safety and thus invoking the connection that actual horror requires.

To demonstrate what I mean, here's an example the other way. One of the inspirations for Delta Green was that John Tynes played a game of the infamously-deadly Call of Cthulhu campaign Masks of Nyarlathotep in university and...well, it was infamously deadly. So deadly that they went through all the various family and friends of the original characters who could have reasonably gone to investigate what happened and started bringing in people on the street and random guys they found in bars. They basically zerg rushed Nyarlathotep with such luminaries as Backwash McJesus and his brother Bastard, two hobos the PCs randomly found on the street and later roped into saving the world. I think it was a triple-digit death toll by the end.

In essence, horror without an investment all too easily becomes farce. Then again, that's pretty true of roleplaying in general.

Assuming you have that investment, though, there are still better and worse ways to go about it.

Examples
By far the best system I've seen for representing madness is the Madness Meters that I've mentioned before, but while they work just fine for a modern-day occult horror game like Unknown Armies or the excellent Delta Green, they make much less sense for a fantasy game--even a dark fantasy one. Penalizing adventurers for killing people or stealing things or seeing weird monsters might work okay in some kind of meta-game about how adventurers are crazy because no sane person would come out of a underground cavern system laden with enough treasure to set them up for life, only to walk to the Mages Guild, blow it all on even sharper swords that go *ting* and armor that glows, and then go back underground, but for a typical fantasy game about hardass murderhobos it's not that great. That cuts out the Violence, Unnatural, and Self gauges right there and doesn't leave much of the meat left.

Ravenloft is pretty clearly a topical example. I'm only familiar with the second edition version, but there are three different mechanics there: Fear, Horror, and Madness Checks. Fear is when the ghost jumps out and shrieks in your face, horror is when you hear children laughing in the decrepit old mansion, and madness is pretty obvious. Failing Fear checks makes you have a short-term freakout, and failing Horror or Madness Checks have long-term consequences. Horror can give penalties on Fear Checks, and Madness is CoC-style with permanent disorders. That's workable, if a bit tailored to the heavily Gothic overtones that Ravenloft has.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay has something similar, though it's oriented differently. Fear Tests give you a dice penalty if you fail them but don't constrain the PC's actions, Terror Tests make you run if you fail them, and Insanity Tests give you insanity points. Anyone who hits 6 IPs needs to make Willpower Tests to avoid getting a disorder, and if they stave it off until 12 IPs, they automatically get one. After a Disorder, IPs go down to zero and the counter starts up again.

Call of Cthulhu, of course, has its Sanity system that are basically mental hit points. Lose too many at once and you freak out.

Dread is one of those new-fangled indie games, but it's the only game I've seen that has an mechanic that directly invokes apprehension. Take a Jenga tower. When you do something dangerous in game, pull out a block. If the tower falls, your character dies at the end of the scene. It wouldn't work for a hexcrawling fantasy game, but it is a mechanic that perfectly does what it's designed to do.

Finally, this isn't really a rules example, but the entire reason level draining exists in D&D is to make undead actually scary on a metagame level. I'm sure everyone's familiar with players treating all monsters as bags of HP and special powers regardless of their appearance or capabilities, but if they can suck out your levels? That's scary. Undead being immune to morale served a similar function back when battles were PCs + hirelings vs. tons of monster and most battles lasted until one side broke and ran, but undead always fought to the last.

Implementation
Honestly, I'm tempted to just rip off the WFRP system. I like the idea of encouraging a sense of creeping horror à la the Ravenloft mechanic, but I actually think that giving it mechanical weight works against that in the worst way. Horror, as I said above, is more of a mood thing determined by investment in the situation and the characters, and attempting to induce it mechanically just draws attention to the artificiality of the game and works against the end goal.

But fear is easily represented, especially stealing the Conditions I mentioned from my social post. Fail a Fear Check, and you get a choice--run away, cower, Conan-style berzerk rage to wipe out the unnatural, etc. Maybe penalties if different options are chosen, like automatically gaining an Insanity Point if you go berzerk but hey, you can fight the monster from beyond.

I'm currently leaning towards using this system I'm thinking up to run Sun and Storm, since my other idea of sword-and-sorcery Romans in the jungle would be better served by Runequest, and using fear/insanity there would fit perfectly, since the game is about a civilizational collapse after being conquered by an army of the undead. Though oddly, the original game has no sanity or fear mechanics. I'd think that having to fight your friends and family who now serve the Storm Legion is way more psychologically damaging, even to the generic adventurer, than fighting goblins.

Wait, who am I kidding. Everyone knows that murderhobos don't have family or friends.

Anyway, Fear Checks and escalating insanity points, resisted with Willpower. Simply, nonintrusive, and it already works in another game system.