I do not expect the player/DM dynamic to change, but I did expect a revolution in the game business model. The vast majority of RPG publishers still produce books and miniatures for a game for sale. The main difference is PDFs and other digital formats supplanted some of the old dead tree offerings. It strikes me that all of this technology has so much more to offer than just a download pipe for PDF files.

Wizards of the Coast attempted to leverage some of this technology in their digital initiative (D&D Insider), but they botched it. Software quality aside, WOTC substituted a subscription web site as the delivery system instead of downloads. That was not the evolution in gaming I wanted. It was more of a format change. Book to PDF to website to deliver content  generated from within an ivory tower. WOTC gives and consumers receive with open arms, thankful for the manna from gaming heaven.

The Internet offers so much more in terms of functionality that no gaming company is currently exploiting. I want a game that integrates the best parts of social networking and game design from the moment of conception, not as an afterthought.

First, forget PDF files and dead tree books. Every aspect of the game exists only online, from rules and GM advice to maps and monsters. Create the website with built-in character generators and encounter builders. Use technology to make the game easier to run and more fun to play! On a personal note, add a dice roller for those that choose to use it, but I think most enjoy the clatter and terror of dice flying across the table in a moment of crisis.

Yes, this model requires Internet access to run a game. Given the near ubiquity of wireless net access this is less of an issue than even two years ago. Give it a few more years and you will have to live in Outer Mongolia not to have internet access at your chosen gaming location. Portable computers grow more powerful and cheaper every month, so even the most poverty-stricken of games will wield adequate technology.

You are probably thinking “Hey, you just described the WOTC DDI and 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons.” Partially this is true, but only in the respect that online PC generators and encounter builders are good ideas. I want to get beyond the one-way business model of “publisher creates and the masses consume.”

All role-playing games are organic and evolve as the players move through the plot. GMs create new monsters, adjudicate rules and fix glaring mechanical problems in the system. Players constantly test the system’s limits and offer suggestions. Sadly, all of this evolution occurs on a local level with game groups. Sometimes a massively broken aspect of a game is repaired when enough players gripe to the publisher, but this is relatively uncommon.

My idea is a social network that constantly revises the game system, proposing tweaks and updates on an ongoing basis. Let the players decide if a rule is pointless or needs updating. A simple voting mechanic lets everyone have a say in what goes into the system.

Beyond rules, let members of the social network add content (monsters for example) to the “official” game. Members submit ideas to a voting process and after they reach a certain threshold (60%+), it goes into official canon. After approval all of the game’s features (PC generator, encounter generator) can access the new content immediately.

The social cloud aspect is very important because it makes public the thousands of good ideas that occur within small game groups that never spread into the greater gaming community.

Give out rewards, both tangible (cash/t-shirts/dice, etc) or intangible (admin status, badges) for contributors. Let the players build the game they want, not what a marketing department thinks they want.

This is a very rough draft of what I would like to see. There are still major issues to overcome like copyright ownership of submitted content, a sustainable business model(advertising or subscriptions perhaps), some kind of ombudsman system to review content changes and a hundred other things I have not thought of yet.

So, what say you all? Is this feasible? Is somebody already doing it? Or are we damned to buy paper rule books and PDFs for all time?

Trask, The Last Tyromancer

Clearly a universal system is easier to learn, since only one mechanic resolves all contests. Conversely, the varied systems offer greater complexity, but some players enjoy the variety. I am curious as to how my readership feels about this issue. Should a role-playing  game use a single mechanic to resolve all actions or use different mechanics for different aspects of the game?

Trask, The Last Tyromancer

I will start this festival of pain with my own suggestion: drowning in the 3.5 OGL rules.  Let me refresh your memories.

Drowning

Any character can hold her breath for a number of rounds equal to twice her Constitution score. After this period of time, the character must make a DC 10 Constitution check every round in order to continue holding her breath. Each round, the DC increases by 1. See also: Swim skill description.

When the character finally fails her Constitution check, she begins to drown. In the first round, she falls unconscious (0 hp). In the following round, she drops to -1 hit points and is dying. In the third round, she drowns.

I do not take issue with the concept of drowning in an RPG. It is simply one of the many ways to die in a dangerous world.  If you hit the water unconscious (a surprisingly common event given  the plethora of 3.5 knock-you-out spells/powers/poisons etc), you have three  rounds to avoid death.  Either you get help from another party member or you die.

Here is why it is my nomination for worst rule;  it only applies to low-level characters.  At low levels,most PC types  have terrible constitution bonuses and no magic to allow water breathing.  This vile synergy makes low-level characters very vulnerable to drowning.  Yet, at higher levels there are a plethora of counter-measures to either give water breathing to other players (ie spells) or players simply acquire an item that allows water breathing. I preferred the “Necklace of Adaptation,” since it also makes you gas-proof.

So, drowning is an absolutely lethal rule mechanic that ceases to have much impact at higher levels and is also wildly out of sync with the other environmental hazards in the game.  Drowning kills characters in three rounds regardless of hit points.   Lava exposure only does 2d6 per round! Hmm, let me think how that scores on the verisimilitude scale; 18 seconds under water is lethal, but playing chicken with a volcanic hellfire only scorches you.  I know games are not true simulations, but really…

Now it is your turn. Any game or system is a legitimate target, but please refrain from using the original 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons  skill challenge mechanics as your submission.  As much as I dislike 4th Edition, it feels cruel to pour more salt in that wound. It is just too easy of a target.

I am anxious to hear what rule mechanic nightmares my readership has to share. I am sure there are much worse.

Trask, The Last Tyromancer

A Tripping Victim

“Fakiness” is my term for the ability of any role-playing game to accurately simulate the completely unreal fantasy worlds that players aspire to experience. If you are playing in the standard elf-ridden, high magic, medieval England clone, then the role-playing game system needs rules to accommodate the tropes and trappings of that world, such as elves, magic, impossible combat maneuvers and other feats of derring-do.

These rules allow players to experience the world that lives in their heads, based on their personal experience and cultural inputs, like movies and books. Should the game system omit a key point, say magic as an example, the game is worse for it.

Herein lies my complaint; why the hell can’t I trip anyone in 4th Edition? Wait, before you start flaming me in the comments about how you can trip in 4E, read on. I do not want to hear about some “Dragon Magazine” article, supplement or feat that allows a “once per encounter” trip attempt by a specific character. I want every single character to have tripping. Look at the source material! Virtually every movie or book in the fantasy genre has at least one character at some point in the story tripping a bad guy at a critical moment. Usually the tripper is a non-combat character who just gets lucky, saving the designated hero in the process.

Fakiness demands that the peasant child should be able to trip the villain as he runs past to slay the designated hero. What are beautiful, but non-combatant princesses to do without a comely leg to hinder an attack? What about the dark stranger with a mission that does not want to reveal himself to the PCs just yet? How can he help them in combat? Easy, stick out a leg and foil a back-alley ambush.

All of which is impossible in 4th edition without a specific character class or a feat chain. I am especially annoyed because of the list of “universal” combat maneuvers that all PCs get.

PCs may:

Bull Rush
Grab
Charge

A halfling can try to grab a mighty knight, but he cannot trip him? Where is the fakiness in that? Yes, I know trip is relatively powerful, since it can limit actions in the next round. In the overall structure of a 4E combat, I cannot fathom how it would make a huge difference. It costs the victim a move action to stand up, annoying certainly, but not game breaking.

Let us all inject some fakiness back into our 4E games and bring tripping back to the table.

Trask, The Last Tyromancer

“Visions of Essence” released some new information about their  “Eoris” role-playing game in the form of the “Third Contact.”

The “Third Contact” is a free pdf download that contains some basic rules, maps and a short introductory module. Normally I would not review a “preview” release, but there is so much interest in this game that I thought it worthwhile. To organize this review a bit better, I split the review into three parts; rules, setting and production values.

The Rules:

The game uses a d20 dice pool to determine success or failure. The number of d20s you may roll is dependent on the number of points you spent in a given skill or attribute. A “success” is any d20 roll over the target number, which starts at 15. This number fluctuates depending on narrator (DM) or PC modifiers. Every roll of your dice pool includes an extra d20 called the “essence” dice. The essence dice modifies your success or failure. For example, if you roll 5d20 to climb up a wall and and receive no successes then you failed to climb the wall and fall to the ground. You then consult the essence dice and you rolled a “1.” This is referred to as a “tragedy” in the game. So not only do you fall off the wall, you land on your sword and break it or some other setback determined by the narrator. Conversely, you could roll 5 successes and get a “1″ on the essence dice. This is an “unfortunate success.” The narrator decides you make it up the wall, but drop your sword to the ground. There are some other uses for the essence dice, but you get the idea.

Combat resolution uses opposed dice pool rolls with the highest number of successes either hitting the target or dodging the attack, depending if you the attacker or defender. A similar system also resolves the social skill rolls. The social interaction system in “Eoris” is complex and requires some explanation. Here is a copy of an “Eoris” character sheet.

The “attributes” wheel is familiar to any RPG player and does not need any explanation. The “psychology” section on the right-hand side is a bit unusual. During social encounters the PCs interact with NPCs using these psychological characteristics. It plays very similar to the combat encounters but with character traits. If you succeed in your “attacks” the NPC’s psychology might weaken or they might take “stress” damage. Excessive stress means the NPC might lose self-control and be unable to resist one of his psychological traits. For example, after a successful psychological assault by a PC, the NPC loses the ability to resist his “greed” psychological trait and will accept a bribe. The same applies to a PC, so these social encounter directly impact the PCs behavior.

In the same vein, in the center of the sheet are the “Appearance Status” and “Emotional Status” grids. As the character moves through the world, forces act upon him that move these traits along the two axis. A fighter may start out “secure” on the “Emotional Status” grid, but a terrible defeat moves him towards “frightened.” Where your PC is on these grids at a given moment may give a situational bonus or a penalty to your dice pool.

Though the module contains only “basic” rules, I did not see anything that really scared me off. I would put the complexity well below the old 3.5 OGL system, but a bit above the new 4E system. The explanations are clear and the provided examples got the job done. While I have a personal bias for “crunchy” game systems, the “Essence System” (this is the official name) is certainly playable and easy to learn.

The Setting:

I am not even going to try on this one. It is like trying to summarize the “Dune” universe in a couple of paragraphs. Any summary I could put together just would not do it justice. My best effort is this: there are milleniums of history, science that looks like magic and an extremely well-developed theology woven into it all. Sorry, best I could do. You are much better off downloading the “Second Contact” from the “Eoris” website and reading the history for yourself.

I do feel qualified to comment on the “feel” of the game. This is a role-playing intensive world. About half of the encounters for the module are non-combat, social encounters. While there is some skull crushing in sections, the world, the history and the system lean towards role-playing over combat. Of course you could make the game a pure combat affair, but that would be a disservice to the deep history and the heavy rules emphasis on role-playing mechanics. My personal feeling is the LARP crowd and the “World of Darkness” players will be especially drawn to this game.

Production Values:

Gods, this thing is pretty!

In my interview with the Eoris developers a few months ago I commented on the high-quality of the art and they continue to impress me. I am literally frothing at the mouth to see what the final book looks like. In more mundane matters, the editing is good and the pdf is nearly typo free. While the writing is clear, I did notice one thing about the writing style; it seemed stilted. It was not bad or grammatically incorrect, just a bit stiff. It felt like the author was writing in a foreign language. Not a major complaint, but noticeable.

The separate map download is also worth a mention. There are two versions, one for standard printers and one for a plotter printer. I printed the standard maps and they were adequate, but the plotter maps are very high resolution. It might be worth a trip to a copy shop for a full-size version. Regardless of the version, the maps are very well done.

I was very impressed with the “Third Contact” module from the Eoris team and am looking forward to the full release.  There is no specific release date yet, but they are taking pre-orders on the Eoris website. I will post when I get a firm relase date on “Eoris”

Trask, The Last Tyromancer