I’m supposed to concentrate on writing TSoY, but a short note about something else should break the pace nicely. The following came to me yesterday when I pondered the system aesthetics of fantasy adventure games: if I were to design a beginner-friendly fantasy adventure game, I would consider the d20-based D&D mechanics and pool-based Tunnels & Trolls mechanics both too dependent on special tools – strange dice shapes or too many dice, to wit. So I started thinking of how I’d create a traditional fantasy rules set using only a deck of playing cards.

Deck of Wonders

Each combat round the players draw a hand of N cards from the deck. Each player arranges these cards into sets as he pleases and lays the sets face-down on the table. The permitted sets are as follows:

• Defenses are a series of the same value (doubles, triples, etc.). A defense cancels attack cards valued equal or less to the defense, but at most as many as there are cards in the defense.
• Attacks are straights (consecutive cards by value) of different lengths. Each attack card that passes defenses causes injury.
• Maneuvers are flushes (same suit in all cards) of different sizes. Maneuvers are used for everything else apart from fighting – simply moving about on the fictional battlefield, rearranging the battlefield conditions, swashbucklery, activating some special conditions of the battle, escaping and so on. Presumably a larger maneuver is better – perhaps they’re compared to each other, or you get to do one thing per card or something like that.

The thing here is that while the other players can see how many sets you’re putting forth, they can’t know what type they are before they are revealed. A straight flush may be activated as either an attack or maneuver for an added bit of flexibility. Single cards can be activated as any of the above, they just are not very powerful. Most importantly, it is likely that you have to make choices as to what type of action you’re going to take in the combat: all sets you lay down limit your options as to the other sets you could make.

When the players have laid down their cards, they start revealing them in turns. Timing has some significance, as attacks and maneuvers happen immediately, while defenses stick around to hamper others if and when an attack comes for you. I’ve yet to figure out how damage would be tracked and what the consequences of getting hit would be, but that’s details – the important thing is whether the probabilities of card play work to map out a nice fiction. Might be that defenses need to stick around even after being activated; it’s pretty difficult to get triples or four of a kind from a single deck, after all, even with jokers.

Elaboration

The basic system would be simple in this hypothetical beginner-friendly fantasy combat rpg. Perhaps each character gets five cards in battle, or perhaps it depends on bit on your competence: fighters get eight, normal adventurers five and civilians only three. Something like that. Further combat competence would come in the form of redraws: a really competent character could put down some sets and then fill his hand one or more times, thus potentially developing some even stronger sets.

Special maneuvers could come in many forms in this card-based combat system: players could trade cards to represent characters cooperating, a character could have some permanent cards he always gets from the deck at the beginning of the battle, a character could be able to activate special maneuvers with the right sort of set (a fireball spell with a straight of three red cards, whatever) and so on. Pretty easy to hang elaboration on something like this.

The actually interesting question to me is, however, whether a system like this would be doable as a more beginner-friendly alternative for something that requires you to either make a box set or require the players to buy funky dice separately. Everybody has playing cards, sure, but the above system might feel somewhat more abstract than the traditional roll-dice-to-hit thing is.

This last part of my rpg history concerns the last five years or so. This stuff is probably pretty well-known to my friends, I’ve left much more documentation behind in the Internet and other places lately than I used to earlier. Still, it won’t hurt to list some of the gaming that feels particularly significant to me.

Here’s a list of links to the earlier parts of this narrative:

• Part #1 discusses my childhood and how I learned about roleplaying in the first place.
• Part #2 tells about my first cycle of roleplaying and my first real gaming group.
• Part #3 is about my quiet years at the end of the ’90s; it also discusses my experiments with larping.
• Part #4 tells of my university studies and how I got over my rpg-less slump.

Arkenstone Years

The last part of my history stopped at 2003, and with good reason; after the Ropecon of that year my roleplaying was again obviously on-track: the Bextropolis campaign I wrote about last time was proceeding solidly and I was actively writing and reading games. I’ve never been very active in buying rpg material (never learned to rely on material culture in my rural youth, I might say), but I read everything the Internet had to offer at the time, and it was a lot – I knew the Forgean design precepts of games by heart even while I owned nothing but HeroQuest and Sorcerer in my game library (having left most of my games up north).

So while I was active in design and quickly becoming acclimated to the Forge socially, my gaming was simple, consisting of 1-3 sessions of my Bextropolis D&D weekly all through the winter of 2003-04. This changed when I accepted the post as the editor of Alterations, the rpg ‘zine of the university roleplaying club. At the time I was pretty interested in club activity and wanted to see whether I could do anything to make the rpg club a more active and interesting place. (Proved that I couldn’t, but that’s a different story.) A part of that was the notion that I’d demonstrate communal interest in roleplaying through the ‘zine with a special roleplaying event: I’d gather many people to play the same game to allow them to share in a common experience, perhaps bringing the club together a bit and giving the members something in common to chew over.

This shenanigan was relevant mostly because it made me contact Paul Czege, the designer of My Life with Master: MLwM was the perfect small, experimental and celebrated game for my project, so I asked Paul whether he’d allow me to distribute the game for free to the project participants to facilitate everybody playing the same game. In hindsight I’m pretty surprised that he graciously allowed this – Paul was probably smarter than me, he knew that this sort of thing is prone to reaping unexpected benefits.

So in 2004 I played a lot of MLwM in Helsinki, and I wrote my own game: my D&D homebrew had solidified enough for me to imagine that I might be able to write it down. Bextropolis was in many ways a very progressive campaign; it was head and shoulders above its nearest comparison, HeroQuest, which had earlier voided my superhero game with its superior method. With Bextropolis I wanted to make a game that was even better than HeroQuest in terms of system elegance and powerful tools for narrativistic adventure gaming. Ultimately another American designer, Clinton R. Nixon would again pre-empt me by publishing his Shadow of Yesterday, which fulfilled the design mandate of Bextropolis to such an extent that I ultimately couldn’t justify continuing my own writing project.

In the summer of 2004 we of course started our own independent publishing company with my brothers, Arkenstone Publishing. This was a direct consequence of my earlier correspondence with Paul, as our purpose in starting the company was to publish a Finnish translation of My Life with Master. This is not a history of Arkenstone, so I won’t go into details on that, but I should say that ever since then my gaming has been majorly influenced by my publishing and retail endeavours: Arkenstone retails foreign indie games in Finland, which practically means that I buy games that I like and play them and sell them. We’ve also translated a bunch of games, all of which I’ve ended up playing in large amounts – look at the Arkenstone oeuvre and you’ll see what I’ve been playing through the recent years.

An important consequence of all this has been a new change in the social environment of my gaming. Ultimately I moved out of Helsinki (ending our Bextropolis campaign) and back to Upper Savo because I decided to abandon my academic aspirations; my recent roleplaying experiences had convinced me that I wanted to be an artist, not a scientist (a rough dichotomy that has haunted me ever since my early teens). This of course meant abandoning my friends in Helsinki and finding new people to game with. Consequently I nowadays boast two different circles of gaming buddies: on the one hand I have the local teenagers whom I groom into gamers as necessary; we play boardgames and roleplaying games, often playtesting something for me or playing historically significant games to widen the horizons for the teenagers. On the other hand I have people such as Sami Koponen and Olli Kantola, to name a couple, who live in different parts of the country, but with whom I play whenever I have a chance. The latter I’ve met and grown friendly with largely due to my cultural endeavours in roleplaying: Arkenstone has brought me friends, in other words.

Aside from pointing at the Arkenstone oeuvre and my own game design projects (about which I’ve written in this very blog lately), I can’t really say anything very definitive about my gaming through the last five years. It has all been very rich and varied, to such an extent that there’s hardly a corner of the roleplaying field that I wouldn’t have trawled lately. For example, just this last winter I’ve been playing a lot of dungeoneering adventure and playtests of the new edition of The Shadow of Yesterday, the two of which are in many ways quite the opposite ends of the roleplaying spectrum. When I’m not playtesting something of my own, I tend to end up playing something other designers are working on; I like helping others, so I might as well play their games and give some feedback if I’m going to play something anyway.

The last part of my history progressed to late ’90s, so here I’ll continue about how came to encounter the Forge – this was a major turning point in my roleplaying hobby. In between high school and college was my year in military service in… -99 to 2000, unless I’m mistaken. Continuing from there:

Meeting the Forge

After I came back from military service and moved to Helsinki for my university studies, I was pretty distanced from practical roleplaying. My brother Markku introduced the local university roleplaying club to me, but I didn’t take any strong initiative in that direction – partially this was because I had no real creative direction for my roleplaying, part was just my natural reticence.

My memories of these years are somewhat hazy when it comes to roleplaying, mostly because of the lack of direction I mentioned above. A pretty definite turning point comes about in 2003, when I wrote what I called a “tabletop larp” called Temppeli for the Ropecon of that year. The game was an ambitious piece that strived to combine immersion and director-stance, utilizing techniques that would probably be considered hybrid Forge/jeepform today. My deal with Markku then was that I’d write the scenario and he’d run it, which we did – I myself spent the convention in ticketing duty.

But those first years of the millennium, those are somewhat more vague in my memory… what did I do then, exactly? I literally have to delve into my archives to see if I have anything that I worked on then that’d jog my memory. It proves that while I didn’t have a gaming group at the time and didn’t play a lot, I still thought about roleplaying then. Roleplaying was so meshed with my creative process that even during my major fairy tale binge early this decade I wrote extensive notes for a fairy tale roleplaying game, it seems – I’d forgotten about this one, I haven’t touched it since early 2002. Another similar thing is a large Kalevala-based superhero campaign/rules framework I seem to have worked on during the next winter; this one I remember well, I often draw on those experiences when interacting with other designers who seem to be stuck in the same place I was; I spent enormous amounts of time then fiddling with the logical end-point of my late ’90s play. The rules-set I ended up with has its starting point in Basic Roleplaying System (not a coincidence that it’s one of the most prominent unified mechanics ever), while the end-result resembles the Whitewolf Storyteller system on crack: the entire rules-set in all its minute detail is dedicated to a point-buy with a player-defined skill/ability system that’d allow the players seamless control over the strengths and weaknesses of their character. The whole game has practically nothing else to it, it’s all a huge character creation system. A bit like GURPS in that regard.

I worked on many other things during this period as well – now that I trawl my archives the picture is starting to emerge. Here’s a rough timeline of what happened through those years:

• In 2000 and 2001 I hardly roleplayed. I remember participating in a few abortive attempts at the Helsinki University roleplaying club. Mostly that play left me deeply unsatisfied; the groups didn’t cohere, some campaigns never got more than a chargen session, and even those where the GM worked at it diligently felt like chores in the end. In hindsight I don’t think the other people in those games enjoyed themselves too much, either.
• Sometime in 2001 or 2002 I stumbled at the Forge. At the time it was little more than a repository for articles – or at least I don’t remember reading the forums. Anyway, I wasn’t that interested in forums at the time. What I do remember is reading Ron’s GNS article and vaguely liking what I read. This wasn’t the sort of flashy insight you might imagine – at the time I read a lot of rpg stuff in the Internet, this was just another bunch of stuff along those lines. Still, the seeds started germinating then: I spent more and more time following the development of the Forge after that.
• In 2002 my own creative spirit was again engaged with roleplaying games in various ways. I think that this was probably a combination of reading the Forge and participating in those various game sessions in Helsinki – I’d seen what the urban roleplaying scene had to offer, so I could start working on my own ideas again. This was speculative design mostly, except for one thing: in the fall of 2002 I started an intense, new D&D fantasy adventure campaign called Bextropoliin kuningas in Helsinki. More on that below, it’s important.
• In the summer of 2003 I was myself: I sketched out several game designs then, wrote Temppeli (from which I started, above) and ran serious playtests of a completely reimagined superhero rpg I called Voima Yli Muiden, one which I remember having idly considered for publication even then. Before the end of the year I signed up on the Forge forums after having read them intensely for the last year.

The turning point for me in all this was two-fold: through the winter of 2002-03 I spent increasingly more time reading the Forge and playing D&D with a completely new group I gathered in Helsinki. “The King of Bextropolis” was an intensely rewarding campaign in hindsight; although I didn’t participate at the Forge at the time yet, I remember vividly how aware of GNS theory and other new ideas I was when constructing and running the game. The campaign was a very creative endeavour for all of us who participated: many things were tried, many people came on and dropped off later. The campaign was originally started out of simple interaction: I wanted to play a roleplaying game with my older brother Markku, and the new D&D was a reasonable starting point for both of us (Markku at the time hadn’t played roleplaying games for years, I understand). The gaming group that we gathered to play my strongly hombrewed D&D campaign was robust enough to continue to this day – my brother Markku and another stalwart, Tuomas Lempiäinen, run 4th edition D&D for the group now.

In fact, the Bextropoliin kuningas episode in my rpg career is so important that I’m not even going to try to describe everything I learned in those weekly and twice-weekly sessions through 2002-2005. It’s a story for another time – it’s suffices to say that before the experience I was not a roleplayer anymore, while the very faults and victories of those experiences motivated me to proceed in the directions I’ve since taken. I remember those years very fondly, and will immediately grasp the opportunity to again play with the guys, should life take me to Helsinki for an extended time again.

After 2003 I start remembering more things: more interesting, more satisfying play started cropping up. I’ll write about this recent history in the next, probably the last episode of this blog series.

The third part of my personal rpg history series. The second part dealt with my formative years in the mid-’90s, so here I’ll write about how I stopped roleplaying. I’ve told this story to many people when it’s come up, but perhaps there’ll be some interesting detail here for those interested in that sort of thing.

High school

A partial reason for the cultural energy we had in our little roleplaying crew might well have been dissatisfaction with the form; we didn’t quite address it directly, but as the years went by our efforts at roleplaying slowly petered off and stumbled on our increasing expectations. Many campaigns were started and aborted shortly due to scheduling – but really, that sort of thing is always more about motivation. The games were failing us as a creative outlet, it seems to me in retrospect – the GMing grew more intricate and the game preparation grew into what could be considered the traditional gold standard of ambitious GM-performed story-telling, but satisfaction was hardly evident.

Our group started flaking, and while we continued to renew it with interested newcomers, the downward spiral was clear as other hobbies took more and more of our time. The process was not one of estrangement between friends, though – we just had better hobbies, and worked to fit each other into our schedules even when we didn’t have anything particularly to share. Computer games were a shared thing, I guess, but otherwise each of us continued in many ways towards our own interests; roleplaying was kept nominally on the side as something we were supposed to do together, but in reality it was a minor thing. We were more likely to go on long hikes or bike trips with the crew than play a roleplaying game, and when we did, it was often with a skeleton crew. Creative goals became an increasingly big thing: some of us had those, some didn’t, and some were simply incompatible.

At this time larping came to Sonkajärvi as an idea in a big way, so we sampled some of that as well. Those experiences were pretty weird, as it was a sort of repeat of the cargo cult situation – we knew what this new sort of roleplaying was, but we needed to build it from the ground up ourselves. I designed and arranged a larp that was probably one of the first pervasive ones in Finland; the topic was Highlander, the premise that the players would keep their existence secret among the general populace while fighting a war that’d gain them the powers of quickening and eventual Gathering, just like in the movie. The rules were an interesting combination of hardcore boffer larp and tabletop aesthetics; characters had levels which were quite concretely stolen by their killers, who’d then manifest new super powers as their level went up. Apparently the most enthusiastic players terrified some grandmothers by running around the town with their foam-padded swords in plain daylight. The game was very strategic and tactical, with an emphasis on players creating their own solutions – like a freeform Assassin with fictional color in many ways. An important design principle was independence from GMing, which was achieved by vesting the players with an authority to make their own rules-calls as necessary; the game would run 24/7 and it’d be on the heads of the players to decide how much they’d care to invest in it. I’ve since then wondered what might have made the western, southern areas of the country that became the hotbed of larping go the way they went – today it all seems very different from the directions we tried in our time.

Ultimately larping didn’t catch on with me and my peers (even if it has since; Upper Savo has a pretty healthy larping culture today); on my own part this was mostly because the stumbling form couldn’t at the time convince a sophisticated GM type that the bother and social risk was worthwhile; the pressures on a larp manager are quite large, as he’s putting his reputation and the reputation of the hobby on line – this is especially the case when just 20% of your larp participants have played roleplaying games before. I ultimately had no interest in putting myself on the line with this new thing at the time when I had my hands full with my literary ambitions and flagging tabletop hobby. It also wasn’t very creatively interesting to be the GM of the sort of larp I’d designed, as it involved no creative writing; the players got to write their own characters, the GM really only had to be a referee. Today I’d treasure this, but even while I myself designed the game that way at the time, I was not satisfied to actually play it thus.

Our roleplaying troupe was never one to invest monetarily into the hobby. One consequence of that was the fact that our gaming all through the ’90s, even as it grew more sophisticated, never moved onto English-language games. The only English game we played through these years was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and I don’t think we played more than a session of that; it was simply too old-fashioned at the time, the height of modern sensibilities for us was an unified resolution system with simple, universal rules. I heard about Whitewolf for the first time in the Internet.

I didn’t understand it at the time, but especially towards the end of high school my roleplaying had become a label only. Jukka and I wrote stories and critiqued them instead of playing; Heikki and Timo and I adventured in the real world; I was perhaps the most invested in roleplaying of the crew, but even I didn’t actually mind it when our breaks from the hobby grew into months and whole seasons. I seem to remember that none of us formally “stopped roleplaying”, it just happened. I seem to remember that at the end of high school I knew clearly that we would never play together again – I still thought that I’d continue roleplaying myself, but there was no practical basis for that without a viable crew.

Looking at things now, only I and Jari are still involved with roleplaying. Even Jari would certainly have little contact with the hobby if I didn’t draw him back. I’ll write about that in the next part of the series. The rest of the guys I played with in my youth – I still see them from time to time and consider them dear friends; with some the lack of common interests is more of a problem than with others. They probably think that I’m pretty cooky for still doing roleplaying, although we haven’t really discussed it seriously.

The story of my roleplaying history continues. The last part was about my earliest rpg memories and how I came to initiate myself into the hobby of roleplaying in the first place. This second part has some real rpg action, I’ll write about my first rpg-playing years.

Middle-school

My first real, creatively concerned rpg session happened sometime in… I think it was 1994 or something like that. The game was Twilight 2000 (yes, we sure ended up playing some funny games then; the older hobbyists were busy translating their favourite games into Finnish during the early ’90s only to have them desecrated bytweens looking for their first rpg ), we were 12-14 years old and very much a new group. I remember it vividly: we played at my sister’s place and the game was relatively short due to how our characters got blown to bits by enemy mortars. The last scene of the roughly three-scene session was a torture session with a captive character; it ended shortly with the enemy blowing the obstinate prisoner to bits.

What made this session a different experience was not the quality of the game; it was inferior compared to several earlier projects, such as our megalomaniacHeroquest campaigning or the sampling of LotRAG we did. The difference was solely in the fact that I was playing with new friends who shared my passion for this new thing calledroleplaying. I was then at an age when children make new social contacts, and I’d met a couple of guys who just happened to know what roleplaying was about. I’m pretty sure that I met Heikki and Timo in the boy scouts – another hobby we shared passionately through our teenage years. Timo and I had quite a natural kinship then: we were both the younger brothers of old nerds, Timo’s brother had in fact gamed with mine at some point; Timo was consequently the same sort of second-generation geek I was. Heikki and Timo were good friends, and Heikki had a natural imagination and social bravery that allowed him to put himself on the line as an artist and roleplayer. Then there was Heikki’s neighbour Jukka, who would grow into quite the committed geek culture enthusiast; and of course my brother Jari, whom I introduced to our group in short order – a quite viable group, that!

The following 3-4 years were a time of intensive roleplaying for all of us, and for many friends who sampled roleplaying with us in shorter or longer time-frames. We dropped Twilight after that first session and instead played a long campaign of Elhendi, a fantasy game created by Nordic, the same columnist whose texts in Mikrobitti had schooled us in the basics of roleplaying years ago. After that we went through many other games – perhaps a more varied set than many other teenage roleplayers, as the local library and our own bookshelves were quite bursting with the crop of games that had just been translated into Finnish during the mad years of the early ’90s. We had anambituous campaign of Cyberpunk 2020, several memorable one-shots of Call of Cthulhu, quite some home-brew settings for Runequest, a hilarious campaign of Paranoia (in many ways our most ambitious in literary terms; I’ve never thought that humour is the same as vapidity) occasional dashes of Stormbringer, more Twilight and Elhendi, Astra, Middle-Earth Roleplaying Game… practically the only game from that varied bunch of translations that never got play from us through these years was Dungeons & Dragons, a game that was the seminal encounter for many other Finnish roleplayers in the Mentzer edition translated into Finnish in the late ’80s.

These years were a transformative time for our little group, not the least because of the friendships and cultural grounding. Looking back to it, I see our local roleplaying micro-culture as a surprisingly rich and purposeful thing, considering how isolated from the greater scene we were: our small town in Eastern Finland had only nominal contact with what happened in Finnish roleplaying; through those years I knew nothing of new publications, new trends or anything else. The most substantial change was when the local bookstore dumped off the excess rpg stock later in the decade; this has been etched in my mind as the time when roleplaying failed its promise as a viable mainstream business. Despite our isolation we had our creative goals and inspirations: as an example, I remember vividly how the couple of us who’d read Lovecraft had an on-going ambition towards replicating those experiences for the rest of the crew in roleplaying form; sometimes this worked, sometimes not. Such literary antecedents were clearly with us whether playing Elhendi and emulating Dragonlance with it or playing Cyberpunk and reinventing classical scifi through it. We were hungry for excellence from an early time, which has later stricken me as an interesting question: when we nowadays talk of roleplaying and have these interminable fights about whether rpgs are “art” or “entertainment”, does that mean that others do not try to make the experience the best it can be? For us this was always a matter of course, we were never satisfied to stay with what we knew.

A friend of mine, Sami Koponen, wrote about his roleplaying history a while back (in Finnish). He also asked a bunch of other Finnish roleplayers to write similarly about theirs. I’ve been relatively busy with work-type things, but I might as well do this rpg history thing at this juncture. This’ll be quite a long memory trip, so I’ll split it in parts.

Elementary school

I was introduced to roleplaying games as an idea by my elder brother’s hobby – Markku is a decade older, so we didn’t exactly play together during his teenage years, but I picked up the idea by osmosis; I imagine that this is a pretty typical thing with siblings. The idea of roleplaying was pretty clear to me from a young age, thanks to some observation and the usual literary sources: like many roleplayers, I learned the basics from the columns of the influential Finnish rpg activist Nordic in the foremost Finnish computer magazine, Mikrobitti. My earliest memories of roleplaying are of my brother playing… I think it was Mechwarrior, with his friends; of reading about Nordic’s fantasy adventures; of playing half-formed play/game things with my younger brother.

I should mention here that the literary genre of speculative fiction, especially fantasy, surely had a major impact on my being so persistently interested in roleplaying. I’m convinced that this is a common strand for roleplayers who started gaming through the ’80s and early ’90s, especially here in Finland: roleplaying simply was the cultural flagship of this genre of literature, it was obvious to little Eero that rpgs were where it was at when you’d read your Tolkien and wanted more. For me there was no difference between my rpg hobby and literary hobby until long after the early phase.

My earliest contacts with the literary roleplaying tradition proper were with game texts our parents bought for us, mostly due to us children badgering for them. My first rpg text was certainly a mismatch if there ever was one – 2300 AD had just been translated into Finnish, and this still being a time when rpgs were distributed through bookstores, it ended up in our hands. I remember the game pretty fondly, it has an intricate literary background that compares favorably to most games. By the same token it was clearly too much of an endeavour for elementary school kids – I remember vividly how the example adventure in the game deals with a months-long scouting/exploration mission to an uninhabited planet with the expectation that the GM would wing all actual content within the loose framework. It’s no wonder we never got a full session out of the game.

Another near-miss was the Lord of the Rings Adventure Game, a beginner-friendly rpg I’m still very fond of. (Yes, some pretty marginal games got translated into Finnish during the early -90s.) We played it a couple of times, and it worked just fine for the cargo cult situation we had – the game featured very clear rules and procedures, ready-made characters and an adventure. For those who don’t know it, the LotRAG wasn’t in the dungeoneering tradition; it has a very clear goal of introducing fantasy adventure in a literary context. We loved it, considering how we adored Tolkien in general at the time. For some reason the game didn’t become a habit at the time, however. I suspect that this was mostly because we didn’t manage to gather a functional gaming group, but perhaps also because the type of ambitious plotted adventure LotRAG advocated was slightly above the ability level of elementary school kids; it’d still be a couple of years before we’d be routinely able to plot adventures.

(The “we” here consists mostly of me and my little brother Jari; we had some friends participate in these early experiments with roleplaying, but it didn’t really take for the others. Jari, on the other hand, followed solidly along wherever the elder brother lead him.)

Ah, I should also mention Heroquest: like most roleplayers in my age group, we of course played and adored this and other adventure boardgames all through the elementary school years; we had quite a collection of these at one time. My memory is that while we started playing this stuff as boardgames, as our roleplaying experience and knowledge of those vistas grew, the adventure boardgames started breaking apart by the simple force of imagination. Some of our later efforts at playing Heroquest were pretty funny, as our ambitions in terms of actor freedom and campaign consistency far outreached the tools the game offered.

I haven’t been blogging much lately, what with being busy doing real work. A little convention report should be doable, however: we were at Levels in Jyväskylä this past weekend with my brothers to represent and advocate for roleplaying game culture amongst the other game programming. Levels is a small video game convention (500 people or so) with a delightfully comprehensive view on the boundaries of game culture, encompassing and supporting quite a bit of non-electronic gaming as well. This was only the second year Levels has been convened, but perhaps it’ll continue; the convention is arranged by the local university of applied sciences as a student project, I understand, so it has some chances of becoming an institutional event in perpetuity even after the current crop of students leaves the house.

The convention didn’t involve very many roleplayers or otherwise interested people, which meant that our schedule was pretty lax most of the time. Although this meant that we didn’t get many sales (for our indie game line), it also meant that I had plenty of time to devote to discussing game craft and playing games with the few interested rpg activists that bothered to show. I also got interviewed for tv and radio with what hopefully may be considered a positive message.

Lecture

I gave a small lecture on ethics of gamecraft at the beginning of the convention. The seminar participation in general seemed pretty sparse, as most convention participants were families and teenagers with little interest in listening to beards on podiums. The talks were pretty short as well, which meant that I could only scratch the surface of my topic: I gave a rundown of the largest ethical challenges game designers seem to face when it comes to their design decisions. I had many questions, but gave only a few answers in the allotted time-frame.

Kung-fu

A local game designer, Petteri Hannila, was gracious in allowing us to make camp at his place in Jyväskylä on Saturday. We also got a good opportunity to talk about wuxia games, a topic that has been concerning Petteri lately. On Sunday Petteri, Markku and others played a long Solar System -based one-shot with wuxia elements: it was relatively ambituous mechanically, with new Pools and crunch created on the spot. Perhaps the wuxia interactions will inspire Petteri in the future; he has a couple of pretty interesting game ideas along these lines, so it’s just a matter of focusing on what matters and finishing those projects.

Witches

As we speculated on a game to play on Saturday, I surprised the crew by suggesting a playtest: we would play the game-in-development of one Tuomas Riekkinen from Oulu; the game’s name is Noitahovi (Witchcourt) and it seemed like a good pick for a convention one-shot. I’d been discussing the game with Tuomas during the last couple of weeks, so I wanted to see how it’d play in practice. What we got was a very northernly fantasy movie that discoursed in length on the futility of man’s endeavours in love and war. I’ll perhaps write more about this later, there are some mechanical bits that need careful thought before the game is ready for the limelight.

Others

My own Sunday was mostly spent alternating between demonstrations of Zombie Cinema to people who’d never played roleplaying games and listening to a local designer by the name of Antti Luukkonen tell us about his game in development Tähtiritarit (Sidereal Knights). The latter had some interesting ideas, but I got the feel that Antti doesn’t quite yet have a focus on what, exactly, he wants the game to do. It was like a mix of Super Sentai and Shadow of the Colossus – both fine influences to be sure, but it seems to still be largely up in the air how Antti is going to utilize the obvious action sequences; especially the issue of whether player characters actually have a human nature or would they rather be shallow pawns for the players was completely up in the air.

I’m something of a fanatic when it comes to the rules of Diplomacy. I have a reverence for them that must be quite unhealthy – I consider the game one of the most perfect designer games, a wonderfully powerful and robust engine that does exactly what it purports to. Thus I’m very hesitant to give my blessings to even small deviations from the rules, unless they display the same sort of universal power we get with the Calhamer rules. (Ironic how I am still capable of participating in those detailed arguments about convoy paradoxes and such; those parts of the rules text are and have long been a mess, even if the rules as they are played around here are very clear and logical. As always, I try to play according to the Platonic ideal of the rules, not so much based on any particular edition of the text.)

I myself haven’t had any strong inclination towards changing the rules of Diplomacy with house rulings of any sort, and I usually just yawn at any variants that add things on top of the basic structure, making it more complex. So it’s quite surprising that for a while now I’ve been iddly wondering about one particular rules change that I can’t quite dismiss on the grounds of inferiority. Could I have figured out a rule that actually improves Diplomacy? I’ll need to test this one and find out!

My industrialization rule

My new rule is simple: instead of home centres, Powers now have “industrialized” centres that are marked with a suitable marker on the board. At the beginning of the game the home centres are all industrialized. A centre that changes hands always loses the industrialization; a player may industrialize a new centre by foregoing a possible build during the winter phase – the order is “B(uild) I(ndustrialization) [centre]“. When a power builds new units, the builds have to happen on empty industrialized centres.

The experienced Diplomacy player should immediately see what this rule is intended to cause:

• Variants have difficulty with Powers that do not possess coastal home centres. This rule allows a country to add suitable new centres into their industrial base for a cost, removing the need for annoying ahistorical compromises with where you can build fleets. The map notation is also simplified in many cases, as it no longer is necessary to keep track of home centre status – just industrialization status.
• The Calhamer map is notorious for the many stalemate lines it has. This rule changes the end-game by making it possible for all countries to build fleets at any coast, provided they can hold a centre on the coast and empty it for the winter season.
• Powers dispossessed of their home centres or forced to fight a protracted war on top of them are hampered to such a degree that those powers really have no room for negotiation with their opposition. By allowing new industrialization new diplomatic opportunities also open up: a Power might recover from drastic losses by creating new home centres away from their original home, given time and resources.
• Large variants suffer from a slow-down of play due to the increasing time it takes to get units from the home centres to the frontlines. Allowing the players to make their own industrialization decisions allows dynamical speed-up in large variant end-games while keeping small variants near unchanged. Meanwhile the new opportunities cannot be used for cumulative power stabs (the phenomenon where stab gains are leveraged into instant forces that are used against the same target next year) outside the home area because the newly industrialized center is at risk of being overrun by the opponent if it’s situated immediately on the frontlines.

Looking at uncertainties, on the other hand: I’m not entirely sure whether this rule would be beneficial in small-power midgame defense situations. It is already pretty difficult for a power to recover after being reduced to 1-3 centres; imagine how much more difficult it’d be if you’d also need to rebuild the industrial base after the war to get new units. Another issue with this is that industrialization could only be achieved by first creating a surplus of supply centres, which might be too difficult for the small, relocating government-in-exile. Might be that I’d need to have a rule for disbanding an unit on top of a centre to industrialize it – the unit sort of lays down its arms and joins the city, if you will.

This rule is so simple that it seems a very natural part of the rules set, aesthetically speaking. The only variation I could imagine in it would be in which centres would be applicable for industrialization – it could be beneficial to require the new industry to be built in an empty centre (like new units are), or perhaps to require that the centre has been in possession for the last year (to prevent an immediate industrialization after capture). This latter especially wouldn’t be a too onerous limitation, but might prevent misusing this new rule to create more efficient offensives. I’ll need to test the rule and see if this is a concern.

Is there some way in which this rule is worse than the default concept of “home centre”?

Diplomacy is one of the most played and researched of modern designer boardgames. Regardless, many interesting theoretical issues remain. One I’ve been occupying myself with is scoring games – or more generally, evaluating player performance. I have some vague notion that this’ll be useful when we have tournaments here in Finland, but mostly I just find this issue an interesting theoretical problem. It’s so challenging, in fact, that I don’t have any ready-made answers – I can formulate the question, but I don’t have a perfect response.

Formulating the question

The general, vague form of my question is this: when you’ve played a game of Diplomacy, who won and who lost, and can anything more be said of the player performance? Furthermore, if we have a number of players participating in a tournament, how much and what sort of play do we need to find out the best player of the bunch – and ideally, the ranking of the rest as well?

To be more specific, we have a number of interconnected questions here:

1. The rules of Calhamer Diplomacy state that the game can end in either one player winning and everybody else losing, or with a consensual tie amongst the still surviving players at any point of the game. Is this ideal? Can anything more be said of the player performance? Is a victory more desirable outcome than a tie, is a scarcer tie (more losers, less tied players) more desirable than a wider one, is getting killed late more desirable than early?
2. Diplomacy is rarely played to the end due to the length of the game. If we have to end the game early, can anything be said of the player performance? Given that we want to have tournament environments and we have to be able to compete with unfinished games, how do we move from the perfect Calhamer arrangement into a compromise solution that allows us to score player performance without actually resolving the game?
3. Given answers to questions 1 & 2, assuming that we are playing a tournament with several rounds of Diplomacy play, how do we combine the results into an overall one? Do we give numerical scores to individual games and then manipulate those numbers? How many games are needed to find a substantial winner out of N players? How many games are needed to rank all players in some meaningful manner?

In addition to these basic questions I am myself concerned with the following generalized issues:

4. Given that we are able to run tournaments where players play a preset number of games of Diplomacy (question number 3 sorted out, essentially), can we generalize this into an environment where each player plays a variable amount? If one player participates in one game while another plays two, how do we stack these performances in relation to each other?
5. Given that we have figured out question 3, can we generalize this into a system wherein the tournament consists of a number of Diplomacy scenarios (in the sense of this post) instead of sequential plays of the Calhamer scenario? What if these scenarios include different numbers of centres or players or other variables?
6. Finally: given answers to questions 4 & 5, what would an universal scoring system look like? Such a system would need to take as input the performance results of N players playing a variable number of games in different groupings. The system wouldn’t need to always provide perfect results, as the input might be incomplete, but we would have to be able to know how to achieve such results with further input.

Despite my language here I don’t want to suggest that the answers to these questions necessarily flow top-down – in fact, it seems probable to me that the last question, if it can be answered meaningfully at all, would need to be considered with each choice on the lower steps. Perhaps these questions are best considered as each internalizing the question before it as a special case – the special cases can be answered in different ways, but as we require more general solutions the choices valid for lower steps of the pyramid break down.

Now, some thinking on these matters has certainly gone down before. Especially questions 1-3 are very practical concerns for Diplomacy tournaments every week all over the globe. As far as I know nobody else is concerned with questions 4-6, but luckily I don’t need to account for my Diplomacy time to anybody else. Before going into my own musings on those generalized questions and playing variants in a tournament, let’s look into what has been said of the first three questions:

1: What should one try to achieve in Diplomacy?

My inspiration for writing this post was that I recently reread Objectives Other Than Winning, a 1974 piece by Allan Calhamer himself. Calhamer writes about the recent practice among a certain subset of Diplomacy players, this being the tendency of the players to satisfy themselves with “second place” achievement in the game on the basis of centre count. I find myself in full agreement on this topic with Calhamer, his argumentation is very cogent: Diplomacy, when played to the finish, only recognizes a winner or a draw. There is no “second place”.

However, I also fully understand why crediting other goals has become commonplace among the players of the game: Diplomacy is a hard game, long and exhausting. It is psychologically easy to judge a player’s performance in the game in different ways even when the rules have no criteria for it. After playing a whole night it might be somewhat dissatisfying that only one player gets official recognition for his play – the game designer can scream until he’s blue in the face, but that does not take away the second place finisher’s satisfaction in at least having beaten the other five players at the table.

Personally, though, I condemn recognizing any results apart from a win or a draw in a Diplomacy game played to the finish – allowing a player to intentionally play for the second place (based on centre count or whatever) without strict censure breaks the game, as it becomes trivial for the leading player to promise the second position to his most dangerous enemy. He will even keep such a promise, as it detracts not at all from his own success.

If players desire to differentiate between performances a bit more, then I suggest looking at elimination dates; the structure of the game is such that I find no problem in claiming that a player who got eliminated earlier played a “worse” game than one who survived longer in the game. Surviving on the board should be a prime concern for all players anyway, as you can’t win after you’ve become eliminated.

Another viewpoint is that Diplomacy is, despite its wargame stylings, a semi-cooperative game. Each draw result, which are actually rather common in a well-played game, is a cooperative victory for the players participating in it. Players even have a chance to “improve” the victory by eliminating non-crucial participants from the draw to sharpen it – this might not matter for a single game in isolation, but when comparing results between several games (to which I’ll come soon), it’s clear that a smaller draw is a stronger result.

2: How to evaluate an unfinished game?

OK, so I don’t see much ambiguity in question one, Calhamer’s right all the way. However, #2 is a much, much more complex beast. When time constraints force us to cut a game of Diplomacy short, as happens most of the time in real life, what can be said of the performances of the players?

I should address the most importan thing immediately, and that is centre-count: practically all modern tournament scoring systems count centres on the board to find out which player did better and which did worse after a set number of turns of play. After having judged several tournaments under these sorts of systems I find this scoring playable but ultimately unsatisfactory. There are two issues with it:

1. Centre count does not reflect the goals of the game perfectly. Thus it influences the way the game is played.
2. An arbitrary cut-off for the game influences the play in major ways at the end – so much so that I’m tempted to consider tournament Diplomacy with its last year mad centre grab a variant rules-set for the game, and not necessarily one that benefits it.

The problem here is that if we want to be absolutely faithful to the logic of the game, then an unfinished game provides us with no data on player performance – after all, if the game had continued, any player not eliminated could have gone on to win it. From this viewpoint the only way to use unfinished games as data points is to only count eliminations of players and play however many games it takes to rank the players on the basis of who gets eliminated. Not only would this be prohibitively slow, but it would also strongly favour Powers positioned to avoid early fall – and, of course, it’s clear that the game’s purpose is hardly served if the only concern of each player is survival, not dominance.

Centre count is deservedly the dominant form of scoring unfinished games, considering that centres are something like 80% of the success in high-level games. It might be that an approximate solution is inherently the only possibility in this matter. Almost the only other solution that even comes to mind for me is to use judges to score the game – a judge could take a glance at the board and tell the players who won, who became second, etc. all based on relative strategic positions. Almost always this’d produce the same results as centre count, but philosophically it’s quite different.

The fundamental problem with centre count calculation is that the purpose of skill in Diplomacy is to balance tactical gains with diplomatic losses. Thus a typical mid-game position has a dominant Power being resisted by weaker Powers around it. When the game is frozen and centre-count executed, the materially dominant Power benefits from having its strengths considered, while players with a more laid-back and careful play suffer; this might come as a surprise for players who only play time-limited games, but on full games of Diplomacy a grab of material must by necessity be balanced by the diplomatic considerations.

From the viewpoint of diplomatic balancing, one could well consider compensating limited games with some sort of inbuilt subgame that kicks in near the end of the game and allows the players to force the game to reflect their overriding diplomatic concerns around the time the game is frozen and scores tallied. A sort of peace conference or congress, I’d imagine it – perhaps the players could form voting blocks to deduct points from their enemies, to get simplistic about it, votes based on centre count… or players might get the opportunity to form a progressive series of “unbreakable” alliances during the last couple of years in the game to reflect the organic concerns they have when the game finally ends. Something like that might be worthwhile to explore, although it might also be too complex to justify itself in a pure Diplomacy tournament.

However individual, unfinished games are scored, it seems that such a scoring could only gain validation by staying within the spirit and goals of the full game.

3: Building tournament systems

Question #2 is really the stumbling block in these matters, but I want to look into one extra possibility: almost all Diplomacy scoring systems provide us with numerical scores for each game played, and for good reason – it’s much easier to compare games, combine the results of several games and thus produce more data to figure out player rankings when you the results are numerical. However, what if they weren’t?

In principle we could play elimination tournaments: instead of scoring a couple or three games and seeing who played best overall, have each game drop players from the tournament until you only have enough for a final table, then play that and see who gets dropped and who doesn’t. Elimination tournament, when played with complete games or near so, could be extremely Calhamer-faithful; one could decide that all players participating in a draw continue in the tournament, for instance, while any elimination drops a player. The final round could give us a bunch of winners if it ended in a draw: anybody still standing at that point would be an equal victor of the slaughter that the tournament metaphorically became. The weakness of this set-up is, of course, that elimination is a slow business that leaves the eliminated players with less interest in the tournament and play after their defeat.

In principle I am very much in favour of having a top table in tournaments – this is basic procedure in most of Europe, but I understand Americans just compute scores to find out an overall winner for the tournament. In principle I find it more satisfying to put the players who compete for the top positions up against each other, though. Another mathematically pretty favourable practice around here is a 2/3-tournament format wherein there are three initial rounds, after which the best two results of each player from those rounds determine which players get to the top table, which is played as a fourth round.

Ultimately, though, the tournament system is not nearly as tricky an issue as the scoring system. One depends on the other.

An effort at universal scoring

Now, getting back to my own concern, scoring arbitrary length variant scenario tournaments: most existing Diplomacy scoring systems depend on centre count, which makes them largely useless from the viewpoint of variant scenarios: different numbers of centres and potentially different dynamics in gaining and losing them make it difficult to compare results. Different numbers of players open up the question of challenge: it is more difficult to win an 8-player game than it is a 5-player game, but how much so?

As a rough sketch, here are some basic ideas for scoring universal Diplomacy:

• A game performance is more definitive and valuable as ranking information when it is more complete (that is, played closer to the end), played with more players, eliminated more players and survived longer in the game.
• When counting victory points in our universal tournament, we can determine that the definite solo victory of a Diplomacy scenario for N players is simply worth N points. This is intuitively obvious and simple, a victory is always more definite when it is achieved against more players, assuming that all of those players have equal opportunity for victory. In a full-length game of high-level Diplomacy this is pretty much always the case due to the self-balancing nature of the game, so we don’t need to know anything more than the number of players that participated in a game.
• More intricately, we can determine that a K-way draw (considering a solo victory as a 1-way draw) allows all draw members the same number of victory points. I have two simple notions here: we could give each player N/K points, thus splitting the solo victory from above into equal parts for each participant of the draw. Or we could determine that the value of the draw is equal to N-K for each player. This would lessen the difference between a draw and a solo victory considerably; with the first method a 2-way draw in Calhamer Diplomacy would be worth 3,5 points vs. 7 points for a solo, while in the latter method the numbers would be 5 vs. 6. Both methods rank sharper draws as more valuable than weaker ones, which they should.To choose between those two principal ideas, let’s compare some games. Which is more valuable, winning a 8-player game or a 3-way draw in a 10-player game? The former system gives us 8 vs. 3,33, the latter 7 vs. 7. I am inclined to lean for the latter interpretation of value in some ways: in both games the winner(s) managed to eliminate 7 other players without being themselves among those eliminated. On the other hand, a 3-way draw avoids the end-game crunch of solo victory, which makes it less prestigious and definitive. So I think I’m siding with the split solution.
• The actual difficult part comes with how to handle incomplete games. These are always less definite than complete ones, so it stands to reason that they should be worth less points. How much less? Because it’s just about impossible to develop a general function for estimating the state of finish in an ongoing Diplomacy game, I’m going with a moral measure: the game approaches the state of being finished as the players put more work into playing it. In other words: the more years the players play, the more authoritative the results are, even if the players do not manage to resolve the game. In practice this could come to play as a percentage multiplier for the score totals: a game played for x years might get f(x) as the multiplier, where f is some function that approaches 1 asymptotically from below. Thus when we have two otherwise identical board positions, but one group has tried longer to find a resolution to the situation, the longer-suffering group is entitled to a larger share of points.
• The other half of the incompleteness conundrum is the issue of how to split the available points among the players. As I describe above, I don’t like centre-counting too much… my inclination would be to at least try a solution wherein the current leading player (by centre-count) tries to form a majority coalition (by centre count again) which gets points like in a draw (less the non-finish penalty from last step), and should he fail, the next player in line could try, and so on – if nobody manages to form a majority coalition, then everybody loses and nobody scores from the game. I’d be surprised if this were an ideal solution, considering the opportunities for metagaming, but it might beat pure centre-counting in some circumstances – I especially like it how your centre count doesn’t directly turn into points but instead just makes you a more likely candidate for a member of a majority coalition. As points are divided evenly between coalition members, the negotiators have a motivation to keep the coalition as small as possible, which means taking only significant players – but there is enough freedom to drop out somebody who annoyed you in the game or refuse to get into coalition with a bigger partner who’d need you to get that majority; this last bit is the one I’m most suspect about, as this last choice in the game isn’t constrained by diplomacy in the way other choices are; that’s a recipe for metagaming. Perhaps I’d need to have the players make their coalition choices a couple of turns before game end, or something like that.

This way we have a pretty complete scoring system for Diplomacy, and it’s a system that doesn’t care about the number of players or centres or even whether the individual games are short or full-length. Now I’ll just need to get some volunteers to playtest a variant tournament; could be fun when you wouldn’t necessarily know at all what sort of map and how many players you’d face in a given game.

This is a sort of sister thread for my look at Vancian magic from last week. Looking at what you actually do in D&D (generally, not specifically the modern take), this is what I get:

• Plenty of freeform negotiation of situations (which I’ve sort of already dealt with last year in my discussion of challenge-based adventuring); despite some weak efforts to the contrary, the core D&D experience really runs on the basis of you-imagine, I-imagine, the result of which is a set of mutually accepted (credible, in theory-speak) challenge constraints that are then set in stone until the challenge is completed.
• The magic system, which is the most important resource subsystem in the game. Increasingly so at higher levels, increasingly so in later editions.
• The combat system, which is what you do with that positioning and those resources.

So it stands to reason that I’m interested in tackling the combat system now.

The basic system

Urban legend has it that the iconic D&D combat system was originally designed for modern era warship battles. This is sort of believable, looking at the dynamics.

Regardless, the system does have its strengths – it is not the most popular rpg combat system by accident. For one thing, the system is simple and quick to use. The great amount of abstraction is a big benefit, as is the resource attrition that allows combat to be expectable, controllable and survivable for the player characters. Almost all competing systems through the decades have provided “increased realism” (read: lethality) as their marketing point, so D&D stands in stark contrast to that: it’s procedural, easy and really just a most basic pacing device for something we could be resolving with just one die roll if we wanted to.

The heart of the D&D combat system is as follows, stripped from all extraneous elements: each turn each combatant chooses his target and tries to strike them. All combatants have a strike value and defense value, which are compared during the attack. A successful attack reduces the defender’s staying power. The combat ends when one party decides to retreat or is reduced to zero staying power.

This system is so familiar and endemic that we can’t even really appreciate it for what it is. I myself intensely dislike almost all applications of the D&D model of combat (except for computer games, in which I can stand it), but looking at the basic form, there is nothing objectionable in it: my dislike stems solely from the way the details are implemented, with weird weaponry and armour fetishes, vague rules for using terrain, efforts at tying abstract “hit points” down into some sort of in-fiction health tokens and so on and so forth.

Let’s look at how that combat system looks after we rework it into a modern conflict resolution system. I suspect that I’m going to like it.

Hit points

Hit points depict a character’s capability for continuing this fight. They’re an abstract measurement of combat experience, tenaciousness, preparation and so on and so forth – essentially, we justify hit points a posteori as anything that explains why the combat is not over yet. Hit points are specifically not something you can restore with magic, simply because there is no specific one thing to restore. Magic could give you extra hit points, but then that’d be because the magic gives you more will to fight, more energy, more of something that allows you to keep fighting.

Hit points are an abstract measure that determines when the combat starts causing consequences for you. A character with hit points won’t normally be injured seriously by the fighting – this is a cinematic concession, one might say. A character who loses his hit points does not benefit of this plot protection any more, and will be in danger of getting injured. As we’ll be seeing, the combat system is such that this is a quite dire situation: you’re probably not going to last many direct blows from that sword when it actually starts hitting.

Hit points are rolled at the start of combat. In my own homebrew sensibilities it’s likely that only fighters (which in my homebrew means “anybody with fighting experience, as depicted by their fighter class levels”) will gain hit points in every combat. Other characters might gain hit points if they surprised their opponent, had strong motivations for starting the fight or had some other conditions that favoured them in this fight.

Fighters would probably gain something like 1d6 hit points per level for my homebrew purposes, and of course they’d also get the same sort of additional conditional points the other characters could benefit from. Constitution or other abilities wouldn’t come into it (my homebrew doesn’t even have Constitution as an ability, now that I think of it), as they influence combat in other ways. I’m not so sure that I like that 1d6 thing, as I don’t know yet if I’m going to really use different die sizes enough to justify using them at all, as far as system elegance goes. I might go with +1 hit point per level just as easily, or even a pool of d20 equal to level, pick the highest. A system aesthetics issue, essentially.

An obvious example of a feat or special ability certain fighters might have would be to gain more or less hit points per level. Another obvious one would be a maneuver where the character gets to reroll his hit dice to try to improve them in the middle of combat. After all, a low-level fighter will be especially prone to swings in his hit point total from fight to fight, so something like that could be useful.

There is probably not much in the way of injury management in between fights. This is simply because a fighter who gets injured is not likely to be fighting another fight in true D&D style right afterwards – getting injured is serious, it might kill you. Losing hit points, on the other hand, is no big deal: those come back for each fight. It’s like those per-encounter powers in 4th edition D&D, one might say.

Combat rounds

Nowadays D&D is big on carefully lineated initiative order, but this has not always been the case. For the longest time D&D only determined initiative for each side in the combat separately, I seem to remember from my reading. On the level of abstraction D&D combat really moves, I find exact initiative order to be somewhat weird. I might well go for simultaneous action, in fact – just let everybody roll their dice and see what happens.

Doing simultaneous action allows characters to kill each other simultaneously, which is just fine and dandy with me. Surprise, which apparently was the big deal with initiative in the first place, can be handled as increased hit points for the surprising party, as to-hit bonuses or as extra rounds of action for the party with the initiative. No problem here.

In practice I’d likely steal a page from Trollbabe and have each round being with a “free-and-clear” phase during which the combatants decide what they’re going to do during the round. This can easily be done in public – if a player wants to react to something another player is doing, then let the two hash out their actions; if they get stuck in an infinite loop of second-guessing (which would be really rare), just have the GM decide that the two characters bash each other in the head. There’s not that much to decide on in D&D combat, anyway: you just need to choose who you’re going to whack, pretty much. Battlefield-positioning won’t be important for the wast majority of situations, you can whack anybody in the battle as far as I’m concerned. If the fiction has characters in hard to reach places or protected by others or some other such things, then I’d give you penalties to your attack check, simply enough.

One shouldn’t forget special actions, however; running away is a very important action in D&D combat, as it is the only way a traditional D&D game has for controlling the stakes in combat. D&D combat has traditionally been a bloodthirsty affair of kill-or-be-killed, and I probably wouldn’t change that a lot. The default consequence of losing would still be death, it seems to me.

But, special actions: my combat system wouldn’t mess with separate movement actions and action actions and free actions and all that 3rd edition shit – you pick one thing to do for one round, and that’s that. Running away is a fine special action if you don’t want to whack anybody, and there might be other things important enough to justify as combat actions. I’m considering surrender, myself: perhaps it could be mechanized the slightest bit consequence-wise, even, to make it more appealing. Spell-casting would be a combat action, too, I imagine – at least for spells intended to be cast that quickly.

D&D has long put stock on multiple attacks per round, and I sort of like the idea. Traditional implementations suck, of course, due to how they increase whiffing and unnecessary dice-rolling. But I’m just going to design around that because I have another special power I want fighters to be able to get: a feat (or some such) that allows the fighter to take actions equal to his fighter level divided by the fighter level of his enemies. So a 3rd level fighter fighting 1st level fighters could take three attacks, for example, while the opponents only get one. A 10th level fighter fighting a 5th level fighter would get two attacks against the opponent’s one. An 8th level fighter could take one action against a 5th level fighter and one action against a 3rd level fighter. That sort of thing, in any combination practicable on the field. I like this mechanic a lot because it scales: evenly leveled or nearly so opponents will always get just the one attack against each other, so the number of attacks will not get ridiculous in high-level fights.

Attacking and defending

For my homebrew purposes attack checks are ability checks just like everything else: Ability + d20. (Frequent readers will remember that I do Abilities as 3d6 in order, so most characters won’t have that many points of difference here.) Only fighters are getting experience-based bonuses on this check: +1 per level. Others might take some feat or such that allows them +½ per level or something, I don’t care.

The target number for the attack check is a bit more tricky. I’m quite partial to simply having the opponents compare their checks against each other and have the better check hit while the other misses. This is especially pertinent due to how I don’t much like armor and armor class: from my viewpoint that’s again weirdo aesthetics getting in the way of swingin’ fiction – the D&D combat system is much too abstract to have things like armor be the main determinant in whether you hit an opponent or not. I’d rather have armor provide more hit points.

Another option would be a special defense roll, but that solution sucks, too: too much dice rolling for little discernible gain.

Perhaps my favourite solution is to have the roll be against a semi-static difficulty level that might perhaps be changed for exceptional opponents. I’m thinking that rolling against 20 would be fine for my homebrew – amateur boxers can still hit each other half the time, even the most incapable characters have some chance to hit, and professionals or naturally talented characters will hit all the time. Perhaps another obvious fighter feat would be something that allows you to add your fighter level to the difficulty of hitting you.

(An obvious observation in choosing a static target number, by the way, is that characters might easily get into a situation where their actual bonus is so high that they’ll hit all the time. My system in general can handle this just fine: not only are hits scalable as we’ll see, but I’m probably going to cap that experience bonus for fighters at +5 or something as long as the fighter is not magical in nature. Plenty of ways to deal with static difficulties, and they have some philosophical benefits: by not scaling the difficulty of different accomplishments as characters increase in level, you actually allow the characters to genuinely progress in the game; I don’t much like the modern D&D style of just increasing the opposing numbers as the characters gain in power – why bother with gaining experience if you’re still going to be rolling a 50/50 check to do the same thing you did before?)

Ways for that striking difficulty to change… well, most things that affect combat are such that I’d rather make them give hit points, really. Increased defense would only be gained from some rather generic and generically powerful force-multipliers. I already mentioned the fighter’s experience level as a possible source of defense, and I could see some magic that gave defense, too. Also, targeted special attacks: should the opponent try something other than just decreasing hit points from the target, the difficulty level could be different. Instant decapitation could be at difficulty 30, for instance.

Perhaps an obvious action choice in combat would be going full defense, at which point the character could make an ability check to defend himself from an attack instead of trusting in the static defense modifier. Sounds reasonable to me. Perhaps make that “defensive fighting” and allow the defender to damage the attacker if he succeeds in his check much better than the opponent. Or just allow the defender to get more hit points as a reward for successful defense. These sorts of options might be important for high-level combat, if I’m not providing enough opportunities for increasing the difficulty of scoring a strike.

Hit damage

Now, hitting opponents is just as abstract in the core D&D system as everything else. That loss of hit points caused by a successful “hit” can be explained as many things; essentially, it just means that the striking character manages to somehow erode the fighting resources of the opposition. I’m specifically going to say that getting a “hit” in my homebrew won’t be the same as injuring the opponent in the fiction: that’s different.

How much damage? I’m tempted to get rid of a separate damage check, frankly: I never was very interested in the specific weapons that characters carry, just as I’m not interested in their armor. The background and skills of the character are much more interesting. So if I’m going to have some sort of separate damage check, it won’t be based on how large a weapon the character carries: such a set-up would make no sense at all when hit points are not about concretely hitting the opponent, anyway. That’s battleship thinking, and people are not battleships.

Instead, I’d most likely want to be simple and just let the hit point reduction be taken directly from the hit check: the difference between the check and the difficulty is probably a pretty good number to deduct from those hit points. It won’t be a big number for low-level fighters, but then such fighters won’t have many hit points, anyway.

I could also see the hit point damage getting multiplied by choosing to use some special maneuvers. Like, instead of taking the basic hit against difficulty 20, the character does something risky, pays 5 hit points of his own and gets double damage against his opponent. Or perhaps it’s a check against difficulty 25, but the damage is multiplied, so if you’re going to roll over 30, it’s a good deal. Whatever, lots of options for depicting different combat details.

Characters who go to negative hit points are nearing their end. The negative hit points by themselves won’t be a problem, though: the problem is that the next time the opponent succeeds in his attack, the weapon actually strikes home. This could be direct ability damage as I’ve done lately, but I’m actually sort of leaning towards separate consequential conditions nowadays: a first-degree success (0-4 points over the target number) allows you to give the opponent a wound that has some sort of consequence, a second-degree success (5-9 points over the target) strikes an incapasitating wound, a third-degree success kills outright. That sort of thing. Essentially, not having hit points opens the character up to actually dangerous attacks. The difficulty of this check might be different, too: perhaps it’s an opposed check finally, as it’s the opposing character’s life on the line. Maybe the opponent actually can’t act anymore normally after losing his hit point buffer, and he now has to take these defensive actions to keep himself alive while hoping to score a high enough success to get some more hit points – after successful defense gave him back enough points, he could go back to the normal combat mechanics.

Fighters as a character class

It’s pretty obvious that in my homebrew fighters are the ones who rule the roost on the battlefield: they get the experience bonuses to hit, they get the extra hit points, they get the extra attacks and so on. This is just fine with me: I don’t much like the way all characters improve in their fighting skills in traditional D&D implementations. Much more fun from my viewpoint if the player has to balance a multiclassing conundrum: if he wants his character to actually do anything in combat, he better take some fighter levels. That’s what it means to have combat skills, taking fighter levels.

(For fictional purposes, note that what I’m calling “fighters” can be whatever martially inclined character classes I’d care to have in my campaign. So “barbarians”, “ninjas” and any other things that train for combat would get some subset of the various benefits I’ve listed here.)

The legacy

If this system seems just a bit like the excellent Glorantha roleplaying game Heroquest, then that’s because the Heroquest complex conflict system is actually just the D&D combat system taken through this same wrangler. One would think that the game of the decade, the masterpiece of Robin D. Laws design would make a complete break with the mechanical principles of old games, but actually D&D already had a rather elegant conflict system lurking underneath all that detail. Isn’t roleplaying interesting?

Another system that is very similar is of course Solar System, which was created by Clinton R. Nixon as a sort of D&D love letter anyway. In general, all rpg conflict systems that feature ablative buffer resources that characters whittle down in an effort to overcome their opposition are in many ways just elaborations and streamlining on D&D’s quirky battleship-sinking rules. One would be justified in saying that those rules capture something rather basic about dramatic pacing – the most important success of the D&D combat rules is that they tell us in clear terms how long the fight is still going to last, how well individuals are doing and when we should add another snippet of fiction in our unfolding fight choreography. Just don’t try to use the hit points as fictional representation of getting hit with weapons – that makes sense for ships with thick hulls and redundant systems, but humans are rather more frail. D&D combat went to hell in a handbasket when hit points were equated with physical well-fare. (Pretty sad that this apparently happened with the very first versions of the game, which already included such pearls of wisdom as the “Cure Light Wounds” spell.)