gamemastering

My approach to running Sword & Sorcery campaigns

Someone was asking me about advice for running a Sword & Sorcery themed campaign in an RPG. Since that’s a pretty open question regarding a rather wide topic, I thought this might be a good subject for a full length post.

I think the first thing here would be to establish what I specifically mean when I am talking about Sword & Sorcery. Unlike most names for fantasy sub-genres, Sword & Sorcery has an actual and pretty specific meaning. Not everyone is using it the same way, but in this case we know exactly who created the term and what his intention was by doing so, so we can actually say that some people are just using is wrong. In 1961, Michael Moorcock wrote in a letter printed in a magazine that it would be a good idea to somehow distinguish the kind of fantasy he and others were writing from works like The Lord of the Rings and Narnia. They are all “fantasy” but drastically different in many, and perhaps even most details. In reply to that, Fritz Leiber wrote that he thought a great name for the subgenre would be “Sword & Sorcery”. And later he somewhat elaborated by saying “The best pulp Sword and Sorcery writer was Robert E. Howard”. So the actual definition of Sword & Sorcery could be said to be “Howard, Leiber, and Moorcock and specifically not Tolkien”.

But that doesn’t actually tell us what makes Sword & Sorcery what it is, which is necessary when you want to capture the spirit of Howard, Leiber, and Moorcock either in writing or running a roleplaying game. Now I admit that there is some validity to statements like “Those are just lables, don’t blindy follow old conventions, be creative and don’t immitate”. But in reality you often see works that are cool and you’re able to tell that there are other cool works that are similar, but you can’t put your finger on it what it actually is that makes them both similar and cool. Saying that you want to “create Sword & Sorcery” is not creative bankrupcy or being a sellout. When you want to play Heavy Metal or Blues, there is a good deal of established conventions that make the genres what they are. You don’t have to follow every single one of those conventions, but you have to follow most of them or the result will be something completely different. Same thing with fiction. A really great attempt at a definition of Sword & Sorcery heroes does not come from me, but is actually from Joseph McCullough, and I think he really quite nails it. A Sword & Sorcery hero is someone who is a.) using decisive action to b.) to pursue self-motiavted goals while c.) standing outside the normal rules and conventions of society. And pretty much everything else about the genre follows from that. Continue reading “My approach to running Sword & Sorcery campaigns”

Simple Treasure table for B/X

While I am generally a fan of having characters gain experience based not only on the amount of enemies they defeat in battle but also on how many treasures they retrieved during the adventure, dealing with individual gold pieces always seemed too fiddly to me.

My preffered way to handle treasure both in regard to wealth and encumbrance is to use a simple unit of “1 treasure”. As long as characters still have 1 treasure, they can buy any items and services of trivial costs, such as food, drink, a room in an inn, most weapons, and so on. Anything that is too expensive for most common people to affort cost 1 treasure, such as a horse, chainmal armor, or a boat. As a rule of thumb, every treasure is worth about 100 gold pieces and can consists either of a bag of coins, a large golden cup, a crown, or whatever else the GM wants to describe it like. It also counts as 1 item for calculating encumbrance. (A character carrying items numbering up to their Strength score are unencumbred and can carry twice as much being lightly encumbred and three times as much being heavily encumbred.)

The treasure tables in the Basic and Expert sets of Dungeons & Dragons give various chances and amounts for different types of coins and gems, so using this alternative treasure system while retaining the same rate of experience gain requires some conversion work.

Which I did. Here’s the result.

Type J and type P to S are not on this table as their average results are way below 100 gp.

Zeb Cook on Sandbox campaigns

While doing a full readthrough of the 1980 Expert Set, I came upon this little paragraph in the Introduction chapter. (Which probably a huge number of people never read.)

Most important, the characters in the wilderness campaign do not exist in a vacuum. The DM should have events going on elsewhere that may affect (or be affected by) the actions of the players. There may be any number of “plots” going on at once, and the DM should try to involve each player in some chain of events. These should develop logically from the actions of those involved. It is important not to force the action to a pre-determined conclusion. The plot lines can always be adjusted for the actions of the players.

Emphasis not mine.

This isn’t any world shattering wisdom here, but you could easily call it the most condensed explanation of the current consensus regarding sandbox campaigns, especially among OSR grognards. Even with all the dozens of articles written on the topic and probably thousands of forum posts, it doesn’t really seem like we’ve discovered anything truly new about the understanding of how these types of games work. It’s all aready there, 35 years ago. This quote even predates the release of X1: The Isle of Dread by a few months, so he was talking about something most people actually hadn’t heard of before.

Strange that I’ve never seen this quote in any discussions about sandbox campaigns before.

Why so little love for Group Initiative?

Among the many great things of Basic D&D, one that stands out the most for me is the initiative system. I find it so much better than the commonly used by other editions and even most B/X clones.

A wonderful thing about group initiative is that it completely removes the whole work of remembering the initiative order. I absolutely hate it to scribble down a list of all the PCs and enemies in the correct order at the beginning of each fight. That’s always a minute or so of interruption doing something tedious, right at the most exciting moment of the game. The alternative is to write down the names in advance and make a row of numbers with the initiative counts, but then you easily skip someone by accident all the time. (At least I do.) With group initiative that doesn’t matter. You roll two d6 at the beginning of each round and then everyone goes in whatever order they want.

But I think something even much more important is happening on the player side. Everyone is paying attention all the time and taking turns much faster. Nobody is sitting around three numbers until their number comes up.
The players who decide the fastest what they want to do go first, and those who take longer do their thinking while everyone else is taking their turn. And everyone needs to pay attention during the whole enemy turn, because the next turn is always their turn.

I’ve been using this system for a while, and it’s just so much more fun to run the game, and I believe for the players as well. Why doesn’t everyone use it and most games go with individual initiative counts instead? Even such otherwise great games as Basic Fantasy and Lamentations of the Flame Princess and wonderful ones like Spears of the Dawn and Barbarians of Lemuria (not a B/X clone, but still) go with the cumbersome initiative count system. Which to me really has always been one of the most annoying thing about running games.

Awesome future novel idea #1: Not all is quiet on the Western Front

Here’s a potentially cool idea for a horror storie or adventure: Lovecraftian horror set on a World War I battlefield. Usually this style of horror doesn’t work when the characters are highly armed and there are lots of other people around. But the battlefields of the Western Front are probably as far removed from normality as it can possibly get. You could have creatures stalking the muddy bogs of artillery craters and barbed wire, murdering men left and right. And while there are lots of armed soldiers all around who would hear the screams and gunshots and stumble upon the corpses the next day, nobody would think anything to be out of the ordinary. The protagonist of the story would doubt his senses and wonder if he is simply going mad, and even if he told others what he saw, who would believe him? Either he went a bit mad or he is pretending to be mad to get out of the battle.

Maybe the creature is a werewolf, or it’s a group of ghouls who come crawling out of a crypt burried below a shelled cemetery that is no longer recognizable as such. It could go on for weeks or months, with only one or two man noticing that those attacks are not normal raids by the enemy. And the during artillery bombardment the bunkers would be deathtraps for all inside if a monster gets in.

I’d read something like that.

Riddle me this

“Why do riddles exist in RPGs?”

The obvious answer is “Because Tolkien did it”. Which is the answer to almost every question about conventions in fantasy. (If not this, then “Gygax did it”.)

But I think they are a terrible idea to include in a roleplaying game. Tolkien could use them in his novel because he knew the answer and the reader didn’t have to figure it out for the story to continue. And that’s one of the biggest mistakes many GMs and most writers of published adventures are making all the time: They approach creating adventures like writing a novel and then having the players act out the parts of the characters. But unlike actors, they don’t know the script. Story is certainly a very important element in most roleplaying games, but it works completely different from story in a novel or a movie. Story is what is happening now, not what somewhat has prepared to happen in the future. When you have the characters in the adventure face a riddle, there is a good chance that the players won’t figure out the answer at all. Then what? Or even if they do, it might take them a very long time and can very soon become the opposite of fun.

And what justification is there within the world of the campaign for the riddle being asked in the first place? The sphinx in the desert was asking riddles of travelers or it would kill and eat them. That was not a test of cunning or a password to be granted passage, but simply some additional torture before the poor traveler would be murdered. There was no point to it other than causing suffering. The secret gate of Moria did work really well with a riddle lock. But it worked not because the riddle was challenging, but because there wasn’t any indication that it was a riddle at all. Frodos stroke of genius was not solving the riddle, but recognizing that it was a riddle to begin with. However, that trick works only once and Tolkien already did it.

Other than this one case, riddle locks don’t make sense. Why would anyone secure an important place with a lock that random passer-bys can open with a few minuts of thinking? If it is to make any sense at all, then the answer would have to be something that is only known to people who have been initiated, but which an outsider can not possibly know. Which is very difficult to do in an RPG. Players only remember details about the setting if they know that this detail is probably going to be important later the moment they first hear about it. If a character should know something because of his background, but the player isn’t aware of it, you can’t use it for a riddle either. The only thing you could do in that case is to make a skill check or something like that to see if the character knows or remembers it and then telling the answer to the player. Which would be completely boring.

So my advice to anyone creating adventures: Don’t use riddles. They don’t make sense and are not as fun as you probably think they will be. (Because you already know the answer.)