Questers into the Unknown

I have been working again on Questers, this time translating it to Dungeon World. So far, this is my progress. Let me know what you think, and I will add it to the blog Treasury for future access. Credit where credit is due, it owes a lot to Vincent Baker (Apocalypse World), Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel (Dungeon World) and Ryan Stoughton (E6 D&D). And while we are at it, here is an excellent map of Unknown Kadath.

Bonded to the World

In many ways, how players are rewarded at the table will define your game, and thus your game world. After all, the world only comes to life in response to the players' action (or inaction), which is then driven by their goals. Rewards give the players an indication of what they should be doing, generally speaking. At the same time, rewards are much more than mere incentives, which would lead players along a predesigned course. Rather, how the players go about achieving these rewards is unique to each group and to each story, and thus rewards must be open-ended. As mentioned in the previous article, players should always be given problems, not answers. How they answer problems is an expression of their freedom within the game world, and is the very narrative of the story itself.

Perhaps a good example of this can be seen in "Old Geezer" Mike Monard's fascinating on-going "tell-all" about the early days of Dungeons & Dragons. As he describes, experience awarded for defeating monsters in the Greyhawk dungeon was almost nothing, perhaps only enough to round off the experience gained from treasure, and that in his own games he does not reward any experience for monsters. The picture that immediately forms is one in stark contrast to modern "dungeon delving" games, with the players cast as "amoral mercenaries out to loot the dungeon," as one commenter put it. Where there is no reward, there is no risk-reward structure, and thus monsters are carefully avoided, like elite soldiers sneaking deep behind enemy lines in some subterranean fantasy Vietnam.

In the same way, a game that does not have a clearly identified reward structure is a game (and a game world) with an identity crisis. Without a framework of rewards (whether fame and fortune, or something else entirely), the players will not have a clear idea of what they should be doing. Without player action to fuel it, the world cannot come to life. This is probably one of the most discussed aspects of Dungeon World, still a work-in-progress, and several iterations of an "experience" system have been proposed (experience being one way to quantify reward).

One of the options that has gained the most traction, although not the current "official" solution, is Ryan Macklin's experiment. A hold-over from the primogenitor game Apocalypse World, this system has each player pick a basic strategy for another player to pursue that session (such as pulling stunts, defending others, acting diplomatically, solving possibles and so on). Each time the player acts accordingly, they earn experience, rewarding immediate and short term narrative styling. Thus, a Cleric (bidden to be more aggressive that session) will show a new angle to his character, as he beats the goblin he interrogates, or lashes out at his superiors in the monastery.

This is a fine system in itself, but perhaps more suited to the game it originated from (Apocalypse World is all about psychologically breaking characters down in a ruined world where no one is granted tomorrow). As forum-goer nemomeme points out, the reward structure determines what the very game is about. We must be careful to think about the essential design goals behind the game before tackling rewards.

So what is adventuring about? The very principles of Dungeon World (which make it so interesting and unique) demand that the fiction comes first. Like microgame adventures, the rules are discrete components that have specific triggers from the fiction, and are otherwise out of sight. The principles also state that the game is a conversation, so thus the rewards should also be in conversation. Perhaps a good model for reward, which is based on the fiction and also in constant conversation, would be Jeff Rient's article on "eXPloration".

Here, I can imagine players and referee discussing, as a group, what they want to do, as it comes up in the fiction. They could even create "experience ladders," listing some goals and objectives. Once players have achieved (or failed) all of their plans for a front (a living, breathing local situation), and the game master has no more moves to make, this should indicate that the front has been fully explored and the next expedition should be chartered. Each player might have a different list, but commonalities and overlaps are expected, as the party is acting within the same local area. An example might be:

• Find the slave camp deep in the jungle (+1 Exp)
• Defeat the Guaraxx lurking in the delta (+2 Exp)
• Get revenge on those pirates (+1 Exp)
• Discover what has made the villagers so frightened, and make it safe again (+2 Exp)
• Climb to the top of White Doom Mountain (+3 Exp)
• Spend a night in the Lost City (+1 Exp)

These goals are constantly being discussed, revised and traded as the fiction dictates, and represent paths of action parallel or tangential to the plot of the front. They give the players a clear idea of what this world is about (that is, the cool and amazing things to do and see, the supernatural adversity to overcome and the bonds to play off between players in the process). In fact, in many ways, this is merely an extension of the bonds rule from Dungeon World, which gives players an initial motivation before the first front is even encountered. Here, in addition to being bonded to each other, the players are bonded to the world. Most importantly, this method lets the fiction come first, which is an essential quality of Dungeon World, and a great deal of what makes it so unique.

Worldsmiths

I wanted to expand a little on the previous discussion of campaign preparation. I do not believe a referee's preparation should look anything like a published adventure module, which were fixed and scripted scenarios developed specifically for the tournament milieu. These are, of course, fun to read for inspiration or to run the players through a "gauntlet" typical of gaming conventions. However, for home games, these adventures are far too scripted, and go against the basic principle that narration is neither controlled by referee nor by player (as discussed in the previous article).

Yet, it is imperative that the game world seems real and adventureful at every moment and in every scene. Some work must go into world creation, but this fashioning and shaping cannot have a stymying effect. The generative process must be continuous through the process of playing, so that the world comes alive and retains full fluidity. Player decisions, ever capricious, must remain meaningful.

Marshall Miller has given a good example of what this might look like for Dungeon World, a fan variant of Vincent Baker's Apocalypse World. That game already divides the environs of a game world into Fronts, which are living, breathing local situations that the players can get themselves mired in. Not only is a Front (e.g. the Caves of Chaos) a vivid and lush location to explore, but it is also an ambiguous, evil force to oppose the heroes, a ticking time bomb (with signs of the looming disaster), and a creature in and of itself (capable of executing its own moves and maneuvers against the players). A Front is a setting that truly comes to life, like the Mines of Moria, and opposes the heroes by its very nature. It must be carefully explored, discussed and negotiated by both the players and the referee alike, with the primary vehicle for this being dice rolls and decisions.

What Miller has added to this is the notion of the "Adventure Starter." This is another sort of environ in the game world, contained within a quick, flexible toolkit designed to spark the initial interest and action. An entire "Adventure Starter" environ consists in a reminder of the referee's guiding principles (make the world real, make it full of adventure etc), a list of scenic impressions to colour your descriptions and make the world real, some open-ended questions meant to both inspire sub-plots and to hook your players, a list of artifacts and creatures that might be of utility for the referee and finally a list of new moves open to the players while they explore the setting. Importantly, there are no maps, no pre-scripted story and no hard timelines. The referee could glance at the two-page setting and read as much or as little as he likes without missing anything important.

Both Fronts and Adventure Starters are an excellent way for a referee to prepare the environs and locales of the game world. They are inspirational and fluid, and may be used before and during the game to drive interesting scenes. At the same time, preparing this kind of gaming world is not about pre-establishing events, plots or geography. Those are answers, and the answers that the actual playing experience will give you are always better. Rather, the referee should start to think about preparing problems which do not necessarily have an answer… yet. Confronted with a living, dynamic and danger-filled world, the players' actions and words fill the adventure-engine that the referee has prepared, fueling gameplay that players can actually care about and feel.

Say No or Force Them to Make a Saving Throw Versus Death

Flipping through Diaspora yesterday, I came across a sentiment increasingly common to modern roleplaying games. At the core of Diaspora (and many such newer games) is the phrase "Say Yes, or Roll the Dice." Essentially, this axiom requires the referee to always endorse the players' proposed strategy, or at least give them a shot with a die roll.

For Fate fans (which includes Diaspora, Spirit of the Century, Legends of Anglerre and many other related games), this has been heralded as a very "tactical" system. Players are constantly coming up with spur of the moment plans (actually, justifications for why they should win), which the referee must then accept, or let the dice decide. It is reminiscent of old school procedure, where the referee listens to the plan carefully and then comes up with a target number and rolls the die to determine success. The only difference is that "Say Yes…" precludes the referee's veto. The referee is instead slavishly committed to accepting every player strategy, regardless of how believable it is, or how it circumvents the referee's own schemes. Rather than staging a tactical opposition, the referee is subject to player whim.

This is, perhaps, seen as contrasting adversarial-style refereeing. It also developed, however, in response to a style of Dungeons & Dragons that increasingly defined characters by "Player Options," "Powers" and other mechanical advantages. Instead of thinking through a problem, players would simply look down at their character sheet for all the answers. Written in 2002 at the height of the third edition, The Burning Wheel fantasy roleplaying game was, in many ways, a response to what Dungeons & Dragons had become. In contrast with a referee-dominated narrative and players with mechanically enabling character powers, The Burning Wheel introduced the "Say Yes…" paradigm for the first time, and thus framed the referee as an enabler and the players as holding narrative control.

Of course, buying into this premise of "player control versus referee control" has obscured the original simple and elegant functionality of Dungeons & Dragons. Recently, I asked Mike Monard (veteran of the original Lake Geneva campaign) whether referees back in the day would punish Magic-Users who neglected utility spells and front-loaded combat spells by throwing in obstacles that would require the former. His response was illuminating, and is worth quoting here in full:

"Remember… the world was created first, THEN the characters were created to explore it. The way Gary, Dave, and the rest of us did it, we would set up our dungeons such that you would need a selection of both combat and utility spells. Choosing how to allocate your limited spell slots was part of the fun, as was dealing with not having a certain spell where it would be useful.

The world came first, so changing the world based on player spell selection would have been cheating. It's about the only way for the referee to cheat, in fact. Any ref who changed things on the fly to punish players based on that day's spell selection would have found themselves without any players.

What was there, was there. There was a nest of six trolls on Level 1 of Greyhawk. If you went there with three first level characters, you found six trolls. If you went there with nine 11th level characters, you found six trolls. Changing the world as you seem to be describing above would have been anathema. It is really the only way to cheat as the referee."

The referee developed a world, the players investigated it, and changing things after the fact was cheating. It was part and parcel of suspension of disbelief that the world followed its own laws and trajectory. How player decisions might intersect with that trajectory was largely unpredictable, and there was a level of excitement and discovery for both players and referee. There is a classic movement here which is common to Shakespeare plays, whereby one person would pass partial information along to another individual, who would then filter it further to a third. Consider the Doctor who agrees to provide the Queen with a vial of poison but, fearing her evil designs, actually gives her a sleeping draught. The Queen, thinking the elixir to be a poison, hands it further to the naive rival princess, promising that it is a healing balm to be taken when she is feeling ill. The King falls ill and the princess administers the sleeping draught. Chaos ensues.

Likewise, the referee may know what is really going on, but this is filtered through interrogated non-player characters or partial clues that the players may find. Only half of the truth reaches the players, who then introduce a further (and unpredictable) abstraction through their misinterpretation of the situation. This beautiful friction makes for the stuff of true legends. Here, the referee is neither adversarial nor enabling, but rather purely neutral (which reminds me of an excellent and illustrative Knights of the Dinner Table comic, where the Knights are able to "outsmart" B.A.'s flagship dungeon).

The take away from all of this is that we as referees must again become world-smiths. It is hard work, and tremendous preparation must go into the campaign as well as each individual session. Different webs of non-player characters must be charted, including individual motives and knowledge. Interesting eventualities must be at least initially considered, while some obstacles with no apparent solution should be cataloged (perhaps a dungeon at the top of a perfectly sheer cliff, encouraging the players to be creative). The story will take unexpected turns, and the referee's encyclopedic register of history and dramatis personae will breath enough life into the world that it will take on its own momentum. In all of this, narrative control belongs to the friction between player knowledge and referee impartiality. As the authors of Adventurer Conqueror King put it, "every campaign is a law unto itself" and the excitement comes from these worlds taking on a life of their own.

Every Fighting-Man is Unique

I am not aware when it came about, but at some point a vicious rumour crept into our collective understanding of Dungeons & Dragons. This rumour subtly, surreptitiously put forth the notion that the original game, in its basic, open-ended template form, was somehow too limited. There weren't enough monsters, there weren't enough classes, there weren't enough powers or abilities. The original game, so this shadowy speculation would have you believe, just didn't have enough stuff.

So the next generation of more "advanced" games came out, promising more things for the throngs of adventure-hungry players to do by promising game rules that were packed with more stuff. Ironically, on the other end of this history (some thirty years later), we are now flooded with such games—enough to stack from floor to ceiling in a dusty, unvisited brick-and-mortar gaming store. We certainly have enough adventure, yet, we have very few players hungry for adventure. What went wrong? What was it that originally enchanted those players, who came from every walk of life, and made them so esurient?

Today's games have naturally attracted a very different, and far less diverse crowd (which is unfortunate, not only because we lose perspective and creativity, but because many of the so-called "gamers" are individuals that no one in their right mind would like to spend an afternoon with). The excessive influx of systems, mechanics and rules to our Saturday afternoon scenarios naturally caters to rules-obsessed types, and the move away from free-form, communal decision-making and storytelling alienates people who didn't sign up for this level of commitment. But there is also a delightful agility that was somehow lost in this sad transmutation.

I believe that earlier adventuring aficionados truly understood that the original game was merely a template. The apparent limitation, for example, to choose one of three iconic character options (Fighting-Man, Magic-User or Cleric) belies the fact that these choices were never meant as more than basic blueprints from which characters were built. Looking in the three little books, for instance, one finds extremely few limitations: ability scores have next to no impact on the game, the rules allow dual and multi-classing, and any character can attempt any action. There was essentially an adventurer, and different options determined what access he or she had to different equipment and spellcraft.

One of the rarely highlighted aspects of the original game in particular is the concept of level titles. This dizzying array of honorifics is typically understood as a strict progression, one to the next, so that a Hero becomes a Swashbuckler or a Sorcerer becomes a Necromancer or a Bishop becomes a Lama. Yet, as we can see, this progression is not altogether coherent (why should a Catholic Bishop become a Tibetan Lama, exactly?), which may have led many to simply discard level titles entirely. At my table, I encourage my players to really make level titles their own, however, and use them to define their characters.

Maybe Toki, a Japanese Fighting-Man character, starts off as a Veteran. By level two, I encourage him to describe how his Fighting-Man is different, and soon he takes the level two title "Sohei" (or warrior monk, becoming an ascetic mountain warrior). During level two, I allow him to track monsters through the woods or navigate untamed mountains. By level three, the campaign has taken another turn: Toki takes on the role of a pirate and starts swinging from ropes and intimidating his opponents.

Customizing level titles is an excellent way to show your players that the archetypal classes are merely base templates from which characters are developed. I do not believe a party with 14 Fighting-Men should feel like a party with 14 Fighting-Men. The fact is that the Fighting-Man class, like the other classes, is broad enough to contain every sword-swinging hero one could dream up. Each character should be different and unique, and the rules of the original game are just open-ended enough to allow that. In reality, there is nothing more alienating than bringing a new player to your table and telling him that his character concept has to fit within your game's hard boundaries and strict definitions, and this is one of the main reasons that this hobby lost its diverse player community: we stopped asking people to bring their own creativity and ideas to the table.

What is a Setting?

Campaign settings have always held a rather schizophrenic place in this hobby. The first settings, Blackmoor and Greyhawk, were merely the dungeon and the environs around it, extending further only rarely, as the adventurers pursued other plots (and then collapsing back to the central dungeon when new players came in). A great example of this are the adventures of Robliar, Tenser and Erac, who dropped through the chute to China in the ruined pile of Greyhawk Castle, only to adventure back to the other side of the world, drawn like a magnet to the tentpole of the campaign. Other campaign events created new areas, such as the domain of Iuz (a foe who was originally released from the dungeons of Greyhawk), yet these new area always deferred to the original environs (with no sustained campaigning in the new regions).

Yet, when TSR took off, it became profitable to publish fully detailed and designed campaign backdrops. World maps were drawn up for the first time ever, and the local environs around Castle Greyhawk became the "World of Greyhawk" (true, the original Greyhawk was situated on the C&C Society map, but the extent of this map is unknown and apparently not well developed). With published settings, the concept of a campaign backdrop turned from the small, local region to the internation and global scene.

Still, I suspect, most referees ended up designing their own settings for their home campaigns, much like Arneson and Gygax themselves had done. The natural impulse is not to delineate a sweeping world, painting with a broad brush, but rather to go ever smaller, refining the details and going deeper into the very concept of the setting. The former approach is geographic, and creates boundaries that delimit thought even as the "broad approach" is meant to liberate possibilities by making the world seem "big." The latter approach is conceptual, and defines the setting as an idea, not a fixed and stale cartography where the possibility for new events must be fit into a pre-existing framework. They are fundamentally different approaches, one structural and the other theoretical, that produce very different experiences for the referee (and we must remember that the referee is a player too, and that campaign preparation is part of the game).

Interestingly, it was setting stagnation (and setting over-definition), that first drove Arneson to boredom with Braunstein, leading him to create Blackmoor. The Napoleonic scenario had been fully described and defined, and the possibilities exhausted, by a structural approach to the scenario that put characters in relation to each other like chess pieces. Instead of focusing on the politics of the scenario, however, Blackmoor focused on the root inspiration at the core of the setting. As the DCC rulebook says:

"Make your world mysterious by making it small—very small. What lies past the next valley? None can be sure. When a five-mile journey becomes an adventure, you'll have succeeded in bringing life to your world." (Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game, page 314)

Here, the sage advice to "think local" should be paired with a conceptual approach to campaign definition. There is world enough in the 50 miles around your central megadungeon: make things happen there! Festivals are thrown, distant merchants arrive, new enemies appear, alliances are struck and broken. The core concept of your campaign inspiration is often difficult to articulate, but one should not flee from this and start detailing regions that no player will likely ever see. Instead, turn back and develop that core concept more and more, mining it for new inspiration, and do not be afraid to let it change as your interests (or real events from the campaign) require. No one truly knows where such a setting will go next, yet it always feels like home.

New Gary Gygax Setting

I don't usually do this, especially after my recent rant about Kickstarters that "over-promise," but I have to make an exception for John Adams' (of Brave Halfling Publishing fame) new project, the Appendix N Adventure Toolkits. Unlike some of the lest-tested indie publishers, who are riding on the coattails of OSR-Kickstarter craze, I know Brave Halfling's work well and have a lot of trust in John's ability. He's been around for quite a while now, and I even own some of his early publications for Castles & Crusades, Swords & Wizardry and Labyrinth Lord. He has been behind a lot of truly excellent products, like the "Old School Gaming Box," Delving Deeper (the original Dungeons & Dragons reprint with Rob Conley's Blackmarsh) and Perilous Mazes (the Holmes Basic Dungeons & Dragons reprint).

His latest effort, however, is stunning. While it started out as simply a single, low-level module, the Appendix N Adventure Toolkits has surpassed my expectations. I find it somewhat difficult to interpret Kickstarters sometimes, so I will break it down for those who haven't had a chance to check this project out yet. After breaking four stretch goals, the project is now giving each supporter (at the paltry $20 level): a PDF copy of each of the five full adventure modules (one of the scenarios which will never be released again), a digest print copy of each of the same (each signed, numbered and shrink wrapped), a poster to hang up in your den and a special edition box to store the modules. For an extra $10, you get a second copy of each module (I guess one would be a play copy and the other a keeper? Or maybe a gift to your nephew to get him into roleplaying?) and eight (8!) more PDFs of new rules and options for DCC characters and classes.

This is really a fantastic value, and a very neat idea to boot (especially the collector's box for storing everything), and the artwork previews already released are top-notch. However, what caught my attention in the first place was the next stretch goal: an original setting developed by John Adams and Gary Gygax through their correspondences. This unpublished work was going to be for Gary's last game, Lejendary Adventures, but came to a halt with his passing. While I never thought Gary was the best game designer, his worlds have always inspired me, and I have found him to be quite a wordsmith when drawing up an old-school setting. Now, if this project gets enough funders, anyone who puts in that same paltry $20 donation will get a sixth print and PDF, "The Old Isle Campaign Setting," in addition to a color poster map of the setting. I cannot be alone in finding it a shame to leave this final work undiscovered, which was written by Adams, but with the keen editing and insight of the original Dungeon Master. Count me interested and in support of this project.