Got Some Unexpected Help Figuring Some Stuff Out

 

We're pretty much all dorks/geeks/nerds here at the Tavern (except for Rach...she's an angel...[I got your back Erik!]).....and I'm willing to bet that most of us goofs like more than just RPGs.

Now I don't consider myself a Star Wars geek, but I do enjoy the films....for the most part. I really didn't care for the last trilogy we got and at the point of coming across as sexist (too late... I opened my mouth so therefor I am wrong) I really didn't care for the character of Rey. My problem though, was I could not tell you why I didn't like Rey, I just didn't. Now I really try not to be some pseudointellectual type and me trying to get up in my head as to why or why not I don't like something really isn't going to work unless I can point to something concrete and obvious......or I have it pointed out to me.

Now the title alone would normally dissuade me from watching the video, but it came up automagically in my cue 'cause I watched something about "Charismatic Intelligence" with Hollywood types and this rotated in. I won't go into the finer details here but the author/narrator's words hit home because she was able to point out something really obvious, but beyond my grasp to understand without the help.

Now since my mind wanders like no other I started to wonder if there was such a thing as "womansplaining" since I had to have a woman point out the painfully obvious to my clueless self. There is, it's called "femsplaining" and this video was so not it.

No this video was just a good explanation on a few things I couldn't wrap my head around because.....I hadn't tried?......I lack the sufficient mental capacity?......I didn't care to explore the concept further?

Most likely the latter because if you don't like something, why spend more energy trying to figure out why? It's either obvious, or it's not and knowing either way doesn't matter if you don't want to spend more resources (time & energy) on it.

Now there have been some RPG games I haven't liked, but usually it's quite obvious to me. The rules are too crunchy/fiddly for my tastes (Rolemaster) or I don't care for the amount of effort it takes to make a PC (D&D 3.5). Doesn't mean I won't play those games, but I'd rather play something else if given the opportunity.

There was a time when HackMaster was becoming a game I didn't enjoy playing, but I had no clue as to why and again I was fortunate to have another woman point out the painfully obvious to my clueless-ass self. Back when HackMaster 4th edition was waning, but 5th Edition wasn't available yet there was the "secret" 5th Edition playtesting. Now the majority of the D(evelopment) Team at KenzerCo are engineers and while they're all great guys......but holy hell can they over-engineer a RPG....and this is coming from a guy who likes a fair amount of RPG Crunch.

HackMaster 5th Edition is heavily skills based and the design of the skill system was basically that skills started at 100 and went down as they improved. You rolled a % and wanted to get over your skill number. High was always good and adding bonuses to your die roll was literally adding a number to your die roll. Sounds good right? I think there are several systems out there that use a similar mechanic.

Nope......did not like it. Honestly I don't think anyone outside of the D-Team liked this skill system, but for the life of me I could not figure out why I didn't like it. Then Shabby, a fellow friend/gamer/playtester pointed out the painfully obvious: If you have a 90% in a skill, that percentage is your chance of failure, not success.

 As players we want to succeed, so I don't want to hear the GM tell me the chances of failure, but my chances to succeed! One is just inherently negative and the other is positive. Yes, a 90% chance of failure is technically the same as a 10% chance to succeed, but don't tell me I'm going to miss on a d20 roll of 1 to 18. Tell me I'm going to hit on a roll of 19 or 20!

The playtesters managed, probably with a HUGE amount of convincing by Shabby, to "fix" the skill system in HackMaster 5th edition to the point where I'm a fan again. While I know now this wasn't "womansplaining" I'm personally glad to have been helped out on these two occasions to figure out that I like character development and positivity in my gaming systems......

.....now if I could only get some help with some other shit I can't figure out.....but that would also require me to care more than I do. Life's too short to dwell on media and games you don't like...... 

Hitting the Party Sideways

One thing that has always gotten under my skin was the concept that as an adventure author, of course this is HackMaster (Association) specific, that my adventure had to "Hit the Party Sideways", or have elements so far out of left field as to surprise the players to the point where it'll lead to a PC death.

Now granted this was usually in context of one of the two big national (Origins & GenCon) multi-round elimination tournaments, but as a GM or a tournament/adventure author, should our goal ever be a player-character death? Personally I say no. My job is to make a fun, engaging adventure that sets up the possibility for the PCs to kill themselves. Despite the apparent adversarial overtones of the GM/Players relationship (we did have PC kill stickers after all), I'm there to have fun and I root for the PCs just as much as against them.

While this "hit them sideways" bit was usually a generic challenge, I have had it issued with regards to a specific group, in one case the winner's of the tournament last year. Evidently my buddy Topher and his group kicked too much ass and needed to be taken down a peg or two. Now I will admit that back in the day I called bullshit. Now I'll admit I was friends with Topher and had actually flown from Boise to Chattanooga a few times to game with his group......ok that's an exaggeration. My work flew me from Boise to Nashville a couple times and I did the added two-hour drive to Chattanooga on my free Monday nights to sling dice. Anyway, this group was a well-oiled machine that wasn't a collection of PCs, but a group that started having their collective shit together before they started rolling 3d6. When Topher played (he was normally the GM) his PC was a Double-Specialist Diviner, basically the magical equivalent to Sherlock Holmes. In a heavy hack & slash game like HackMaster, Diviners seem kind of lame since they are non-combative one-trick ponies that seem kind of useless on the surface. Useless that is unless you need to find out some information about something......which comes up so much more often in a tournament situation than you might imagine.

In any regard, good job creating a PC that either shines or hangs back and does jack squat. In most gaming groups this would not be a good PC to play, but in a good cohesive team built from the ground-up to work together, this guy could be a tournament wrecker......could be.

I'm not one to care if a specific group/table/player/PC finds one particular encounter easy because of good roleplay, character design, teamwork, or just dumb luck. Technically, especially in HackMaster, it is possible for me to set a single 1st level Cleric with a wooden hammer up against a Red Dragon and have the Dragon succumb in one blow due to a critical hit. Statistically impossible, but still can happen. As a GM/author you cannot, I dare say should not, plan for/against outliers. It's kind of a waste of your time.

If you're writing for a group other than your own, make up a story and make it make freakin sense for your game world. Who cares if somebody isn't sufficiently challenged by one particular encounter, or hell....even the whole thing. Now I'm not saying that you shouldn't put in the effort to make it fun for everyone involved, but spending an inordinate amount of time of making it sufficiently "sideways" is not a good use of your time.

I'm not quite sure I can tell you what is the right amount of "sideways" and I'm not sure one even exists because that seems to go against my personal philosophy, but I can give an example where I had added some.....and where it didn't matter. This particular encounter takes place in what is essentially an exit shaft up and out the mountainside of a Dwarven fortress. It's really designed for exit OUT of the complex, but the players are trying to use it to go IN. The wide corridor extends a good 100 meters into the mountainside and ends in what appears to be a dead-end. At the end of this hall is a stone tray filled with large tiles, Dwarven runes on one side and copper pegs embedded in the other side (I actually had props for this of placards with Runes on one side of a bunch of cards). The end wall of this hall had tile-sized indents filled with little holes. Now this was basically a lock for the escape hatch out of the mountain. The idea was that there was a password to open the lock where you had an eight-letter word you needed to spell out in runes using the letters provided. Once the last tiles was placed, if the word was correct, the secret door would open. If not, the ceiling would drop out and crush the party.

Now it is important to note that this encounter was designed to be a time-waster more than anything.  The tiles were large enough and spread out enough that it would take more than a pair of thieves to "pick" the lock. Three thieves could try, but ideally it took four. If a party had three or four thieves in it, they suffered enough and should be able to get a pass on this encounter. This trap/lock was like a memory game. Every letter corresponded to a section of hallway, with an extra section at the end above the tiles. For every letter/rune in the word that was incorrect, that ceiling section came down, doing a specific amount of damage.....but so did the section above the tiles. With enough trial and error, a group should be able to figure out the word needed and open the secret door, which was well down the corridor they had already walked through, definitely not within the area of the trap.

Now with the right spells, skills, magic items the party might be able to eventually find the door on their own and bypassing it (and the trap) would take some effort, but mostly because it wasn't where you would normally look. A party going that far would still be wasting time and having to use resources that would then not be available to them later in the game. The time-wasting effect would still be there.

Now I'm sure this wasn't a sufficiently "sideways" for some of my adventure reviewers, but come on.....this was basically just a fancy lock on a fancy door that was really made for one-way use. If you needed it to be a little more....I don't know...extra: remove some of the needed tiles. Maybe this lock had been used more often than originally intended and some of the tiles were showing some extra wear & tear so one of the brighter Dwarven guards temporarily removed some key tiles so newer replacements could be made.......

......that makes sense to me. Hitting the group sideways by spelling the "password" wrong to begin with, that's probably more like what I'd been told to do all along.

Top Five Entries Get Prizes, But ALL Entries Become the Property of Kobold Press

I feel like I was just part of a conversation about giving up rights to your work for the opportunity to enter a contest. That's right, its not just the winners that give up the rights to their entries, but the losers too!

What are we referring to? Why, Monarch of the Monsters 4: Enter the Arena! of course!

Listen, I enjoyed Kobold Quarterly when it was published. I personally like Kobold Press, even if they don't put out anything that I would currently use. Still the idea of giving up the rights to you work for the opportunity to enter a contest seems... lame, especially in the RPG publishing world.

The main prize is like "mega-awesome" for the winner - "The winning designer will receive a freelance design commission from Kobold Press, and he or she may be interviewed for the Kobold Press website."  All five finalists get a bunch of PDFs. Every entrant loses the rights to their work.

Maybe it's common contest mumbo jumbo, but if they put out a product based upon these entries and you weren't one of the top five, you just worked for free on (what I'm sure would be) a for profit product.

The prizes are PDFs put out by the awarder of the prizes, so they have no real cost to Kobold Press, so in truth, there is little cost to KP for the opportunity to get a large selection of predesigned monsters for their publishing stable.

Maybe I'm just getting grumpy in my old age. Maybe this is what all of the young folks are doing.

Damn, I may just be an old crotchety fuck these days...

Making Magic - Then Trying To Catch It Before It's Too Late

Thoughts are like dandelion fluff. If you don't hold on hard enough, the first breeze takes it away.

Which is annoying, as most of my brainstorming seems to take place as I drive, and it's not always (if ever) convenient to pull over to write some thoughts down.

Some of my current brainstorming has been about brewing up some unique magic items, which may or may not make their way into a published product. They most assuredly will make their way into my ACKS campaign. They certainly can't make their way to this blog without first being introduced in my campaign, or else I risk letting my players in on all the little secrets before they even come across them in the first place.

I will say this - magic weapons and armor are not part of the growing list of things I'm working on. Not only are they too linked to individual systems, but it's the miscellaneous magic that adds the depth to the world. Besides, would most wizards spend time making magic swords and enchanting chain mail when they could be making thinks that actually help them?

I think not. I say empower the wizards not by giving them at will powers, but give them willful toys. Or something like that ;)