Category: Game Design

Equal 3d6 — a computer program to roll characters for you

~ robdalexander ~ Leave a comment

As I noted in my previous post, I want to generate random character attributes (Str, Dex, etc). But I want them to be balanced — I want characters to differ in their talents but have the same overall ability. There are many ways to do this (e.g. see a discussion of such on rpg.net), but the natural way for me was to write a computer program to do it.

The rules

  • Characters consist of six attributes in an order
  • Attributes are rolled on 3d6 and modifiers calculated on the Mentzer/BECMI scale that LotFP uses
  • Each generated character is checked against an acceptance rule. If they pass they go on the list to print, otherways they are discarded and a new one is rolled in their place
    • Default rule is “modifiers must sum to +2”
  • The program is set to produce a fixed number of characters per run. It will keep trying to generate them until it has that number
    • If the acceptance rule always returns false, the program will run until the end of time

The code is set up so most of the above are easy to change and experiment with.

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D&D attributes, equal random generation, and skills

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Context

Immergleich’s rules are based on Lamentations of the Flame Princess (LotFP), and so it inherits the following:

  • Character attributes (the D&D set of Str, Dex etc) are randomly generated — 3d6 in order, roll again if modifiers sum to less than zero, player may make one swap.
    • I like this — it makes character generation a “let’s see what I get to work with” rather than a pure act of design. It cuts through overthinking and it pushes players to try concepts they would instinctively avoid. It helps to cue up players that my game is about rolling with situations, not about grinding through fair challenges for a fixed-schedule reward. It probably discourages the mechanical-optimisation-oriented players who won’t do well in my game anyway.
  • There are no direct rolls of attributes or their modifiers — there are attack rolls, saves, and skills rolls, some of which are modified by attributes
  • It is implied that you use the common OSR approach of resolving most challenges through player creativity assessed by GM judgement. Outside of combat, most challenges don’t involve rolling.
  • There are skills, but they only cover near-impossible things e.g. climbing a sheer surface. Most characters are stuck with a 1 in 6 success chance in all skills; only thieves (“specialists”) can improve them.

Problems

  1. Although PCs are never very weak (the roll-again rule prevents it), some PCs are stronger than others (it’s not that rare to have your modifiers sum to +5)
  2. Even if PCs end up with a balance of overall scores, some attributes are much more useful than others (e.g. Int is almost irrelevant)
  3. I don’t like the pure creativity-and-judgement approach to problems. When failure is a possibility and would be interesting, I like to roll.
    • I particularly like to use rolls to skip over complicated interactions (with objects or with NPCs) and get straight to the result
  4. Attributes are underused.  They’re right there on the sheet, concisely describing characters in ways that make obvious sense to many players, yet most of the time they are only used indirectly. In some situations where they sound like they’d be relevant, they’re not used at all.

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What I like about Dungeon World, and what I do not

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Status: quite confident. I’ve continued to update this since posting it, partly from some notes I found from 2014 (when I was playing it regularly).

I’ve played a fair amount of Dungeon World — perhaps 45 sessions in all, about 8 as a player and the rest as a GM. You may reasonably doubt my memory of these, as only three of them were in the past two years. Nevertheless, I have views, and I shall state them.

Overall, I like some properties of DW, but I strongly dislike other ones. And I do not know how to make a game that has only the ones I like, or to what extent that is even possible. My primary goal here is to help myself understand DW, and my experiences with it, so that I can design games that I like better.

Some top-level clarifications based on feedback:

  • This is not intended as a review. It’s a very idiosyncratic exploration of my subjective response to the game and the reasons for that. That said, if you’re evaluating DW before buying or running, it may be of some value (insofar as you are like me). If you’re designing a DW-like game for a broad audience, it may be of some value (insofar as many people in your audience are like me). But primarily this article is for me. If you want to understand me (as I do), it’s likely to be useful.
  • When I say “design”, I don’t just mean game design. There are aspects of the writing and art that don’t work for me, and I think they strongly colour my experience of “Dungeon World”.
  • It may help to know that my main current game is Lamentations of the Flame Princess (LotFP), house-ruled and run as described elsewhere on this blog. If not stated in any specific case, that is probably the reference model I have in mind (especially when I’m describing where DW works well for me). This is not to say LotFP works for me, either — overall, I like it less than DW.

This post is long. Bring a torch.

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Verbose arguments, pedantic, overcomplicated

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Over on rpg.net, user “Azraele” comments on my article about rulesets and their role in changing player behaviour thus:

I want to mention, without judgement, that the language used is extremely convoluted to no productive end; your thesis and definitions aren’t careful enough to warrant the use of such hyper technical language. Switching to plain language doesn’t rob your observations of important detail; it unearths them from mounds of obfuscation.

On reflection, I disagree that this has no productive end. When I write like that, there for several reasons:

  • I’m trying to spell out my argument very precisely, so that it can be rigorously analysed (and indeed so that in the process I may catch my own errors and ambiguities). If my definitions are indeed “not careful enough”, then the process will reveal that (as it did for that blog post once others read it carefully).
    • If my argument is precise, doesn’t mean that it is right, or even structurally sound; it just means that it’s going to be obvious when its wrong or unsound.
  • I’m generating terms and definitions for my own future use (and that of others). Complication now may let me say something very simply later, if only to myself.

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Low-prep dungeons — a larval proposal

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From a grain of sand to the darkest crypt beneath the earth…

The basic idea

Have concentric levels of prep, from the very quick to the very detailed. Each supports the next, more detailed level — if you prep at x, then later find time to do x+1, little of your effort at x is wasted.

For each level, I have a target for average prep time to carry it out.

General notes

  • A “dungeon” is not necessarily underground. It could be a tower, a house, a dense forest area.
  • “a dungeon” is a bounded thing, although it may be very large. It may of course link to other named dungeons.

A gloomy descent into the earth of detail

Level 1 — improv to theme (three minutes prep)

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Low-prep dungeons — problems and goals

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Problems that trouble me underground

  1. Detailed dungeon prep (e.g. room-by-room topological map with full brief keying) is impractical for Immergleich. There are thirty-odd districts and each has at least one conventional dungeon. Many houses are basically small dungeons. Meanwhile my “maybe do” list is ninety items, and most of those aren’t dungeon mapping.
  2. When I do some dungeon prep, I often feel that I’m getting very low ROI, especially given the dungeon may never be entered. I’m not confident that I’m using my time well — if I have thirty minutes, I want to spend it in a high-yield way, not pacing out three miserable rooms1.
  3. I am mighty in improvising. I see places in my head and you can follow my voice into them and be metatasized by a slime. But when I do this, I worry that:
    • I’m using only a narrow subset of the possibilities of dungeons.
    • I’m arbitrarily deciding how large the dungeon is, where important things (e.g. quest objects) are. It is harder to see where player skill fits into this, at least player skill of the dungeoneering kind valorised by the OSR.
    • I am also haunted by the Quantum Ogre. I am not sure I care about him, but i see him crouching over there by the old fireplace.2
  4. Because players often enter dungeons in response to jobs from the Immergleich job list, I often need to seed job goals into dungeon spaces.

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Vincent Baker’s key writings on how games work

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“Periodic Reminder” — System, rules and principles

“How RPG Rules Work” — fiction, players and rules

“Rules vs Vigorous Creative Agreement” — Rules exist to force outcomes that no-one playing would have chosen

His use of “system” in those follows the Lumpley Principle / Baker-Care Principle — “System (including but not limited to ‘the rules’) is defined as the means by which the group agrees to imagined events during play.”1

NB I generally don’t use that definition — it conflicts with the much more general use that I’m familiar with professionally, and it is unhelpful as a jargon term because it’s too easily confused with “rules” or “ruleset”. So I use a much more generic definition as sketched in Some meanings of some terms.

Footnotes:

1. http://big-model.info/wiki/Lumpley_Principle

Some meanings of some terms

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My previous post has attracted some discussion on /r/rpg, Story Games, and rpg.net. Some commenters have asked for the definitions I am using. So:

Definitions

System

A set of parts that interact so as to give rise to some kind of interesting higher level behaviour, with a configuration that is somewhat stable over time. E.g. a car is a system – it’s made from parts that interact so as to exhibit movement behaviour. It can be stable over many years, if maintained.

A key property of systems is that they self-regulate to some degree — they keep their key properties/state variables within tolerable levels. E.g the engine of a car regulates its temperature, speeds of key moving parts, timing of the pistons. Stability over time usually depends on this self-regulation.

(The easiest models of self-regulation to understand are the thermostat and the steam governor)

Complication — there are no systems:

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A Ruleset is an Intervention Tool

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Status: messy. There is a valuable idea here, but it is awkwardly expressed. The examples are relevant, but mediocre.

A friend comes up to you, careworn and unkempt. She says “I’m tired of my Pathfinder campaign. The fights take too long, the prep is too arduous, the players just follow my lead, and I’m bored of fantasy as a genre.”

“No problem” you say, “I have a remedy for you”. You pull Apocalypse World from your battered messenger bag. “Play this instead. It will solve your problems.”

“Oh!” she says, smiling for the first time in seven months as she leafs through the pages, “I think this what I’m looking for”.

You ride off on your low-seat BMX, pleased to have given her the new game system she needs.

But you should not be so self-satisfied. You did not give her a new game system; you merely gave her a tool to help her intervene in her group’s social system. She should not be smiling. Her work has only just begun.

When you intervene in a social system, your goal is to change behaviour

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