As I mentioned in a post that shouldn't be too hard to find, the inevitable Age of Wonders has come and gone. Like I previously mentioned, it is why we have rare artifacts... and why we don't all have access to them and why they are legendary.
I mentioned before one major thing that I have never touched upon is the actual end of the age. Well, I did finally. Had to. I made the general mistake of tying four different organizations to the various magical and technological disasters that have stemmed from the very long and agonizing death of the Age of Wonders and it's tortured remains that came afterwards... in other words... the 1300+ years that came after that... IE: My campaigns over the last 13 years or so in the same world.
Trust me, I got the original map from 1998 that I colored with markers... complete with desert that disappeared because I got over-zealous with the green but I was not going to redraw the damn thing since it was on card stock.
Suddenly, every little problem and justification was dragged into the light. At first, it was easy. It was simple. They were just ancient powerhouse organizations. That is all. Don't ask questions. Wait! What are you doing? You actually want to know about them? Okay... here is the pamphlet/Wikipedia stub about them. That is enough, right?
I mean, one of them is an organization that hunts evil... think the harpers from forgotten realms meet the templars and decide to co-op with some paladin type refuges from Wheel of Time. Toss in a bit of Imperium of Man Inquisition for fun and profit.
One of them searches the countryside for monsters. They don't care about evil. They just want to safeguard the people from terrors that lurk in the darkness. They guard a massive wall and draw some inspiration from refugees from A Game of Thrones.
One is dedicated to the hunting of the dark and forbidden arts of technology and it's proscribed sub-sect, magical based technologies. They detest the wonder weapons of the Age of Wonders and the rise of the Industrial Revolution that came in it's flame covered wake.
Another is an order of spell casters trying their best to police themselves, hoping no one remembers that at one time, it was their own kind... the god priests and terror inducing wizards who had brought the world to it's knees in the first place. A self regulating body to prevent the rise of another lich king or similar wanna-be godling from rising from their ranks. Think Psi-Corps... but for ALL spell casters... divine and arcane.
The last is simply an order of warriors meant to be the counterbalance for the previous group. Supreme warriors who hone their abilities without aid of magic or enhancement because the leader of the organization has access to five great artifacts that can negate all magic for a certain area. When the mages fail or a truly terrible threat rises, the masters of this order sorte to solve it.
This was enough for months and months.
That changed.
That changed when suddenly players attached themselves to these organizations as former, disillusioned members. Suddenly, I need to figure things out. Histories, doctrines, and the such. The lore that backs these details suddenly means something now.
I couldn't be happier.
It is just suddenly means I need to actually work again... because someone might actually stumble across a shred of truth and start actually assembling the great mysteries that have been laying dormant in my notebooks for years. They occasionally stumble and solve part of them but never truly get it all... but suddenly, there might be a player who might start asking the questions as to the origins of the two worlds I run on... and it might make sense.
For the first time in years, I might have someone who might be able to play the game on the level that I used to run on. Not on the person on person level or the party on party level... no, to debate policy with ancient powers, to give their versions of a B5 level speech and maybe even steal the keys the worlds from my hand to shape it to their will like the players of old that I have had the pleasure to run for.
I couldn't be happier.
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Thursday, December 15, 2011
3 month update for the giant Risk map
As with any good engine, there is a good deal of engineering that goes into it. Trial and error... emphasis on the failure.
What have I learned from this process?
The rules I have created for province improvement and construction was well received. It was simple and after a very minor bit of book keeping work on a seasonal basis in game, it was understood. I ended up going with a seasonal basis for the game because it freed up the players to be able to still adventure and do what they want most with gaming... to play their characters.
They actually started to try to lay the ground work for a feudal system into play. When confronted with weeks long travel times, suddenly the idea of why nobles had so much power as they did outside the control of a king became more apparent to them. It was a beautiful moment as a GM to sit back and actually have them get nervous over picking who their regent or majordomo or the new lord of a newly claimed province. The idea that they are not able to police or get to the entire width and length of their kingdom made them actually slow down their ambitions.
When confronted with the idea of such expansive kingdoms that might take a month and a half to just march an army from one border to the next, suddenly that 200 man garrison within a major city did not seem like it was much, even if it is enough to bring down an average adventuring party. Time suddenly came into being important. That LotR-esque multi-month foot journey on a quest to sabotage a rogue noble might give that noble time to do something mean to prepare. Suddenly, that orc army from Return of the King seems less insane.
What have I really learned?
I need a better way to utilize armies effectively. Or at least run their battles.
There is no other way of saying it.
No matter how well I model the feudal system (or more accurately, it self-organizes itself), no matter how indepth I put the politics or the intrigue that goes behind the game of thrones, the moment the armies hit the field, it falls apart.
Player psychology puts themselves as being a cut above the rest and who doesn't think this way? We all want to be Conan the Barbarian, slaying all those who stand before us or fight like Aragorn. But there is a disconnect the moment that there is a marching band of 800 men, banners flying in the air.
Yes, they are a mass of level 1 to 3 NPCs. They are all powerful characters. They have butchered goblin or orc warbands that attack wildly in the dark of the night but suddenly, when faced with an organized army in an open field with their own special units attached to it and an intelligent commander, all the adventurer tricks went right out the window.
I have done this before, in an earlier campaign setting, when a player who was playing a shape changing berserker charged an entire motorized infantry company and their support vehicles. It took most of a day to roll out all the attacks of that combat. All 200 or so plus their supporting vehicles and support weapons. It was an odd campaign honestly... glad I laid that game to rest.
The long and the short of it is this... while he managed to kill a few and disable one of the vehicles, he was brought down... but it took four hours to run 3 turns of combat. And he wouldn't run away... he was depending on the idea that he could do the impossible, that he was invincible only because he had an incredible AC and a TON of hit points to soak what was a few pin-pricks at a time. Problem is... 200+ attacks per turn over 3 turns was just too much for one man to do.
Yet I still want players to feel like they can do something during a major battle. I want it to feel incredible for them. It is why we tell the stories and tales, yes? To feel like we are part of some epic fight? Yet how do I divorce players from thinking they are playing a table top version of the Koei made Dynasty Warrior series?
Because that is what I think they are thinking when they think of their characters verse an army.
Some mighty incarnation of Lu Bu capable of shattering ranks of infantry by merely charging into their ranks or pulling some Baron Munchhausen style insanity, thinking it will actually turn the tide of battle.
How else do you term riding a catapult bolder into battle and using feather fall to not die from the impact? All to get surrounded by foot soldier company.
Because they are not fighting disorganized orcs who don't know how to fight but groups of proper centuries, ordered and disciplined... and not just one century but a full on cohort... plus auxiliaries! Sorry, anything short of Hercules or Thor is going to be stop the power of a single cohort... let alone a full on Legion. Which is what sometimes is hanging on the wings.
Now, I can always just take it as my players (and players in general) are arrogant and think that since they can bring down a dragon or slay a lich or survive a trap filled dungeon or decode a mysterious legend that they are pretty capable. But put a roman-esque legion in their way or a mechanized SS grenadier company or what ever... and they think tackle them like it was a simple orc horde.
Oh well... this is the next great challenge in improving the system.
Do I keep the armies as mere set peices, fighting their great wars in the background while the players lurk about sabotaging supply lines, assassinating commanders, stealing plans... in essence, being commandos or James Bond special agents fighting small skirmishes with a few people at a time...
or do I figure out a way to put the players in situations akin to the storming of Normandy or Iwo Jima, the battlefields of El Alamein, the bloody fields of Agincourt, or the narrows at Thermopylae...
without dragging the game down with a million dice rolls that detract more than add... no game should ever be each player gets to roll their 2 or 3 attacks or 1 spell and then the GM has to roll 1000 times for both the player's allies and the enemy.
Hopefully I will get an update that ISN"T 3 months from now... but prep work always sucks up so much time.
What have I learned from this process?
The rules I have created for province improvement and construction was well received. It was simple and after a very minor bit of book keeping work on a seasonal basis in game, it was understood. I ended up going with a seasonal basis for the game because it freed up the players to be able to still adventure and do what they want most with gaming... to play their characters.
They actually started to try to lay the ground work for a feudal system into play. When confronted with weeks long travel times, suddenly the idea of why nobles had so much power as they did outside the control of a king became more apparent to them. It was a beautiful moment as a GM to sit back and actually have them get nervous over picking who their regent or majordomo or the new lord of a newly claimed province. The idea that they are not able to police or get to the entire width and length of their kingdom made them actually slow down their ambitions.
When confronted with the idea of such expansive kingdoms that might take a month and a half to just march an army from one border to the next, suddenly that 200 man garrison within a major city did not seem like it was much, even if it is enough to bring down an average adventuring party. Time suddenly came into being important. That LotR-esque multi-month foot journey on a quest to sabotage a rogue noble might give that noble time to do something mean to prepare. Suddenly, that orc army from Return of the King seems less insane.
What have I really learned?
I need a better way to utilize armies effectively. Or at least run their battles.
There is no other way of saying it.
No matter how well I model the feudal system (or more accurately, it self-organizes itself), no matter how indepth I put the politics or the intrigue that goes behind the game of thrones, the moment the armies hit the field, it falls apart.
Player psychology puts themselves as being a cut above the rest and who doesn't think this way? We all want to be Conan the Barbarian, slaying all those who stand before us or fight like Aragorn. But there is a disconnect the moment that there is a marching band of 800 men, banners flying in the air.
Yes, they are a mass of level 1 to 3 NPCs. They are all powerful characters. They have butchered goblin or orc warbands that attack wildly in the dark of the night but suddenly, when faced with an organized army in an open field with their own special units attached to it and an intelligent commander, all the adventurer tricks went right out the window.
I have done this before, in an earlier campaign setting, when a player who was playing a shape changing berserker charged an entire motorized infantry company and their support vehicles. It took most of a day to roll out all the attacks of that combat. All 200 or so plus their supporting vehicles and support weapons. It was an odd campaign honestly... glad I laid that game to rest.
The long and the short of it is this... while he managed to kill a few and disable one of the vehicles, he was brought down... but it took four hours to run 3 turns of combat. And he wouldn't run away... he was depending on the idea that he could do the impossible, that he was invincible only because he had an incredible AC and a TON of hit points to soak what was a few pin-pricks at a time. Problem is... 200+ attacks per turn over 3 turns was just too much for one man to do.
Yet I still want players to feel like they can do something during a major battle. I want it to feel incredible for them. It is why we tell the stories and tales, yes? To feel like we are part of some epic fight? Yet how do I divorce players from thinking they are playing a table top version of the Koei made Dynasty Warrior series?
Because that is what I think they are thinking when they think of their characters verse an army.
Some mighty incarnation of Lu Bu capable of shattering ranks of infantry by merely charging into their ranks or pulling some Baron Munchhausen style insanity, thinking it will actually turn the tide of battle.
How else do you term riding a catapult bolder into battle and using feather fall to not die from the impact? All to get surrounded by foot soldier company.
Because they are not fighting disorganized orcs who don't know how to fight but groups of proper centuries, ordered and disciplined... and not just one century but a full on cohort... plus auxiliaries! Sorry, anything short of Hercules or Thor is going to be stop the power of a single cohort... let alone a full on Legion. Which is what sometimes is hanging on the wings.
Now, I can always just take it as my players (and players in general) are arrogant and think that since they can bring down a dragon or slay a lich or survive a trap filled dungeon or decode a mysterious legend that they are pretty capable. But put a roman-esque legion in their way or a mechanized SS grenadier company or what ever... and they think tackle them like it was a simple orc horde.
Oh well... this is the next great challenge in improving the system.
Do I keep the armies as mere set peices, fighting their great wars in the background while the players lurk about sabotaging supply lines, assassinating commanders, stealing plans... in essence, being commandos or James Bond special agents fighting small skirmishes with a few people at a time...
or do I figure out a way to put the players in situations akin to the storming of Normandy or Iwo Jima, the battlefields of El Alamein, the bloody fields of Agincourt, or the narrows at Thermopylae...
without dragging the game down with a million dice rolls that detract more than add... no game should ever be each player gets to roll their 2 or 3 attacks or 1 spell and then the GM has to roll 1000 times for both the player's allies and the enemy.
Hopefully I will get an update that ISN"T 3 months from now... but prep work always sucks up so much time.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Return to Risk
I was wrong to call what I was creating Risk. Only about 2/3 done with the massive map's provinces... not even started naming them. It's not Risk, it's Birthright. Except I don't want that cluster fuck of rules. God did it suck and digging out that horrid module, it leaves a whole hell of a lot to be desired when compared to the last decade and a half of empire building game advancement from 1996 to today.
What did my players want to do immediate when they got land? They wanted to develop it. To pour countless tons of wealth into the land to turn each province they had so lovingly stolen from the minor nobles in isolated lands to turn them into real cities. They wanted to do what they do any game of Civilization or Master of Orion or Alpha Centauri or Hearts of Iron 3... or any of the later Total War series games.
Except you can only do the most rudimentary of upgrades in Birthright. There is nothing to allow a person to develop a backwater province and turn it into a powerhouse if they pour enough roads and make it attractive enough. It assumes in the rules that you go in with the idea that using their maps and regions is the only way to play!
Screw that!
I am a die hard empire builder and I know at least 2/3 of my players want to also build an empire. They want to know their money is doing something. I want their money to do something. They are also patient. They are playing long lived races and are more than content to take a decade or two to build up a nation from next to nothing and into something that might eventually make a stand against ancient powers. The satisfaction of knowing they took disparate provinces no one cared about on the frontier and turned them into a Prussia or better. Some dream bigger than that.
This means I need to throw off the cheap way out and start to work to help fuel their desires, to help stoke the fires of ambition and see where this takes them. Will they build something that will last or will they try to reach too far too fast and end up in ruins, an occupied shell under the rule of an empire? That means newer and better rules.
Simple rules that can be easily understood but big enough to cover the level of detail they request... like their armies, infrastructure, crafting capacity, income makers, and critical resources... but avoid the minute details that would bog it down too much under paper work. They are to be kings, not accountants... that is what the Hand is for. Btw, that's me.
But it is a neat experiment honestly on my part to see what my players when forced to make the BIG choices do. They have been adventurers across a number of campaigns for years. Now, they have to take on the mantle of being something far, far more.
All because a simple map with silly names was put before them and they could for once actually plot out their actual size of their tiny holdings and think. So glad I listened to my room mate that day and spent the time working on it... even if I was distracted with the Ninja Warrior marathon because the main entertainment was knocked out thanks to the hurricane knocking out the web servers.
What did my players want to do immediate when they got land? They wanted to develop it. To pour countless tons of wealth into the land to turn each province they had so lovingly stolen from the minor nobles in isolated lands to turn them into real cities. They wanted to do what they do any game of Civilization or Master of Orion or Alpha Centauri or Hearts of Iron 3... or any of the later Total War series games.
Except you can only do the most rudimentary of upgrades in Birthright. There is nothing to allow a person to develop a backwater province and turn it into a powerhouse if they pour enough roads and make it attractive enough. It assumes in the rules that you go in with the idea that using their maps and regions is the only way to play!
Screw that!
I am a die hard empire builder and I know at least 2/3 of my players want to also build an empire. They want to know their money is doing something. I want their money to do something. They are also patient. They are playing long lived races and are more than content to take a decade or two to build up a nation from next to nothing and into something that might eventually make a stand against ancient powers. The satisfaction of knowing they took disparate provinces no one cared about on the frontier and turned them into a Prussia or better. Some dream bigger than that.
This means I need to throw off the cheap way out and start to work to help fuel their desires, to help stoke the fires of ambition and see where this takes them. Will they build something that will last or will they try to reach too far too fast and end up in ruins, an occupied shell under the rule of an empire? That means newer and better rules.
Simple rules that can be easily understood but big enough to cover the level of detail they request... like their armies, infrastructure, crafting capacity, income makers, and critical resources... but avoid the minute details that would bog it down too much under paper work. They are to be kings, not accountants... that is what the Hand is for. Btw, that's me.
But it is a neat experiment honestly on my part to see what my players when forced to make the BIG choices do. They have been adventurers across a number of campaigns for years. Now, they have to take on the mantle of being something far, far more.
All because a simple map with silly names was put before them and they could for once actually plot out their actual size of their tiny holdings and think. So glad I listened to my room mate that day and spent the time working on it... even if I was distracted with the Ninja Warrior marathon because the main entertainment was knocked out thanks to the hurricane knocking out the web servers.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Risk and D&D
Hillariously, I was digging through my shelves not too long ago and I stumbled across a whole slew of empire building games. You know the kind... Risk, Shogun, that sort of game. So pulling out some simple blank paper, I started laying them out over the reversed side of the board.
There I was, standing there, looking at a blank game board. Nothing of note there when my room mate spoke up and said I should draw my game world map on it. I kind of blinked a few times and asked, "Which one? There are two."
"The one we are currently in. It would help us out in our mass scheming."
Then it sank it. He was right. I have drawn hundreds of maps over the years. Each time redefining the political borders of the world as time has advanced and changed or where the predominate language and dialect is spoken. I've even redrawn them to show the environmental effects of massive cataclysms that the players failed to stop or were responsible for themselves. Ruined and lost cities, ancient relic locations that have long been lost to time. In fact, it is odd pulling out a bit of parchment from folder and tossing a stack of unlabled maps that I know what they are that only show a year... sometimes two or three hundred years out of date and watch players pour over those maps for clues or a fragment of information that might lead them to where the villain is or where a lost item of power is at.
But never have they had a giant map they could push counters across like it was a Risk board or one of those battle maps you see generals and world leaders standing over in movies, documentaries, and photos. I have so many silly old games no one plays anymore... the version of risk I have still uses the old three pointed and five pointed counters for the armies and not the molded figures you see today. So nicely generic. Lord of the Rings Monopoly... odd christmas gift because they thought since I liked fantasy... but it still has money in the original rubber bands BUT it did have tiny forts and castles instead of houses and hotels. Shogun? Hundreds of tiny color coded samurai and two stage castles.
I got nearly everything I need honestly to do something up for my players. I just need to pick up a couple medieval or civil war standard bearers to represent major generals in the world and get to painting them up with the major house banners and I am set.
It is odd though how the moment a massive game board comes out, people's perceptions change. I am currently using the back of my never used World of Warcraft: The Board Game map as the future backing of the board... something that had only given me an infinite supply of cheap D8s to pretty much throw about or use as the cores of dice buildings and tons of cheap monster stand ins in the years since I wasted money on it. Glad to see it get one more use out of it. Now, if I can get a use of the cards, I will have scavanged it for everything it is worth.
Well... I'll try to post updates as I go on this... going to have to start marking out the province borders properly of the surface and the two major underdark regions.
There I was, standing there, looking at a blank game board. Nothing of note there when my room mate spoke up and said I should draw my game world map on it. I kind of blinked a few times and asked, "Which one? There are two."
"The one we are currently in. It would help us out in our mass scheming."
Then it sank it. He was right. I have drawn hundreds of maps over the years. Each time redefining the political borders of the world as time has advanced and changed or where the predominate language and dialect is spoken. I've even redrawn them to show the environmental effects of massive cataclysms that the players failed to stop or were responsible for themselves. Ruined and lost cities, ancient relic locations that have long been lost to time. In fact, it is odd pulling out a bit of parchment from folder and tossing a stack of unlabled maps that I know what they are that only show a year... sometimes two or three hundred years out of date and watch players pour over those maps for clues or a fragment of information that might lead them to where the villain is or where a lost item of power is at.
But never have they had a giant map they could push counters across like it was a Risk board or one of those battle maps you see generals and world leaders standing over in movies, documentaries, and photos. I have so many silly old games no one plays anymore... the version of risk I have still uses the old three pointed and five pointed counters for the armies and not the molded figures you see today. So nicely generic. Lord of the Rings Monopoly... odd christmas gift because they thought since I liked fantasy... but it still has money in the original rubber bands BUT it did have tiny forts and castles instead of houses and hotels. Shogun? Hundreds of tiny color coded samurai and two stage castles.
I got nearly everything I need honestly to do something up for my players. I just need to pick up a couple medieval or civil war standard bearers to represent major generals in the world and get to painting them up with the major house banners and I am set.
It is odd though how the moment a massive game board comes out, people's perceptions change. I am currently using the back of my never used World of Warcraft: The Board Game map as the future backing of the board... something that had only given me an infinite supply of cheap D8s to pretty much throw about or use as the cores of dice buildings and tons of cheap monster stand ins in the years since I wasted money on it. Glad to see it get one more use out of it. Now, if I can get a use of the cards, I will have scavanged it for everything it is worth.
Well... I'll try to post updates as I go on this... going to have to start marking out the province borders properly of the surface and the two major underdark regions.
Monday, August 1, 2011
The Inevitable Age of Wonders
It doesn't matter what the game, what the setting but there is always an age of wonders. It is the ancient age where the artifacts came from. Legendary god kings and dragons the size of cities. Where demons and giants walked the earth. An age of myth. The stuff of bards And the one big thing is that... it has come to an end.
Be it in fire, by the breaking of the world, barbarians, corruption from the inside, or just the slow atrophy of time... it has ended.
How does it end? How does it go from a period of time where something like the Staff of the Magi or the Rod of Seven Parts was made and known to a period where there is only a few enchanters left that still know how to wrought steel and meld it with magic? Where magic is now the purview of only the most rarest of wizards still control the powers of the old days while the rest wallow in the dirt or dig through the ruins for what came before.
So in almost everyone of my games, the great debate always comes forward... some who want to advance... to 'modernize', to bring on the age of reason and the enlightenment. Others want to remain in an age of kings and lords... they require nothing more than strength to rule. The rarest seem to want to return to the age of the god kings.
But still, how did we get here? How did it happen in your games? How fast did it happen? Is it three millennium ago and lives on in legend? Did it just happen and the players are living in the ashes of the collapse?
For me, I went for the popular breaking of the world and slow degradation of the world as it moved towards it nadir and then slowly up towards the age of enlightenment. It is the benefit of running a world that across the many campaigns has crawled across 1,300 years of history... actually mapping out the evolution of cultures... but I never addressed how it reached the original nadir point. All the other disasters, they were story driven or player driven... but I never addressed the original breaking of the world... it never came up.
Till now. Now, it is like the players are the archeologists, digging through the dirt of three millenium to search for the titans of greek mythology... completely Indian Jones stuff... trying to uncover what happened because one of those titans decided to wake up. Now, I need to do the work.
Be it in fire, by the breaking of the world, barbarians, corruption from the inside, or just the slow atrophy of time... it has ended.
How does it end? How does it go from a period of time where something like the Staff of the Magi or the Rod of Seven Parts was made and known to a period where there is only a few enchanters left that still know how to wrought steel and meld it with magic? Where magic is now the purview of only the most rarest of wizards still control the powers of the old days while the rest wallow in the dirt or dig through the ruins for what came before.
So in almost everyone of my games, the great debate always comes forward... some who want to advance... to 'modernize', to bring on the age of reason and the enlightenment. Others want to remain in an age of kings and lords... they require nothing more than strength to rule. The rarest seem to want to return to the age of the god kings.
But still, how did we get here? How did it happen in your games? How fast did it happen? Is it three millennium ago and lives on in legend? Did it just happen and the players are living in the ashes of the collapse?
For me, I went for the popular breaking of the world and slow degradation of the world as it moved towards it nadir and then slowly up towards the age of enlightenment. It is the benefit of running a world that across the many campaigns has crawled across 1,300 years of history... actually mapping out the evolution of cultures... but I never addressed how it reached the original nadir point. All the other disasters, they were story driven or player driven... but I never addressed the original breaking of the world... it never came up.
Till now. Now, it is like the players are the archeologists, digging through the dirt of three millenium to search for the titans of greek mythology... completely Indian Jones stuff... trying to uncover what happened because one of those titans decided to wake up. Now, I need to do the work.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Magical Defense, is there one? Pt 1
How do you defend against magic? The short answers almost always comes up... Anti-magic fields/zones and counterspells/Dispel Magic.
The thing is... those... pseudo active forms of defense. The former has a duration, stops your own beneficial magics, and is a limited area of effect spell while the latter requires not only a caster to be present but also to see the spell being cast and also, depending on the ruleset, cast a similar spell (or spell level) to neutralize it.
Now both of these actually require a spell caster to stop. Only the dispel magic line of spells actually address a huge disadvantage that any GM trying to challenge a party... or conversely a party trying to protect against NPCs... magic items.
See, a good deal of this stems from the fact that players, particularly my own, are very paranoid people. Despite the fact that I enjoy and encourage over the top heroics and daring, I have a reputation with my players of being a bit mean. This is a bit unfounded. I do punish stupidity and charging in blindly but I don't punish heroics.
What this means is that they are overly paranoid of the concept of Scry and Die or variations of it. Constantly looking over their shoulder in a fashion that only usually gets seen in Shadowrun or Cyberpunk players. Warded against all forms of remote detection and viewing. They are afraid of squads of people showing up in the middle of the night and killing them all. They are afraid of the wizard who will appear out of nowhere and slay them all while flying and invisible.
Mind you, they won't mind it at all if they do it. But because of the Player/GM arms race... they are literally terrified of the day I return the favor. I won't... its not ultimately fair or conductive to the continuation of the campaign's story. They are convinced though that at any moment, I am going to swoop in with elite NPCs and slaughter them all.
Not unless my story benefits. Sorry. It is one thing to kill the characters or the whole party due to the luck of the dice during a climactic battle or they were stupid and charged straight in on the dragon on their own volition. It is a complete other to merely slit their throats without it meaning something. It is why I am not a fan of the random encounter. Random encounters lead to random damage and thus to meaningless deaths. But that is a topic for another day.
No, the crux of this once divorced of my player's paranoia is my own paranoia as a GM. How do I stop the spell casters?
It is a pretty well accepted concept that a properly prepared mage is like Batman if given prep time. A well run party is like a whole slew of Batmans in tandem. Watch what a cleric, a mage, and a bard can do to buff a rogue and warrior sometime and be amazed.
Now... to ask the question that every Batman villain asks himself... How do you stop Batman?
If your villain is in a central location... be it Mt Doom or just a simple evil castle... and directing his legions of darkness, what keeps him safe from the party? Besides the level problem... according to rules... nothing actually.
Now, if you are running it entirely as a dungeon crawl game... congrats, you don't have my problem. Your players are programmed to think in simple squares and I envy you. I don't have that luxury... I have unwittingly trained a whole slew of gamers who don't think 'inside the box' so to speak.
To them, the world is open... the villains move according to their plans and agendas. If the players deign themselves interested enough to interfere with the villains, the villains will notice and adjust accordingly to the delays and setbacks inflicted upon them by the players. The retaliation is often in kind.
To my players, major attacks are conducted like military operations. They will recon the area, take out as many guards as possible quietly to soften up the area, and then strike heavy and hard towards the perceived target. It is not always successful. But it is effective.
The problem is... how do you challenge a group like this? There is the traditional monster... blargh! I be scary or odd or unknown... the monster from obscure manual 34B page 12 is interesting and it works well for dungeons... but not if your villain is say... a local corrupt noble who has human guards.
What about traps you say! Of course! Traps! Ask yourself this... would you trap your living room? While you were still living in your house? Would you trap the hallway to the bathroom? The answer to these usually should be... no. Why? Because not only do you live there... so do others... who don't know of your traps. You don't want to hurt your friends.
Now, some of you might actually be complete and total shut ins who are completely anti-social and have no guests. To you, the idea of trapping ever 5 feet of your home sounds logical. But say you actually did have friends and family and loved ones... I know... venturing into Fantasy territory here... or employees or guards. No... you might trap a vault... but that is now just a deterrent against rogues and spies... not parties. No... traps are not a solution.
I'll get down to this more later...
The thing is... those... pseudo active forms of defense. The former has a duration, stops your own beneficial magics, and is a limited area of effect spell while the latter requires not only a caster to be present but also to see the spell being cast and also, depending on the ruleset, cast a similar spell (or spell level) to neutralize it.
Now both of these actually require a spell caster to stop. Only the dispel magic line of spells actually address a huge disadvantage that any GM trying to challenge a party... or conversely a party trying to protect against NPCs... magic items.
See, a good deal of this stems from the fact that players, particularly my own, are very paranoid people. Despite the fact that I enjoy and encourage over the top heroics and daring, I have a reputation with my players of being a bit mean. This is a bit unfounded. I do punish stupidity and charging in blindly but I don't punish heroics.
What this means is that they are overly paranoid of the concept of Scry and Die or variations of it. Constantly looking over their shoulder in a fashion that only usually gets seen in Shadowrun or Cyberpunk players. Warded against all forms of remote detection and viewing. They are afraid of squads of people showing up in the middle of the night and killing them all. They are afraid of the wizard who will appear out of nowhere and slay them all while flying and invisible.
Mind you, they won't mind it at all if they do it. But because of the Player/GM arms race... they are literally terrified of the day I return the favor. I won't... its not ultimately fair or conductive to the continuation of the campaign's story. They are convinced though that at any moment, I am going to swoop in with elite NPCs and slaughter them all.
Not unless my story benefits. Sorry. It is one thing to kill the characters or the whole party due to the luck of the dice during a climactic battle or they were stupid and charged straight in on the dragon on their own volition. It is a complete other to merely slit their throats without it meaning something. It is why I am not a fan of the random encounter. Random encounters lead to random damage and thus to meaningless deaths. But that is a topic for another day.
No, the crux of this once divorced of my player's paranoia is my own paranoia as a GM. How do I stop the spell casters?
It is a pretty well accepted concept that a properly prepared mage is like Batman if given prep time. A well run party is like a whole slew of Batmans in tandem. Watch what a cleric, a mage, and a bard can do to buff a rogue and warrior sometime and be amazed.
Now... to ask the question that every Batman villain asks himself... How do you stop Batman?
If your villain is in a central location... be it Mt Doom or just a simple evil castle... and directing his legions of darkness, what keeps him safe from the party? Besides the level problem... according to rules... nothing actually.
Now, if you are running it entirely as a dungeon crawl game... congrats, you don't have my problem. Your players are programmed to think in simple squares and I envy you. I don't have that luxury... I have unwittingly trained a whole slew of gamers who don't think 'inside the box' so to speak.
To them, the world is open... the villains move according to their plans and agendas. If the players deign themselves interested enough to interfere with the villains, the villains will notice and adjust accordingly to the delays and setbacks inflicted upon them by the players. The retaliation is often in kind.
To my players, major attacks are conducted like military operations. They will recon the area, take out as many guards as possible quietly to soften up the area, and then strike heavy and hard towards the perceived target. It is not always successful. But it is effective.
The problem is... how do you challenge a group like this? There is the traditional monster... blargh! I be scary or odd or unknown... the monster from obscure manual 34B page 12 is interesting and it works well for dungeons... but not if your villain is say... a local corrupt noble who has human guards.
What about traps you say! Of course! Traps! Ask yourself this... would you trap your living room? While you were still living in your house? Would you trap the hallway to the bathroom? The answer to these usually should be... no. Why? Because not only do you live there... so do others... who don't know of your traps. You don't want to hurt your friends.
Now, some of you might actually be complete and total shut ins who are completely anti-social and have no guests. To you, the idea of trapping ever 5 feet of your home sounds logical. But say you actually did have friends and family and loved ones... I know... venturing into Fantasy territory here... or employees or guards. No... you might trap a vault... but that is now just a deterrent against rogues and spies... not parties. No... traps are not a solution.
I'll get down to this more later...
Sunday, February 13, 2011
It all started with a spark...
For our classic traditional high fantasy world, we have to assume that we are living in the ruins of a greater empire that dominated in the past, beyond living memory of all but the longest lived of races. Considering high fantasy is often pseudo-european... we are going to assume it will be roman like though we can easily supplant the glories of Rome with any culture really. No matter though... we are living in a period of darkness and fear and ignorance. We don't know what lives in the shadows... in the woods and in the mountains.
Not only do we have the barbarians who sacked and destroyed the old empire... there are countless monsters. After all, we have books upon books of them. Some come from higher or lower planes of existence... who consider mortal life to be a bug under their feet, barely registering that we even exist. The gods barely do much to influence or stop these threats. After all, they are some of the beings who exist on a higher dimension... they are mysterious and powerful.
Mighty knights and adventurers proceed out into the ruins of the fallen empire, looting the remains of past glories. Perhaps they are fighting an enemy who has come into a weapon or item of great power, a remnant of the true power wielded by the previous age. There is always the next massive invasion of barbarians... I mean... orcs and their ilk who threaten the tentative thread of civilization upon which it hangs. Someone is out trying to summon a higher being to our own level of reality again.
These are the various common filaments that fill high fantasy. This is the fuel that has run countless games in both paper and electronic form. It also is so very limiting.
It only begins to appear though as such when you start to run longer games. When you are playing a new game... everything is so new... so much of the map is still unfilled. Here there be dragons still rings true. But what happens if the world survives your plot and the heroes defeat the dark lord of the mountain of black death and the legions of the twilight god? What if the world actually manages to move forward a century or two? Does it STAY locked in the realm of high fantasy?
Well... to some designers... the answer is yes. Some details might change... but there will still be the lords of realm, knights, baronies, the overly superstitious nature of religion, and the people still being locked in awe of magical items and spells. Take a look at Forgotten Realms. Take a good long look at it. Open up its histories. They have a recorded history that blows our own recorded history out of the water... yet they still are locked perpetually in high fantasy era. Lord of the Rings doesn't get away either.
No... there is always a magical apocalypse on the horizon or a war of the gods that resets it back to being stupidly locked in this era of mindset. At no point does it actually ever improve for ANYONE. It is counter productive but hey, it leaves the world constantly ready for the next wave of generic adventurers to sally forth from Minas Tirith, Waterdeep, or Stormwind and fight the next great dragon or army of evil.
Who can fix this? Who can stop this endless cycle? Who can affix the lantern of knowledge to the highest tower and drive away the darkness?
It sure is not the cleric, he is too locked in the trappings and prayers of his deity of choice... unless he is one of the rare clerics of a god of knowledge... but they are useless for the most part.
It is not the fighter, he is a brute for the most part and most of the time can not grasp the higher concepts of civilization and economics. Problems are solved with power and physical strength.
The Druid? He would be happier seeing the world turn back to a wild place.
The Sorcerer? Oh no, he was born with power in his veins. He can't teach that. He is a greedy bastard who shapes with his mind and does not truly understand what he is doing... since it is all second nature to him.
The Bard? Maybe... if he is smart enough and realizes he can actually shape and direct a people. They are great organizers.
Monks? No... their belly button lint is too interesting. They focus on the self. Meditation and purification of the body. But their advice can help people but not nearly as much as they would like. Only if they actually try to direct society like Confucius or promote true Taoism... they are not going to do it.
The ranger? The barbarian? Look at our druid and you will understand.
The Paladin? He is happier with the status quo and has too much invested in the mindset of the cleric. He is enslaved to the mindset of the deity he worships to be of ANY use outside of being a better equipped protector.
The rogue? He is like the bard and monk... if his mind is sharp enough and his tongue made of silver... he might be able to do something.
There are always exceptional people in these classes that can be uplifting but they always do so with the help of people who think outside of the box, who are free and above the powers of the world. They turn to one group and one group alone... a group capable of doing everything that they wish they could.
They turn to the mage. The wizard. The heretic who controls powers that defy gods, who understand the very equations that make the invisible gears of the universe turn. Yes, they don't have the ability to just conjure up fire at a whim like those mutant blooded bastard sorcerers or channel the powers of outsiders like a cleric but they alone have dissected magic down to equations and formula. A pinch of this... a dash of that... and stir under this temperature till done... and you have directed the flows of magic to do what you desire.
In the fantasy world, these people are alchemists and guardians of a mostly forgotten lore. So much is always assumed to have been lost and it is assumed that the wizard and his ilk are clinging to the scattered remnants what survived the fall of the previous ages. They don't understand fully what they are dealing with...
Which makes what they do even more impressive.
After all, using scattered chunks of knowledge... they can call forth beasts and more from the outer realms, ignite flame with a snap of the finger, shatter stone, create illusions that all can see, identify somethings true nature, and at their apex of power... wish something into being... in essence... force reality to bend to their will. And this is with what little they still have. Imagine what they could do if they bothered to actually improve upon it.
Everyone who plays D&D knows of the lich. Every mage player has always wanted to BE one. Why? I am a wizard who gets to live forever! Right! Why live forever though? Oh, so I can become an even more powerful mage. Alright. Our settings provided to us usually have one or two extremely powerful liches out there. Some hundreds of years old. Yet they still play by the rules and cast the same spells that mortal mages do. Their items are not better than what a hero might carry. Despite that there are rules for making better spells. They have not done much with their power.
Kel'Thuzad... you get a pass on this one. You were a successful lich in the whole 5 or so years you got to run around and do things in your setting. You actually DID something with all that power.
No... we must assume now that all initial NPC mages and liches and clerics and deities are... unambitious. They are not looking towards the future. They are not invested in the idea of progressing forward a society and only in maintaining a status quo in which they are on top and everyone is left in the dust and mud below them.
Something needs to set the spark that will burn away the old world and bring about a new age.
The world needs a wizard who actually wants progress... or a non-caster who has the vision to ask a mage to do so. Like I said, we can't ask a cleric to do it... he has to go then and ask his deity who might say no for some mystical reason and give a bullshit answer as to why. The sorcerer is actually limited in what all he can do... he only has so many tricks that his limited blood can bring forth. He is worthless. Once he dies... his tricks die with him. Nothing lasting. Nothing worth it. At most... we can use the sorcerer as a foot soldier or a specialized tool... use it till it breaks and discard it. Train him and send him off.
No, the wizard is the key to a better world. His perception of the world, his attention to detail, is everything. His mind is worth so much more than anyone else is.
The only people who rival the wizard in usefulness are inventors and scientists... and occasionally a bard who actually focuses on knowledge and studies and people instead of silly fucking music or brandishing a sword. After all, everyone needs to have a walking library of lore to draw upon. They are perfect assistants. Too bad we are stuck trying to change the world within the rules and outside of going to third party books... inventors, engineers, scientists, and the ilk are unavailable...
until of course... our wizardry origins allow us to.
Not only do we have the barbarians who sacked and destroyed the old empire... there are countless monsters. After all, we have books upon books of them. Some come from higher or lower planes of existence... who consider mortal life to be a bug under their feet, barely registering that we even exist. The gods barely do much to influence or stop these threats. After all, they are some of the beings who exist on a higher dimension... they are mysterious and powerful.
Mighty knights and adventurers proceed out into the ruins of the fallen empire, looting the remains of past glories. Perhaps they are fighting an enemy who has come into a weapon or item of great power, a remnant of the true power wielded by the previous age. There is always the next massive invasion of barbarians... I mean... orcs and their ilk who threaten the tentative thread of civilization upon which it hangs. Someone is out trying to summon a higher being to our own level of reality again.
These are the various common filaments that fill high fantasy. This is the fuel that has run countless games in both paper and electronic form. It also is so very limiting.
It only begins to appear though as such when you start to run longer games. When you are playing a new game... everything is so new... so much of the map is still unfilled. Here there be dragons still rings true. But what happens if the world survives your plot and the heroes defeat the dark lord of the mountain of black death and the legions of the twilight god? What if the world actually manages to move forward a century or two? Does it STAY locked in the realm of high fantasy?
Well... to some designers... the answer is yes. Some details might change... but there will still be the lords of realm, knights, baronies, the overly superstitious nature of religion, and the people still being locked in awe of magical items and spells. Take a look at Forgotten Realms. Take a good long look at it. Open up its histories. They have a recorded history that blows our own recorded history out of the water... yet they still are locked perpetually in high fantasy era. Lord of the Rings doesn't get away either.
No... there is always a magical apocalypse on the horizon or a war of the gods that resets it back to being stupidly locked in this era of mindset. At no point does it actually ever improve for ANYONE. It is counter productive but hey, it leaves the world constantly ready for the next wave of generic adventurers to sally forth from Minas Tirith, Waterdeep, or Stormwind and fight the next great dragon or army of evil.
Who can fix this? Who can stop this endless cycle? Who can affix the lantern of knowledge to the highest tower and drive away the darkness?
It sure is not the cleric, he is too locked in the trappings and prayers of his deity of choice... unless he is one of the rare clerics of a god of knowledge... but they are useless for the most part.
It is not the fighter, he is a brute for the most part and most of the time can not grasp the higher concepts of civilization and economics. Problems are solved with power and physical strength.
The Druid? He would be happier seeing the world turn back to a wild place.
The Sorcerer? Oh no, he was born with power in his veins. He can't teach that. He is a greedy bastard who shapes with his mind and does not truly understand what he is doing... since it is all second nature to him.
The Bard? Maybe... if he is smart enough and realizes he can actually shape and direct a people. They are great organizers.
Monks? No... their belly button lint is too interesting. They focus on the self. Meditation and purification of the body. But their advice can help people but not nearly as much as they would like. Only if they actually try to direct society like Confucius or promote true Taoism... they are not going to do it.
The ranger? The barbarian? Look at our druid and you will understand.
The Paladin? He is happier with the status quo and has too much invested in the mindset of the cleric. He is enslaved to the mindset of the deity he worships to be of ANY use outside of being a better equipped protector.
The rogue? He is like the bard and monk... if his mind is sharp enough and his tongue made of silver... he might be able to do something.
There are always exceptional people in these classes that can be uplifting but they always do so with the help of people who think outside of the box, who are free and above the powers of the world. They turn to one group and one group alone... a group capable of doing everything that they wish they could.
They turn to the mage. The wizard. The heretic who controls powers that defy gods, who understand the very equations that make the invisible gears of the universe turn. Yes, they don't have the ability to just conjure up fire at a whim like those mutant blooded bastard sorcerers or channel the powers of outsiders like a cleric but they alone have dissected magic down to equations and formula. A pinch of this... a dash of that... and stir under this temperature till done... and you have directed the flows of magic to do what you desire.
In the fantasy world, these people are alchemists and guardians of a mostly forgotten lore. So much is always assumed to have been lost and it is assumed that the wizard and his ilk are clinging to the scattered remnants what survived the fall of the previous ages. They don't understand fully what they are dealing with...
Which makes what they do even more impressive.
After all, using scattered chunks of knowledge... they can call forth beasts and more from the outer realms, ignite flame with a snap of the finger, shatter stone, create illusions that all can see, identify somethings true nature, and at their apex of power... wish something into being... in essence... force reality to bend to their will. And this is with what little they still have. Imagine what they could do if they bothered to actually improve upon it.
Everyone who plays D&D knows of the lich. Every mage player has always wanted to BE one. Why? I am a wizard who gets to live forever! Right! Why live forever though? Oh, so I can become an even more powerful mage. Alright. Our settings provided to us usually have one or two extremely powerful liches out there. Some hundreds of years old. Yet they still play by the rules and cast the same spells that mortal mages do. Their items are not better than what a hero might carry. Despite that there are rules for making better spells. They have not done much with their power.
Kel'Thuzad... you get a pass on this one. You were a successful lich in the whole 5 or so years you got to run around and do things in your setting. You actually DID something with all that power.
No... we must assume now that all initial NPC mages and liches and clerics and deities are... unambitious. They are not looking towards the future. They are not invested in the idea of progressing forward a society and only in maintaining a status quo in which they are on top and everyone is left in the dust and mud below them.
Something needs to set the spark that will burn away the old world and bring about a new age.
The world needs a wizard who actually wants progress... or a non-caster who has the vision to ask a mage to do so. Like I said, we can't ask a cleric to do it... he has to go then and ask his deity who might say no for some mystical reason and give a bullshit answer as to why. The sorcerer is actually limited in what all he can do... he only has so many tricks that his limited blood can bring forth. He is worthless. Once he dies... his tricks die with him. Nothing lasting. Nothing worth it. At most... we can use the sorcerer as a foot soldier or a specialized tool... use it till it breaks and discard it. Train him and send him off.
No, the wizard is the key to a better world. His perception of the world, his attention to detail, is everything. His mind is worth so much more than anyone else is.
The only people who rival the wizard in usefulness are inventors and scientists... and occasionally a bard who actually focuses on knowledge and studies and people instead of silly fucking music or brandishing a sword. After all, everyone needs to have a walking library of lore to draw upon. They are perfect assistants. Too bad we are stuck trying to change the world within the rules and outside of going to third party books... inventors, engineers, scientists, and the ilk are unavailable...
until of course... our wizardry origins allow us to.
And so it begins...
Alright... I think I have gotten a good view of the basics on how magic COULD be viewed...
You see, I think a major problem with how I think is that I made the mistake of actually reading things outside of D&D and thinking of how it could be adapted. I have also had a good deal of players who constantly challenge the borders of the box, pushing the limits and seeing what they can do. Though not so much anymore, they used to love the concept of constantly researching new spells and magic to either enhance or modify existing spells or break new ground.
I have seen the wonders of Mage: The Ascension and all its capabilities. Infact... its fluff is what made my mind wander and dance the most. Namely the Technocracy and the more technological oriented magical disciplines. Oh, I enjoyed the traditionalists a great deal... I won't pass up a chance to play an Order of Hermes mage... they are the quintessential D&D mage in that system. I do so enjoy lighting things on fire occasionally.
But the thing is... the Hermetic mages... the traditionalists... never advance. Why should they? They already can do so very much with the wiggle of a finger and a thought. Their focus is a small wand or a gem and they can do wonders! Its the appeal of magic.
Its also very greedy. Ooooh sure, there are the Gandalfs and the Elminsters who decide to come down from on high to interact with the non-magical folk and help but for the most part... they are just shepherds to all the non-magical people. After all, they wield powers that rival deities. Clerics are not much better here... but I will get to my hatred of why clerics shouldn't be doing what they do in a later post... right now, I am focused on the wizardry world.
No, these people barely actually help to change the world that they are in... if you assume that they exist within the framework of the pseudo-medieval setting that is the stock worlds of Dungeons and Dragons or High Fantasy in general. There are various weak reasons why they have not taken over... Templars, Laws of Magic enforced by overly traditionalist mages, 'the church', a deity of magic who is being obstinate... the reasons are countless on how we are stuck in a traditional High Fantasy world instead of something far more fantastic.
So... we are going to start here... in the world of high fantasy... and start to look at just how magic can actually improve or change a setting so completely and yet still arrive at a world that we can relate to. Finally, we are arriving at a point where the title of this blog finally gets to come into play. How does a society actually adapt and change to reflect powers that magic has over it? How do people come to grips with something that is a force upon the universe once the veil of mystery and the arcane get strips away? What happens to magic once logic and the serious eyes of the educated get turned to it?
Can the traditional mage and the church survive in a world where words like heresy and mystery have been dispelled like a shadow under the light of a lantern?
You see, I think a major problem with how I think is that I made the mistake of actually reading things outside of D&D and thinking of how it could be adapted. I have also had a good deal of players who constantly challenge the borders of the box, pushing the limits and seeing what they can do. Though not so much anymore, they used to love the concept of constantly researching new spells and magic to either enhance or modify existing spells or break new ground.
I have seen the wonders of Mage: The Ascension and all its capabilities. Infact... its fluff is what made my mind wander and dance the most. Namely the Technocracy and the more technological oriented magical disciplines. Oh, I enjoyed the traditionalists a great deal... I won't pass up a chance to play an Order of Hermes mage... they are the quintessential D&D mage in that system. I do so enjoy lighting things on fire occasionally.
But the thing is... the Hermetic mages... the traditionalists... never advance. Why should they? They already can do so very much with the wiggle of a finger and a thought. Their focus is a small wand or a gem and they can do wonders! Its the appeal of magic.
Its also very greedy. Ooooh sure, there are the Gandalfs and the Elminsters who decide to come down from on high to interact with the non-magical folk and help but for the most part... they are just shepherds to all the non-magical people. After all, they wield powers that rival deities. Clerics are not much better here... but I will get to my hatred of why clerics shouldn't be doing what they do in a later post... right now, I am focused on the wizardry world.
No, these people barely actually help to change the world that they are in... if you assume that they exist within the framework of the pseudo-medieval setting that is the stock worlds of Dungeons and Dragons or High Fantasy in general. There are various weak reasons why they have not taken over... Templars, Laws of Magic enforced by overly traditionalist mages, 'the church', a deity of magic who is being obstinate... the reasons are countless on how we are stuck in a traditional High Fantasy world instead of something far more fantastic.
So... we are going to start here... in the world of high fantasy... and start to look at just how magic can actually improve or change a setting so completely and yet still arrive at a world that we can relate to. Finally, we are arriving at a point where the title of this blog finally gets to come into play. How does a society actually adapt and change to reflect powers that magic has over it? How do people come to grips with something that is a force upon the universe once the veil of mystery and the arcane get strips away? What happens to magic once logic and the serious eyes of the educated get turned to it?
Can the traditional mage and the church survive in a world where words like heresy and mystery have been dispelled like a shadow under the light of a lantern?
Friday, February 11, 2011
How magic can circumvent the Industrial Revolution pt 2
It doesn't take a rocket scientist honestly to say that players think outside the box. It is something great to have happen in a small campaign world that won't last past the end of the story line. In a situation like this, no one cares if the mage incinerates a village. Oh, of course someone will but ultimately... it will all disappear when the game finally ends. So will that revolutionary idea of using a zeppelin built by that crack pot that came to be so vital to the party plan. All knowledge is still going to be eternally locked within the ancient tomes and dusty towers of the sages.
The thing is... this is not the case. Not if the game world persists from one campaign to the next. Unless the year is reset to an early/same point as the previous game, the previous characters erased from society or a different part of the world... the old characters might encounter the new characters... altering events and such. Paradox and players who have dealt with time travel and what ifs tend to either embrace them or hate them. No matter what, the idea of having to run the same threat for the party to fight is pretty lame. You can only retread the same path so many times.
No, the only solution is that time has to progress if the world is a persistent one. Someone remembers the fiendishly genius plan of the mage riding into battle in an iron golem. Someone remembers that airship that carried the party from one part of the world to the next. Someone recorded the battles and took inspiration from the ingenuity. Someone remembered what the villains did.
NPCs learn just as much as the players. Albeit, a bit slower because you, the GM, was trying to portray the world as a stock high fantasy world. Those economic trends started by the players might take hold elsewhere.
No... I originally thought about how many ways magic could be used to duplicate or surpass modern technology. There are the classics like a guilder with a trinket that has a continuous gust of air spell put on it strapped to it to get a simple one man flying machine that has no duration. That only costs a mere 12,300g at market value... heck... 6,100g if you got an inside track on enchanters and crafters. It might take a glider or two to get the steering and propulsion... might even finagle out a bit better speed, considering you are no longer gliding and have enough thrust to make it difficult for a man to be able to move (Read the spell)... but hey, flight for less than a fourth the value of wings of flying... I'll take it. I don't care about the fact that I can't hover or use it in a dungeon... in the open world... better believe I am going to use it to get around. Low and behold... the D&D equivalent of a jet engine.
Or the creation of a pair of magic items that when put together creates a nuclear reactor... albeit, one is a custom created magic item. But when you can create an combo that will push a vehicle at 90' per round... no matter what the weather condition. The item says ANY vehicle at this speed... no matter how big. Of course, the biggest ship is a Galley in the basic rules. Actually, under the new Pathfinder rules... the ship speed is doubled by the item rules... to 180' per round... but we will assume that we are using a sailing ship... 90' or 120'. Still. This fast... without wind. Okay, it may not be nuclear power... but hey, 14 mph is not that bad really for a single turbine engined ship. This comes in at the beefy cost of 120,000g (60,000g if you have the crafters able to do it)... but if you are looking for something that can maneuver in foul weather and out run pirates... the ship will pay itself out in the long run. I'll take that... means less rigging for the GM to snare up or set fire.
These are extortionately expensive compared to another +5 sword or armor or that magic trinket but these are the items that change worlds.
Why do these items cost so much? Oh, because they are hand made, nearly unique items that use ancient and arcane Techniques barely understood and with reagents that don't make sense but contain powers beyond recognition and are rare. This is how it will always be.
But what if the scientific theory that so drove mundane science was turned towards the arcane?
To use an Alpha Centauri quote...
"We hold life to be sacred, but we also know the foundation of life consists in a stream of codes not so different from the successive frames of a watchvid. Why then cannot we cut one code short here, and start another there? Is life so fragile that it can withstand no tampering? Does the sacred brook no improvement?"
Why must magic be forever trapped in the chains of always being something so arcane. Mages, through the very act of intellect, are able to manipulate the very essence of creation and turn it against their enemies. Their books are filled with piles equations, runes, formula, and such. Potion masters can distill and trap divine power into a potion form. Wands and staves do the same.
It may take centuries... but scholars might be able to unlock the very secrets of how mana flows... freeing it from the very trappings of the shadows of past and mystery. Perhaps they could see the secrets of what makes deities what they are... how they perform their abilities. Psionics unlocked... yeah, it might be the equivalent to the age of enlightenment or discovery before real breakthroughs happen... thus pushing through the very edge of what a typical game might go... but if a campaign world has managed to make it long enough... and the players still enthusiastic... it just might make it that far. After all... elves live a 1000 years... why not? Not ever elf desires to stay trapped in a single age like the elves of Tolkien.
Magic items are better understood... the equations better known... the materials standardized. Costs drop. Especially if there is a demand or a state controls the sources to create it. Hey, the dawn of the magical industrial revolution and an age of imperialism is just around the corner.
I might ramble more on this later.
The thing is... this is not the case. Not if the game world persists from one campaign to the next. Unless the year is reset to an early/same point as the previous game, the previous characters erased from society or a different part of the world... the old characters might encounter the new characters... altering events and such. Paradox and players who have dealt with time travel and what ifs tend to either embrace them or hate them. No matter what, the idea of having to run the same threat for the party to fight is pretty lame. You can only retread the same path so many times.
No, the only solution is that time has to progress if the world is a persistent one. Someone remembers the fiendishly genius plan of the mage riding into battle in an iron golem. Someone remembers that airship that carried the party from one part of the world to the next. Someone recorded the battles and took inspiration from the ingenuity. Someone remembered what the villains did.
NPCs learn just as much as the players. Albeit, a bit slower because you, the GM, was trying to portray the world as a stock high fantasy world. Those economic trends started by the players might take hold elsewhere.
No... I originally thought about how many ways magic could be used to duplicate or surpass modern technology. There are the classics like a guilder with a trinket that has a continuous gust of air spell put on it strapped to it to get a simple one man flying machine that has no duration. That only costs a mere 12,300g at market value... heck... 6,100g if you got an inside track on enchanters and crafters. It might take a glider or two to get the steering and propulsion... might even finagle out a bit better speed, considering you are no longer gliding and have enough thrust to make it difficult for a man to be able to move (Read the spell)... but hey, flight for less than a fourth the value of wings of flying... I'll take it. I don't care about the fact that I can't hover or use it in a dungeon... in the open world... better believe I am going to use it to get around. Low and behold... the D&D equivalent of a jet engine.
Or the creation of a pair of magic items that when put together creates a nuclear reactor... albeit, one is a custom created magic item. But when you can create an combo that will push a vehicle at 90' per round... no matter what the weather condition. The item says ANY vehicle at this speed... no matter how big. Of course, the biggest ship is a Galley in the basic rules. Actually, under the new Pathfinder rules... the ship speed is doubled by the item rules... to 180' per round... but we will assume that we are using a sailing ship... 90' or 120'. Still. This fast... without wind. Okay, it may not be nuclear power... but hey, 14 mph is not that bad really for a single turbine engined ship. This comes in at the beefy cost of 120,000g (60,000g if you have the crafters able to do it)... but if you are looking for something that can maneuver in foul weather and out run pirates... the ship will pay itself out in the long run. I'll take that... means less rigging for the GM to snare up or set fire.
These are extortionately expensive compared to another +5 sword or armor or that magic trinket but these are the items that change worlds.
Why do these items cost so much? Oh, because they are hand made, nearly unique items that use ancient and arcane Techniques barely understood and with reagents that don't make sense but contain powers beyond recognition and are rare. This is how it will always be.
But what if the scientific theory that so drove mundane science was turned towards the arcane?
To use an Alpha Centauri quote...
"We hold life to be sacred, but we also know the foundation of life consists in a stream of codes not so different from the successive frames of a watchvid. Why then cannot we cut one code short here, and start another there? Is life so fragile that it can withstand no tampering? Does the sacred brook no improvement?"
Why must magic be forever trapped in the chains of always being something so arcane. Mages, through the very act of intellect, are able to manipulate the very essence of creation and turn it against their enemies. Their books are filled with piles equations, runes, formula, and such. Potion masters can distill and trap divine power into a potion form. Wands and staves do the same.
It may take centuries... but scholars might be able to unlock the very secrets of how mana flows... freeing it from the very trappings of the shadows of past and mystery. Perhaps they could see the secrets of what makes deities what they are... how they perform their abilities. Psionics unlocked... yeah, it might be the equivalent to the age of enlightenment or discovery before real breakthroughs happen... thus pushing through the very edge of what a typical game might go... but if a campaign world has managed to make it long enough... and the players still enthusiastic... it just might make it that far. After all... elves live a 1000 years... why not? Not ever elf desires to stay trapped in a single age like the elves of Tolkien.
Magic items are better understood... the equations better known... the materials standardized. Costs drop. Especially if there is a demand or a state controls the sources to create it. Hey, the dawn of the magical industrial revolution and an age of imperialism is just around the corner.
I might ramble more on this later.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
How magic can circumvent the Industrial Revolution pt 1
Its no false statement to say that we play fantasy to escape for the modern day but we also bring the modern day with us when we play.
Look at your players... look at what is offered. Only in the most grittiest of low magic games does what I am about to talk about not occur. What am I talking about? Modern conveniences in a fantasy game.
But this isn't a problem, is it? After all... most of us like to have some of the things we have grown accustomed to, right? Of course!
Magic swords and armor is one thing... but what happens when your players get... smart? Creative?
You can't really have a simulation type game when I am flying on a griffin. Or flying in general. Or an archer who levitated up to a place no one can get to for that firing position on the advancing army. You know the one that the druid helped carve out of the hill side to provide cover? Or the druid who is casting fire from her eye balls while skittering about as a squirrel.
Like wise... have you ever had a player look at you and ask if he can make a golem? If he has the money... why not... right? Sure it is an iron golem... this is a higher level game, right? Okay... cool. Now, he asks... can he ride inside it? He is still controlling technically. He just hollowed it out inside to have a place for him. If you say yes... congratulations... you have just recreated what modern technology has barely even started to attempt... you have created power armor.
Most splat books have mechanical things you can build... some of them are... fanciful. Like gilders or submarines or zeppelins. After all, everyone loves airships almost as much as they love having a tall ship to sail on. I have not met a player yet that doesn't actually want a sailing ship... as long as it isn't a galley. There is the siege towers and the armored wagons.
Don't tell me your players have NEVER wanted to do this at one time or another. I mean, the armored wagon with a ballista on top? Tanks never get old... no matter how old the player is. If given the option, I have heard the youngest players to the old battle vets in their 50s jump at the idea if the GM will allow it.
Players think they are really creative. Honestly... at times... they are. They find the most broken uses for magical items and situations. No manor house is too safe... no castle secure. To the veteran player, asymmetrical warfare is second nature and no Romanesque legion of doom will ever make them falter.
If you are not careful, your players will try to acquire an airship, flying boat, or zeppelins and launch glider borne raids on castles from miles away in the dark of they night... if they don't just cast fly... but spells are limited... the glider is cheap.
What prevents the glider from being more effective? First off... we are in a fantasy game... how the hell did I get a glider? I dunno.. the same place the flying boat came from? How about the Ornithopter? We won't ask about the submarine? Obviously... in our high fantasy game... we have rudimentary ideas of how lighter than air and heavier than air flight is done. Well, it is magic after all and after watching the great wyrm red dragon burn our village last year... I can see how motivation towards perfecting a flying machine might have a bit more impetus to being done.
Well... mages won't help us advance. Are you sure? Look at your average dungeon party load out... yeah... they do. All it takes is one or two who feel like advancing the world to actually do so. To teach instead of just hoard.
But that is the thing... people assume that high fantasy worlds are perpetually locked in a pseudo-medieval Renaissance time frame. There will never be a ship better than the carrack or caravel and most still use galleys. Gun powder won't be available most of the time... most GMs won't allow it out of fear that guns will replace their beloved weapons. Everything has to be crafted by hand... nothing is interchangeable with anything else... and nothing will ever improve. Behold plate armor... our god and savior.
Our lands are farmed by hand... with primitive ox and plow... trees felled by great men who go into the dark forests... so on and so forth.
BS.
Give the players the reigns to a settlement for a bit and watch the magic. Especially if they have the average wealth that adventures carry in liquid assets.
Depending on their environment, the settlement will reflect it. I have seen players build vast mountain fortresses with water powered everything (there was a river near by). They shaped the very rivers itself (Yay for magic) to make it more efficient. To quote the player... log flume rides get you around in a jiffy. Yay for engineers.
Another player in the mountains literally quarried out the very mountain itself, terracing the land to create vast amounts of farmland (again, yay magic). The people themselves lived in a vast underground city but thanks to magic... was very well lit and ventilated... only going out via the fortified exits to tend the fields or to help add additional heavy fortifications and towers to the perimeter of the territory thanks to all the stone being quarried out for additional farmland and living space at a slow but steady pace.
I could go on but won't... it is just what people will do when they really get going.
They will pour vast amounts of money into the economy... based on what is in the area. Iron mine? Of hell yeah... you better believe that there will be a forge, a smith, and if the more industrial minded people are playing... a smelting facility. Rocky area? Quarry and prospecting. Wooded area? Lumber mills. Grasslands and plains? Agriculture and brewing. They will jump head long into the economics game if allowed to create a sustainable income.
An income not dependent upon a GM's whims. Oh, don't give me the old 'just raid their stuff' excuse. They will guard that. Initially with their own hands... later as their economic influences increase... with guards. As much as we would like to honestly say that monster will get progressively more deadly or the bandit lords more effective... There is a limit to what a player can believe.
After all... how many times will they believe that a beholder attacked their caravan or that the 12th bandit lord of the north has arrived? No... if you do that... you will see convoys that will make Mad Max shiver in fear start to arise. The type that you see the signs of their arrival hours before they are seen. One player literally got so tired of a GM screwing with his caravans that the size and defenses of his caravans were starting to rival the size of late WW2 Atlantic convoys. Complete with massive armored wagons with balistas with companies of troops, mages, clerics, and scouts riding in the wings and flying scouts looking on high. Short of a dragon, they could handle nearly anything... and in one theoretical encounter just to test it... short of an elder dragon... the volume of fire that could be concentrated was staggering. It was a small army just to guard the player's important trade routes from a dickish GM.
This is what paranoid players resort to. Remember though... most of the world DOESN'T do this. Most merchants are able to get from point a to point b unmolested. It is how ANY trade is accomplished.
No, players want to establish a stead income they can count on... sure, the adventuring gives them the money to spend on frivolous things but the engineering types... the accountants and civil engineers that I game with... no... the stead income is investment money that can be used to build empires...
and to cheat the technology system altogether.
Look at your players... look at what is offered. Only in the most grittiest of low magic games does what I am about to talk about not occur. What am I talking about? Modern conveniences in a fantasy game.
But this isn't a problem, is it? After all... most of us like to have some of the things we have grown accustomed to, right? Of course!
Magic swords and armor is one thing... but what happens when your players get... smart? Creative?
You can't really have a simulation type game when I am flying on a griffin. Or flying in general. Or an archer who levitated up to a place no one can get to for that firing position on the advancing army. You know the one that the druid helped carve out of the hill side to provide cover? Or the druid who is casting fire from her eye balls while skittering about as a squirrel.
Like wise... have you ever had a player look at you and ask if he can make a golem? If he has the money... why not... right? Sure it is an iron golem... this is a higher level game, right? Okay... cool. Now, he asks... can he ride inside it? He is still controlling technically. He just hollowed it out inside to have a place for him. If you say yes... congratulations... you have just recreated what modern technology has barely even started to attempt... you have created power armor.
Most splat books have mechanical things you can build... some of them are... fanciful. Like gilders or submarines or zeppelins. After all, everyone loves airships almost as much as they love having a tall ship to sail on. I have not met a player yet that doesn't actually want a sailing ship... as long as it isn't a galley. There is the siege towers and the armored wagons.
Don't tell me your players have NEVER wanted to do this at one time or another. I mean, the armored wagon with a ballista on top? Tanks never get old... no matter how old the player is. If given the option, I have heard the youngest players to the old battle vets in their 50s jump at the idea if the GM will allow it.
Players think they are really creative. Honestly... at times... they are. They find the most broken uses for magical items and situations. No manor house is too safe... no castle secure. To the veteran player, asymmetrical warfare is second nature and no Romanesque legion of doom will ever make them falter.
If you are not careful, your players will try to acquire an airship, flying boat, or zeppelins and launch glider borne raids on castles from miles away in the dark of they night... if they don't just cast fly... but spells are limited... the glider is cheap.
What prevents the glider from being more effective? First off... we are in a fantasy game... how the hell did I get a glider? I dunno.. the same place the flying boat came from? How about the Ornithopter? We won't ask about the submarine? Obviously... in our high fantasy game... we have rudimentary ideas of how lighter than air and heavier than air flight is done. Well, it is magic after all and after watching the great wyrm red dragon burn our village last year... I can see how motivation towards perfecting a flying machine might have a bit more impetus to being done.
Well... mages won't help us advance. Are you sure? Look at your average dungeon party load out... yeah... they do. All it takes is one or two who feel like advancing the world to actually do so. To teach instead of just hoard.
But that is the thing... people assume that high fantasy worlds are perpetually locked in a pseudo-medieval Renaissance time frame. There will never be a ship better than the carrack or caravel and most still use galleys. Gun powder won't be available most of the time... most GMs won't allow it out of fear that guns will replace their beloved weapons. Everything has to be crafted by hand... nothing is interchangeable with anything else... and nothing will ever improve. Behold plate armor... our god and savior.
Our lands are farmed by hand... with primitive ox and plow... trees felled by great men who go into the dark forests... so on and so forth.
BS.
Give the players the reigns to a settlement for a bit and watch the magic. Especially if they have the average wealth that adventures carry in liquid assets.
Depending on their environment, the settlement will reflect it. I have seen players build vast mountain fortresses with water powered everything (there was a river near by). They shaped the very rivers itself (Yay for magic) to make it more efficient. To quote the player... log flume rides get you around in a jiffy. Yay for engineers.
Another player in the mountains literally quarried out the very mountain itself, terracing the land to create vast amounts of farmland (again, yay magic). The people themselves lived in a vast underground city but thanks to magic... was very well lit and ventilated... only going out via the fortified exits to tend the fields or to help add additional heavy fortifications and towers to the perimeter of the territory thanks to all the stone being quarried out for additional farmland and living space at a slow but steady pace.
I could go on but won't... it is just what people will do when they really get going.
They will pour vast amounts of money into the economy... based on what is in the area. Iron mine? Of hell yeah... you better believe that there will be a forge, a smith, and if the more industrial minded people are playing... a smelting facility. Rocky area? Quarry and prospecting. Wooded area? Lumber mills. Grasslands and plains? Agriculture and brewing. They will jump head long into the economics game if allowed to create a sustainable income.
An income not dependent upon a GM's whims. Oh, don't give me the old 'just raid their stuff' excuse. They will guard that. Initially with their own hands... later as their economic influences increase... with guards. As much as we would like to honestly say that monster will get progressively more deadly or the bandit lords more effective... There is a limit to what a player can believe.
After all... how many times will they believe that a beholder attacked their caravan or that the 12th bandit lord of the north has arrived? No... if you do that... you will see convoys that will make Mad Max shiver in fear start to arise. The type that you see the signs of their arrival hours before they are seen. One player literally got so tired of a GM screwing with his caravans that the size and defenses of his caravans were starting to rival the size of late WW2 Atlantic convoys. Complete with massive armored wagons with balistas with companies of troops, mages, clerics, and scouts riding in the wings and flying scouts looking on high. Short of a dragon, they could handle nearly anything... and in one theoretical encounter just to test it... short of an elder dragon... the volume of fire that could be concentrated was staggering. It was a small army just to guard the player's important trade routes from a dickish GM.
This is what paranoid players resort to. Remember though... most of the world DOESN'T do this. Most merchants are able to get from point a to point b unmolested. It is how ANY trade is accomplished.
No, players want to establish a stead income they can count on... sure, the adventuring gives them the money to spend on frivolous things but the engineering types... the accountants and civil engineers that I game with... no... the stead income is investment money that can be used to build empires...
and to cheat the technology system altogether.
The Follies of Magic pt 1
What does D&D, when mentioned invoke?
To most, it will definitely be images of huge dragons soaring through the sky, white marble castles, armored knights parading across fields, leather clad sneaks darting about in the dark of night, terrifying dungeons full of treasure... and magic.
Oh... its the magic. Supposedly the sole domain of the wizard and cleric... our iconic lonely hermit in a tower or bedecked in vestments priest in their cathedrals tending the masses that hold the populace in sway. Dark and dangerous heretics in the shadows, the otherworldly touched sorcerers, the hedge wizards, and the terrible druids who hide mysteriously in the deepest woods beyond the safety of the roads. This is what most think of immediately.
Why? Because this is Dungeons and Dragons... this is high fantasy. This is the dominion of great wizards like Elminster or the iconic Gandalf. Our villains are our dark wizards or corrupt clerics. After all, what can truly be more terrifying than someone who wields the power to manipulate the very fabric of reality or channel the power of an unfathomable god. I'll touch on my feelings on deities later... that is not the thing I am chasing after today.
But magic is a rare thing, yes? Right?
No... it's not. Every bloody adventurer worth two cents has something magical. Ultimately, by mid level... if going by the suggested wealth in the books... his boots, his cloak, two rings, a belt, his armor, his shirt, his necklace, a headband, his arm bands, his gloves, two of his belt pouches, countless tiny things in his pockets, some vials in a bandoleer, and at least two weapons or a shield if he is feeling traditional in terms of going out as a sword and board type. His mount is wearing magical shoes if he deems using a mount is worth his time. The selection of wands and staves that have randomly dropped will be worth it for anyone to take the abuse magical device skills.
What? You are limiting your players? Congratulations. You have successfully managed to keep your players happy with what you give them. They have money right? Of course... wealth is a must, right? There are countless ways of determining wealth to be honest... it is not all in coins. Limiting their chances to create magic items with the wealth you are giving them? Of course... you are trying hard to keep it grounded. I know I did for a long time.
Suddenly... like that event that shifts the paradigm completely... something happens. Someone decides to actually start taking all the creation feats... either through themselves or through a follower/cohort. Suddenly the door has been unlocked for the players. The wealth you have been keeping tied up is freed. The doors to infinite selection becomes theirs to open. You no longer have control over what they have at their disposal.
A party has a good deal of resources. All those one use scrolls that have been piling up because there is rarely a point to actually using one suddenly become reagents in items. That money you have been not letting the players spend on upgrades now is... but this time without your 10 to 20+% mark up that you throw on top of all the items when coming from a merchant. No, they are now actually getting it at a 50% discount with no limits... the only limits are their own resources and if the party is big or the right spells are picked... there is nothing keeping them from gearing out completely... save time.
Of course! Time! It is the only thing saving your story... right? Normally, in a quick paced game to take the great item to the place to stop the evil guy or stop the unstoppable legions from eating the good people of generic-burg or delving into the depths of the terrible tunnels of terror... you don't have the time to stop and make all those custom items.
But what if you are running a much more open game?
What if your world is bigger than just a simple adventure? Your time frame is not days or weeks... but months or years? What is the world can survive for another couple months?
Now... your players CAN and WILL. What do you do? Do you stop it? Kill the player or NPC who is doing this? Constantly put something in their way to stop them from being able to? Might work the first time... but after the third... well... you are running dangerously thin on ideas. What is the counter? Oh, there is always trying to match the players... be more open. Now that they have the ability... what is the harm?
But... this is only a piece of the ultimate problem. Now... our high fantasy game isn't quite so... LotR and now more WoW. Then again... if you run a heavy dungeon crawling game and use random treasure... a few lucky rolls can make you just want to cry as the party runs away with massive mountains of treasure and if they are creative... an awesome new dungeon base of operations. Hand picking out what treasure the party gets can side step this but for only so long.
Okay, lets see if we can attack this from a new angle. We can't eliminate magic, right? Of course not... this is high fantasy! If I can not have a mage cast fireball and light a village aflame... what is the point? No matter how much of a simulation game we might make the guy wearing the full plate or how much that long sword weight or the fighting styles be accurate or properly represent a hand axe going through flesh... we STILL have a guy who is flying and shooting lightning bolts. We have someone wearing armor made of ultra-light magic metal that he can summon with a snap of a finger and a sword that crackles with lightning that leaps from his gloves.
Obviously... this is magic going wild. This is also any D&D game that is past 5th level at the same time.
Before that... oh hell yes, it is as gritty as any novel can be. Want to recreate the adventures of Aragorn or Gimli or the Dwarves to the halls under the mountain... yep. Conan time? Yeah! The clash of steel, a single blow fells a man, screams of hordes on the horizon. Having to count every coin and ride on the back of wagons to get from one end of the country to another. By the gods, its great to be low level when you are the GM.
But like kittens and puppies... it never lasts. The game inevitably will grow. They will inevitably need new challenges. New challenges mean new gear that comes with it... its inevitable. There has to be SOME reward for having braved the tomb of the fire queen. Something tangible. Unless of course, you enjoy the idea of making your players nobles with lands to manage... but then you got to reward the party in a fashion that they will all want. It is all social after all. It isn't fair to give one player the title and lands of a count while another player gets nothing but a small pittance... but that is a different problem all unto itself. That is the problem with hand picked rewards... sometimes the players might not want any of your pre-ordained rewards. They will want something else... or might just take it to sell it off in the next city over.
We are now back to the players having vast amounts of wealth and nothing to spend it on... especially if they don't want to tend to lands, build a castle, or raise an army. They are looking to spend it on something and robbing them of money that you have given and they have not spent yet is not fair if done to much and without something to make up for it. Don't be an ass and do that... you lose players fast if you are known for robbing them left and right or by never giving them a selection of anything.
I am kinda rambling here... infact... I think this has gone on a bit too long and off topic.
Needless to say... you can see where I am coming from in terms of the problems of magic in the forms of items.
To most, it will definitely be images of huge dragons soaring through the sky, white marble castles, armored knights parading across fields, leather clad sneaks darting about in the dark of night, terrifying dungeons full of treasure... and magic.
Oh... its the magic. Supposedly the sole domain of the wizard and cleric... our iconic lonely hermit in a tower or bedecked in vestments priest in their cathedrals tending the masses that hold the populace in sway. Dark and dangerous heretics in the shadows, the otherworldly touched sorcerers, the hedge wizards, and the terrible druids who hide mysteriously in the deepest woods beyond the safety of the roads. This is what most think of immediately.
Why? Because this is Dungeons and Dragons... this is high fantasy. This is the dominion of great wizards like Elminster or the iconic Gandalf. Our villains are our dark wizards or corrupt clerics. After all, what can truly be more terrifying than someone who wields the power to manipulate the very fabric of reality or channel the power of an unfathomable god. I'll touch on my feelings on deities later... that is not the thing I am chasing after today.
But magic is a rare thing, yes? Right?
No... it's not. Every bloody adventurer worth two cents has something magical. Ultimately, by mid level... if going by the suggested wealth in the books... his boots, his cloak, two rings, a belt, his armor, his shirt, his necklace, a headband, his arm bands, his gloves, two of his belt pouches, countless tiny things in his pockets, some vials in a bandoleer, and at least two weapons or a shield if he is feeling traditional in terms of going out as a sword and board type. His mount is wearing magical shoes if he deems using a mount is worth his time. The selection of wands and staves that have randomly dropped will be worth it for anyone to take the abuse magical device skills.
What? You are limiting your players? Congratulations. You have successfully managed to keep your players happy with what you give them. They have money right? Of course... wealth is a must, right? There are countless ways of determining wealth to be honest... it is not all in coins. Limiting their chances to create magic items with the wealth you are giving them? Of course... you are trying hard to keep it grounded. I know I did for a long time.
Suddenly... like that event that shifts the paradigm completely... something happens. Someone decides to actually start taking all the creation feats... either through themselves or through a follower/cohort. Suddenly the door has been unlocked for the players. The wealth you have been keeping tied up is freed. The doors to infinite selection becomes theirs to open. You no longer have control over what they have at their disposal.
A party has a good deal of resources. All those one use scrolls that have been piling up because there is rarely a point to actually using one suddenly become reagents in items. That money you have been not letting the players spend on upgrades now is... but this time without your 10 to 20+% mark up that you throw on top of all the items when coming from a merchant. No, they are now actually getting it at a 50% discount with no limits... the only limits are their own resources and if the party is big or the right spells are picked... there is nothing keeping them from gearing out completely... save time.
Of course! Time! It is the only thing saving your story... right? Normally, in a quick paced game to take the great item to the place to stop the evil guy or stop the unstoppable legions from eating the good people of generic-burg or delving into the depths of the terrible tunnels of terror... you don't have the time to stop and make all those custom items.
But what if you are running a much more open game?
What if your world is bigger than just a simple adventure? Your time frame is not days or weeks... but months or years? What is the world can survive for another couple months?
Now... your players CAN and WILL. What do you do? Do you stop it? Kill the player or NPC who is doing this? Constantly put something in their way to stop them from being able to? Might work the first time... but after the third... well... you are running dangerously thin on ideas. What is the counter? Oh, there is always trying to match the players... be more open. Now that they have the ability... what is the harm?
But... this is only a piece of the ultimate problem. Now... our high fantasy game isn't quite so... LotR and now more WoW. Then again... if you run a heavy dungeon crawling game and use random treasure... a few lucky rolls can make you just want to cry as the party runs away with massive mountains of treasure and if they are creative... an awesome new dungeon base of operations. Hand picking out what treasure the party gets can side step this but for only so long.
Okay, lets see if we can attack this from a new angle. We can't eliminate magic, right? Of course not... this is high fantasy! If I can not have a mage cast fireball and light a village aflame... what is the point? No matter how much of a simulation game we might make the guy wearing the full plate or how much that long sword weight or the fighting styles be accurate or properly represent a hand axe going through flesh... we STILL have a guy who is flying and shooting lightning bolts. We have someone wearing armor made of ultra-light magic metal that he can summon with a snap of a finger and a sword that crackles with lightning that leaps from his gloves.
Obviously... this is magic going wild. This is also any D&D game that is past 5th level at the same time.
Before that... oh hell yes, it is as gritty as any novel can be. Want to recreate the adventures of Aragorn or Gimli or the Dwarves to the halls under the mountain... yep. Conan time? Yeah! The clash of steel, a single blow fells a man, screams of hordes on the horizon. Having to count every coin and ride on the back of wagons to get from one end of the country to another. By the gods, its great to be low level when you are the GM.
But like kittens and puppies... it never lasts. The game inevitably will grow. They will inevitably need new challenges. New challenges mean new gear that comes with it... its inevitable. There has to be SOME reward for having braved the tomb of the fire queen. Something tangible. Unless of course, you enjoy the idea of making your players nobles with lands to manage... but then you got to reward the party in a fashion that they will all want. It is all social after all. It isn't fair to give one player the title and lands of a count while another player gets nothing but a small pittance... but that is a different problem all unto itself. That is the problem with hand picked rewards... sometimes the players might not want any of your pre-ordained rewards. They will want something else... or might just take it to sell it off in the next city over.
We are now back to the players having vast amounts of wealth and nothing to spend it on... especially if they don't want to tend to lands, build a castle, or raise an army. They are looking to spend it on something and robbing them of money that you have given and they have not spent yet is not fair if done to much and without something to make up for it. Don't be an ass and do that... you lose players fast if you are known for robbing them left and right or by never giving them a selection of anything.
I am kinda rambling here... infact... I think this has gone on a bit too long and off topic.
Needless to say... you can see where I am coming from in terms of the problems of magic in the forms of items.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
How does time move for you?
This is one I am always curious about really. How does time move in the games that other people run? Is it a day to day thing or is it more fluid?
In my games, time is very fluid. Sometimes... it will come down to the very minutes and I'll have a stop watch running, only stopping it when an out of character question is asked. Other times, I might hand wave off entire weeks if they are waiting on the repairs to a boat or a new item to finish being crafted and they are somewhere secluded and safe. I might let a year pass if there is a lull in the adventures and they are wanting to pursue individual desires for a bit.
I think this is why like almost 1400 years 'in game' have passed. There have been some time jumps in there between particular campaigns... namely if they resolved the big problems in the world and set everything on course to be stable for generations to come. It's happened... twice now? Not a very good success rate... but no matter... entropy eventually wins and new problems rise up, new ambitious people or people no longer bothering to listen to now lackluster words of wisdom. Question... is looking back at the 1800's considered ancient yet or just old?
But the thing is, time also seems to make the players feel... invested in the world. Yes, it is ultimately my decision on what happens or not but suddenly, when you offer the players the possibility that their decisions might have ramifications centuries down the road... they become... cautious. Suddenly, they aren't so head strong towards racing into all things that might kill them. They want to live... possibly forever... or at least a few centuries... just to see what they have done and how it turns out.
Now, this doesn't mean that I don't have time tables. I do. I have certain events that I would like to happen in the stories. Might even go as far as to say what days they fall on. This is always a loose framework at best. Giving the players room to be able to work, research, investigate and travel makes players very happy.
This is a very difficult thing sometimes though to balance. How much time do you give? Well, how much do you want to have your players do? I know I have had trouble juggling all this in the past. Infact, I have had a rather heated argument with my players, all of them, where they said that they were too scared to do anything because the plot would move without them. I'll touch on the world moving without the players in a future post. Needless to say, I learned through pain that they want to be able to feel free to do something but not left bored... and thus, the game greatly benefit from it.
I think I'll touch on this again later, this is enough for now.
In my games, time is very fluid. Sometimes... it will come down to the very minutes and I'll have a stop watch running, only stopping it when an out of character question is asked. Other times, I might hand wave off entire weeks if they are waiting on the repairs to a boat or a new item to finish being crafted and they are somewhere secluded and safe. I might let a year pass if there is a lull in the adventures and they are wanting to pursue individual desires for a bit.
I think this is why like almost 1400 years 'in game' have passed. There have been some time jumps in there between particular campaigns... namely if they resolved the big problems in the world and set everything on course to be stable for generations to come. It's happened... twice now? Not a very good success rate... but no matter... entropy eventually wins and new problems rise up, new ambitious people or people no longer bothering to listen to now lackluster words of wisdom. Question... is looking back at the 1800's considered ancient yet or just old?
But the thing is, time also seems to make the players feel... invested in the world. Yes, it is ultimately my decision on what happens or not but suddenly, when you offer the players the possibility that their decisions might have ramifications centuries down the road... they become... cautious. Suddenly, they aren't so head strong towards racing into all things that might kill them. They want to live... possibly forever... or at least a few centuries... just to see what they have done and how it turns out.
Now, this doesn't mean that I don't have time tables. I do. I have certain events that I would like to happen in the stories. Might even go as far as to say what days they fall on. This is always a loose framework at best. Giving the players room to be able to work, research, investigate and travel makes players very happy.
This is a very difficult thing sometimes though to balance. How much time do you give? Well, how much do you want to have your players do? I know I have had trouble juggling all this in the past. Infact, I have had a rather heated argument with my players, all of them, where they said that they were too scared to do anything because the plot would move without them. I'll touch on the world moving without the players in a future post. Needless to say, I learned through pain that they want to be able to feel free to do something but not left bored... and thus, the game greatly benefit from it.
I think I'll touch on this again later, this is enough for now.
Which engines do you prefer?
Over the years... I have had the fortune to play under a good number of people in a massive number of game engines. It is truly amazing honestly how many games are out there and how many go neglected. Honestly, I could go for a long time discussing that which systems are good and for what reason... but that isn't the point today. By the way... almost all have their own merit in one regard or the other, just wanted to say that.
I'll admit that I am a bit of an old guard member... I still enjoy classic AD&D 2nd. It's like your first doctor or first love, you will always remember them fondly. In fact, I still have enough of the books to be able to run a game if I chose to. Will I? Probably not. Why not? I know it well enough, yes... the big black bound books of the players handbook sits next to my well loved players option manuals. I often will still reference ideas from those old tomes. It was the pre-template days and it was good. But why not? Lack of desire from players.
Oh, I can wow those players in my living room for hours on end with stories of past glories and adventures... of people long past and challenges defeated and failures so fun that it can not help but be riveting. Every gamer who has spent time amongst their own kind has done it, its part of our culture! We are storytellers. But the moment those books come out... it's different and would require a good deal of re-education... difficult in the face of they are satisfied with the current engine we are running. If more of the old guard players I used to play with when I was younger were still around, we might still be using 2nd/Player's Options but they have moved on or have become enamored with newer editions.
I have run through the entire swath of 3rd through 3.5 and to it's present incarnation of Pathfinder. If you haven't realized it yet, that is the current engine of choice. It is not my first choice but it has worked well enough that we make do and it is a vehicle for the story. Common footing and all that.
This is not to say that I have not attempted to run other engines... oh no! Not true!
There is my classic favorite of Legend of the Five Rings... prefer the first but even through it's 4th edition... it has been well loved and received. So many players enjoy it and it was the original engine I ran during the youth of my current world. Sadly, the people who really enjoyed asian culture moved on and the newer gamers, not enamored with concepts of samurai culture and honor, moved the game towards the western world. Despite my love of the setting and the engine, it is semi-retired for me, despite attempts to stay current.
There is my love of 7th Sea. Had I still kept all my books for that, I would still be running it to this day. It is a blast but they disappeared with time. Entropy is great sometimes. Its fun and fluid and cinematic. Unfortunately, for all my love of swashbuckling and Errol Flynn movies, not as many love it as much I do. It is great source material.
Ooooh look here, Shadowrun... the old West End Games version of Star Wars, Traveller from so many versions (even the D20 version), Battletech/Mechwarrior (even the playtest for the current rules), the Starfleet Battles RPG (Prime Directive), BESM (1st thru 3rd), Heavy Gear, Amber, oWoD (predominately Mage, Vampire, and Changeling), and Exalted. I've tried to run all of these to various levels and degrees of success. They are all masterful and fun (perhaps not Prime Directive... but it is Starfleet Battles afterall, you have to be a masochist) but ultimately... everyone clamors back for the classic that keeps them coming back...
Dungeons and Dragons.... or more specifically... Pathfinder these days. It seems to give them level of customization with all the books that I provide for them, the safety of rules for nearly everything that can silence an argument... or fuel one, and an easy way to gauge their own abilities against another that they can't get from my more preferred storyteller games. They chafe under some of the poorly written rules but those can fixed.
House rules exist in plenty. How can you run anything for long without coming up with a few dozen? Compared to what my old gaming friends and I did to the D6 Star Wars engine where we rewrote it from the bones up... the changes to pathfinder have been really slim. Why? New gamers join all the time. The books have to be solid base to build from... otherwise they will never know where they stand and grow from. They have to trust the books in their hand are worth the time they put into reading it. The long departed old guard, we had the benefit of only having 8 people who were always together... today, I don't have that. I have 2 old players who know my house rules, 4 that are relatively older and 2 two who are new... and a waiting list of people to join... this isn't counting the people who are on the 'inactive but always welcomed' list. It has to work for all of them
I think it is why ultimately, we stick with Pathfinder... despite calls from some to play Exalted or Mage or Battletech or Legend of the Five Rings... people who would jump at the first sign of me wanting to run those again. Pathfinder and thus, Dungeons and Dragons is the safe rock they all trust. Call it what you want, Pathfinder, D&D, Iron Kingdoms, Warcraft: The RPG/World of Warcraft, Wheel of Time, or just D20... its all compatible... like GURPS for those of us who like slightly less algebra in our games... or don't know GURPS.
Thus, its my game. It is the current vehicle for the world till a better one is found... and I will always look for a better engine to drive the world with... because the current one is imperfect... but hey, it is just an engine... after all, without the story... all the crunch in the world is meaningless.
BTW, I only avoided 4th because it was too much of a change to what I knew. Despite wanting to learn it to see what it could do, it was anathema to my player base and as a GM, never lose your player base... or you might find yourself without players and having to turn to the old cork board at the local gaming ship for a new group. Plus, I am friends with all of them... never good to piss off the very people you go out drinking with, have cook outs with, go see movies, or work with. This is a social hobby after all.
I'll admit that I am a bit of an old guard member... I still enjoy classic AD&D 2nd. It's like your first doctor or first love, you will always remember them fondly. In fact, I still have enough of the books to be able to run a game if I chose to. Will I? Probably not. Why not? I know it well enough, yes... the big black bound books of the players handbook sits next to my well loved players option manuals. I often will still reference ideas from those old tomes. It was the pre-template days and it was good. But why not? Lack of desire from players.
Oh, I can wow those players in my living room for hours on end with stories of past glories and adventures... of people long past and challenges defeated and failures so fun that it can not help but be riveting. Every gamer who has spent time amongst their own kind has done it, its part of our culture! We are storytellers. But the moment those books come out... it's different and would require a good deal of re-education... difficult in the face of they are satisfied with the current engine we are running. If more of the old guard players I used to play with when I was younger were still around, we might still be using 2nd/Player's Options but they have moved on or have become enamored with newer editions.
I have run through the entire swath of 3rd through 3.5 and to it's present incarnation of Pathfinder. If you haven't realized it yet, that is the current engine of choice. It is not my first choice but it has worked well enough that we make do and it is a vehicle for the story. Common footing and all that.
This is not to say that I have not attempted to run other engines... oh no! Not true!
There is my classic favorite of Legend of the Five Rings... prefer the first but even through it's 4th edition... it has been well loved and received. So many players enjoy it and it was the original engine I ran during the youth of my current world. Sadly, the people who really enjoyed asian culture moved on and the newer gamers, not enamored with concepts of samurai culture and honor, moved the game towards the western world. Despite my love of the setting and the engine, it is semi-retired for me, despite attempts to stay current.
There is my love of 7th Sea. Had I still kept all my books for that, I would still be running it to this day. It is a blast but they disappeared with time. Entropy is great sometimes. Its fun and fluid and cinematic. Unfortunately, for all my love of swashbuckling and Errol Flynn movies, not as many love it as much I do. It is great source material.
Ooooh look here, Shadowrun... the old West End Games version of Star Wars, Traveller from so many versions (even the D20 version), Battletech/Mechwarrior (even the playtest for the current rules), the Starfleet Battles RPG (Prime Directive), BESM (1st thru 3rd), Heavy Gear, Amber, oWoD (predominately Mage, Vampire, and Changeling), and Exalted. I've tried to run all of these to various levels and degrees of success. They are all masterful and fun (perhaps not Prime Directive... but it is Starfleet Battles afterall, you have to be a masochist) but ultimately... everyone clamors back for the classic that keeps them coming back...
Dungeons and Dragons.... or more specifically... Pathfinder these days. It seems to give them level of customization with all the books that I provide for them, the safety of rules for nearly everything that can silence an argument... or fuel one, and an easy way to gauge their own abilities against another that they can't get from my more preferred storyteller games. They chafe under some of the poorly written rules but those can fixed.
House rules exist in plenty. How can you run anything for long without coming up with a few dozen? Compared to what my old gaming friends and I did to the D6 Star Wars engine where we rewrote it from the bones up... the changes to pathfinder have been really slim. Why? New gamers join all the time. The books have to be solid base to build from... otherwise they will never know where they stand and grow from. They have to trust the books in their hand are worth the time they put into reading it. The long departed old guard, we had the benefit of only having 8 people who were always together... today, I don't have that. I have 2 old players who know my house rules, 4 that are relatively older and 2 two who are new... and a waiting list of people to join... this isn't counting the people who are on the 'inactive but always welcomed' list. It has to work for all of them
I think it is why ultimately, we stick with Pathfinder... despite calls from some to play Exalted or Mage or Battletech or Legend of the Five Rings... people who would jump at the first sign of me wanting to run those again. Pathfinder and thus, Dungeons and Dragons is the safe rock they all trust. Call it what you want, Pathfinder, D&D, Iron Kingdoms, Warcraft: The RPG/World of Warcraft, Wheel of Time, or just D20... its all compatible... like GURPS for those of us who like slightly less algebra in our games... or don't know GURPS.
Thus, its my game. It is the current vehicle for the world till a better one is found... and I will always look for a better engine to drive the world with... because the current one is imperfect... but hey, it is just an engine... after all, without the story... all the crunch in the world is meaningless.
BTW, I only avoided 4th because it was too much of a change to what I knew. Despite wanting to learn it to see what it could do, it was anathema to my player base and as a GM, never lose your player base... or you might find yourself without players and having to turn to the old cork board at the local gaming ship for a new group. Plus, I am friends with all of them... never good to piss off the very people you go out drinking with, have cook outs with, go see movies, or work with. This is a social hobby after all.
A Simple Introduction
As simple as that.
After reading a good number of blogs over the various years and endless discussions of them with people in person... and recently responding to them in more detail... I decided to actually start my own. Perhaps to be able to better explain my own perceptions on gaming, storytelling, and world building... perhaps just to talk to the heavens, so to speak, and perhaps entertain someone who stumbles across it for a short while. If anything, give something back to the community, even on accident.
Over the course of time, I hope to do something akin to other good bloggers but I won't claim I am anything special. I am not an industry writer, I haven't written a book, I don't have a degree in anything. What I have done is run... a lot. One 'sandbox' world for about 14 years now across 5 separate rule engines and numerous iterations and errata and splat book arrivals. There has been a few breaks... a number of attempts to kill the world on my part... more than enough fights to make anyone else give up... and a laundry list of problems that have been overcome. Its crossed numerous campaigns and none of the players I started with are still around. It happens, lives change... I was in college with this started... definitely older now... though the age of my players seems to stay the same... except for a precious few.
I am not a hard core rules lawyer though I do love having crunch to back up my ideas. I am not a free former though I do love letting imagination take over and see where it goes. No matter what I am, I have to rule it has been success. People have enjoyed it greatly... only leaving because life changes and takes them away. Only really lost maybe two from actual disagreements but that is a pretty good ratio... 1 every 7 years? I'll take that. Isn't that the point of this hobby after all? To enjoy the game? Of course it is!
Perhaps I am wrong in my ideas and I hope to the gods that I am! I am saying this out the void that is the internet because I want more feedback. I can never stop improving... it is why I read blogs such as The Tao of D&D or the creator diaries of an endless string of games. Its why I watch things like The Big Picture with Movie Bob, Extra Credits, or Zero Punctuation over at The Escapist. Its why I enjoy listening to Total Biscuit. I don't take all that they say whole cloth but they always bring up ideas that I can extrapolate on and use to improve if I think I agree with something they say... or figure out what I disagree with and formulate it into a semi-intelligent state.
I plan on touching base with a whole lot of things... if time allows. I guarantee it won't be perfect. I guarantee you might not get the same mileage that I have with my ideas. Perhaps though, you might be able to derive something from my ramblings and ideas that you can use. Even if it is a name or a concept... that's okay. If you don't agree with, please say so! I might not change my stance on it but if I can take something from your argument, I will... and I hope that if I can explain it better to you, you might change your stance as well.
But, for a simple introduction... I think this has rambled on a good deal.
After reading a good number of blogs over the various years and endless discussions of them with people in person... and recently responding to them in more detail... I decided to actually start my own. Perhaps to be able to better explain my own perceptions on gaming, storytelling, and world building... perhaps just to talk to the heavens, so to speak, and perhaps entertain someone who stumbles across it for a short while. If anything, give something back to the community, even on accident.
Over the course of time, I hope to do something akin to other good bloggers but I won't claim I am anything special. I am not an industry writer, I haven't written a book, I don't have a degree in anything. What I have done is run... a lot. One 'sandbox' world for about 14 years now across 5 separate rule engines and numerous iterations and errata and splat book arrivals. There has been a few breaks... a number of attempts to kill the world on my part... more than enough fights to make anyone else give up... and a laundry list of problems that have been overcome. Its crossed numerous campaigns and none of the players I started with are still around. It happens, lives change... I was in college with this started... definitely older now... though the age of my players seems to stay the same... except for a precious few.
I am not a hard core rules lawyer though I do love having crunch to back up my ideas. I am not a free former though I do love letting imagination take over and see where it goes. No matter what I am, I have to rule it has been success. People have enjoyed it greatly... only leaving because life changes and takes them away. Only really lost maybe two from actual disagreements but that is a pretty good ratio... 1 every 7 years? I'll take that. Isn't that the point of this hobby after all? To enjoy the game? Of course it is!
Perhaps I am wrong in my ideas and I hope to the gods that I am! I am saying this out the void that is the internet because I want more feedback. I can never stop improving... it is why I read blogs such as The Tao of D&D or the creator diaries of an endless string of games. Its why I watch things like The Big Picture with Movie Bob, Extra Credits, or Zero Punctuation over at The Escapist. Its why I enjoy listening to Total Biscuit. I don't take all that they say whole cloth but they always bring up ideas that I can extrapolate on and use to improve if I think I agree with something they say... or figure out what I disagree with and formulate it into a semi-intelligent state.
I plan on touching base with a whole lot of things... if time allows. I guarantee it won't be perfect. I guarantee you might not get the same mileage that I have with my ideas. Perhaps though, you might be able to derive something from my ramblings and ideas that you can use. Even if it is a name or a concept... that's okay. If you don't agree with, please say so! I might not change my stance on it but if I can take something from your argument, I will... and I hope that if I can explain it better to you, you might change your stance as well.
But, for a simple introduction... I think this has rambled on a good deal.
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