CHILL Art!

I hate to say it but it seems as if RPGs these days are chock full of art which is technically astute but as sharp as a wad of old chewing gum. Flip through the 5e D&D Players Handbook and it is character in armor, character in armor swinging weapon, characters in armor sitting around a campfire half of them apparently asleep, character in armor, scattering of tools, butterfly, spider, encephalitic halfling playing a lute that is thankfully mute, character in armor, character in armor, wizard casting spell of some sort, character in armor.

Ugh. Snore. Yerk! (Sound of my head suddenly jerking awake)

That is some damn dull art. Sadly, it almost seems to prove my suspicion that art in RPGs is like grammar. It is something that needs to be there to prove that someone cares about what we are reading. On the whole, after the initial purchase we stop noticing it. The art becomes a layout device to break up text walls and does not much else.

Since Halloween is almost upon us, I thought I might take a look at a game which I think does have good if not great art in it, and that is the original CHILL from Pacesetter which came out back when I was a kid circa '84.

CHILL has been and still is a spotty affair. It had great creative writing, crappy mechanics, and a slew of follow up editions that should never have been made. I'm sorry if that trods on any toes but Mayfair Chill looks like someone pulled it out of a dumpster dive and 3rd Edition, while doing much to improve the rules is just a strikingly dull affair. Sometimes it almost feels as if CHILL is a cursed property that no one can seem to do anything with. Or at least, nothing that improves over the original.

One of the reasons for this may have something to do with the excellent artwork of Jim Holloway. Most of it is done in stark black and white. It is not edgy. It is not extreme. It often looks like stills taken from a Hammer Horror film, but it is a whole lot of fun. This is what I mean about being sharp. A decent amount of thought was put into each of these images, probably well before pencil was ever put to paper. So let's take a look....

No snoozing around the campfire here. This guy is screwed! He is in a dark cemetery at night with at least two beasts to content with (probably werewolves, Pacesetter CHILL loves its werewolves). Oh yeah, and he has a single shot pistol. Is there a silver slug in that gun? Let's hope so.

Holloway loves to put a sense of direction and depth into his art. This one starts in the lower right corner of the foreground, shoots through it to the fearful expression on the guys face, and then goes beyond it to the red eyes he is blindly running towards. We are seeing this scene from the point of view of the creature which heightens the tension by implying that there is no guarantee mutton-chop man is going to survive the night.

GyaAAAAAAAAH!!!!! It's hard not to jump a bit when seeing this classic pic. This is no character in armor standing around waiting for something to happen. This is a guy in a suit who has probably fallen while fleeing a cemetery and hit the ground in the worst of all possible places. That arm is shooting up out of the ground, implied by the small bits of dirt hanging in the air around it. Once again we get a great use of perspective with the head stones adding to its depth. Holloway loves to use the moon as a back light, allowing him to highlight a face while still using a perfectly black sky.

"You Cowards!" You can almost hear her shout as the men in the room faint and flee around her. Once again, Holloway isn't interested in an unexpressed face and neither are we. It's also interesting that he doesn't care much for drawing furniture. He can, it shows up in other pics, but if the room is dark then why bother with anything but darkness? You can pretty much guess that there is a werewolf standing in the doorway but because all we are given is a silhouette we don't know for sure and that adds to the tension of the scene.

You never want to let the viewers eye fall on an image and go thud. This one has a great swoop of motion funneled through the big areas of black in its corners. The interest begins in the upper right hand corner, moves down over the werewolf, follows the creature's gaze in the direction of the girl moves up her dress, over her hands to her face and then follows the gnarled branch back onto the werewolf, or possibly off to somewhere else. Does he know she's there? Has she hidden herself well enough? Roll the dice...

Another great thing about this pic is its use of shadows. Hiding half of her head in darkness but showing us the whites of her eyes truly makes them pop.

Speaking of popping eyes, this is another great pic which has nothing over the top happening in it. The PC's are examining a skull that has been shot in the head. That magnifying glass blows the guy's eye way out of proportion. It says to Look! Look here! Look closely! There is something important to be found.

An interesting observation. Sherlock isn't looking at the bullet wound in the skull, the most obvious point of interest. He's looking at something else about it, possibly its teeth. What it is we will never know.

Be careful what you read in Chill. There is no telling what it might summon. In horror, you never want to show the entire creature. To know everything there is about a beast defines it, encapsulates it, limits it. Leaving it partially hidden erases its parameters. In the darkness there is no telling where its horror actually ends. But....

It's a werewolf. It's always a werewolf.

Want a great depiction of fear that doesn't involve chainsaws? Put Ben Franklin on a horse which is so spooked it is beyond control and running as fast as it can across the moonlit countryside. Ben is saying, "Whoa! Whoa! Nag Whoa!" but the horse knows better. It knows the headless horseman is charging up behind them, flaming jack-o-lantern in hand.

Once again, this is not just a picture of a thing. It is a happening. It's a big complicated messy misunderstanding just about to break. Isn't it great! So often adventurers get to run around doing whatever they want, but in CHILL the world still is as it is and for the police that five hundred year old vampire is just a kindly old, slightly eccentric, gentleman who is having his rights violated by a bunch of mutton-chop bearing hoodlums.

More fun with vampires. It's not enough to show us characters standing there. Everyone is doing something in this scene, even the vampire himself who we somehow know is summoning up the swarm of rats squeaking behind them. Another thing Holloway loves to do in his pictures is put a frame around the image and then break it (look for the torch and flying rat) to provide an extra sense of depth.

Is it me or does this one seem a lot like the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima? Either that or a deleted scene from The Breakfast Club. Speaking of eating....

Even by Florida standards, that is one hell of a roach. I love the guy about to chuck a squab at it. When was the last time someone in one of your games chucked a squab at something?

Once again, the picture is not just about having something happening but also capturing everyone's reactions to the happening. It makes one wonder, if something is happening and the characters are not reacting to it then does it actually happen at all?

Probably one of the most bad-ass images in all of classic gaming, nothing says Chill quite like a werewolf battling zombies in a decrepit old graveyard full of gnarled trees and with a big bloated moon hanging on the horizon in the background.

It makes me wonder about what else might be going on behind the scenes of all these pics. Could it be that the guy who fell in the cemetery before the up-shooting hand is actually a werewolf? Is the werewolf a villain or a hero? The world will never know.

With all of these works, it is also good to pay some attention to what is not in them. There is worry, fear, rage, concern and disgust, but there are none of the truly negative aspects of horror. No one is being tortured. No one is reduced to tears and begging for their lives. This is fun horror. Terrible things happen but no one's soul is ever being crushed beneath the heel of the bad guys. If anything, this is fight or flight horror. It brings out the best in these characters, forcing them to do more than they ever thought they could.

Ultimately, CHILL is an excuse to have characters run around screaming their heads off and occasionally hacking apart some ghoul with a shovel. Thanks Jim Holloway! There is just so much to love here. Happy Halloween!

Pop!

Car Wars 6th Edition. Autoduel for Dummies?

JFK riveted a nation when he said, “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard!”

And in not nearly as glorious a light, I think the same could be said about why we played Car Wars back in the 80’s. Or at least why we spent so much time designing cars for it. When you pulled together a Car Wars car you milled through hundreds of equipment options, balancing price, weight and space with your vehicle’s engine power and suspension and chassis limitations. You crunched numbers. Boy did you crunch numbers. I think I once broke a calculator crunching all those numbers. Strangely though, that is what made Car Wars fun.

Know what sucked?

The game itself.

The downside of Car Wars was that you would eventually have to play Car Wars, a game with slow  screwy rules played on an overly large map that used dinky little cardboard chits which skidded out of control when you breathed on them. The only reason to play Car Wars was to test your vehicle design and take it back to the drawing board after the game destroyed it. If my friends and I had all been born two decades earlier, we all probably would have been gearheads doing the same thing with actual hot rods which we would take out to the desert to drag race American Graffiti style.

Or possibly not. That kind of thing is expensive and we lived nowhere’s near a desert. Like everybody else we probably would have sat around dreaming of such things. Which is why we play games. For the time and money involved, Car Wars is a lot cheaper than the nearest reality.

So anyways….

I just caught this video review of the new Car Wars 6th Edition which is coming out sometime soon.

It’s Easy Guys! Come on, it’s so so Easy. So much easier. And a whole lot easier than it used to be. If I had a dime for every time they called the game easy, I’d be rich and SJGames would be broke.

They realllllllllllllllly want us to believe that the new Car Wars is easy.
The funny thing is that I’m not sure if I believe them.

I can’t say anything for certain because I haven’t seen the rules, but from what I was able to glean, the new game seems more abstract than the original but not necessarily easier. You roll dice with little symbols on them. Like a cash registers at McDonalds they try to use hieroglyphs in place of words wherever they can. I didn’t see anything which resembled a speed or handling track. Maybe this makes it all easier, but the problem with an abstraction is that you cannot use your imagination to reason your way through it. All you can do is roll the dice and take whatever it gives you.

What do you want to eat today? Roll a die….

1 Big Mac.
2 Quarter Pounder.
3 McRib.
4 Fillet-O-Fish.

A 3! Oh, don’t look so sad. A lot of people like the McRib, and it only comes out once a year. Please come again….

I like what they had to say about Funsics vs Physics, but original Car Wars never ran on physics to begin with. It was always a close approximation of what seemed to be real, done to impart a realistic quality more than anything else. Funsics seems to be more about, “we can’t give you reality so we’re just going to give you a load of barbeque sauce and hope you don’t notice what’s missing.”

(Contains as much pork as Car Wars contains Physics)

Meanwhile, building a vehicle has been dumbed down to where your vehicle has a number of Build Points (like 16 or 32) and everything you add to it will cost a number of points. No price/weight/space or acceleration calculations. It sounds like something pulled from a video game. It feels like the principal was to zip through vehicle design as quickly as possible, something hearkening back to 5th edition Car Wars which had no vehicle design rules and had reduced the game to a collection of over-priced pamphlets containing pre-made vehicles and rules which if I recall correctly were still not complete enough to let people actually play the game. If there was cash to be grabbed, 5th edition would have existed to do just that and not much else.

Now. I have nothing against simple games that are easy to play and Car Wars - more than any game out there - could use a complete rules overhaul when it comes to the play of the game?

It feels like it is missing the target, that something is being lost.

The entire gaming world seems to be racing towards a ephemeral state where games are designed to be picked up, played once and abandoned. Like getting tube socks in a plastic bag with a ziplock seal, you may actually wear the socks until they hatch holes, but the company itself would much rather have you treat them as lunch meat for your feet. Something you would never think to wear twice. And yet, this is Car Wars. You never played just one game. If anything, games like Car Wars and Battletech were more sports than games. There was always an element of “wait until next time!” as you wheel the wreckage of your latest creation back to the drawing board to make changes and tweak endlessly.

(better believe I'll be back)

So. 6th Edition is finally going to be a thing. It will probably be SJGames does Gaslands. After all, if it wasn’t for Gaslands pulling the rug out from under Car War’s former glory there would probably be no 6th edition. Will it be good? Will it suck? Well, it really can’t be any worse than Car Wars itself. The question is, will it still be Car Wars or will this be more like Twisted Metal the tabletop edition?

We’ll just have to check it out and see.

The Adventurers Club

Want some old-school cred?
I gotchya old school cred right here…

This is from Dimensions ‘84 my Junior High School yearbook. I am the kid in the center shuffling a bunch of papers and notably - not - looking as if the entire party had just been TPK’d. Chris, the tall kid standing next to me, may have been the DM or it may have been me. We all took turns DM-ing different adventures. Honestly, I don’t remember the photograph even being taken. It was definitely staged though. One of us is probably standing so we didn’t have to sit with our back to the camera. We did push desks together to play on, but the surface usually wasn’t so cluttered. We probably did this for the photo because - D&D - even back then it did not seem right without wobbly towers of books and papers sliding around the table.

I also have no recollection of being voted “co-president” of the group. That was complete news to me when the yearbook came out. Maybe Joe Spoleti (not pictured) snuck it in there to get access to the dodgeball launch codes, or whatever it is that the co-presidents of after-school groups actually do. It says we were a club but we were really more of a group. Part of being able to use the school was an open door policy where anyone could join. There were no strange initiation rites. If you showed up we would set you up with a character and try to squeeze you into the game as best we could. Girls were invited but none dared to show, so it did remain something of a sausage fest.

(and maybe that was all for the better) 

Every Tuesday and Thursday (I’m pretty sure) we would meet after school in the social studies room and play for a couple of hours. Mrs. Dewsnap sat quietly at her desk in the front of the room correcting papers, undoubtedly listening in to make sure things didn’t get too out of hand. To her credit, she never intervened on any of our games, and to our credit things we never got so out of hand that she had to. We were good kids. We even had something of an unwritten policy where you never killed anything unless they had done something to deserve it, especially humanoids. In a strange way, I guess it’s kind of fitting that it all took place in the social studies room. Now if only actual human history could be so kind.

I moved to Red Hook in the summer of ‘82 and the Adventurers Club had already formed by then. I really had no idea what D&D was and had only heard of the game through news coverage of it being burned in effigy, but I needed to make new friends so why not? On the very first day of school I was invited to join. I became the party cleric (of course) and it was love at first die roll. I turned some skeletons with my holy symbol and never looked back. I don’t know what the Adventurers Club was like before 82, but I’m pretty sure it peaked around 83/84. Not many people had shown up for this photograph but I do recall games where we had like twelve kids all trying to play at once and getting absolutely nowhere. The idea that there could be a maximum number of players in a game hadn’t gotten around to us yet.

By 84/85 the group was on the wane and by the spring of 85 it was over. So my experience with the golden age of RPG’s perfectly fit into the stretch of Junior High and maybe that was the problem. We were eager to move into High School and become teenagers - cool in every way - D&D had not yet developed the stigmatism of being a nerdy pastime (that was the chess club, three rooms down the hall). Two of the guys in this photo were on the football team. In fact, we often had jocks playing with us if their favorite sport was out of season. Still, the things you do in Junior High just don’t fly when you get to the hallowed halls of High School, where the rule of cool is more autocratic law than mere guideline.

(Come to think of it, the Red Hook Junior High

 really does look a bit like a castle.)

Another problem may have lain in the games themselves. Specifically D&D, and that specious notion that when your character dies you have to start over at 1st level. No one wants to start over at first level when everyone else is 7th, 8th or 9th. Especially when most of your XP comes from creatures killed, and the way we played had all of the XP going to whoever delivered the killing blow. That was the way we played and we followed those rules a little too religiously. On the internet there is this notion going around that the Rules Lawyer did not exist until D&D 3.0 -  w  r  o  n  g  - oh so wrong. I think that for as long as there have been rules there have been rules lawyers looking to win on a complication. D&D exploded with content during these years. Between Dragon Magazine and Unearthed Arcana the rules bloat made playing the game nearly impossible. There were way too many instances of people stopping everything to look something up and then squabbling endlessly afterwards over what one thing or another actually meant. The idea of the DM being above the rules was another convention that was not a part of our mindset and our games truly suffered for it.

Far more insidious (more insidious that rule lawyers! Impossible!) I think the Satanic Panic also caught up with us and took its toll. There were a number of kids who truly loved the game but just stopped showing up for reasons they would not discuss. I am Catholic and the family did go to church every Sunday. In fact, I was actually a regular reader of the liturgy. But my parents were college educated and they knew hokum when they heard it. We never had that little talk about the perils of Satan & D&D. If anything, I think my dad got a kick out of the fact that I enjoyed something which in many ways resembled the school board meetings his job forced him to attend. He probably wished his meetings could have been as much fun. Yet, I do remember that at the end of Confirmation we were given a meeting with our priest and allowed to ask him anything off the record. The one question which commanded the whole affair was, “what’s wrong with D&D?”

And it was not asked by me.

I was largely a silent observer. It was brought up and debated by those kids who were in the AC but had mysteriously dropped out. I actually felt bad for Father Coen because they had him pinned to the blackboard with something he honestly knew nothing about. There were actually many reasons to condemn D&D at that point, most notably the idea that you had to kill and steal to get ahead, but the best he could manage was the tired old line of “it involves, witchcraft and demons and magic and things you should not be playing with” which all boils down to “you don’t play the game because my higher-ups are telling me to tell you not to play the game.”

We may have been confirmed that day, but it was an indoctrination into a world where you say what you say to toe the line yet rarely ever say what is on your mind. Welcome to adulthood kids. I suspect the church lost some converts that day and the free thinkers of the world gained a few. Or at least, so I hope.

Last but not least, there was also the rise of the VCR and girls and after-school jobs and cars. And actually a whole bunch of other adultish things to drag us away. As John Cougar Mellancamp sang it best, hold onto sixteen as long as you can ‘cause changes came around real soon to make us women and men.

But for everything that went wrong during this period it was still dramatically outshined by all that we got right. The camaraderie, the friendship, the astounding feats of imagination. Gaming wasn’t pure escapism. It wasn’t any one of us alone, dreamily disappearing into the pages of a novel. When we joined forces on those Tuesday afternoons it felt like we were actually accomplishing something. We took our games seriously - sometimes a little too seriously - but we came out of them feeling bold, noble, mighty, proud.

And I wouldn’t trade that for anything.

Junk'd is not Junk!

GO BUY THIS GAME. For no better reason than to keep Hankerin cranking out the beautiful craziness which is Runehammer games. Junk’d costs about as much as a gallon of gas and will probably give you far better mileage than whatever car crash game you may to be playing right now.

For the record, I have not played Junk’d. All I’ve done is read the rules and dreamt about it a bit. But I have seen enough to feel confident in saying that the writing is excellent. The art is spot on. The game is fun. And I absolutely love the idea behind the Ghostriders. It gives those players who are no longer in the race something to do besides sit around and wait to see who wins it. It also goes to show just how well thought out the game actually is.

(And is just wicked fricken cool!!!!!)

Junk’d easily circumvents one of the biggest problems with tabletop driving games which is the matter of accurately portraying vehicles designed to cover long distances in a short stint of time.

It simply doesn’t.

And that’s a good thing.

Instead it goes for the abstract, the engine power of your car does matter but it works in fits and spurts, only periodically moving you forward. Twelve steps forward and that’s a battle. Unlike Car Wars, you don’t need a free ping pong table to play on. Using micro machines you might even be able to play Junk’d in the back seat of an actual car. Think about that for your next road trip.

(Hey you kids! Keep it down back there!

Don't make me pull over!)

Vehicle design is super simple. It can be done in under a minute. And yet it still has a feeling of importance. The vehicle you drive will change the way you play the game. Maybe Junk’d doesn’t have enough meat on the bone to satiate any serious gearhead urgings, but at least you won't spend a whole evening beating a calculator to death to make one car.

Where does Junk’d falter?

When I said the writing was excellent, I meant the creative side. The instructional side is a bit iffy and even after reading it three or four times I’m still not completely sure I understand how the game is played. It is a turn based game and on each turn you make one of five dice pool rolls.

Engine - for moving ahead and powering to the end of the stretch.

Tires - for swerving side to side, changing lanes.

Ram - for slamming sideways into a vehicle beside you.

Guns - for taking a pot shot at someone directly in front of you.

Armor - for surviving being hit by gun fire or a collision.

Actually, you choose one of the first four. I don’t think there is ever a reason you would voluntarily roll your Armor. With engine you move straight ahead as many segments as the best number rolled. With Tires, Ram and Guns it is good to understand that there are six lanes on the stretch and each are numbered. With Tires you may move into any lane you rolled the number of. With Ram you do the same but only if there is a vehicle there for you to hit (where that vehicle goes after you slam it is not so clear, maybe you ride on top of it?). With Guns you can shoot someone directly ahead of you, but only if you manage to roll that lane number.

Now, Tires I like, even if it leaves you in the awkward position of being unable to switch into the next lane over but able to careen all the way across the board. Yes, your steering wheel is made of silly putty.

Guns is alright, but I think you should be able to target anyone on the stretch of road just as long as you are able to roll the number of the lane they are in. Having to move into a lane and roll that lane’s number feels like a bit much.

Ram is the only roll that doesn’t sit well with me. Sure, it is basically a sideways version of the Guns roll, but it is a little too abstract. If anything, I think Ram should be like Armor, a defensive roll you need to roll a 6 on whenever you collide with something. Hit a wreckage, roll a 6 and you burst through it in a cloud of bent flying steel. Engine forward or tires sideways into another vehicle and both drivers need to make a Ram roll. Whoever rolls the lesser number gets junk’d (a tie junks you both!). Beat the other vehicle’s ram roll and that vehicle also get pushed backwards a segment to make room for you.

But that’s just me.

When it comes to games I’m like the Mikey the Life cereal kid. I’ll waste anyone who tries to come between me and my milk-soggy bowl of corn puffs.

On the whole. Junk’d is an excellent little car battle game that should hold the world over until another Mad Max movie gets made. It does not accurately simulate anything, other than the abject insanity of a Fury Road drag race.

And when the hell is another Mad Max movie coming out! Star Wars films keep dropping from the sky like so many malfunctioning satellites, and yet Fury Road 2? Come on Mr. Miller, hit the nitro already.

Dammit, where are my dice!

Kull the DM!

So, this past week I got in a conversation online about whether or not RPGs could exist before the 1970’s. I mentioned a fragment of writing by RE Howard which appears to have some of his characters sitting around a parlor and playing one. Thaddeus Moore wanted to know where it could be found so here it is. It comes from the back pages of Kull Vol.2 by Baen Books.

But I thought I would do Thaddeus one better by scanning in the pages, so here they are. The parts which I found most interesting at least. The rest of the fragment is just two more pages describing the history and appearance of Howard’s characters.

Yes, it is not much to go on, but there are some interesting points to be found here. Kull shouts out Score! So the imaginary game does have a win condition and is being played competitively. He moves an ivory figure which insinuates a game of fantasy chess. He tells Brule “my wizard menaces your warrior” which could be taken as “my bishop moves to where it could strike your knight” but why would you tell your opponent this? And when was the last time you played chess with three people? Ronaro doesn’t make a move in the game, but he is sitting at the table and described as one of its players.

Probably the most interesting bit is what Brule says on page 192. “A wizard is a hard man to beat, Kull, in this game or in the real game of battle-” Granted it was probably meant to be nothing more than a segue to Brule telling a story, but it does imply that you do not simply defeat a character in this game by knocking them over like a chess piece. That there might be some hit points involved, some special powers and the casting of spells.

If only Howard had written something about rolling dice!

My point is that the dream of the Fantasy RPG was there. I suspect that RE Howard while writing this bit of text wasn’t just thinking about a possible story but also about how cool it would be to have a game where he and his friends could play the characters in his fiction. Maybe that’s why this fragment never went on to become a full fledged story. When you’re writing, it’s easy to get derailed by a good idea.

The 1930’s would have been perfect for the advent of the TTRPG. Print technology was at its prime with only film and radio to compete with. Polyhedral dice did not exist but six-sided dice were plentiful. And of course, there was the depression. There would have been large numbers of people in desperate need of a cheap escape and stuck with more than enough time to play in a seemingly endless campaign. It’s easy to imagine Weird Tales printing a single issue containing nothing but the rules for an RPG written by its authors - providing anyone ever thought to do so.

And that’s the clincher.

Ultimately, my answer to it all was -No- at least here in the USA the TTRPG could not have existed before the 1970’s, the reason being that you need the tumultous revolutionary thinking of the 1960’s to open people’s minds to where the playing this game - which comes in a box but has no board, a game with no winning condition, a game where you play with your friends rather than against them, a game where you and your friends pretend to be elves - is possible. Even in Howard’s imagination he cannot totally escape the idea of games which have an end and a winner and a competitive nature. It’s easy to forget just how rigid people's mindsets were in the 40’s and 50’s and presumably every decade leading up to the 1960's. In the 1950’s, when Elvis was caught shaking his hips on the Ed Sullivan show the world exploded with moral outrage. This is not a world which is ready for Dungeons & Dragons.

Even back in the 1930’s, if I remember right, pulp magazines were treated like pornography. They were kept under the counter at the local drug store, meaning you had to ask for them by name and endure the disapproving stink eye of whatever American Gothic caricature happened to be working the counter that day. So even if Weird Tales had produced an RPG it would have never encountered the massive success which D&D did in the late 70’s and early 80’s. It would have been frowned upon into oblivion. Just like the weird pulp fiction of Howard’s time, it would have become a niche hobby enjoyed by scattered bunches of basement dwelling weirdos.

(Not that there is anything wrong with that.)

In my comment to the post I also joked that you had to be stoned to enjoy a game like D&D. I did not mean this literally. Marijuana & Dungeons & Dragons do not mix. Well. But there is no overlooking the mind-expanding influence of psychedelic drugs on the culture of the 60’s and 70’s. Even if you never went near the stuff, the counter-culture did and they in turn took over the culture itself, opening people up to at least contemplating ideas which just a few years earlier would have been strictly taboo. While it is easy to think of D&D as a cultural vanguard, the game was more of a cultural coat-tail rider. The reason there are oriental monks in AD&D is thanks to Bruce Lee and the popularity of Kung-Fu movies. The mess that was psionics? That probably came from doing bong hits while watching In Search Of (well, how would you explain AD&D Psionics?). Gygax and friends were basically cultural trash compactors. If it was popular, if people mentioned a desire to have it in their game, they found a ways to squeeze it in there.

So if Vietnam had not been a thing for the hippies to rebel against. And if those rebellious hippies had not latched onto fantasy fiction - Tolkein in particular - as a metaphor for what they were trying to do by defying the establishment and living differently. And if bands like Led Zeppelin had never latched onto what their fans were reading and helped revive Tolkein in the popular imagination?

Well, maybe the TTRPG would still come into existence, but it would not be the same kind of game that we play today. It is doubtful that it would have ever been anything more than a small-skirmish version of a larger wargame. Think Call of Duty sans the computer. It would have been a game for the cadets at West Point to play and study as a battle simulator. And for those of us who stumbled into TTTRPGs because of D&D’s early success? There’s no telling what we would have done with all that free time, but we probably would not have enjoyed it nearly as much.

Number Resolution

WOO-HOO! PAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRTTTTTY!!!!!!!
IT DOESN’T GET MUCH MORE EXCITING THAN THIS!

Actually it does.

In fact, most paint dries with greater excitement than the matter of number resolution, but it’s still something I tend to think about far more than I should. And that is pretty much what I write about around here.

Number Resolution. It’s like the screen you’re looking at. The greater the number of pixels the computer manufacturer packs into the display the finer a picture you will recieve, and yet the more work it demands of the computer processor to project it up there. With tabletop RPGs - for me at least - number resolution does the same thing. It comes in three flavors: High, Medium and Low Resolution.

HIGH RESOLUTION
1d100. This is the truest view of what is going on with most core mechanics. You have a number range from 0 to 100 with 50 being the universal average. It’s high resolution because it allows you to add something as small as a +1 for an ultrafine adjustment of character chances. It’s also the most demanding. Quick what’s 87 - 36?

That took you a little while now didn’t it? And here is the problem with high resolution, unless you are of a mind-set which easily swims through seas of numbers the game is going to grow tedious and exhausting for most people. The game needs to truly be special to justify the math. Of course, you could resort to using just 5 point blocks, but if you’re going to do that you might as well use….

MEDIUM RESOLUTION
1d20. 2d10. 3d6. This is where most games reside. Those 5 point blocks become single points on the range from 1 to 20. Quick! What’s 17 - 7?

That was a whole lot easier. This is the same problem from above changed from high to medium resolution and rounded down (because we always round down). Some of the fine granularity has been traded in favor of greater speed and die rolling possibilities. And yet it still has enough variance to let things like the difference between a sword and an axe matter to its players.

LOW RESOLUTION
1d10. 1d12. 2d6. Roughly speaking every 10 points of high resolution have been reduced to 1 point of low resolution. Quick! What’s 8 - 3?

Wait for it. Come on!
You can do it!
I believe in you!!!!

Note that the answer is half of what it was in medium resolution and a fifth of what it was in high resolution. Unfortunately the game is getting pretty chunky at this point. A +1 matters immensely, but because of this you cannot simply throw them around without good cause which will cause a loss of distinction.

We could go lower, and there are games out there which have done so. Rolling just 1d4 or flipping a coin to determine an outcome, but for me this loses the whole point of replicating reality and the influences that things have upon each other.

SO WHICH TO USE?
That is the hard part. It’s actually something I’ve been wrestling with right now. As a game designer I love the idea of high resolution. I’d love to create a game where you could actually build your own suit of armor with greaves (+3), different layers of mail (+2 +2 +2), full helmet (+8) or possibly just an open faced helmet (+4) and it all adds up to your armor class. But. That takes a hell of a lot of time to design let alone play and most players are fine with picking a suit - chainmail, platemail, scalemail, etc. - and moving on. There is also the matter of what people are expecting from the game itself. I think of TOON from SJGames.

(Because I always think of TOON, the screensaver of my mind)

TOON is a great low resolution system. You could convert the number system to a high resolution 1d100 experience but it would slow down the action to the point where you might feel like an animator drawing an actual cartoon frame by frame. You would probably have to pay people to play the game at that point. Even as a medium resolution game TOON could still be overbearing. TOON is good for one night single-shot events. Nobody turns to it looking for the long evolved campaigns that D&D provides. TOON campaigns are measured in hours, not days. TOON runs on 2d6 and speaking as someone who has played many games of it, I’d say it does so perfectly.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT DICE
Most games don’t talk about why they choose to use the dice that they do. I’ve heard a lot of people defend the use of d6’s by saying “they’re common dice, they can be found anywhere, most people have some laying around the house and they will be more likely play my game if I use them!”

You’re so cute….

But think about this for a moment. Dice of different shapes and sizes are more prevalent now than ever before, and the sad fact of the matter is that most people will gravitate towards the major label games and possibly spend years there before they ever bother with the minor label games that (presumably) you and I produce. This means our players will probably already have a big bag of dice at their disposal.

There is something to be said about the tactile affair of rolling dice. The d6 does a very nice job coming to a stop after a roll, which is probably why the d30 never caught on. It also has a home-spun feel to it, which can work for or against the system at hand.

Then there is the matter of the number of dice involved in the roll. I’m not a big fan of the single die roll. I think it feels strangely weak and insubstantial. Meanwhile the thunder-like clatter of seven to ten dice hitting the table all at once may sound impressive but it is also kinda of annoying trying to pick through the results. And yes, I have not even begun to address the matter of dice pool games, but hasn’t this blog post gone on long enough?

JUST END IT ALREADY!
So ultimately, between the three resolutions I think high resolution is the most ambitious but also the most risky as far as the time it takes to design the game and people’s reluctance to play it. Maybe for hard sci-fi games which can play off the technical appeal of large numbers.

Low resolution is just the opposite. It can come together quite quickly an be fun to play, but like an 8-bit video game from the 1980’s people may be willing to play it once but I can't imagine them playing it too many times. People are going to want such games to be small and limiting oneself in such a way is not always easy.

Medium resolution? Well, there’s a reason it is the industry standard and it’s not just because it was there first. Medium resolution does a good job balancing simulation with playability. But. There are so many medium res games out there that you need to offer something truly special to separate from the pack.

So what do you think about all of this? Why does your game use the die roll that it does? Am I spot on or totally off my rocker?

Oh, and just because I can. One of my favorite bits from Ren & Stimpy. Remember kids, play with dice, not electricity!

Speed Metal D&D

This came from a discussion on Google+ where Michael Bacon was wondering about running a game of D&D as quickly as possible, primarily by removing the to-Hit roll and using just damage rolls. One thing snowballed into another and - well – here is my take (at least) on how B/X D&D could be run as fast as possible without breaking the thing into smithereens. So dig out your B/X books and play along kids!

(DM Lemmy says Roll for Initiative).

Character Creation

Everything remains pretty much as is with just a few changes.

Strength

Your Strength score provides a Muscle Power modifier or MP which works as you might expect. It provides a modifier for opening doors and doing damage with muscle powered weaponry (meaning everything except crossbows). We do increase its modifier by a point.

18 = MP +4
16-17 = MP +3
14-15 = MP +2
12-13 = MP +1
10-11 = MP -0
8-9 = MP -1
6-7 = MP -2
4-5 = MP -3
3 = MP -4

Encumbrance

Is not optional, but it is different and it plays off of your Muscle Power. Every 400 coins you carry reduces your MP by 1, even if this means turning it into a penalty.

0 = MP -0
400 = MP -1
800 = MP -2
1200 = MP -3
1600 = MP -4

How encumbrance effects your total muscle power determines your movement rate. With Normal / Encounter / Running...

MP +4 = 240/80/240
MP +3 = 210/70/210
MP +2 = 180/60/180
MP +1 = 150/50/150
MP -0 = 120/40/120
MP -1 = 90/30/90
MP -2 = 60/20/60
MP -3 = 30/10/30
MP -4 = 15/5/15

If your fighter has a strength of 14 this will provide MP +2. Carrying 400 to 799 coins of stuff will reduce it to MP +1. It also reduces your movement rate to 150/50/150. If you were carrying 399 coins or less you would regain that extra point and it would boost your movement to 180/60/180.

Dexterity

There are no to-hit rolls so the missile fire adjustment becomes a damage bonus. However, you may not combine your Muscle Power with the Dex bonus. Use whichever one gives you the best bonus.

When range is a consideration, what was a to-hit roll is now a damage modifier. Short increases damage by +1. Long reduces it by -1.

Level Damage Bonus

No to-hit rolls? No problem! Characters gain a damage bonus based on their level.

Fighter Types (Dwarves, Elves, Fighters and Halflings) a +1 is gained for each experience level. A level 5 fighter gains a +5 on every damage roll.

Semi-Fighter Types (Clerics, Thieves) gain a +1 every other level.

Non-Fighter Types (Magic-Users) do not gain a bonus.

Monsters use their hit dice in place of a level, ignoring any add ons. A bugbear is a fighter type with Hit Dice 3+1. It gains a +3 on all damage rolls.

Weapons 

Before the game begins, be sure to add together what you can so you know what to roll when the time comes. This means....

Damage Die + Magic Bonus + Muscle Power + Level Damage Bonus

For a Battle Axe +2 in the hands of a 3^rd level fighter with an encumbrance adjusted muscle power of +1 you would write down Battle Axe 1d8+6.

Reductive Armor Class

Armor Class is now reductive, meaning when you get hit you subtract your AC from the damage and anything left over it is taken as hit point damage. To make the conversion use the table below, B/X is on the left. The S/M value is on the right.

AC 9 = AC -2
AC 8 = AC -3
AC 7 = AC -4
AC 6 = AC -5
AC 5 = AC -6
AC 4 = AC -7
AC 3 = AC -8
AC 2 = AC -9
AC 1 = AC -10
AC 0 = AC -11
AC -1 = AC -12
AC -2 = AC -13
AC -3 = AC -14

Pop-Point AC

Or you might want to give Pop-Point AC a try. With this system AC is the number of points of damage it takes to cause one hit point to pop. If you get hit by 8 points of damage and have a pop point AC 3 then only 2 points of damage slip through to damage your character. To make the conversion the B/X is on the left and the S/M is on the right.

AC 9 = AC 1
AC 8 = AC 1
AC 7 = AC 2
AC 6 = AC 2
AC 5 = AC 3
AC 4 = AC 3
AC 3 = AC 4
AC 2 = AC 4
AC 1 = AC 5
AC 0 = AC 5
AC -1 = AC 6
AC -2 = AC 6
AC -3 = AC 7

Pop or Reductive? If it was an easy choice you wouldn't be reading about both of them. Reductive is the current favorite, but it can easily lead to situations where a character is either un-hittable or too hittable. Pop point works well, guaranteeing that a creature can almost always be hit. Unfortunately, there is a huge difference between AC 1 and AC 2.

Exploding Dice!

Whichever AC system you choose to use, damage rolls should be allowed to explode, meaning that when the die rolls the best it can roll you get to roll again and add it in. If this second roll explodes then it will lead to a third roll and possibly a fourth, going off like a strip of firecrackers.

Magic Spells

Clerics, Magic-Users and Elves still have the typical limit to the number of spells they can have ready to cast, but in Speed Metal D&D there is no limit to the number of times those spells can be cast.

There is, however, a chance that the spell will fizzle. For each spell cast roll a 1d20 hoping to roll under or equal to the character's Intelligence (or Wisdom if a cleric) plus the character level  minus the spell level doubled.

Roll 1d20 -vs- Int + Character Level – (Spell Level x 2)

Fireball is a 3^rd level spell. When cast by a 4^th level Magic-User with a 16 Intelligence the character needs to roll (16 + 4 – 6 = 14) 14 or less. Roll a 15 or more and the spell doesn't go off. With a 9th level spell the same character would need to roll (16 + 4 - 18 = 2) a 2 or less. Good luck with that!

Since the only thing that is bound to change is the die roll, be sure to find your spell conjure scores before the game begins and write them next to the spell name on your character sheet. For the example: Fireball 14.

Initiative

Initiative is found at the beginning of a battle and the same result is used round after round until a round passes where no one makes an attack. At that point the tide of battle may change so initiative should be rolled again.

Combat

Combat runs just as you might expect except no to-hit rolls are made. When your turn comes you simply point out the creature you are attacking and roll for damage.

Shmearing Damage. When it makes sense you should also be allowed to hit more than one creature at once (and they likewise), spreading the damage out like nutella over a warm bloody goblin sandwich. It is left up to the player to decide how much damage goes where.

Parrying Damage. In a similar vein, you can also use or reserve damage points for the purpose of parrying damage headed your way or in the direction of someone close to you. With 6 parry points you can stop 6 points of damage. The catch is that if you don't find something to do with your parry points by the end of the round they disappear. 

Monster Rolls. The DM should be encouraged to consolidate die rolls. No one wants to wait around while two dozen orc die rolls are made. If the creatures all use the same die roll? Roll once and let them use the same outcome. Randomly rolling a series of numbers in advance works too.

Why Is This Better?

Speed Metal D&D moves faster, duh. First and foremost it uses just one die roll with no table to look at or number to compare it too. Less noticeable is how this also cuts down on gamey conversation. There is no, “what do I need to hit?” being asked. You just reach out and smack that bugbear.

(And sometimes the bugbear smacks you back)

Whether you use reductive or pop armor class, the AC and all of its ramifications becomes something that the recorder of the damage needs to deal with and can be done quite quickly.

Last, but not least, Speed Metal D&D patches the somewhat awkward absence of a fighter's inability to do anything more than make one low-impact weapon attack per round. The fighter in particular becomes a damage generating machine, more meat grinder than meat shield and hopefully someone who will prove more useful all throughout the game.