Words Upon Worlds

It may be apparent, because this is the first post in about two years, but his blog is long dead. However, I do have another blog, called Words Upon Worlds, where I post free RPG setting content (mostly system neutral) each week. That’s also where I announce any publications I’ve worked on, and wil occasionally post free bonus stuff (like adventures). Check it out!

HP/MP Restored, But You’re Still Hungry *grumble sound*

Thanks to darkly dreaming dscii for the gif.

The title comes from Chrono Trigger, which is, as far as I can tell, the best JRPG ever made. The title came to me while I was thinking about healing in D&D 5e, because it has a very “restore your hp by sleeping at an inn,” JRPG feel to me. Let me explain.

So in D&D 5e you can heal naturally in two ways (not counting magic or items): During a short rest, a period defined as being at least 1 hour of relaxing, you can roll a number of Hit Dice (HD) (up to your character level) to restore hp. So, as a second level wizard, Namfoodle “Nam” Ningle can roll 2d6, and get back that many hp. You can only spend a given HD once in a day, so if I rolled both of those HDs in that one short rest, that’s all I get.

There are also long rests, which are defined as at least 8 hours of downtime and may contain no more than 2 hours of standing watch. During a long rest, you get back any HD you’ve spent to heal during short rests, and, the big win: you get back all your hp, as long as you have at least 1 hp when you start the rest.

So, in a sense, it’s the traditional JRPG model of go to an inn, pay however much gold, and get all your hit points back.

Hit Points as Abstraction

Personally, I really like this model, because it helps to streamline the game and, somewhat more importantly, it helps to abstract hit points. See, while I’ve played D&D or some variation thereof for a long, long time now, and I love those games, I’ve always had issues with a few of the core assumptions those systems make. Hit points, classes, and levels have always caused problems for me. I’ll save classes and levels for another time, but I want to talk about hit points now.

The main problem that I had with hit points is that they weren’t terribly descriptive of a character or monster’s actual health. Once I discovered them, I prefered, at least conceptually, wound systems like you might see in Star Wars D6 or Exalted, which come preloaded with indications of just how wounded a character has become. The other thing that these systems did which D&D did not do was attach penalties to those wound levels: the more hurt you were, the harder it was to do things, which made sense. With hit points, you’re totally fine until you hit 0 and then you’re dead (or dying, depending on the version, the DM, or whether we’re talking about a player character or a monster).

Now there are a number of things this analysis is missing, but understand that this was a much younger me who was missing some important elements. Namely, D&D is heroic fantasy (which Exalted and SWD6 could certainly be classified as) and it trades on heroes being tough and cool and hard to kill. Admittedly, the wound system of Vampire: The Masquerade doesn’t really make all that much sense in Exalted, but it’s there because they’re both Storyteller games, and that’s how White Wolf rolls (namely they don’t often challenge the core assumptions of the system when they create a new setting using it). But this realization isn’t what helped me come to like hit points (at least for some games).

RPG systems are abstractions, of course, and hit points are part of that abstraction, but they aren’t an abstraction of pure damage, they don’t just measure how much blood you’ve got left. They measure how much, for lack of a better term, heroism you have left. Moxy. Gumption. Whatever you want to call it, hp doesn’t track your proximity to death, but your proximity to being out of the fight; whether it’s because you’re dead, unconscious, or simply exhausted. Two games helped me to realize this fact: Star Wars d20, and Fate.

Fate is newer, both as a game system and as one that I’m familiar with, and it helped me realize a lesson that I should have learned with SWd20. Fate uses stress and consequences, which are accrued in lieu of being removed from a conflict. Take enough stress and you’re out of the scene somehow, it might be damage, or you might be driven away from your goal, any number of things. Fate is very narrative focused and less combat driven, so this makes sense.

What SWd20 did was to provide characters with both hit points and wounds. Hit points worked just like other d20 games and you got more of them as you leveled up, but they represented more of your will to fight, your “luck” or the favor of the Force or whatever. Run out, and you were unconscious. Some damage came in the form of wounds though, and you had wounds equal to your Constitution score. If those fell to 0, you were in serious trouble. I really like this system because it allows you to defeat enemies without killing them all the time, which made sense for Star Wars, but maybe not as much sense for typical D&D games.

Descriptive Coherence

All of this has been on my mind because, while reading the 5e Player’s Handbook, I realized something about how I’ve been game mastering. I tend to describe violence in loving detail which, is difficult on the narrative because it results in creatures taking some truly grotesque amounts of damage over a combat. It also makes no sense in 5e (which I’m not running but still) because sleeping heals you to full. That’s less a problem in Pathfinder, where natural healing takes much longer, but hp is doing the same job in both games.

The problem with graphic damage descriptions is that it doesn’t gel with the system. D&D doesn’t have complicated systems for hit location, crippling, and the like (unless you add them) so describing combat in this way causes descriptive dissonance: the style of description does not match the style of play. You wouldn’t use D&D to run a tabletop version of the films Hostel or Saw, because the system assumes heroic actions that don’t work with the assumptions of those narratives (namely body horror). Why then, would you use those styles of damage to describe combat in D&D?

The other problem is that I rarely described a strike hitting a target unless it did damage. Rarely were blows deflected or parried; they either missed or they did damage. That’s weird, because it implies that combat is largely just missing wildly or gouging out huge chunks of monster flesh. Not ideal. I want Inigo Montoya versus the Man in Black from The Princess Bride, not Wednesday versus Pugsley from The Addams Family. The former has a ton of interesting footwork and swords clashing but no blood and gore. It’s a fun, epic fight (the best sword fight ever filmed), and it’s basically what I want from my game. The latter is two kids standing in place and doing absurd amounts of damage to each other (via special effects). It’s hilarious and subversive, but not exciting. I want fights to be dynamic, and I want creatures put on the defensive (i.e. being hit with attack roles) to become winded, to make mistakes, and not necessarily bleed all over the place.

At the Table

So hit points in D&D and Pathfinder collapse the role of both hp and wounds from SWd20: they mostly abstract stamina, energy, spirit, but at some point they abstract real, physical damage. The trick here is figuring out where to draw the line between the two (if at all). I think this is what Wizards of the Coast was trying to do in D&D 4e with the “bloodied” status. When a creature was reduced to half their hit points they were “bloodied,” which usually meant that they gained access to an ability they didn’t have before, but also stood as a marker to players that the creature was at half their hit points. I don’t think half hit points is the best point to start describing hit point loss as physical damage, but I like the idea of setting a point to do so.

What I’m suggesting, and plan to do myself, is to describe hit point loss with a two stage method. Starting with descriptions of parries, shield blocks, exhaustion and so forth and then, at a predetermined point, describing the strikes as physical damage like blood loss, gaping wounds and so on. Figuring out what this point should be will require some play-testing, but I do know that these descriptions should not be injuries that are incapable of healing. Only if an attack kills a creature should that hit do some irreparable damage. For ease of inclusion, setting this at something like 25% of the creature’s original hit points makes sense. On the other hand, I feel like this might vary from creature to creature, and so the “real damage” threshold for a dragon might be different than a kobold. The threshold might be determined by creature type, HD, some combination of the two, or whatever other factors a given GM might want to use.

TableTop is Back!

Season three of Wil Wheaton’s TableTop started yesterday, and that’s awesome. I’m a huge fan of the show and I contributed to the IndieGoGo campaign to fund this season, so I’m really excited to finally be able to watch new episodes again. I watched the first episode, and then went back to watch some of the older stuff that I had missed, and it got me thinking about why this series is so important to me.

As a Gamer

As a fan of tabletop games, the show is invaluable because it introduces me to a ton of seemingly awesome games. I bought Smallworld, Pandemic, Forbidden Island, Star Trek: Attack Wing (because it’s the same engine as X-Wing), Carcassonne, Tsuro, Munchkin, Gloom, and King of Tokyo (so far) because I saw them on TableTop. My roommate bought Ticket to Ride because of it.

For those unfamiliar with the show’s format, Wheaton introduces the game and gives us a breakdown of gameplay (which is written by producer Boyan Radakovich) and then plays the game with three (or sometimes four) of his famous type friends. It’s a great way to see how a game is played and decide if you’re interested in playing it yourself.

As a Designer

It’s fascinating to watch people play these games. There are extended versions of some of them, which allows you to see a lot more of the games themselves, since the normal episodes cut a lot of stoppage of play, “boring” turns, and the like. You can get a pretty good sense of how the games work, which is important as a designer, because that’s how you learn to design games.

In grad school as a historian, you spend a lot of time reading the works of established historians, and talking about that work with your colleagues and professors, then, eventually, you do history of your own. Usually at least a paper per class each semester. You have to learn how to be a historian by watching other people do it and then trying it yourself. Game design works the same way: play lots of games, talk about those games, and then make your own.

When your schedule or living arrangement doesn’t provide a lot of opportunities to play games, something like TableTop is super helpful. You can essentially try out a game without needing $40 and a group of friends. This may sound sad, but when the show debuted, I didn’t have anyone to play games with in Lansing where I was living for grad school. Later I would make some really great friends and eventually we would make gaming a weekly, or in the case of my roommate and I, almost daily occurrence. I’m still sort of “settling in” here in Seattle, and I haven’t had the opportunity to meet a lot of people here and find new gamers. Two of my roommates (one of whom I lived with in Lansing) are into tabletop gaming, but our schedules have prevented us from having a lot of time to game. Many of the games we own are better with 4+ players, and getting the fourth roommate to play is next to impossible. So being able to watch Wil Wheaton play games with his friends gives me access to the basic systems of those games. Whether I want to buy those games or not, seeing them in action essentially adds them to my collective knowledge of game rules, tactics, and the like, and gives me that much more raw data to consider when working on my own designs.

Go through the archives and check out the older videos, they’re all worth watching, especially if you aren’t familiar with the game being played. You get to see the games in action. It’s a great teaching tool too. The first time I got to play Smallworld with people, we watched the TableTop episode about it before we played, and I think it helped a lot. Even the gag reels and extended player interviews are helpful, because they give you a better idea of what the game is like on the table, being played by actual people, many of whom are new to the game in question.

As a Person

This is probably not the most helpful thing for most readers, but I want to share it anyway. I’ve long been a gamer, and before I fell in love with history and decided to become a professor, I wanted to design games professionally. I did a little bit of freelance d20 work, but that all ended when grad school began.

I discovered TableTop because I was already a huge fan of Felicia Day’s series The Guild, so when she got her own YouTube channel, Geek & Sundry, I was a fan from the start. TableTop reminded me of how much I missed gaming, and as the first season unfolded, I realized just how big a hole there was in my life that had been filled by gaming. When grad school became fully unbearable (it was always hard, but it became apparent that I didn’t want to be there anymore), and I went into existential crisis mode, I realized that gaming was the answer. Or more specifically, game design. TableTop helped me realize that, as much as I love history and social theory, I loved game design more, and that was what I should be doing with my life. At least, eventually.

The Story So Far

I struggled to decide what to call this post. My first instinct was “Back in Black,” but I’m not that big of an AC/DC fan, which led me to “It’s Been a Long Time” because I am a big Led Zeppelin fan, but then I decided to get away from song references and go with a narrative cliché instead. It made the most sense.

If you’ve been to my blog before, welcome back? I haven’t posted in a long time, and there are some good reasons for that, which I will enumerate below. If you’ve never been to my blog before and are somehow reading this, great, here’s like an introduction I guess?

So, my last post was on… October 21, 2014. Over a year ago. So, in that time I finished my master’s thesis in history, got an article published in Wayfinder #11, finished watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (the best trek), moved to Seattle, attended PaizoCon and GeekGirlCon, and published a supplement for Broken Earth (which was the number 1 selling item on RPGNow.com the day after it debuted). I also killed Owen Street Press, LLC with fire, mostly because I was moving across the country and that was the easiest way to deal with it, but because I frankly founded that company way too early. I haven’t figured out if I’ll be starting a new company out here yet; we’ll see if it’s a good idea or not. I won’t go into the details of that for now, probably in a later post though.

I also now own a Star Trek: The Next Generation hoodie (command red) and bathrobe (operations gold). This is important. This means something.

So this is no longer a “company” website but simply my own blog which, let’s face it, it pretty much was anyway. I do plan on talking about my projects on here (to the extent that I’m willing or able to share information about them), and writing posts about game design and gaming in general. I’ll probably stay away from politics and social issues, because I don’t think this is the right venue for them, but if they’re applicable they might still come up. Same goes for social theory or history stuff, which actually will have a significant impact on my design (and has had a significant impact on my political and social views).

No promises about quantity or, frankly, quality of posts, but I’m going to aim for a Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule for now, and see how that goes.

Welcome to Night Vale

Welcome to Night Vale is a podcast from Commonplace Books. It’s a community radio broadcast from a fictional town in the American Southwest called Night Vale, where pretty much any kind of weird thing you can imagine happens. I’ve five episodes in, each are about 22 minutes, and they’re amazing.

I have a soft spot for anthology weirdness like this, from straight shows like the Twilight Zone, to absurdist parodies like the Scary Door from Futurama. I also love Twin Peaks, and, although I’ve only seen two episodes, Hemlock Grove is pretty great. Most of all, I love Alan Wake, it’s one of my favorite video games of all time, and the inclusion within that mythology of an anthology show called Night Springs, especially in the sidequel, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare.

Night Vale is mostly funny, but every so often they get deep and downright creepy, and quite frequently they cross the same kind of lines that The Onion does, where even though the story is funny, it only thinly masks unnerving or downright depressing concepts.

Fandom = Participation

The act of consumption, specifically of popular culture, gets criticized a lot, especially be elitists (sometimes masquerading as populists). The basic logic goes that consumption is mindless and simply a tool used by the capitalist oppressing class to lull the masses into a false sense of happiness, so we don’t notice that they’re oppressing us.

I’m not saying that capitalists don’t make use of consumption in this way, but such arguments set up the consumer as a straw man (or lady, or person) without any real agency.

Recently Jacobin.com (yes, I read Jacobin, sometimes) ran some blogs about geek culture. Two of the three were pretty weak. Ian Williams basically argues that geeks are corporate shills who buy into whatever Marvel, Disney, or whomever is selling. I call bullshit on that.

Despite his identification as a geek, Williams’ piece shows a pretty stark unfamiliarity with geek culture (a term that, in and of itself, is pretty empty), but it shows a definite unfamiliarity with fan production. The basic assumption is that fans don’t question or critique anything, that we just sit here like sea cucumbers (and not the cool ones like Sea Pigs) and consume whatever floats our way.

The subjects of my MA thesis, the people who edited their own fanzines about comic books, or contributed to or even read those fanzines, were certainly not passive consumers. They were thinking about the stories, the characters, the industry and its actions, and they were discussing them, extensively. Today this happens on forums around the Internet. When people cosplay at cons, they choose their costumes because those characters resonate with them in some way, whether they’ve consciously thought about it or not.

Fandom is inherently participatory, even if you don’t critique every episode of Warehouse 13, the simple fact that you chose to watch that show, instead of something else, means that you actively thought about your decision.  This is becoming especially true in the days of streaming media: I can’t let Netflix just run and play shows at me, I have to choose them, which means I have to make decisions about what media to engage with at a particular time.

Were we to create a theoretical hierarchy of consumptive acts, the choice of whether or not to watch or read the thing in front of you, instead of doing something else, would be on the bottom, but even that is still active. Higher up would be the decision to see a film or to boycott it, higher still would be writing fan fiction, doing cosplay, or making a fanzine (in absolutely no order at all).

All consumption is inherently active, and inherently participatory, because consuming media is one of the ways in which we participate in contemporary capitalism. Fandom takes that participation a step further, by engaging with some kind of media to a greater extent than just consuming it. I’m not here to put labels on people, because fan and geek are self-applied identities, and nobody gets to tell you that you “aren’t a fan” of something, try as they might. So the simple fact that you choose to watch a show regularly, without going on forums to talk about it, makes you a fan if you choose to identify yourself as such. Among other things, I’m a Brony, even though I’ve never written pony fan fiction, remixed a song, or drawn Applejack fanart (Applejack is best pony), but I’m still a fan of the show, and own a bunch of random pony merchandise.

I should note that Williams wasn’t writing a “dismissal of fandom or media consumption as a whole” (his words), which is good. I still disagree with some of the basic assumptions he’s making though, which I find happens a lot when discussing “geek” culture (I really want to write something about assuming that all geeks are unpopular, only popular because geek is “chic” or have all been bullied). It’s only a blog post on a website, and so it would be too much to ask that it (or this post, for that matter), be terribly in-depth or well-sourced. It’s a spring boar to other ideas, and part of a larger conversation.

That conversation continues directly in a Jacobin piece by Jase Short, which specifically responds to Williams.  He does a nice job of challenging this passive idea of consumption. I’m a Marxist scholar at heart, but Marx was writing quite a while ago, and he never could have predicted how capitalism would have evolved (and yes, companies like Marvel only exist because of capitalism), and since human societies change over time, the theories that we use to discuss them have to as well. There are a lot of very interesting philosophers, scholars, authors, social critics, journalists and so on who have written things that are relevant to studying popular culture, consumption, capitalism, and the like. No single one of them has gotten it totally right, and those of us who want to continue this trend of studying the things that make up the day-to-day experiences of humans have to take what works from each and add to it ourselves. Otherwise we won’t learn anything.