Ten Things I Like About Dragonlance

For some gaming bloggers, taking potshots at Dragonlance is such a common occurrence, and done with so much venom, that you'd think the campaign setting pinched their kid sister's bum, got their dad fired from the mill, tripped their mom on the way back from the store, and got their older brother sent off to die on the front lines, all before lunchtime. Go figure. I guess some people just need to buy slacks that aren't so binding.

Anyhow.

Way back when, in one of the first posts here at the T&B, I talked about how Dragonlance, specifically the Dragonlance novels, were one of my earliest gateways into fantasy, and essentially, gaming. Oddly enough, although I've owned DL gaming material since almost as soon as I started gaming, I've never played in a Dragonlance campaign. Actually, as it now stands, I'd like to try a DL game some time putting Castles & Crusades in place of D&D. I think it'd port over pretty easily, and I've found C&C dead easy for new players to get a handle on.

And with that in mind, I wanted to present a list of ten things I like about the Dragonlance campaign setting. This isn't "ten great things about Dragonlance that make it better than other campaign settings", this is just ten things that I, personally, like about the setting.

1. The Cataclysm. Nothing says campaign backstory like dropping a crapton of giant freakin' rocks on a planet cuz the gods are angry. Actually, I think it's not a bad idea at all - if you're running a game set around the War of the Lance, the 'clysm happened only a few hundred years ago - long enough for ruined cities and other abandoned places to, ahem, take on new residents, but not so long ago that nothing would remain of what was left behind. Perfect dungeon-delving idea fodder.

2. No Orcs. It's not that I've got a problem with orcs, it's just that it's kinda nice to have a D&D setting without them. Some settings work fine with the "crack open the Monster Manual and go crazy" idea, but others work best, I think, when the designers (and the GMs) make a conscious decision to restrict the monsters that you'll find in the world. Also (again, not that there's anything wrong with it), avoiding orcs allows DL to take a (small) step away from Tolkien (and since it's based around a big huge epic struggle of Good vs. Evil and championed by a ragtag band of heroes, sometimes it needs all the distance it can get).

3. No Hobbits. Hey, those fuzzy-footed, curly-haired, roly-poly dudes who like to hang out and have four breakfasts and a nice pint and just chill out are totally fun, but I just don't get 'em as "adventurers" outside of The Hobbit and LotR. I've never really liked 'em in D&D, ever since that one time at band camp...okay, never mind. Circle of sharing, circle of sharing.

4. Kender. No, I am totally serious on this one. I like Kender. Not in that way, pervert. I actually think they fit the D&D dynamic a lot better than Hobbits, at least in Krynn. They are natural "wanderers", they steal stuff and are so good at it even THEY don't even know they're stealing, and they have no fear. At all. Totally fearless. Suck on that, Frodo. Actually, the only problem with Kender, in my mind, is that the people who want to play Kender are always the people you DON'T want playing Kender, because instead of grooving on the chance to have fun and explore that whole childlike innocence / comic relief thing, Kender PC players are usually total prats who just want to have an in-game excuse to annoy their fellow players and the DM while stealing from the party.
On a more serious note, Dragonlance is, to me, a campaign setting with a strong thematic current running through it regarding the death of innocence in a world. Between the Cataclysm and the loss of the favor of the gods, followed by the terrors of the rampaging Dragonarmies and their winged namesakes, being able to play a character who just doesn't "get it", who's full of hope and visions of adventure and glory, and then let's face it, make 'em watch you kick the puppy (figuratively speaking) can be a pretty cool idea. Actually, it's what I think made Tasselhoff (believe it or not) one of the (secretly) best parts of the first three novels - the times where he encountered real sadness, encountered pure evil and tragedy, and realized that the world was NOT a fun place - it was actually kinda cool. Does that make me a bad person? Hmmm...moving on.

5. Draconians. I dig these guys for a couple of reasons. One, because each of them die in such a way as to mess with (and possibly kill) the people who did them in. Two, they're monsters that are directly tied into the history of the campaign setting, assuming you're gaming around the time of the War of the Lance. Three, they are monsters that you can actually develop into interesting "characters" of their own, since several of the Draconian breeds are specifically mentioned as being used as spies, assassins, generals, etc., meaning that a good DM can build them into more than just another cool monster. You can have that Aurak Draconian general who's the party nemesis, PCs being hunted by and hunting in turn a Sivak shape-shifting spy in their midst, or suffer repeated attacks from a particularly resourceful Kapak assassin.

6. Minotaurs. Although I'm not huge on the whole "other campaign setting on the other side of the world" thing, I do dig minotaurs as a PC race. I dunno why, but I've always thought minotaurs were cool, and the thought of being able to play one is kinda awesome. The idea that they have a sort of proto-Roman society and are all arrogant and badass makes them even more cool in my mind. Oddly enough, I did have a Minotaur PC once, but it wasn't in DL - it was in a friend's short-lived homebrew campaign, where all the PCs were humanoids. Kind of a bummer that the game fell through - my Minotaur cleric was pretty badass.

7. Orders of High Sorcery. Some people like the idea of having a "wizard's guild" thing going on in their campaign, some don't. I think all too often this idea gets implemented into a game, but in the end doesn't really have an effect on the PCs. However, I think the OoHS are significant and structured enough that they create real choices and consequences for a magic-user PC. Once you hit 4th level, you either make a choice as to your order (and go through the trials), or you go rogue and suffer the consequences if you get caught. I also think it creates a good dynamic for the Illusionist to exist as a class apart from the magic-user, as a sort of rogue Order apart from the "true" orders, if one is so inclined.

8. The Dragons of Krynn. I think in too many campaign settings, Dragons are portrayed as little more than a big-monster-guarding-treasure adventure plot point. There's the usual "ancient and powerful creatures who once ruled the earth but now are few and far between, yet fearsome and nigh-unstoppable when disturbed", stuff, but then it tends to not go anywhere. DL actually took all that backfluff and did something with it. Some people think that's part of what makes the setting so craptastic, but eh, a lot of those people also didn't get hugged enough as children.

9. Tinker Gnomes. I dunno why I like these dudes, since they're kind of annoying, but I like them anyhow. I suppose a lot of people DON'T like them because many feel you can't have "comedy" or whatnot in a serious epic-battle-against-evil campaign setting. Well, like Kender, I think the problem isn't so much Tinker Gnomes themselves, as it is the people who always WANT to play Tinker Gnomes. I guess the biggest problem is that, if you go by the canon of the rules, Tinker Gnome inventions essentially never work, at least not the way they are supposed to. I'd be nice if, in fact, some of the Tinker Gnome devices did what they were intended to do, and could aid the rest of the party in their adventures.

10. Rarity of Clerics. If you're playing a campaign set around the War of the Lance, there really should be only a handful of "good" clerics around, and most of them will be involved in the war effort. I've always found the whole "clerics as medics" thing fine during adventuring, but if even low-level clerics in city or town temples have the ability to cure diseases and heal wounds, the social dynamics of a lot of campaign settings should really be a lot different. Even a 1st level cleric (assuming a version of the rules that allows 1st level Clerics to cast spells) would make a tangible difference, being able to heal a lot of injuries that would normally kill your average medieval peasant. Being able to create water during a drought, or purify food and drink - a lot of things that would change the way such communities would work. In Dragonlance, there's actually a pretty good reason that Magic-Users are feared and Clerics are rare (or just don't exist, depending on the time frame). However, I think that if I run a DL campaign using C&C rules, I'd have Druids still exist even after the Cataclysm, although they would be rare and very reclusive (the druids drawing their magical power from "nature" rather from the gods, or in a way, from the gods through a proxy, thus getting around the whole "punish the humans for their hubris" thing.

All right, that's that. Dragonlance isn't the best setting ever, and I will agree that it has its flaws, but I do think there is plenty to like about it, and the setting is perfectly usable as background for a good campaign - even one not set during the War.

As always, questions and comments are welcome.

Chris Dane Owens, Shine on THIS

My good buddy Masakari, always mindful of my heavy metal tastes, and having suffered through that crapfest "Shine On Me" video, found this and decided I needed to see it.

Title: Into the Maelstrom
Artists: A Band of Orcs



I believe that's what is called a "palate cleanser".

I wonder what it says about my gaming tastes that I get more inspiration from this video than I ever would from Owen's hair-flowingly prattish spectacle.

F.G.F #1: Grosse Pointe Blank(1997)

At first blush, Grosse Pointe Blank might not seem like a very gaming-related film. On the other hand, it has some themes that are, I feel, very applicable. Foremost among them is the theme of a person who has been living on the violent, lawless, immoral side of life suddenly having to reintegrate himself back into "normal" society. This movie is far from the first film to touch on this - the film (and it's preceding book) Shane is a masterwork in handling this idea - but I think GPB handles it pretty well. How do you reconnect with people you haven't seen in over a decade when you have absolutely nothing in common with them, and in fact can't even talk about what you do for a living or what's happened in your life for the last 10 years? How do you come back home again after disappearing for a decade, and reconcile with lost loves and lost friends when they discover that you kill people for a living?

Here's an (admittedly rough-looking) trailer for the film:



(Actually, although it's not a "film", JJ Abrams' Alias was an excellent look at this concept - how does a person function in a polite modern society when your life is nothing but secrets, lies, and violence? Although this theme fades out in the later half of the series, it's actually the backbone of the first couple of seasons. If you get a chance, give the series a try.)

This is a theme that can be pulled into a lot of different genres. In your average fantasy setting "adventurers" might be commonplace, or they might be quite rare, but it's reasonable to believe that a breed of people who make their living going out into the wilds, killing monsters and looting long-abandoned places for fun and profit, aren't going to have a lot in common with your typical village population. Your average gaming party is a heavily armed band of marauding profiteers who make a living through plunder and slaughter - how do you put that aside when, for example, you return to your home village when your younger brother gets betrothed?

Or heck, how do you deal with "the normal people" whenever you stop off for the day in any little one-horse town between Ye Home Base and the nearest dungeon? The party is probably treated with respect only out of sheer terror, the locals fearing that if your tankard isn't kept full you'll slaughter the entire village. How can such simple peasants possibly hope to relate to people who regularly face and deal out death with sword, bow, and spell? Who confront demons and dragons and the undead? Frankly, the PCs would, I think, be regarded more often than not as little better than the creatures they habitually do battle with.

This theme carries over even better into more modern, real-world settings. In a techno-thriller or espionage campaign, how do PCs deal with the fact that you can't tell your friends or family what you do? You can't have a serious relationship and heck - at what point does your character stop viewing "normal" people as human beings, and begin viewing them as little more than sheep - or worse, target practice? Col. Dave Grossman's disturbingly insightful work On Killing talks about this at some length - the difficulty in associating with "noncombatants" when your life is a horror show of death and violence. How can you attend your high school reunion and enjoy yourself when, in the back of your mind, all you're doing is idly contemplating firing angles, ingress and egress points, suitable venues of cover, and whether that guy from your senior physics class is now fat enough to use as a bullet sponge if all hell breaks loose?

That's all for now, folks. As always, questions and comments are appreciated.

New Column: Filmic Gaming Fodder

I was a Film major in college, and while that didn't do much for my employability in later years, it certainly did contribute to my gaming vision, both as a player and as a GM. Now, I'm not saying one needs a Film degree in order to appreciate movies, even at a deeper level than your average moviegoer, but I have to admit that it does change your perspective when it comes to watching a film - you find yourself pondering the lighting and the angles, the writing and the editing and the production values, blah blah blah blah. Of course, this can ruin films for you just like having a degree in Classical Studies might make you loathe a movie like 300. I know an Art History professor who was so disgusted with the depiction of the Colosseum in Ridley Scott's Gladiator that he couldn't finish the rest of the film. I was just glad to see Sven Ole Thorsen still getting work.

Anyhow, to the point at hand. I want to take a look at a number of films, some of which are stock favorites among a lot of gamers, and some that are less conventional "gaming movies", but offer some interesting game-related insights, particularly in the areas of interesting scenes, characterizations, story themes, and game-inspiring moods and tonalities. A lot of these films will probably fall outside of the more common sci-fi/fantasy/action movie genres as well; one of the things I hope to accomplish with this column is also an interest in gaming outside of more conventional settings and genres.

As for how these movies will be organized or discussed, I'll probably just cherry-pick from some of my favorite movies and not worry too much about an over-arching theme for this column or flimic timeline - I'm just not organized enough for that kind of long-term thinking. I'd like to do at least one a week, but only time will tell if I can pull that off.

Hopefully today I can bang out my first F.G.F review...

RPG Design Journal 2.1: Kicking the Baby

See? This is why it's good (but painful) to sometimes expose one's ideas to the 'Net.

All the posters who commented on my last column made very good points. As mentioned in a response comment, the original idea for the mechanic came from Silhouette's basic skill test mechanic, which involved rolling a number of skill dice, adding an attribute-based mod to the highest die, and then comparing the two highest dice and using the remainder to determine the effects. I liked the idea, but started tinkering with it and looking for ways to make it my own. What ultimately came about was something that, apparently, is a non-starter.

Which leads me to a point I want to emphasize, both to myself and to my readers who are also considering work on their own systems or rules - don't be afraid to kick the baby.

Somewhere floating out there I once came across a list of 10 (?) tips for indie RPG designers (here's a list of good ones, although this isn't the list I'm talking about). Maybe it was written by Ron Edwards, maybe Robin Laws - I can't remember. But one of those points was that you cannot cling to one concept so tightly that it blinds you to the fact that it was never worth holding on to in the first place. For a lot of people (myself included) RPGs are a very personal, creative thing, and a lot of us take great pains to shield our creations from the harsh glare of objective criticism. In the end, as with real children, if you shelter it too much, your creation will suffer.

[Edit: My good buddy Masakari was able to find the post I was thinking of. I was thinking of points 2, 3, and especially #10.]

So, I'm tossing aside my High Roll mechanic. I actually think I'm going to use a more Traveller-like idea; 2d6 + Skill Rating, aiming to beat a base difficulty of 7 (so 8+ is a success). It's quick, it's (I think) pretty straightforward, and for a lot of people, it will be at least passingly familiar.

What do people think - an improvement? Comments and questions are, as always, welcome.

RPG Design Journal Part 2: The Core Mechanic

So way, wayyy back in April I posted Part 1 of the Design Journal, where I "set the stage" for my vague thoughts on RPG system development. A lot of time and thought has passed regarding this idea of mine, and I've chipped away a little at what I call, for better or for worse, the Tankards & Broadswords RPG. Not especially original, I know, but whatcha gonna do, right?

Anyhow, one thing that I want to hammer down before anything else is the Core Mechanic. I must admit that I am a fan of having One Core Mechanic in a system. That doesn't mean that there won't be the occasional odd roll here or there, so I guess I'm not a Core Mechanic purist, but I like having a system where, when explaining it to a new player for the first time, there's really just one core system idea you need to nail down, like "roll this d20 and get a high number" or "roll these percentile dice and hope you roll low". Basic Roleplaying does a good job of this. They have one standard percentile mechanic, but the rules aren't above asking for a random 1-10 roll or 1-6 roll now and then to determine something that doesn't need the granularity of a percentile roll.

So with that in mind, here's my Core Mechanic. I think it's relatively easy to pick up, quick, requires essentially no math, and is more or less generic enough to be used as a "Core" determination mechanic. To quote my current rules draft:

The High Roll Mechanic
The T&B RPG uses one standard mechanic for determining the outcome of most gameplay decisions - the High Roll. Whenever a character has to make a skill roll, the Player rolls a number of six-sided dice equal to the character's skill rating. The result of the throw, from highest number to lowest, is then compared to an opposing die roll - representing either an attempt by another character to prevent the action, or simply the vagaries of chance and circumstance getting in the way. Whichever throw has the "High Roll" - the highest die unmatched by a die on the opposing side - is the winner.
For example. Two characters are battling each other. The attacker makes a roll with his Melee skill of 4, rolling four dice - 5, 4, 2, 1. The defender makes a roll with his Defense skill of 3, rolling three dice - 5, 4, and 4. The first two dice match up and cancel each other out, but the first unmatched pair of dice - the attacker's 2 and the defender's 4 - determine the result. In this case, the defender wins with a Balance (remainder) of 2. The attacker's 1 is immaterial and isn't considered in the results.
Keep in mind that the number of dice rolled and the overall result has no bearing on how well an action was performed - all that matters is the result of the highest unmatched die - the High Roll. If one character rolls six dice and gets 4, 4, 3, 3, 3, and 2, and an opposing character rolls a single die and gets a 5, the 5 wins out. None of the other dice the first character rolled have any bearing on the outcome - only the High Roll matters.

The Rule of 6
Although there are only results from 1 to 6 on the dice used in the skill rolls, a High Roll can go above 6 if there is more than one 6 rolled in a single throw. For every additional 6 rolled in a single throw, the High Roll is raised by 1. So if a character rolls five dice and gets 6, 6, 6, 4, and 2, the High Roll is an 8; 6 + 1 + 1 for the two additional sixes.
Furthermore, if every die rolled in a skill test is a 6, the player is allowed to roll an additional die. If THAT die is a 6, another additional die may be rolled, and so on and so forth. This allows for a (vanishingly small) chance that the High Roll can have any result, so even a pretty incompetent character can produce a (very lucky) High Roll of 7 or more.

The "0d" Rule
Characters who have no dice in a particular skill can still try and make a skill roll. The player rolls 1d, and subtracts 1 from the result. While this doesn't seem like a big difference compared to someone with 1d in a skill, keep in mind that the -1 modifier means the 0d skill doesn't benefit from the "Rule of 6". Furthermore, even if there is a skill modifier (due to circumstances, magic, equipment - whatever) that raises the result so the roll is a "6", a 0d skill cannot ever make use of the "Rule of 6".

And there we go. This would be the basic task-resolution mechanic for the system. There will be the occasional "roll 1d/2d and look here", and damage is done using a straight die roll, but in terms of task resolution, the "High Roll" is it.

Opinions? Comments? Questions?

History as Textbook vs. History as Discovery

Or, as I like to call it, The Silmarillion vs. The Hobbit.

So, the next book on deck, the book that should carry me through my two weeks' worth of Holiday vacation, is The Silmarillion. I like LotR well enough and I've got no problem with Tolkien, but I've never been a crazy big fan of Middle Earth, and while I've owned a small paperback of the book for a long, long time, I've never gotten around to reading it. But a week ago on a whim I picked up The Children of Hurin, and my buddy Darkwing informed me that reading the Silmarillion might be a good idea before I start in on CoH in order to have a better idea of the backstory.

Well, the Silmarillion is a pretty hefty text. It's basically a history of the origins of Middle Earth, but written in what you might call a "pseudo-homeric" style, so it's not really textbook writing so much as something like the Bible or the Aeneid. It's laying out multiple thousands of years of history and great big world-making and world-shaking events - seriously heavy stuff here. I'm sure at 16 I didn't have the patience to read this beast, and I'm hoping now that I'm twice that age, it'll come along a little easier.

But what I want to talk about, after all that, is this. Say you read the Silmarillion before you read the Hobbit. Wouldn't it change the perspective from which you viewed the story considerably? Taking this a step further, if Bilbo (and later Frodo) had read that text, would it have changed their perspective on things during the course of their adventures?

All this circles back to gaming. I, at one time in my foolish youth, loved to bang out these weighty, multi-page treatises for my players to read, detailing the lush history of their gaming world, the customs and cultures of all its peoples, yadda yadda yadda. Some read it, some didn't, no big whup. Now that I'm older, I tend to shy away from doing this because A) I don't have the time or energy for it anymore, and B) neither do my players have the time or energy to read / process it. Instead, I like to start real small - a village or hamlet or whatever, and just kinda build the history and culture in my mind (and the minds of the players) during gameplay. I'm much better at improvising stuff on the fly that I am cobbling together huge plots and ideas beforehand, so this tends to work for me.

Back to the Tolkien reference. If you sit down and write up a big ol' treatise on the history of your campaign setting and hand it out to your players in order to prep them so they know about your campaign world, is that better or worse than just giving them a few small details and then letting their players discover the world and it's history organically through gameplay? On the one hand, it might save you the time and effort it would take to have to explain out things when they come up "Ohhhh, you mean THAT war against the elves. Gotcha!", but on the other hand, it might dampen the thrill of discovery, the "sense of wonderment" players / PCs get when the full tapestry of the game world is revealed thread by thread and their imaginations get the joy of weaving it all together.

So what do you all say? Do you prefer to hand out / have handed to you a "campaign history", or do you just start off with / want given to you a couple of basic details and let it all come out during play? And specifically for GMs, do you try to really build a fully realized history for your campaign setting even before gameplay starts, even if the players don't see it , in order to give your gaming perspective, or do you prefer to just have a few broad-brushstrokes ideas and make it all up as you go along?

There Is No Spoon, Just Some Dice

I've found myself thinking about 1999's The Matrix quite a bit lately for one reason or another. Not only did I got and see it on my birthday when it came out, but it was the DVD to get when it became available in that media. I've probably seen it, or at least instances of it, several dozen times over the last eight and a half years.

One of the things I've been thinking a lot about is that in a lot of ways, The Matrix isn't necessarily a science-fiction movie - it's a modern urban fantasy. Many urban fantasy stories (and I make the "urban" distinction because it's a little bit different than the kind of modern fantasy story that you'll find taking place "in the wild") involve the "other world" that exists co-mingled within our own world (which is where I think urban fantasy differs from rural fantasy - in the rural fantasy realm, the "other world" tends to be some kind of haunted wood or glen). The Matrix isn't quite there, but it seems to blend the genres a lot in some really interesting ways - part sci-fi, part fantasy, part cyberpunk, part superhero.

This sort of modern urban fantasy mix also has me thinking a lot about the old White Wolf games. I played Werewolf: The Apocalypse a lot in college, and dabbled in Mage, Vampire, and the Hunter series (this is in the days before Hunter: the Reckoning - I'm talking about The Hunter's Hunted and the Year of the Hunter sourcebooks). I'm not a fan of V:tM and I think M:tA was a great idea that only half succeeded (I kinda ignore Wraith and Changeling since I have no experience with either and didn't know anyone who had). Werewolf: the Apocalypse, however, I thought was a great idea, lacking a lot of the angst of V:tM or navel-gazing of M:tA, but it still had heart, and something that us poor mortals playing the game could get behind - it's all about nature vs. the machine, the wild vs. uncontrolled chaos, ego vs. id. I've never had a chance to read through any of the "rebooted" WoD material, but I'd probably still be willing to play in or run a W:tA campaign.

Which circles back to The Matrix. There appears to be, after a brief Google search, multiple different versions of a Matrix RPG out there. I'm not really sure I'd want to play in a Matrix RPG, especially one that involved the second and third movies (because they really tend to wrap up the story and give away a lot of "meh" detail that I wouldn't want there anyhow). I wonder if a blend of WoD mechanics/feel plus The Matrix storyline (first movie only) could brew up an intersting RPG. After all, a lot of the Mage powers seem awfully similar to abilities found once the rules of the Matrix are "bent". And was that Neo "ascending" at the end of the first film?

Has anyone out there ever thought of doing a Matrix RPG campaign, or knows anyone who has played in one? I'm curious as to people's thoughts on this matter.