Weird Magical Items and Narrative Reactivity

So, to take a break from podcasts or talking about Assassin’s Creed I recently caught up with an article on io9 called “The 20 Most WTF Magical Items in Dungeons & Dragons”. The intention of this article was to poke fun at some of the more apparently ridiculous items to be found in D&D’s extensive back catalogue of quest minutiae. I don’t know quite how this all works, as in, I’m not sure how these ideas come to be included in official D&D stuff.

Are D&D coast wizards constantly scribbling down ideas for these things in notebooks they keep close at hand day and night? Or do they, in fact, create new items in their own campaigns and then submit the best ones for inclusion in whatever volume of stuff they’re currently compiling? I tend to think the latter as the vast majority of insanely detailed plots, locations, NPCs etc. rise out of play sessions, response to, you know, actual players and the like.

So I guess that we can be comfortable in the notion that these things were not just summoned wholesale from the basement of imagination, made, as it were, from whole cloth. While some of the items seem, quite clearly, to be cursed objects intended to provoke a particular howl of simultaneous disbelief, horror and delight from players others, maybe, bore the marks of a thing I’m going to call “Narrative Reactivity”.

What is this new thing that I have created? Well, it’s less of a creation and more of an observation really. It’s about the nature of lazy creation when it comes to problems where your characters won’t behave in a story. Many times when this happens in role play it comes from the feeling the host has that managing the demands of the players is somewhat akin to herding cats. Maybe that feeling demands some more time in another post at another time, but right now we shall move swiftly on.

In writing the same thing can happen, and is possibly more upsetting for featuring characters dreamed up within your very living brain itself as opposed to being centred in the brains of other people who might be forgiven for not psychically understanding what you want to achieve in the story world you have built for them.

If the characters who come from your own mind start misbehaving, though, that can be, well, troubling. It puts forth the notion that you are not quite in control of parts of your mind, that people you dreamed up can have their own agendas. There’s something dark and mystical about your characters engaging in acts of sabotage against your story. In those cases you might find that the solutions the inexperienced or desperate author comes up with to fight against the tide of mutiny are more desperate, leading to the lazy introduction of plot-hole tearing technologies and surprise deus ex machinas and the like. So my hope with considering a few of these D&D items is to reveal something of the wiring under the board with regards to such incidents in the hope of guarding against such lazy story making.

Exhibit One: The Ring of Contrariness This “forces the wearer to disagree with everything anyone says” the author of the linked argument concludes that given the difficulty of forging magical artifacts this represents “a prime example of some wizard wasting his time.”

This is actually quite an easy one to unpick. It smells like a GM consulting on a D&D expansion met a player who was quiet and unassuming, someone who just appeared to tag along behind in every session. So in a GM ambush this player ends up with this ring on their finger and is magically required to stir up trouble, the peacemaker has become the agitator. Was this fun, or torture, for the player targetted? We will never know.

So, yes, the idea of a wizard inside the narrative bothering to make such an apparently useless artifact is troublesome. So much so that the meta-purpose of the item appears for more clearly than an in-story reason for someone to forge such an irritating artifact. However, the existence of such an item would appear to be a great opportunity for a budding story teller. How did this ring come to be? That is a tale to be told.

From a gamer’s perspective, of course, the item is a curiosity, leading to some sort of game outcome of no major import. If the reasons for its inclusion were indeed as stated above it may have arisen out of a misplaced desire to see all players fully participate in the game. GMs feel that if someone seems not to quite be in the game that this is necessarily a problem in need of resolution when, in reality, some people just like to be along for the ride.

The up front way to deal with a player who doesn’t appear to be participating to the fullest would be to just ask them if they’re happy with the way things are going and only try to change things if they are not. Of course, role playing is a particularly delicate form of social contract so your mileage in such circumstances may vary.

Exhibit Two: Bell's Palette of Identity

Bell the Wizard [made] this magic art palette, which, when used to paint a self-portrait, allows all status effects — basically anything you'd make a saving throw for — get transferred to the portrait instead. Users of the Palette must carry their self-portraits around wherever they go; if they don't have the paintings literally on their body, its powers are useless.

The linked article’s author speculates as to why the portrait must be kept in the possession of the character, tied around their left leg with fishing twine or whatever (rolled up around the inside of a knee-high boot?). The conclusion is that the Wizard Bell was just a bit rubbish not to have fully embraced this offshoot of the Picture of Dorian Gray.

There is, however, a simpler explanation for the item’s strange properties. Firstly, D&D characters have no real homes, they live in campsites and sleep in taverns. The party must never be split and must never stop moving. So the idea of an item that only works when placed on a shelf in the character’s home might lead to some awkwardness.

Also, what is the risk of an item that will make someone immune to whole swathes of rules in the game that cannot be accidentally ruined by a sword slash in the wrong place or accidentally landing up to the waist in swamp water? The properties of the magic palette are a quite obvious trade off of utility and plot convenience.

Exhibit Three: Ring of Bureaucratic Wizardry

When a wizard casts any spell while wearing the ring, a sheaf of papers and a quill pen suddenly appear in his hand. The papers are forms that must be filled out in triplicate explaining the effects of the spell, why the wizard wishes to cast it, whether it is for business or pleasure, and so on. The forms must be filled out before the effects of the spell will occur. The higher the level of the spell cast, the more complicated the forms become. Filling out the forms requires one round per level of spell.

This must have seemed like a cracking gag when it was dreamed up. Indeed it is a very good joke, it works on both a narrative and a ludic level. The joke transfers through the intra-digetic up to the meta level and actually means more things the more levels on which you appreciate it. If I understand correctly the advantage of the artifact would appear to be that the spell being cast is not subject to failure, just to bureaucratic delay.

To make a super-powerful spell operate guaranteed if the rest of the party can just hold off the enemy whilst the wizard does the necessary paperwork is a fantastic mental image. This leaves only one question. How did this item come to be? As I noted I imagine the sudden appearance of artifacts like these is likely to be reactive.

Maybe there was a wizard who was pretty pedantic and always cast low-risk spells leading to a situation where they just weren’t pulling their weight in the party (plus annoying pedants are annoying). This item seems like a cracking way to help address the balance in a way that gets people laughing about the situation.

Exhibit Four: Druid's Yoke

If you're in a D&D campaign where you need to do any kind of farming, you have bigger problems than any magical item can fix. But this yoke allows characters to — when they put it on themselves — turn into an ox. Not a magical ox; a regular ox. Then you can till your field yourself! You can't do it any faster, because again, you're just a goddamned ox, but it does allow you to… do the horrible manual labor… instead of the animal you've bred for this exact purpose. So that's… something someone would totally want. The best part? Once you've put it on, you can't take the yoke off; someone else has to do it for you. Because you're a goddamned ox.

Of all the artifacts that seem to have been created in reaction to a particular situation this one would appear to be the most specific. I can picture a campaign where, in order to get access to a particular bad guy, the players had to get access to a cattle market but the entry is restricted to people who had something to trade. They have money, but of course, the only place to buy a cow in time for the market is, unfortunately, the market: catch 22.

So they do find this Druid’s Yoke thingie which leads to an argument as to which team member will be, er, beefing up, for the market. After all anyone who can’t see the clear downsides to this not-so-genius plan must be a bit dense.

Obviously the plan goes sideways, how could it not? Now the rest of the team have to fight to reclaim their en-oxened party member in order to remove the yoke. Meanwhile the ox itself is trying to shake the yoke, or get it removed, by any means necessary. Hilarity is all but guaranteed to ensue.

Anyone who doesn’t see the narrative potential of this item isn’t thinking very hard. All you need to do is manufacture a reason for someone to put it on and let the rest of the plot flow from that circumstance.

Exhibit Five: Puchezma's Powder of Edible Objects

Interestingly, this odd item is one of the few D&D magical items that does have a back-story; apparently the unfortunately named Puchezma was a cheapskate who inadvertently created a powder that allowed him to eat any chewable material while trying to make a spice that would allow him to eat cheaper and cheaper food. With it, people can eat anything from cotton to tree leaves instead of bread and salted beef! Now, I would say if you're carrying around cotton, you might as well be carrying food. I would also say that if you plan on your player-character eating tree leaves to save fictional money you are very much missing the greater point of D&D.

This, along with another item called “fish dust” seem most obviously created in order to solve a pernickity problem. How to expediate the delivery of food to the players in unusual circumstances or, without exhaustive checks for success in a given activity.

Fish dust is a dust you sprinkle on water and it stuns the fish it touches causing them to float to the surface. Essentially it’s a kind of quiet way of dynamiting fish.

I can just see, in either case, that a party were either a) able to fish but the GM did not want to waste time on having them do so instead of getting on with the story or b) wandering through an ancient tomb of stuff with no food and in danger of starving to death. In each case the GM produced an item which mitigated the immediate problem and allowed the story to move on. No big mystery.

Exhibit Six: Mirror of Simple Order

"When a character steps in front of this mirror, he sees a strangely distorted image of himself. … There are eyes, a mouth, and a nose, but all lack character. Although the figure moves as the character does, it is shorter or taller than he is, adjusted in whatever direction approaches the average height of the character's race. Any clothing worn by the character is altered as well. Bright colors will be muted, appearing to be shades of grey. Any ornamental work on armor, weapons, or clothing will be gone. … He retains his level and class, but is not as exceptional as he might have been. He is bland and boring. The character's alignment changes to lawful neutral, and he becomes interested in little else other than setting order to the world." So there's a magical item that turns you into a soulless bureaucrat. I guess that's whose making those damn rings.

This is a fascinating artifact as, like the Ring of Contrariness, I can see it having been created as a “trap” for a particularly flair heavy and flamboyant player character, but the implications of the device reach far beyond this one usage. In fact, coming to think about it I cannot help but wonder if this is a reaction to a group losing a player who turned in a “unique” performance as an extrovert exhibitionist with bags of charisma.

Not wanting to kill the character or pass it along to another player the Mirror accomplishes the job of leaving the character largely as was but removing all of their individuality. Possibly there was a chance that the player would return, making the restoration of the player’s “true” character a subject for a twist in the narrative.

Essentially, in game terms, this artifact would seem like the perfect tool for turning an individual character into a bland back-up NPC for an uncertain duration and for this reason it is an object that only has its true meaning revealed in its meta-purpose. Intra-digetically to the narrative, of course, the effect of this mirror would be a terrible, subtle and deeply unsettling curse.

Chance Would Be A Fine Thing

Visited London at the weekend to stay with gamer Mike. I got the double pleasure of playing his Tron lightcycle tabletop game, which is a real toy experience, and running a PULP game for Mike, Nick, Rob and Vicky.

They opted for Western style and we produced a slice of fairly moody frontier drama. The characters created weren't high toned enough for spaghetti Western, or silly enough for heroic Western, although Nick's Riverboat gambler did seem to fit into any of the above.

We elected, due to time restraints, to generate characters on the fly and that worked out very well indeed. I'm really happy with the fact that PULP is becoming the most invisible of all of our systems in terms of the dichotomy between support and absence.

On the way home with Justin had a big discussion about the way that No Dice is going and what we might like to do to plan for the future. I'm surprised to find that I am having difficulty viewing any level of corporate involvement as any kind of help at this stage. One day I would love to use what I've learned to design a game with a "proper" games company but I'm not sure that any of our current projects would benefit from the involvement of the wise and wonderful in the world of RP. After all we still have acres of niche to exploit getting PULP RP and the Core System into the homes of gamers everywhere mostly down to the failure of everyone else in the world to really fill the narrative void. This is down in no small part to a corporate model which believes such things to be, at best, too risky to be viable.

I'm also enjoying the Robin Hood act, being generous, being crazy, trying to claim the market with kindness. I'd say it hasn't paid off, except it's starting to. That's what's enormously encouraging. People are coming forth and saying that No Dice is "a good thing". I wouldn't want anything to interfere with that currently.

...And Let That Be The End Of The Matter!

 This Dice vs. Cards thing is now irritating me. Not because everyone keeps saying how much they wuv their dice and would marry them if they were not polyhedral lumps of plastic; although that is slightly creepy.

No, what's getting me is that people say that Cards = Dice and therefore Cards !> Dice. In the Core Book we went into some detail about why this was not the case but now I think about it we probably didn't get to the heart of the matter. All the things we say are true, cards are more versatile and excellent mnemonically to keep system in people's heads instead of forcing them to bookmark rules and charts or refer to their super secret GM Screen to remember what numeric value on what chart means what.

But this doesn't cut to the very greatest thing about cards, i.e. they save you time.

I have not run a session that ran longer than three and a half hours in at least a year. At the same time, no one leaves these sessions feeling short changed. This is not a usual state of affairs in the hobby of RP. Of course I did my hahasoamusing little experiment write up in yesterday's entry. Although intended to be sarcastic it does have a serious point behind it. My session plans have gone from being good for two to three weeks worth of play, doing four and a half hour's worth at a time, coming away from every session feeling we should have done more, to cramming a good deal of plot and action into three to four hours with space for a tea break in the middle. Where did all this time come from?

Some might reason that I had simply become a more efficient Host. Well, possibly, but I know some cracking Hosts who have been in the game far longer than I have who still have a problem keeping in the limits of a good six hour run.

Maybe it is a combination of elements, fair enough. But here's one thing I know for a fact. Rolling a dice isn't just more time-consuming compared to drawing a card, it has the potential to introduce a finger-pause in the action that threatens to deep-six your session. Now, I have noticed that this is certainly not the case when properly playing your game of choice on a tabletop. Board games and the like seem to take a throw of the dice in their stride, it's part of the fun, and I have enjoyed exactly that fun on more than one occasion myself.

No, where dice are the kiss of death is in the sofa-lounge scenario. There's something quite luxurious about loafing about on a sofa engaged in RP something that gets players into a rhythm and even seems to put them in something of a trance. Nothing shatters that concentration like everyone craning forward to see a dice roll. Now, if you were to display dice rolls on a television screen or similar so they were big enough to be read without people craning forward to see them then that might mitigate the problem; but why employ technology when a playing card is usually clear enough to be seen by someone just holding it aloft?

This is where I think the time gains are made. There is some time at the beginning of a session where people are settling into the game. In a way the game takes a while for everyone involved to become fully engaged in it. I believe that in the past when people have rolled a dice it almost jogs them out of the game. Having a tea break also has a similar effect but that happens maybe once in a session, dice rolling is supposed to be a more frequent event.

Now I come to think about it I remember when I used to run Over The Edge by the book, with dice pools and what have you, we used to swerve rolls wherever possible. In fact the habit of being a dice dodger was one that infected all the games I played (not necessarily Hosted, just partook of) before starting in on No Dice. Now I come to think about it I can remember a lot of times the Host of the game, and sometimes that was me, made a Host Fiat decision before allowing the rhythm to be upset by a randomiser check. Randomiser checks which were supposed to be common became a last resort.

Some gamers still wear the "we hardly ever roll dice" thing as a narrative badge of honour. I always felt it made the whole thing less fun if you were afraid of trusting the vagaries of chance. If you stick to the unforgiving mistress that is chance the story is likely to be a lot more dramatic for the players than it is if you are the Host who enforces most of the rules but is basically on the player's side. Choices become important. In a fudged game choices are not really choices, they're just scenery on the mystery tour which really only has one destination and outcome.

Host Fiat in such cases is evil. It should be used to decide whether a proposed player plan even has a chance of succeeding; it's not intended to replace the element of chance altogether. The problem is that when your arbitration mechanism is destructively intrusive it encourages destructively simple Host arbitration. The most effective arbitrary Hosts are the ones who sustain a healthy distance between themselves and the players, although I always find this overcooks the player experience, the game becomes one of [Insert Host Name Here]'s games which are unique and untouchable.

Unless it can be systemised and is approachable it needs work. At least, in my world it does. For these reasons:

• discourages "fluffy Host syndrome"
• encourages randomiser use
• preserves fictive state
• shortens game length
• while increasing game quality

I say cards are indeed > dice. And that's all I have to say on the topic ever.

The Bloody End (of my NSHO).

Doing It For The Fans

 Long time, no blog, for reasons already expounded.

A mail from Matt today prompted me to reconsider the logic of the statement that content producers in various media love to gushingly proclaim: "We're doing this for the fans!"

Matt's mail addressed a perceived problem with the No Dice Core Book that people didn't like the introduction in length or content and it was putting people off the system. Maybe, maybe not. In my experience people are really good at making excuses for not doing this or that. We call people sheep because they resist and reject and reject and resist before, in some cases, running hell for leather towards some mediocre artefact because everyone else is doing it.

Digression! For example the number of moany twunts I've seen complaining that "Cards are not all that different from dice". Here's a simple experiment that proves the utter arsetwattery of such moans:

1) Sit on a sofa holding a D6.
2) Without leaning forward, to the side, employing the aid of any flat surface such as a table or the cover of your favourite "My Little Munchkin" Annual roll the dice to produce a satisfactory result.
3) Notice this is, at least, inconvenient.
4) Repeat the process, except this time hold a shuffled pack of cards in the hand of your choice. Draw rather than roll.
5) Now repeat with dice, but time how long it takes to roll the dice and read off the result.
6) Now repeat with cards and time how long it takes to make and read a draw.
7) Multiply the amount of time from 5 by 50. You will probably end up with an amount of time somewhere in the region of 20 minutes.
8) Multiply the amount of time from 6 by 50. You will probably end up with an amount of time somewhere in the region of 5 minutes.
9) Note how much time you save using a pack of cards.
10) Stop pretending that dice are the convenient randomiser of choice STFU and go away.

It certainly doesn't help that for everything on the good side of mediocre up there is 1000x as much stuff that slides off the grotesque hunchback of the distribution curve and leaves quality produce, or the stuff with potential, drowning in a sump of crap.

People have very strong filters for novelty, it's only necessity that pushes them beyond that. If I was a keen role player of the old school I would be put off No Dice because of its novelty. It's only because I find most role playing system books utterly unreadable, mired in pointless and restrictive micromangement details, filled with equations and charts that make most current role playing "statistics and probability for fun". People I role play with read the systems in order to hack them into something that requires far less effort. Those people are the kinds of people who will decide quite quickly that they've bought enough core books and they're going to do their own thing.

Many of these guys run the one system they could be bothered to finish reading through in pared down form, or just stick to homebrew, or homebrew something LIKE some system they skim read once but a hell of a lot lighter.

But I didn't get involved in No Dice to reach the other people, the people who play by the book, the people who are put off by the mere concept of reappraising their hobby. I believe that we wrote it for newbies and those who love role play as a form of narrative entertainment somehow sullied by arbitrary numeric systems that impede the development of plot.

We wrote No Dice for our friends. All the people who "get" No Dice are fans of it. All the people who just feel slightly nauseous reading the Introduction to the Core Book are not. So of course I'm "doing it for the fans". Who in their right mind would do it for the non-fans? Try and please a bunch of people who really couldn't care less if you died in a ditch? Who would do that?

So I guess like every other content producer and the rest of the gang I am obviously doing No Dice for the fans. Those people who want to whinge that they would love it more if we just changed the length and content of the introduction to sound like every other Role Playing System ever written can shove it up their anuses. If that is they can fit "it" up there with all the polyhedral dice, pencils, double sided character sheets, hex maps and rule expansions they've retained up there already.

Tortured anal retentive joke over I will mention that one of the projects for 2011 is the Core Book Redux. I've reread the Core Book and I can see a hell of a lot that's just plain wrong with it. However, I did not miss the absence of page after page after page of number crunch combat system.

(More To Follow.)

Crawling Toward The Finish Line

Back from Belper and keen to relay gory details but for now suffice to say that my favourite session of the weekend for general hilarity and mirth filled darkness has to have been OTE. Least favourite for running smoothly but certainly no slouch in the "fresh ideas" camp was Dreamtime which was intellectually stimulating whilst being a bit slow to play. Work is ongoing.

Other than that I am pounding the keys frantically on the home stretch with Levercastle which nearly has a magic system and does, in fact, have an Alchemy system which all the failed alchemists in my campaign may be pleased, or nervous, to hear.

For now though, arrivederci.

Missing By A Mile

Recovering from a system bork I found this in my unpublished drafts. It's an article by a much more old-skool games designer than anyone I hang out with.

What I found amusing was the referencing of games designers pandering to rules lawyers. It has to be said that hitherto most successful games companies have made money by doing precisely this. It makes me wonder if we're going about this the right way or if we should be producing another 200 page rules supplement every week like some other games companies.

Oh well, guess we'll never be rich and we'll be considered wrong and foolish; at least we're happy not wasting our lives looking for a definitive decision on that rules quibble.

Yikes!

So RoboJoe stole the show... *sigh* worst X Factor winner Evar! (relatively speaking, Leon Jackson was a massive anti-climax but he wasn't up against talent like Olly, Danyl and Stacey, he also wasn't following talent like Alexandra and JLS).

I've been creating a wiki for No Dice. This will replace the soon to be extinct No Dice Forums. Have a look around. There's already a bunch of stuff in System Hacks.

Also Random Encounters is out! The ideal Chrimbo gift! Buy one now! ;)

Have a good Monday!

Things Are Getting Desperate

Only a couple of days to go until No Dice debuts at Beer & Pretzels. I'm really looking forward to taking some games out for a trundle. Justin, Mrs Monkey and myself had a war council last night and it all is looking quite exciting. I think it's fair to say that hopes are high for this enterprise. Sure we won't be filling a Global Stadium Tour any time soon but I hope people can get behind what we're trying to do here.

One thing that struck me in the paper-riffic character sheet production bonanza that took place yesterday was that we really do have a vast array of different rules and features that swap around in a dizzying number of ways to create an awesome powerhouse of role play variety.

It was part of the design all along that there would be a Vanilla system onto which features would be bolted as suited the needs of the scenario but I never expected there to be so many subtle shades. For example Con of the Dead is the exemplar of cheap and cheerful, four character records to a sheet of A4, 8 stats, a suit, a character name. Extremely efficient.

At the other end of the scale Marauders: Pirates of the Kamuri Kandam has 12 stats and a whole separate grid for fighting. Shadow Cities two meters for combat (ranged and melee and a huge wash of skill slots). Revelation Point, our slasher one off, employs a completely gimmicked system for making Slasher one offs where injuries are micromanaged and obssessed over much as they are in the genre they attempt to emulate.

Despite what could be a dizzying array of different rule sets the system remains, at heart, pretty simple. The scores on the sheets are only ever chucked in when needed. In fact there are sub variations of the rules for certain situations, the Marauders one off we're taking to B&P has almost no role play in it, well, very little that would require role play tests. In response I've stripped the 12 attribute skill grid out of the one off sheets and presented players with a character history and a fighting style.

Anyhow, all of this variety is intended to impress and I hope it does. After this piece of work we're looking forward to a launch party next week and then, well, the launch. A rest can't come soon enough to be honest.

Word of the week has been traction. What we're all really hoping is that this product will create some space for us to get some traction, buy a little time to do the work and get on with writing up the twelve books we've got planned so far (not counting anthologies of one offs). I predict a lot of hoarsely telling people that if they had a good time please to spread the word in the immediate future.

Oh well, off to think about fliers to hand out this weekend...