Sunday, 27 October 2024

Discomfort (RPG All)

I recently took a final pass at a project that's been in gestation since 2021 (my God that seems like forever ago) and was reminded that, in that scenario, I mention a discomfiting subject: the Windrush Scandal

I often do these things. I will touch on a sensitive subject. I will acknowledge that racism exists, for example, and existed in a historical context. I live in a country shaped by racism; I can hardly ignore it, any more than I can ignore the air I breathe. 

I might touch on abortion rights next. The Americans put abortion on the ballot, after all, and that affects us directly. We're small; we lack facilities. If someone needs an abortion and we lack the ability to carry it out here, for whatever reason, then the next step is somewhere on the East Coast. Which will be a bit tricky if the East Coast is closed for business. 

I dislike forcing morality or mortal topics down anyone's throat, but I will say this: roleplay is one of the few arenas in which we can discuss discomfort at one (fictional) remove. We can explore ideas. We can see, and foresee, consequences. I think it is important that we do so. Without discussion, without discomfort, we do not examine our preconceptions. If we do not do that, then we carry blindly on doing whatever damage we do, without thought for the future. 

I have some sympathy for the argument that the gaming table is not the best place for political discussions. That this is where people come to relax, not debate. I would have a great deal more sympathy for that argument if I thought for a moment that the people who made it are, in fact, discussing and debating outside the gaming environment. They are not. They ignore. They stifle. They look the other way, and keeping the gaming table pure (and silent) is just one more part of a long-term campaign to keep everything else pure (and silent). 

I was reminded of this when reading a recent horror setting. I shan't name title or author. It's a fairly complex piece and, as I got to the end, I suddenly realized I hadn't seen a single mention of a black character of any kind. More than 200 pages, American location, and the one African American character I saw in the entire text is an alternate description of a named NPC. 

Pure. Silent. 

Perhaps I'm howling in the wind, but someone's got to. I admire Chris Spivey's work; I hope he has a long and distinguished career. I wish there were twenty more of him. It boggles me more than I can say that in this year of our Lord 2024 there aren't a surfeit of creators out there telling stories like these. 

There are some. Not nearly enough. 

Short post this week. Next week: stuff!

Sunday, 13 October 2024

The Senses (RPG All)

First, a bit of housekeeping.

I shall be abroad next weekend, so no post. It's a bit of an unexpected trip for me but I need to see a tailor. No, really. A tailor. For lo, I am that in need of one, forsooth.

Now, on with the show.

I had intended to do a bit on Silent Hill 2, as the remake is out and, as a treat to self in October, I bought a copy. The plan - sinister and wicked, I'm sure you'll agree - was to play yesterday and talk about it today. I'd even intended to record some footage. 

Life had other plans. I couldn't get the damn thing to play. It hard crashed every time I left the cemetery, roundabout where Silent Hill Ranch is. I convinced myself it was a game problem, but in fact it was a me problem. I had to turn off my VPN. Once I did that, it worked a treat. However, the footage I'd been trying to shoot was lost to the void and it's difficult to get that 'first time' energy when I'd already seen the intro three or four times by that point. 

Still. What little I've seen so far is convincing. If you enjoy the genre and the series, it's worth your money and time. 


It does mean that I'm left with little to talk about. I haven't seen much beyond the first half hour or so. I haven't been to Neely's Bar. I can say that, while this is very like the original, it isn't exactly alike beat-for-beat. The game can still catch you by surprise, even if you - as I have - played the original, perhaps many times before

Let's talk about atmosphere and the senses. 

Touch. Sight. Taste. Smell. Hearing.

Let's use a stock location to explore options: an art gallery. Located in a not-quite-fashionable part of town. What used to be tenements and low-rent housing has become just that little bit gentrified, and this is the result. 

The sky is dark. Streetlamps gleam, little oases of light in inky darkness. The air is heavy and wet; a storm is coming. A brace of stars glimmer in a cloud's rent, the moon smothered. Not another soul on the street, but there are lights in some of the windows, a radio's buzz, laughter, a touch of warmth.

The gallery's doors are wide open.

The first piece that greets you as you walk in the door is a sculpture half the size of a man, twisted as if under a colossal weight or pressure, its tendons gleaming. The floor under your feet is somehow sticky; the soles of your shoes protest just a little every time you move. Peppermint. The antiseptic air is underlaid with the slightest whimper of peppermint. The sensation waters your mouth, just a little.

Touch, Sight. Taste. Smell. Hearing.

It's worth your while borrowing a trick from Dungeons and Dragons. In that system, and in BRPG to a degree though not as often, it's standard practice to write up a brief description of each room in the dungeon as the players enter it for the first time. 

Unfortunately, Dungeons and Dragons often wastes that opportunity by telling you the dimensions of the room or other trivia. As if it matters whether this room is 20 foot by 15. What matters is what the floor is made of, whether it's rough, smooth or something else, whether the air is fresh or foul.

If you've ever been into a house or office that's been shut up for a while, you know it instantly by how the air feels. A kind of trapped, heavy sensation, underlaid with a little damp or rot. If something died in here it decomposed long ago but there may still be a little reek, adding its stench to the mix. If you're sensitive, you may break out in hives or find it difficult to breathe. Your skin may reflexively prickle, as if touched by a thousand needles at once.

It's difficult to think of the right words, on the fly. Much easier to do as D&D does and write them down in advance. Which is what the Cameos and Stock Locations in GUMSHOE are for. They give you something to hang your ideas on; what you do after that is up to you.

Some ideas:
  • Touch:  
    • Slippery, twisting, a cat's reluctance.
    • Sticky, its casing covered in fluids.
    • Hot, just the wrong side of comfortable to the touch.
    • Cold, as if it's been dipped in negative space.
  • Sight:
    • Far-off, just on the edge of perception.
    • Somehow visible in every possible detail, to the least crevice and crack.
    • Impossible to see completely, it fades in and out.
    • Behind you - but you can see a portion out of the corner of your eye/
  • Taste:
    • Cloying, sweetness overpowering and omnipresent.
    • Sharp, acrid, bitter, poisonous.
    • Molten sunlight that lingers and vanishes.
    • A sensory nail through the tongue that no amount of milk will kill.
  • Smell:
    • It rips through your nostrils demanding instant attention.
    • Antiseptic, bitter, a thousand thousand hospital floors.
    • The least hint of something, like daffodils in the Milky Way.
    • Leaden absence of life, light, hope - dust, and nothing more.
  • Hearing:
    • A siren's bold wail, out of sight but drawing nearer.
    • Laughter's warm spice, without malice, without shame.
    • A sudden glimmer of caution, a warning just on the edge of perception.
    • Battering and blowing, a gale demanding entrance.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!



Sunday, 6 October 2024

Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook 2024



I am the first person to get one of these, on-island.

This according to the store owner, who ought to know.

Short version: this is about 60 pages longer than its predecessor, more or less, and feels as if there's not as much there. 

I'm guessing part of the extra length went on spell descriptions. That section is considerably chunkier, about 100 pages more or less compared to the previous book's 80-odd. However, most of the bulk seems to be character classes and their various subclasses, which has gone from 70-80 pages to about 130.

Gone are the extra creative fillips. Gone are the extracts from writers like Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman, Erin Evans. Gone are the call-out boxes like Met With Mistrust (Tieflings) Excellent Ambassadors (Half-Elves, now extinct), Monastic Traditions, Druids and the Gods, the example characters Tika and Artemis, the paragraph of description at the start of every class section (A tall human tribesman strides through a blizzard, draped in fur and holding his axe ...). Gone is the list of recommended reading. 

Even the art is kinda gone. Don't get me wrong; there's still pretty things to look at, and plenty of them. But some of the best pieces (like a full page Ravenloft splash with the usual suspects facing off in Strahd's fortress) are taken from other books. The others ... standard stuff, I guess, but to my untrained eye it looked as if someone said 'we have six poses. Six. Don't go nuts. Stick to the six.'

'Oh, and put a smile on those faces. Everyone's having a good time, ok?' 

Not that they all grin like Joker, but there's an odd lack of genuine emotion across the board. Frankly, after a while it feels less like an exploration of epic fantasy and more like a stroll through the lobotomy ward. It's as if there were two emotional states available, neutral, and smiling. Rarely laughing. Just smiling. 

Except for the Ravenloft piece. Nobody's having a good time in Strahd's castle.

I don't mind the rules changes. It makes sense to me that, say, your stat boosts (to STR, WIS, CON and so on) are based on your background not your ra ... species. Someone who spends their entire life working as a farmer is bound to be marked by that experience. Though I will say that, if Wizards are going in that direction, they needed a lot more backgrounds. 

Particularly given that your starting Feat is also based on your background. I can see a time coming when the players say 'ok, this NPC is clearly a Criminal, so they almost certainly have the Alert feat ...'  

I don't mind the bland player character sheet. In this shiny modern day and age there'll be a dozen of those up on teh Internets in all the usual places before the week is out. Within a month there will be far better character sheets available for free than anything Wizards could put in the book.    

It should be simple enough to use existing books with this new manual. The actual changes are slight. It's the work of maybe a minute to take the information in Volo's about, say, Tabaxi, and translate that to this new ruleset. You'd need to rejig the special traits a little and ignore anything about a stat boost. That's about it. 

I don't doubt that there are some rules changes, some feat rewordings, which will cause many arguments at many tables. The one I spotted was Weapons Mastery. 

A weapon is just a stick with a sharp bit, if you don't know how to use it. If you do, you can unlock special actions like Nick, Cleave, Topple and others. The martial classes - fighter, barbarian, paladin and so on - get a kind of mastery for free at 1st level. They have the option of taking mastery in a particular weapon or weapons mentioned in their basekit (eg. paladins get simple and martial weapons at basekit, which covers a wide range of sticks with sharp bits) but they don't get mastery in every weapon they know. Just the one or two out of the basekit list that they pick. They have the option of changing that weapon mastery at Long Rest, so the paladin who was a master of the longsword can switch to being a master of the halberd, eg.

I can almost smell the arguments incoming. "But I can switch!" "Yeah, at Long Rest. Did you? No. You didn't say. You're stuck with that longsword mastery." Or "we're not having a Long Rest right now, there's too much to do." "But I want to change my master weapon!" Or "Hey! You just picked up that weapon, how come you have mastery in it?" "Oh, uh ... by pure chance I trained in this type of weapon at the last Long Rest." Or "If you just escaped from [prison/durance vile/whatever] with no weapons to train with, how come you have mastery in that one?" "Well, before we were captured, months ago, I trained in this weapon type and never lost mastery, so ..." 

Added to all that is the Weapon Master feat which is a different beast (4th level General feat) with roughly the same intended use, which might end up a feat without a user. The people most interested will be the martial classes but if they already have a form of mastery at basekit, why take the feat? There is a stat bonus attached, but there are plenty of ways to get a stat bonus that don't require wasting a feat slot.

Maybe non-martials will want it? But even rogues (damage dealers but not a natural front line weedwhacker) get the base weapon mastery at 1st level. Only the weedy wizard and suchlike don't. Maybe there's a caster build out there somewhere which wants a sub-par weapons feat? As a replacement for one of the much more useful, class-relevant feats out there?

All that said, I think the most telling changes are the switch in priorities.

In the prior edition the book goes from an Introduction (Worlds of Adventure! How to Play!) which is maybe a few pages long and then leaps straight into Character Creation, where who you are - Race, a little over 20 pages, followed by Classes, then a half a dozen pages on Personality and Background - is the important bit. It lures you in with bold, glittering ideas, followed by a spotlight on You, the Hero.

In the 2024 edition it tells you What You Need right from the jump, followed by a lengthy description of game mechanics. You're 48 pages in before it begins to talk about Classes. More than 180 pages in before it talks about Species, the new way to describe Races. 

This is a system where Who You Are is far less important than How You Play The Game. 

That could be a problem. This book, out of all the books in Dungeons and Dragons, is the ambassador. The carnival barker outside the tent, luring in the rubes. It's the one that everyone's going to own, whether player or dungeon master, experienced gamer or filthy casual. 

It needs to be persuasive. It needs to sell itself. 

I don't know that starting out with 30-odd pages of fairly esoteric rules and little significant flavor text is the way to go.

Maybe I was warned right from the jump when I saw the book had dropped all those fantasy novel quotes, the flavor text at the beginning of the class description, the recommended reading list. This is a book about the rules of the game. Not about its soul. 

That's what I meant earlier when I said it felt as if there was less here than before. Reading this is like wandering through an empty house. You see where all the furniture was, once upon a time. Nothing there now.

Ultimately, I can't judge it. Its companion volume, the DMG, isn't out yet; the Tweedledee to its Tweedledum. 

We'll see. 

I blame Greg Tito, that base, villainous dastard, for getting me back into Dungeons and Dragons. I worked with Greg at the Escapist. I remember his enthusiasm for gaming, the way his little chipmunk face would light up talking about Dungeons and Dragons. It was his persuasive spiel that lured me into Ravenloft and from there to other things. I wonder what he's up to these days ...