Must...Organize...Useless...Ideas...

Once upon a time this blog had zero followers. Assuming you are reading this before the end of all things, it probably now has more than that. Here's a highlight reel for anybody who might've jumped in mid-stream.

WTF is This Blog?

An orientation I wrote once

Our TV Show (episode 18 is the best, they let us kinda do what we wanted starting around episode 5, the ones starting at 8ish are the most popular)

Yeah, We Were In Maxim
The "players" tag has all the articles about the girls themselves
The "actual play" tag has all the actual play reports
I did Red & Pleasant Land which is a very well-regarded game book
Likewise Vornheim
I also did the deluxe rewrite of the DIY D&D classic Death Frost Doom

These three things are available here.
New one, Maze of the Blue Medusa is available here.
Most of the other stuff I invented for my D&D setting that's up on this blog is indexed here.
I have a new horror game I'm writing and drawing here, if you wanna see it finished chip in to the Patreon here.

Contact

Most of our daily RPG conversation goes on here on Google+, send a message that you want to be added.
Twitter.
Facebook.

Essays

Gender and Representation in Warhammer's Realms of Chaos (less boring than it sounds I think)

Snakes Are Books ( a quick setting bit)

Published dungeons should be better

So you wanna write a random table?

DC=Old School Marvel=New School, Sorta

The Fat Game

The Game Is a Player

Felines of the Flat Planet (another setting bit)

Oh I Love Dungeons

Everybody likes this long essay I wrote where I explain that D&D is a story, it's just a picaresque story, not a 3-act story

The Philosophers (on mind flayers & other psionic races)

Cut And Paste vs Cliches

Monsters and the Imaginability Issue

Why roguish PCs and sandbox play go together

On Buy-in: why we like D&D and don't convert to storygames

The Best D&Dable Comic Books

On Player Knowledge and Sandboxing

Panic In The Hands of An Indifferent God (How I DM)

Demogorgon

How Jeff DMs

Irony and D&D: Not-Immersion Isn't So Bad

How to do a sandbox

The Hardest Core RPG Theory Post

Not character-driven, not plot-driven, Solution-driven adventures

Goblins are literally bad ideas

The Mood/Morality Scale

Psychotically long but kind of useful post about degrees of railroading

My biggest fattest blog project: going through all the monsters in alphabetical order--this tag links to the posts in reverse order of when they were written

The DNDWPS crew explains how to play an RPG

When do you need mechanics for stuff?

On That Which Is Weird

How I Want To HearAbout Your Setting

Dwindling (a good thing about crunch)

The Explosions In Space Rule (or How To Weed Out Stupid Players)

Kimberly Kane's first game--an early example of my current group rolling

I review Type IV D&D

I disagree with Robin Laws

Conversation about anime and science fantasy and types of sci fi etc

This Should Be The Introduction To Ever Game Book Ever

How To Actually Use Deities & Demigods

Why Is this Picture So Good?

Well-Designed for Who*?

Allegedly funny

Caveats

Of Snacks

In The Car After Play Report

McCormick & His Paladin

Angry bitter popular review of old free adventures

Interviewing Marilyn Manson about D&D

Resources

Somebody indexed all the setting stuff (monsters, cosmology etc) for the D&D game I run

RPG Speedcyclopedia

All The Monsters I've Invented & Blogged Up Should Be Under This Tag

Ditto For Items

And The Random Tables

Here's a one-shot I wrote that won a contest

The Wire as a D&D campaign

Cathedral of All-Flesh (A dungeon)

Galleries of the Nyctites (A slightly bigger dungeon)

20 Pirate Queens

Search-And-Replace Dungeon (A sort of Mad Libs dungeon)

Adventure-seed generating hack of Jeff's Carousing Table

Early version of the kind of stuff that got made into my book, Vornheim: The Complete City Kit

Wavecrawl Kit

Sandy Box Kit (Desert crawl)

My First Dungeon Kit

100 Problem, Puzzle, Plot Set-Ups

All the "actual play" posts

All the pretty pictures

All the new d100-level-up table classes

Some Series

All the posts on WOTC's (taxidermy-obsessed) Red Hand of Doom

All the posts on WOTC's Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk

Five Churches of Tiamat

Art History for D&D People

Running through all the D&D monsters in alphabetical order

Some rules & DM tricks I use and, sometimes, why I use them:

Simple initiative

Nested Wandering Monster Tables

Lucky Number Kung Fu (a simple bolt-on martial arts system)

Six Simple Martial Arts Systems

RPG Politics & Other Blah Blah Blah

Hire Women

Just link to this instead of saying "Yes, I know about your game, I actually am playing my game on purpose"

Antimemes

Subclans of DIY D&D and OSR people

The girls on hot RPG chicks and pin-up art

RPGnet is run by sexist hypocrites

Teaching Nerds How To Talk About Taste

Dear Wizards

Whores
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The "I Call On My Years Of Training" System

Once per day a PC may say "I call upon my years of training!" and thereby add his/her level to any ability check involving a task characteristic of his or her class or race.

This can only be done once per day no matter how many different kinds of class-appropriate challenges come up that day.

The maximum is + 1o. (10 total including ability score bonuses, if you're using a DC system). After 10 you get to do it twice a day and split the bonus numbers however you want.

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Example:

Scruffy The Bandit and Muppet the Sorceress want to try to interpret the hieroglyphs in a dusty old codex. Scruffy has to roll an Int check (at -8 or at a DC of 18, because the DM says so). Muppet also has to roll an int check (also at -8 or at a DC of 18, because the DM says so) however, Muppet may choose to call on her vast sorceressy training to do this and thus can add +5 since she is level 5.

If, later that day, they come upon an obscure alchemical substance, Muppet is out of luck and has to roll like everybody else, as she's used up her training bonus for the day.

If she was level 13, she could add 5 and bank 8 for later that day or add 10 and bank 3, or whatever, up to 10.

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Optional extras:

-If you are including thief functions in this, thieves do it all the time--not just once per day--up to +10 total (including any ability score bonuses, if you're using the DC system). Edit: In an old-school system, this means the standard array of thief abilities tops out at +10, so this requires a further hack--maybe at this point the thief starts being able to dip his or hands into other classes' skill pools. Like how they can start to read magic or whatever at a certain point...

-If you want to use it with a whole skill system, then just modify the rule so it says "Once per day a PC may add his/her level to any single ability check involving a skill s/he has"

...and otherwise skills don't do anything.

-This whole system probably doesn't apply to saving throws. But consult your GM

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Um, Dude, Why Bother?

I like this system because it creates a situation where tasks that challenge a high-skill PC do not have to be completely out of the range of possibility for low-skill PCs.

It compresses the difficulty scale, essentially.

The high-level adventure does not have to be full of tasks that only one possible class (ranger, thief, druid) could possibly do right.

So you can make a wall at, say, climb check= dex - 4. A fighter might have trouble climbing that wall, but they could make it. A thief of any level could also have trouble climbing that wall, but their level would still matter if they wanted it to.

Or you could make tracking a foe through a marsh check at simply -1 int. The ranger does not have to have a high int to successfully follow the tracks and be better than other people at it, but anybody else still has a shot to follow them. Because, hey, it's tracks in the mud.

There Is Life After Dangerous Ice Monkeys

Dear players:
This is where you are. You are in the ice maze. I'm sure you remember all about the Royal Fist Monkeys.

This is Brug. Remember Brug? Sam is (was?) playing Brug. Now Brug is an ice statue. If Brug gets knocked over by monkeys, even an Ice-To-Flesh spell is not bringing back Brug.

You are in the Ice Maze because the naturalist Miriya Essik is paying you to capture the ice medusa. This is Myria's home.

Just catch the ice medusa, get her to your boat, and sail for 6 days.

Miriya has promised you 2000 gold pieces each. If you return the ice medusa, she will probably offer you more gold to go find her an even more dangerous monster.

Do you have to do it?

No, you can do whatever you want.

Like what?

Here are some outstanding issues you have created:

This is Connie. You remember Connie? Connie's PC got drunk and..well a lot of things happened that got rolled on a random table. One of them is she got in a jam and prayed to her god that she be not in that jam any more. Vorn answered her prayers.

Only problem is: now Vorn wants something in return...

...some crown. Which one? Vorn says Connie will know it when she sees it and it's hidden somewhere in a fortress or dungeon somewhere in the islands you are now in.

Every day she spends not looking for this crown she will lose a saving throw point. That is bad.

So she has to either look, or find a way to get the quest spell lifted. Vorn is watching.

This is Queen Jayaeleene. You rescued her from the ice maze and took her back to her kingdom of Vrokk (one of the islands). She appreciated that. You are welcome to visit whenever.

However, also visiting her is this here white elf, Gormengeth. He's kind of creepy, frankly.

This is Mandy. She is still hallucinating. Someone might want to try to do something about that before the most powerful and unstable member of the party starts imagining flatworms crawling out of your eyes and tries to mace them.

This is the witch, Frost. She's had a vendetta against Mandy ever since she killed one of her bodies waaaaaaaaaay back at level 2. Last time you guys left the ice dungeon, she was there waiting and attacked...

...with her leopard men. They are vicious and leopardy. They will put you in jeopardy.

Then there's always your home, back west, which you have fled, on account of that skeleton invasion. Who the hell knows what's going on back there now?


And, as always, there's the whole rest of the planet to check out. Click to enlarge and be even more confused.

Evolution

Idea....

The most commercially successful games all have a default answer to this question built in to the system:

How will play in this same campaign 8 months from now be fundamentally different than it is tonight?

In D&D the default answer is: you'll be levelled up by then, and this means something. You'll be fighting crazy godlike monsters and exploring planes instead of dungeons or be building castles. Here is the concrete evidence: the spells go up to level 9 and the monsters include like Tiamat and Demogorgon. Look, there it is, waiting for you...

In Rifts the answer is: you'll either be fucking with this Coalition that rules North America or you'll get to see some whole new continent full of more crazy robodemonborgs. Proof: look at these crazy splatbooks we keep putting out Japan, South America, Africa etc. Unlike D&D, your PC will not have changed that much, but you will be seeing new stuff, so keep on.

In Vampire: TM the default answer is: you'll be higher up in the convoluted Vampire hierarchy and/or you will be further along in the metaplot that you've noticed we keep publishing. See, it keeps coming out. Even though you will still be pretty much some bloodsucking badass like you already were, the story will have progressed to some new phase.

In Call of Cthulhu the default answer is: you'll be dead or insane. Or more insane. Or insane in some new way. Or you'll be surrounded by dead or insane friends. Anyway point is the situation will have become entertainingly more desperate.

In Warhammer the default answer is: you'll have a whole new (better, more badass) career and you may also be insane. Or mutated.

-Shadowrun: possible exception?

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Point is: every RPG session produces changes in that session. "Bangs" "assignments""plot developments""twists""occurrences" whatever.

The really successful games promise or suggest (though do not mandate) a specific kind of change will occur over the long haul.

This is like a barely perceptible carrot keeping the players interested session after session, even when they don't know it. The game is going somewhere.

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Notes for GMs:

-Not all level-up systems automatically produce this idea of change. In D&D, level 20 is not just level-1-but-more-powerful, it's practically a different game. You go through distinct phases (usually) in D&D: useless schmuck, badass hero, crazy godling loaded down with items. In other systems, levelling up just means you are kind of better--but the enemies are still the same relative to you.

-The game ending is not an expectation of change. In The Oddyssey the sailors expect to be done and not sailing any more when they finish. That's not what I'm talking about. If they thought in 4 months their boat would be flying and four months after that they'd be maybe going through time then that would be what I'm talking about.

-If you remove a game's built in "change engine" or it doesn't have one but you still want long-term campaign play then either: the players have to trust that the supply of new and crazy exciting ideas you are coming up with is basically infinite (which you may be able to guarantee but the system can't) or you have to create (or let the players create) a developing plot that intrigues the players and makes them want to see what's next.

-Example (thanks John): a D&D ranger guy who is doing a land survey, mapping uncharted territory. If the player thinks genuinely that the next territory will be new and interesting, that is an expectation of change over time. There you go.

Or: A Conan type trying to conquer stuff. If the player expects to conquer stuff and then the game ends, that isn't the expectation that'll keep tons of people interested. If the player expects to conquer stuff and then the game changes to where it's about armies and castles and new lands--that's a change over time.

Smart GMs seems to set up these expectations automatically--like Jeff Gameblog has a dungeon full of 1st-4th level PCs and he is already talking about the dragon in there and the wizard that built it and the possible portal to Hell in the lower depths.

This also may be why lite indie games have a reputation for being one-shotty. Unless the players (or GM, when there is one) makes up a specific change-over-time expectation, the games usually don't provide them on their own. (I have no quarrel with Noisms comment below about how this is often a feature and not a bug.)

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Now in the comments today we will inevitably meet someone who goes "Oh I played such-and-such for 80 years and nothing ever changed and my whole group loved it". That's great. We believe you. Pat pat.

So, Answerers, here is another question..

The striking thing about yesterday's questionnaire (aside from how popular Death Frost Doom apparently is among readers of this blog) is the answer to the last question:

23. Is there anyone you know who you talk about RPGs with who doesn't play? How do those conversations go?

Came up repeatedly: "Well, there's the wife..."

So, to follow up, in her own words: why does your girlfriend/wife not play?

(Huge Bonus Points if you can get an answer better than "I don't play RPGs because I'm not really into RPGs.")

(If some life reason makes asking her impossible, you may go ahead and guess.)

(And yes yes yes I know there are many of you smug bastards--like me--whose significant others do play. Or whose S.O. is male. Or who are currently bereft of the pleasures and enigmas of physical intimacy. But today's question isn't aimed at us.)

GM Questionnaire

Repost and answer. Or, if you don't have a blog, answer in the comments. Or be a big rebel and do neither.

1. If you had to pick a single invention in a game you were most proud of what would it be?

2. When was the last time you GMed?

3. When was the last time you played?

4. Give us a one-sentence pitch for an adventure you haven't run but would like to.

5. What do you do while you wait for players to do things?

6. What, if anything, do you eat while you play?

7. Do you find GMing physically exhausting?

8. What was the last interesting (to you, anyway) thing you remember a PC you were running doing?

9. Do your players take your serious setting and make it unserious? Vice versa? Neither?

10. What do you do with goblins?

11. What was the last non-RPG thing you saw that you converted into game material (background, setting, trap, etc.)?

12. What's the funniest table moment you can remember right now?

13. What was the last game book you looked at--aside from things you referenced in a game--why were you looking at it?

14. Who's your idea of the perfect RPG illustrator?

15. Does your game ever make your players genuinely afraid?

16. What was the best time you ever had running an adventure you didn't write? (If ever)

17. What would be the ideal physical set up to run a game in?

18. If you had to think of the two most disparate games or game products that you like what would they be?

19. If you had to think of the most disparate influences overall on your game, what would they be?

20. As a GM, what kind of player do you want at your table?

21. What's a real life experience you've translated into game terms?

22. Is there an RPG product that you wish existed but doesn't?

23. Is there anyone you know who you talk about RPGs with who doesn't play? How do those conversations go?

What's In The Flippin' Castle?

What's in this room? (somewhat crowdsourced from G+)

1-king
2-queen
3-prince
4-princess
5-advisor/vizier
6-castellan
7-wizard
8-prisoners
9-guards
10-moat monster
11-majordomo (domestic boss)
12-captain (military boss)
13-servants
14-kitchen servants
15-cook

16-stable guy
17-tutor
18-cleric

19-sycophant

20-little kid

21-diplomatic guest

22-minstrel

23-jester

24-doctor

25-messenger

26-herald

27-torturer

28-nurse

29-astronomer

30-astrologer

31-actor

32-courtesan

32-page

33-squire

34-knight

35-merchant

36-falconer

37-sheriff/reeve/johnny law

38-spy (roll again for cover)

39-midwife

40-old relative of queen or king

41-smith

42-ostler

43-porter

44-gaoler

45-chamberlain

46-keeper of the keys (awwww yeah)

47-tailor

48-embroiderer

49-food taster

50-clerk, accountant, or other math-related jamoke

51-painter

52-noble child of vassal kingdom

53-idiot son

54-librarian

55-poet

56-sculptor

57-architect

58-engineer

59-carpenter

60-tapestry-making type people

61-castle brewer

62-70 Roll twice

71-80-Useless fancy junk

81-90-Not much but you can hear some conversation because these morons are all "I, Claudius" and forget to close doors

91-Armory

92-Treasure room

93-Winch room or other device room

94-00 Oooh, something special and weird and unguarded

Assume nearest guards are d4 rounds away.

Assume locks are omnipresent.

Assume room layouts are boring.

Exterior profile of fortress can match this.

Additional castle shenanigans.