What does D&D do?

I have a long list of blogs that I read - most of them are linked on the side of this blog.  I discovered that people talked about D&D on the internets when my tabletop friends in college talked to me about class tiers in 3.5, and I discovered the D&D blogosphere after that.  The most recent addition is the Critical Hits blog, which occasionally features articles applying contemporary economics to a theoretical 'typical' D&D world with an emphasis on murderhobos and murderhobo-related industries.

The most recent post, talks about the process through which one transforms an idea for a game into a game.  While the game described is interesting, I was realizing as I read the post that I didn't begin the process of making Prodigy with any kind of explicit design goals - I didn't have anything like

"Project Brief: Valkyries is a tabletop RPG about group of all-women/trans/NB/agender mercenaries who take jobs raiding planets left for dead by the Galactic Empire.
System: Hack of the Demon Hunters RPG, with heavy card-based elements for easy swapping of weapons, shields, class mods, etc.
Inspirations: Borderlands, Destiny, Dead Iron, Warhammer 40k
Necessities of Presentation: No white dudes in the art, strong cultural representation, possibly afro-futurism.
Practical Concerns: Representation vs appropriation, Norse themes with PoC representation and cultures (more research might be needed, because Norse largely  = white, and we want to be careful there).
Feel During Play: Quick decision-making, weapons/items as abilities to add to die pool, dark humor + hope, badass PCs, feelings of capability, even in the face of incredible odds, large-scale enemies (quantity and size), over-arching theme of fuck the establishment/patriarchy." (same)

At the forefront of my game book or OneNote folder.

And the initial thought was, well, shit.  I've been working on this project for over three years, and I'm only thinking about this now?

This, of course, leads me into thinking about why I didn't have any design goals or desired 'feel during play'.  And my initial, gut-response was that I wanted to make a game that felt like D&D but fixed many of the problems that I had experienced playing in several of its incarnations (for example, the inability of characters to develop organically (outside the level structure), the role rigidity (coded as 'niche protection' in some circles).

As I'm thinking about this, the last thing I wanted to do was to create a game where the setting was tightly integrated with the rules of the game - I felt that one of the problems in many RPGs, and one of the causes for the system agnosticism/game-swapping tendencies of players I've had and people I've read, is that they are almost hyper-general.  GURPS is the obvious example of this, but D&D, in every incarnation with which I've had exposure, makes no demands of its setting other than a general pre-industrial, (and often pre-firearm) timeframe - so we can have D&D games set in 1650, or feudal Japan, and the rules are the same.  I'll come back to this a little later, I think.

OK, so I have a couple components from which I can draw my design specs: I want a D&Dish-type game that allows for character progression without 'leveling up', enables characters to pick up entirely new skillsets not related to their character's original 'class' without penalizing them, and that intimately connects the setting with the mechanics.

Everything except for that first condition is a fairly operational design goal - if you look at the spec and the game, you can determine whether or not the spec has been met.  That first one, though - what is a D&Dish-type game?

And the more I think about it, the more I come to, who's D&Dish-type game?  Because, every gaming group plays something a little different.  And this is true, even among games that harken back to the good old days when D&D was young - one of them tracks the characters' progression from adventurer to conqueror to king while another chronicles fundamentally broken individuals trying to survive in a incomprehensible world that is indifferent to their existence.  A third focuses exclusively on subterranean exploration and looting.

Yet, all three label themselves D&D-type games.  All three are considered, at least, in my small corner of the D&D blogosphere, equally well-regarded as D&D-type games.  When I compare the experiences offered with these three games with the immersive world oft-discussed by Alexis, I find a very different type of game, different than the game that Zak S runs.

Well, that was a helpful exercise.  It's pretty clear that D&D-type games are just that - they are a genre of game, rather than a singular gaming entity.  Anyone who has ever played with more than one group of people could have told you that.  With that out of the way, there are a couple ways we can try to define a D&D-type game: we can look for commonalities between all games that call themselves D&D-type, or we can look for very broad generalization that encompasses everything we see.

This is not uncharted territory; people have done things like this before.  However, this kind of ontological discussion gets troublesome very quickly, and so the only research on the topic that I think has any merit is one that avoids the question entirely (it's available for free here).

In conclusion, then, the question of whether or not a game is D&Dish-type cannot be operationalized.  And even if it were an acceptable game specification, I don't want the same inconsistency of experience clearly available in the wide, wide world of D&Dish-type games.

So, what do I mean when I talk about D&D?  What is my D&D?

The problem with answering this question, at least, lies not in the vagaries of ontology but in the fact that I as a DM and world designer have grown and changed immensely over the course of this project.  My D&D experience began with Neverwinter Nights, which defaults to the hack 'n' slash railroad.  I learned about sandbox-style games when I discovered the D&D blogosphere maybe 5 years ago.  As I've played in them and run them, I've learned a great deal about what they have to offer, to the point where I have trouble playing through video games that so blatantly offer them (like here.  I stopped playing right after writing the review.).

So, while I'll outline the kinds of activities in which I want my players to partake below, I do so knowing that I am still growing as a DM and designer and that much of what I discuss will change over time.

Primarily, I want my players to have two things which may seem paradoxical.  I want them to feel deeply attached to the world - invested in NPCs and locations such that their concern motivates and demotivates character action (investing their gold into building a mill for their farming community, not defaulting on a public contract because they know that the authorities will take it out on their families in town, etc.).  I also want player skill and player knowledge to take center stage - the personality and characteristics of their characters should not take up table time - and so gameplay will be the intersection of the players' collective knowledge with what the characters can physically achieve in the game world (with character knowledge used to frame the situations in which the players and their characters find themselves).

The result of this is that D&D, to me, is a problem-solving game.  I set out a challenge (my go-to is how does the small group of players acquire the documents held in the keep?), the players then decide how to accomplish that task (or whether to accomplish that task, as the case may be), we see how effective that plan was (usually, it's determining how well they have shot themselves in the foot), and the players improvise.  All four of those stages are equally important to me.

I also don't like dungeons, particularly.  The kind of extensive labyrinths found in 'classic' D&D never made much sense - while I dutifully drew complex after complex in my foundling days, I always wanted the dungeons to be functional spaces, and it is incredibly difficult to make a large, functional dungeon (especially if you start factoring in labor costs, time required for construction, and the like).  Architecture is purpose-built, and saying that wizards demand weird dungeon hallways with no signs or understandable floor plan is a cop-out answer.  If a wizard is organized enough to design their own lair and have the money to build it in a reasonable time frame, then that lair is going to be fairly well-organized; the alchemical lab will be near the stillroom, the barracks will be near the entrance, the wizard's bedchambers will be near the laboratory, and it will be fairly convenient to get from the barracks to the mess hall and back again.  If they are insane or poorly-organized, then they won't have the wherewithal to design and oversee its construction (even if they have the funds, they'll need to hire an architect who will absolutely be well-organized).

This bleeds into a philosophy that the world will have an internal logic that is understandable and will become reliable for the players.  One of a player's primary tools is that of prediction, and those predictions should be come more and more accurate as the player gains more experience with the world - if all of the Sluagh the party has faced have been some sort of skeletal being covered in a translucent goo, pretty soon, anytime the party finds group of skeletal corpses, one of their first moves should be to determine whether or not any of that goop is on/in/near the remains.

I've seen worlds and games where that is not the case, where the DM handwaves everything or gleefully admits that the world is organized according to their whims.  In such an environment, there is no point in trying to learn about the world, because that knowledge serves no purpose.  What this means, then, is that the players' engagement will only ever be surface-level.  Because there is no structure underlying the game world, the setting's only function is to contain the sites of adventure, rather than actually motivate their existence.

Coming back from that, then, I want this game to provide tools that will nurture the players' relationships with the world without promoting the kind of acting and character-driven nonsense that is best left to LARPing (which I enjoy but don't want in my tabletop), a setting that rewards players gaining knowledge about it, and allows them to do anything they wish within the setting (from piracy and pirate-hunting, merchanting, exploring the frontier and ancient cities, to inciting revolution, among others).

I'd been feeling a little stuck in writing the Prodigy book for a while, I think due to the fact that I had only a partial set of design goals.  With those goals detailed a little more, I now have a clearer idea of all the work I have to do for it.

D&D Modern: the Demi-Monde

My players and I ran through the third scenario in our world-choosing spree a while ago, and while I will talk about it later (it is a distant area in the World of Prodigy), we ended up choosing the first setting, the demi-monde, set in the city of Tashkent with fantasy-horror themes.

The engine that I used for all three is Lamentations of the Flame Princess, one of the more popular retroclones around.  However, its fixation upon traditional adventuring activities within a quasi-medieval setting and the utter rigidity of its class system left something to be desired when running a game set in modern times.

I'll talk about the economic system I'm using in the next post, so here I'll talk about the game rules I changed to adapt LotFP to the setting.

The largest changes are to the characters.  In a modern game, character skills are both much more disparate and more evenly distributed between the characters - you can have characters knowledgeable with forensic science, arson, gun technology, and driving.  Trying to list each potential skill leads to the kind of dysfunctional complication one finds in GURPS, so I've left it up to my players to define what skills their character possesses, giving them only a limit to the number of skills they can learn.  Furthermore, each character would be expected to have a variety of skills, not just the specialist/thief-type class, and the knowledge available would often be independent of their particular specialty (the fighter character could easily know about electrical engineering while the specialist might be an expert gunsmith), which makes my previous approach, Alexis' sage ability system, not immediately workable.

My current approach, which still needs more work, splits my four classes into pairs.

Fighters and Specialists are mundane individuals who were drawn into the demi-monde incidentally and are two halves of the same coin.

At first level, each class chooses 4 skills.  Fighters must choose 3 fighting-related skills (more on that in a bit) and specialists can choose no more than 2 fighting-related skills.

At each subsequent level, fighters can improve two fighting-related skills or a noncombat skill, and specialists can improve two noncombat skills or one fighting-related skill.

Currently, the fighting-related skills are different groupings of weapons that are used in a specific way.  They include: Wrestling, Bludgeons, Knives, Thrown Objects, Pistols and Stunguns, Rifles, Automatic Weapons, and Specialty.  With the exception of the Specialty skill (which provides training in a single, unique weapon), each skill provides an increased attack bonus whenever using the appropriate weapons - a character with two ranks in Knives would add +3 to their attack rolls when using one (since every character begins with a +1 attack bonus).

A noncombat skill is any skill that does not immediately impact combat.  Depending upon the skill, each point invested increases the odds of success by 10-17% (mainly this determination is whether the skill in question is dependent upon the character's abilities or independent of them.  Dependent skills require rolling under the appropriate ability score, increasing that ability score by each point in the skill, while independent skills requiring rolling 1d6 and hoping to roll equal to or less than the number of ranks acquired).

Witches and Luminaries are people blessed with profane or divine powers and have sought the demi-monde out for their own purposes.  While they receive no skill points, they are deeply knowledgeable about the occult, religious lore, and so on.


The last major hurdle to handle is that of firearms.  I've attempted to maintain the weapon damage scaling of LotFP to firearms, which makes them particularly lethal.
Pistols and autopistols deal 2d4 damage.
Rifles and automatic rifles deal 2d6 damage.
Shotguns deal 2d8 damage.
Sniper rifles deal 2d10 damage.

Automatic weapons attack spaces, not creatures, and all creatures within the targeted space must save v. Breath Weapon or take full damage (they take half damage on a successful save).

I've also created a Sanity mechanic similar to hitpoints, but sanity is only recovered through engaging in life-affirming activities - playing soccer, admiring art, getting drunk/high, watching a movie, etc.  I'll talk about that more, later.

Types of Stories

Generally, there are two types of stories, regardless of medium or genre.  There are stories in a world, and then there are stories of a world.

Stories in a world are exactly that: they are stories contained within a larger setting and the events of the story do not impact the setting.  Most television series are stories set within the world - while character relationships may change over time, the setting might shift for a season, and the character roster may change, the overall setting of the story remains constant.  Some examples include every sitcom ever, every police procedural I can think of, Eureka, Piers Anthony's Xanth books, Shakespeare's plays, The Hobbit, The Walking Dead, etc.

Stories of a world are almost completely different.  The events of the story deal directly with the setting - either the world changes because of the story and/or we understand the world very differently as a result of the story.  I think this happens more frequently in works of science fiction and fantasy because it is in those two genres that authors have the ability to craft their own worlds in a much larger sense than in a non-speculative genre.  Some examples include Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy (at least the first one), Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles, Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar books (from Arrows of the Queen through the Mage Storms trilogy including Vanyel's trilogy), Lost, George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, The Lord of the Rings, Terry Goodkind's Wizard's First Rule and subsequent books, and Karen Russell's Swamplandia!.

Now that you have a better idea what I mean when I talk about each of these types of stories, I want to consider the strengths and weaknesses of each kind of story - neither is 'better' in any sense.

Because stories in a world don't interfere with the setting, they are, in a sense, repeatable.  If the characters and immediate situation surrounding them is compelling, the story never needs to end (until the audience loses interest).  The flipside is that the scale of the stories is necessarily smaller - because the events of the story can't ripple out into the outside world, they have to be restrained.  But wait, you say.  Why, then, is The Hobbit on the list?  It's simple.  Has the world really changed now that Smaug is dead?  Yes, Laketown will have an improved economy and there is now another metal-producing dwarven holt.  But, given the broad expanse that is Middle Earth, that is a penny in the bucket.  But wait, what about the One Ring?  What about it?  Within the story of The Hobbit, it's just a trinket that can turn people invisible.  While the events of The Hobbit do bring about much of the world-altering events of the later series, we see none of that in The Hobbit.  The ultimate risk of a story within a world is that it feels petty, artificially restrained.

Stories of the world are the exact opposite - because their subject matter is by definition epic, the stories are be huge and expansive.  However, most worlds have a finite number of secrets to divulge, and once those secrets are exposed, there is little left to write about.  Terry Goodkind wrote himself into exactly this predicament - he created the entire world around the central protagonists, but because of this he was unable to (successfully) write about other characters within the world - to do so would require writing an entirely different story (one within the world) than he was able to write.  Brandon Sanderson's stories are mostly those of a world, and so when he finishes exploring a world's secrets, he leaves it behind and begins the process over on a new world.  The problem of these stories is that they are ultimately wasteful - because the secrets have been excavated, the world's authors will leave behind the compelling characters and institutions that would have provided many stories within the world.

I'll talk about how we can apply this very directly to roleplaying games shortly, but first I wanted to collapse this binary.  It should be very clear from the opinions above that these two types of stories are highly complementary.  Indeed - many stories within the world find their drama in threatening events that would change the setting of the show, while the secrets and world alteration that occur in stories about a world happen in small dollops between larger events that do not shake the foundations of the world.  Of all my examples, Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar books probably do the best job of this; I include 4 trilogies and of each trilogy, discounting the last, secrets are uncovered and the world shifts in the third book each time - little tidbits are scattered throughout, but the major changes are saved until the end.  The first two books can be viewed as stories within the world that grow into a story about the world.

If Tolkien has been the dominant creative force behind D&D as it began, then looking at the stories being told (via the modules released and the setting details), The Hobbit was far more influential than The Lord of the Rings ever was.  LotR is epic fantasy that changes the face of Middle Earth.  Greyhawk is an unchanging backdrop for site-specific adventures that enrich the party.  However, in many more recently published modules and scenarios I see much more a push for these stories about a world - Paizo's Rise of the Runelords being an excellent example as the party is guided into discovering a number of clues about the history of Paizo's world and in stopping the Runelord's ascension.  Of course, the actual setting doesn't really change over the course of this module, but the scope is far more epic, far more in line with what one might expect from a story about a world.

As a DM, you have a choice to make.  You have the ability to decide what kind of stories your players can tell.  Are the foundations of your world up for negotiation, for realignment?  Or are they fixed in stone?  If you run someone else's module in someone else's setting, that choice is largely made for you.  The intricacies of Society play, of presenting a unified D&D experience means that the world has to stay constant.  When it's your world, you can open that up to your players.  I think that is one of the true powers of well-built sandbox - the world can have secrets for clever players to unlock, kingdoms to topple, and an infinite supply of the smaller-scale adventures.