White Box

Here are the two character sheets I did for Charlie Mason's White Box. White Box is a clone of original D&D. It's a very simple, stripped down game that is probably the easiest version to modify.

Blueholme

I'm doing a series of character sheets for Blueholme Journeymanne rules. Here's the first...

Blueholme is a clone of the 1977 D&D Basic box set edited by J. Eric Holmes. Cool stuff!

Class Alphabet Art

I contributed the Ape Ascendant class to David Coppoletti's Class Alphabet project for use with DCC RPG. Here are two images I also contributed to the upcoming book. These are both digital works.

The Tenacious D-fender class was written by Forrest Aguirre and the Flesh Forged was written by David Baity.

Tenacious D-fender!

Flesh Forged!

To Hit or not To Hit...HIT!

Ok, so one of the types of RPG mechanics that is most vilified is the table mechanic. That is, a resolution mechanic that actually requires you to look at a table for an answer. The classic example is D&D's to-hit or attack matrix. In modern games this type of mechanic is absolutely despised and considered to be akin to writing a game for Commodore 64 in 2017.

When I was young I just took those tables as a given and developed quite a fondness for them. Years later I started thinking about simpler mechanics and I went through a hardcore anti-table period. I even remember ranting against descending AC as recently as 2012... just weeks before I dived headfirst into Labyrinth Lord and rediscovered what I loved about gaming in the first place.

A lot of my character sheets include an attack matrix. In my opinion, the only reason you might dislike these tables is because you have to go to the rulebook to look up your attack values. And that is a pain the ass, I agree. But when those values are on your character sheet I just don't see the problem.

YES... it is an extra step between the attack roll and knowing the outcome. If the target number to roll is equal to the AC, it's much easier and faster to know if you hit. But by using that method you have to rely on a lot of modifiers if you want to model any kind of character progression. Thus we end up with characters that have a +13 to hit. Which is something that bugs the snot out of me.

The attack matrix eliminates that modifier bloat problem. And how god damn hard is it to tilt your head down and look at a number on your sheet?

But hey, I realize these little things matter and you might be a person who HATES IT. I get it.

Anyway... I was fiddling with the attack matrix idea in a new game design. The idea is this:

You have three types of dice rolls for dealing with all possible actions. Each roll is made on a simple matrix identical to the to-hit table pictured here. But the values on the table never change. There is no level system, no progression. So if you start with a 10 at the top slot (roll a 10 to hit AC 9) then you will always have a 10. Thus no messy pencil marks and erasing and no need to reference a rulebook. It's on your sheet in black and white.

(As an aside... the game would encourage "advancement" organically. That is, finding cool stuff that gives you an edge. Learning from super secret tomes of lore. Being blessed or cursed by gods and demons. All of these things would be represented by modifiers... albeit without the bloat. Therefore if you do end up having a +2 on an attack roll it's a big deal. But the only reason you'd ever see +13 is if the group just let things get out of hand. Or WANTED a superpowered game. Whatever.)

Just thinking out loud here. I realize the concept is not going to be appealing to everyone. But a very stubborn part of me wants to do it anyway, just because. And since it is represented visually, it adds to the rule of cool for the game design. The character sheets would LOOK great.

And god dammit... it does NOT slow things down to glance at your sheet when you make a roll. And since the numbers on the sheet will not change... you'll have that shit memorized pretty fast.

Judy: I slice at the animated monkey with my scimitar! (clatter... Judy glances [GLANCES] at her sheet... maybe) I hit AC 4!

Judge: Your steel bites deep. The monkey screeches in pain and begins to vomit fire! But first, roll some damage.

You get the idea.

Paralyzing Perfection

I have always struggled with this weird inability to focus on a single thing long enough to see it finished. It isn't a crippling problem, though. I can finish things. But the things I finish and show to the world are few compared to the many things I dream about or even pour my work into. My old folders (both physical and digital) are filled with partial ideas, even finished comic book pages that never saw their endings (or even their middles). When I was in my 20s I did a comic book series called Anomalic, which I published in the small press arena of the 90s and traded with many awesome creators. I finished five or six issues of Anomalic over the course of about two years. It was an epic fantasy story based on my early D&D campaign ideas and the many characters I created but never really played.

But even though I cranked out a handful of issues the story was simply going nowhere. It was supposed to begin with the meeting of a lost girl and a man with no memory. Then it would unfold into a huge story about a world wide war and - you guessed it - a dark lord villain. But I meandered. I indulged in exploring the setting and lingering on scenes so that by the last issue the two main characters had barely made their way back to the city where the story proper was to begin. I think at that point I just didn't have the spirit to soldier on. And it was because I have this insane idea about perfection.

When I was in 8th grade I had a teacher who was very cool. She was kind of hip. In fact, I'm pretty sure she was a legit hippie of some kind. I don't know. But she was sarcastic and funny and scathing in her humor and attitude toward students... especially the ones displaying a lack of depth or understanding. She once told me that the Greeks had this idea about perfection. She said they believed that the idea was always perfect and each step in the process of converting an idea into a thing reduced its perfection. She even put numbers to it, probably in an effort to get my young mind to grasp the concept. She said the idea of a statue is 100% perfect but the statue itself probably cant' be more than 80% perfect, if that.

I understood. Each time you translate something from one form into another it loses a bit of its original self. Or it gets changed. Like the old analogy of a person calling on the phone to tell a rumor and the rumor being repeated by a dozen people until it makes it way back to the original source. By then the rumor might not be recognizable. Of course, the teacher was referring to ideas such as Plato's forms and probably the cave of shadows, but I didn't know any of that stuff and she didn't elaborate.

Yet the idea drilled into my head and stayed there forever. It was at this time that I discovered D&D and RPGs. I was drawn like a thirsty dog to a bowl of beer. And I believe the thing reason RPGs resonated so completely with me is that they represent potential. They are perfect. When you concoct an adventure to run, that adventure feels perfect. It isn't until you actually run it that the adventure loses that sense of perfection. It gets translated from a potential thing into a real thing. It becomes defined, and in becoming defined it loses most of its potential elements and gains new actualities that are imperfect. It's still a beautiful thing, of course. Or at least it can be.

So I suspect a big part of my frequent inability to finish things is because of this notion of ruining the perfection of an idea. I dislike choosing. Back in the days of video rental, I could spend more than an hour browsing the racks for a movie. I genuinely felt pains at having to pick something. The "but what if" question loomed large. What if that other movie is better? I'll miss out. What if this movie really sucks? I'll waste my time.

And its the same with projects. I have this idea about a sort of quasi-space fantasy realm composed of many worlds. It's really just a fantasy realm, albeit with empty space (or weird space ichors) separating individual cities and forests. So instead of traveling by foot between two points you would travel by boat or ship or magic. Anyway, the idea turns me off at some point because infinite worlds are unappealing. If they are infinite, it seems like a cheap trick. Like you are saying "my setting has everything". But at the same time, a finite and defined realm feels limiting and small. So I bounce between the two concepts, never quite happy with any of it.

Over the years my good friend Cyd and I have discussed these ideas over and over and we have this sort of artistic battle cry: FINISH IT. This bumper stick philosophy comes from the mouth of Neil Gaiman who told Cyd (at a comic con) that the best advice he could offer an aspiring writer is to "finish it, cringe later".

That advice feels like a silver bullet. To reduce indecision, you get in elbows deep and do the work while the work is dominating your mind. Another way of saying it is to "strike while the iron is hot". Do the thing while the thing is alive. Put pen to paper while the idea is still bursting forth. Don't wait too long. Don't wring your hands and worry that it isn't quite right. It'll never be quite right. If you want to do things, finishing them so that others can see, then you have to DO THE THINGS.

Maybe some of you are gifted with great patience and endurance and can work on the project for years at a stretch without losing it. To you I say huzzah. But I'm not like that. If I don't get in there and knock it out fast, it will likely never get knocked out.

I'm pretty sure it was Pablo Picaso who said that to finish a work is to kill it. I hope to slay a lot more ideas before I'm dead.

A page from Zoa Space Fantasy, a comic I never quite finished.

SLUG!

In the mid-90s I got a subscription to Shadis Magazine. From there I ordered FUDGE, and from FUDGE I got SLUG. Looking back on my notes and scribblings from that era, it is very clear that FUDGE and SLUG were huge influences on how I thought about game design. My designs prior to that were hacked up riffs on D&D, Star Frontiers, and perhaps a bit of Bushido. I think it was probably seeing SLUG that planted the seed in my mind that an RPG system can be uber simple and still work.

I never ran SLUG and I kind of didn't love it. The reason was that I craved some kind of metric for deciding just how awesome a PC is. Not just having the player declare it, but having a way of measuring it or giving it a nudge in game. SLUG can do that, of course. The GM can assign modifiers. But there's no inherent way for a SLUG character to have a modifier. Clearly O'Sullivan intended for the characters' descriptions to provide that element. But I've got just enough crunchy bits in my blood that I need a little more.

The Pool is influenced by O'Sullivan's games. He even uses the term "traits", which I tended to use all the time from that point forward.

As an aside, I never ran FUDGE. But owning that game and reading it and understanding that it was open source (I'm not sure what the term was in 1994, but it opened new doors for me) made me want to create content for it. I took my older game idea for a fantasy world called Midaka - up to that point being ran via GURPS - and started fudging it up. But alas I never managed go get a game together.

But by 1995 or so I was running games (infrequently, randomly) using a personal system not unlike SLUG (in spirit). I called it the "ROC System" for a while. This was based on my comic publishing imprint Random Order Creations. The system was this:

1. Describe your character. Use an image if possible. I suggested using art cards, which were all the rage at the time.

2. Write down some traits based on the description and/or image.

3. Distribute 20 points between the traits as you like. All traits need at least 1 point. Each point is expressed as a +1.

4. In play, when a conflict arises you roll 1d20 + your trait vs. some target.

That was the entire system, start to finish. I never developed any sort of crunchy bits from it. No damage or death system. I think I gave players 1-3 points after a solid adventure and they could add them as +1s however they liked. That notions probably came from playing Star Frontiers.

The new game I'm working on uses this rudimentary system as its basic unit, but with some important differences. But I'll get into that later.

Meanwhile, FUDGE or SLUG it up!

SLUG!

SLUG Character Sheet

The Pool - Videos and Thoughts

I wrote an RPG called The Pool back in 2001 or so when I was a regular at The Forge. Ron Edwards promoted the game through discussion because it was among the only games at the time that explicitly explored what I would call shared narrative control. That is, an RPG in which the GM and the players both have some authorship of the game's shared creative space. The Pool allows for this by controlling the creative powers. That is, it has rules for who gets to author and when they get to do it.

Anyway, the game has enjoyed a lot of discussion over the years and I'm proud to have created it. I'm glad that it might have influenced other designers to create even more impressive games. Because frankly, nobody creates anything new. I certainly don't. I'm the guy who assimilates ideas over time. I hear or see something that leaves an impression and it eventually shows up in something I create. The more impressed I am by the thing, the more obvious it is that I'm channeling it. That's why people often comment that my art reminds them of Vaughn Bode or Richard Corben.

Anyway, here's a video of Ron Edwards talking about The Pool to a class inMilan. Strange, but true. And very cool!

Also, here's Ivan talking The Pool as well.

And the game itself got a tiny facelift recently from my friend MattHildebrand who put it into a printer friendly digest PDF.

I'm working on a new game. For the past few years I've focused 100% of my efforts on doing OSR material, which I dearly love. But in January I had a bit of a break from it as an OSR project I was working on kind of fell apart in my head. Possibly this was more related to my mother's health problems and less to gaming. But still, it caused me to step back and start looking at all my junk. Which caused me to flit back and forth between projects. And now I'm at this place creatively where I have an old, potent idea I'd like to explore for a time. It isn't OSR. It's also not a story game. But it does have elements of both those modes of play. Again, this is just me doing what I like to do and not thinking too much about it.

Hell, I don't even want to say what it is because tomorrow I might abandon it. I'll say that it grew out of working on an updated Rabbits &Rangers, but it is not R&R. More later.