Artists I Like: J. Freels

Another artist I like is Jeff Freels, or J. Freels. I know very little about this creator other than he created Bean! the d2 RPG and he is visually impaired.

Bean is a great little game. The central idea is it's a world of anthropomorphic beans and you use actual beans as dice. See, you get a sack of beans and paint one side of some number of them. When you roll the painted side, it is a 1 and when you roll the unpainted side it is a 0. Or something close to that. It's a coin toss. But unlike lame single coin toss systems (50/50 for everything? Boring.), this is a pool system. More beans = more chances for higher scores.

But that's a digression and unrelated to the meat of the post: the art.

Freels is an artist after my own heart. A great cartoonist! His bean characters are swanky and cool, simple and direct. And I love them.

There isn't a lot to be found about Jeff Freels outside his own website. But he has a nice bio page that explains quite a bit about who he is, what he does, and so forth. I don't care about the Reiki Master stuff, I just like the wonderful cartoon art.

Throw Them in the Dungeons!

Here's a thing that is very common in adventure stories but is not necessarily the easiest to use in an adventure RPG: the heroes are captured and thrown into the actual dungeon (jail)!

Happens all the time in movies and TV shows. All. The. Time.

But in a traditional adventure RPG, what is the first thing that tends to happen when any NPC tries to lay a finger on a PC?

"I cast fireball."

"I throw my axe."

"I slip into the shadows so I can get a backstab next round."

Combat. Initiative.

Now, I'm of the mind that the GM should practice firm-but-gentle scene-framing. I think the GM has the power - nay - the responsibility to "force" PCs into certain situations if the alternative would lead to absurdity or certain doom.

I mean, players always assume the PCs can find a way to do anything. And that's great, because they are the heroes. But surely there are times that the party knows collectively when it should measure its words and actions and bide its time. Right?

But we covet our free will as gamers so furiously! Those magic items we carry are not separate things, they are PART OF US. The IDEA of some NPC just taking Hipcracker the +2 war hammer or Whipcakes the Staff of Power off our person and escorting us into a dirty cell? RIDICULOUS.

Of course the NPCs have to be careful. If you have 5 powerful entities in your throne room carrying such mystical magical items and possessing unknown magic powers... you might think twice before just saying "Throw them in the dungeon!"

So there's a caution for the GM as well.

But still. We need to have some cool "will they escape??" moments without "I skewer the first guard on my spear" as the default reaction.

Heat Death

Monday night I started running a sci-fi game (working title "Heat Death"). This is an original system and the tone is supposed to be a bit of Alien + Firefly. Naturally, the players will shift the tone far more towards Ice Pirates no matter what I do... god damn players.

I don't know if this will be a project I'll publish or not. Maybe. I'm putting a decent amount of work into it. I think in the end, if nothing else, I'll put it out as a little mini-game zine or something.

Here's the intro text I provided to my players:

Life in the Main was nice. Strip malls, concert moons, a steady paycheck, and no alien robot infestations. But you don’t live on the Main anymore. You live out here in the Frontier Zones where careers (and people) come to die. Whatever you did to get cast out… was it worth it?

Now you pinch out a living doing contract gigs for the colorfully named Site Evaluation and Data Collection Agency (SEDCA), an inter-governmental department that specializes in “low-profile, moderate-risk projects for the public good”. This arrangement was part of the legal settlement that kept you out of prison.

You work for less than half what you would earn back in the Main. If you keep your nose clean, in three to five years you might get to go home.

In the meantime, it’s all about collecting soil samples, tracking lost cargo, investigating unknown transmissions, and, from time to time, “helping to peacefully contain local disputes”. Life is good if you just grin through it.

It was noted during the game that this idea borrows heavily from Star Frontiers. I can't deny this fact. Star Frontiers was the second RPG I ever owned so it has a very deep and permanent place in my inner world. I even lifted some of the items directly from SF, such as magnigoggles.

The system uses two exploding d4s for task resolution and has a Life Point system. There are no fixed stats, only Traits you can assign to your PC during play. The idea is you have a pool of Ranks (like skill points) and you assign them during play as the inspiration arises. So if you wanna be great at throwing knives, you just put Ranks into it as you describe how you throw knives at the target of the scene.

Anyway... the most important thing is the scenario. It's all set up to run scenarios, not simulate battles or space flight. This scenario has the PCs assigned the mission of investigating a rumored resource of interest on a distant and unknown moon shrouded by radioactive interference that has prevented long range study. By the end of the first session they had arrived at the moon, but were surprised to learn that a second ship was detected by the ship's systems before they dropped out of FTL travel.

GOZR is RISING

OK, time to let the Doomslakers B/X book simmer for a bit while I circle back to fuckin' GOZR!

The pages are back on my drawing board for hopefully final edits. Maybe I can put this bastard out into the wild soon. I had taken a step back from it while playtesting was happening and in order to give myself some breathing room. Now I'm feeling it again and things are looking up for the ugly gooz.

During playtesting, I would update the document with rules tweaks and clarifications and name each iteration alphabetically. I am super duper thankful that my friends Andy Solberg and Dyson Logos each ran GOZR for different groups and provided valuable feedback. I was a player in Andy's game, which as a real stress test for the system as we adventured around Andy's wonderfully silly Gooz York. I think Dyson's playtest, which I wasn't in, was more directly based on the Den sequence from Heavy Metal - probably the chief inspiration for GOZR in the first place.

Bean! Fan Art

I did a bit of fan art for J. Freels' Bean! the d2 RPG. I love that game and I love Freels' cartoon art style. Go check it out.

Thieves! Dirty Rotten Thieves!

Of late I've been thinking about classic D&D. When I think of D&D I always think of B/X D&D, the classic basic rules from 1981 compiled and edited by Tom Moldvay, Dave Cook, and Steve Marsh. That's my jam and probably always will be. It is a clean presentation of the original D&D rules with some tidying up, some clarifications, some stripping down, and some additions.

It is imminently hackable. It melts over new settings like butter on hot bread. When I think about writing fantasy settings for RPGs I always favor using this rule set as a basis, usually via the use of the game's most effective modern clones: Labyrinth Lord and Old School Essentials.

Thinking about B/X lately lead me to recall some of the posts I made about the topic in the past. I wanted to revisit some of them with fresh eyes and see if my thinking has changed.

Thieves' Skills is one of my favorites. I can't remember if this idea started as a G+ post and then I cleaned it up for a blog post or if it was the other way around. But I do remember when the idea hit me and suddenly thieves and their terrible skill ratings clicked into place and made sense.

Thieves' Skills

WHAT DO THE THIEVES SKILLS ACTUALLY MEAN?

You're playing a Thief. You want to pick a lock. You take a peek at your sheet and see that your chance is 15%. That sucks! Surely you can do better than that?

I think you can. I think the Thief's skills are not meant to replace existing stealth rules (such as they are), but to augment them. This is what I mean:

You try to sneak through a room where some orcs are playing bones in the corner. The dice are thrown and the result is 55%. That's well above the 20% you needed to move silently. What does that mean? It means you didn't move silently. It does NOT mean the orcs heard you. It simply means you made some kind of noise that might be heard. So the DM should then make the normal roll to determine if the orcs heard a noise or not.

If you were a Fighter sneaking through the room you'd only get the second roll, not the first one too. So the Thief has an added layer of rules to cover stealth.

Same for hiding in shadows. A failed skill roll means you could be seen. It does not mean you actually were seen. When the Thieves' skill rolls fail you simply fall back to normal rules such as a surprise check or hear noises.

I don't know if this was how the rules were meant to be used or not but this is how I've been thinking of them for a long time. It makes a thousand times more sense to me now than before and it means I don't necessarily have to house rule the Thief (though in all honesty I still do...).

After making this post I revisited the topic several times. In the post THIEVES! I re-state the idea outlined in the previous paragraphs and I introduce my Thief class bennies system, which I later modified into the Black Pudding Playbook's Thief.

In the post Once Again With The Thieves I talked about a new public game I was running and how I modified these ideas once more to suit that table. In that post I outlined this method:

-Thieves roll their skill on percentile dice + an ability check at the same time. If the percentile roll is good, ignore everything else because they have perfectly executed their subtle craft and cannot fail. Otherwise, go with a simple ability check.

-Non-thieves do sneaky stuff on an ability check, usually with Disadvantage. They cannot do super-secret stuff like climbing sheer surfaces or disarming complex traps (unless the player has a terrific plan).

Looking at it now, I still think this method is very good for a public game in which you have no idea who will show up to play. It eliminates the d6 rolls for hearing noises and such, which would be harder to explain to a complete noob. Rolling d100 and d20 at once is fast and smooth. Using Advantage and Disadvantage is both elegant and well known.

Still, as a B/X fan, I want the pure experience so I want as few house rules as possible. I need a good damn reason to house rule.*

In that same post I re-stated the original idea again in a way that I kinda like:

The idea here is to say that thief skills are special. The thief isn't merely trying to be very quiet or trying to find footholds on a wall. They have been trained or have discovered lost secrets or have tapped into natural talents that normal people cannot access. The thief doesn't simply "hide" in shadows, they fucking disappear. If that percentile roll is a good one, the thief cannot be detected. They are as good as invisible, though not in a magical way.

In the post Thief! Stop Thief! I had an idea for using the default saving throws as skill categories. Check it out. I haven't used this and it isn't what I'm leaning toward today but it's a neat idea, right?

SUMMARY

My thinking in 2021 is similar to 2015 with regards to Thief skills. Use the skills as they exist, without altering the tables or numbers. But treat those skills as *almost magical*, where the Thief is perfectly successful on a good roll and falls back to the default stealth rules when they fail. For my money, this actually solves the problem with Thieves.

Beyond that, I'm also in favor of giving Thieves another benefit in the form of special tricks. It could be a standard list such as forgery and reading scrolls and what not. Or it could be left wide open so the player can decide what their tricks are. I dunno. I'll ponder that one a little more.

I have some thoughts about wizards too...

* And oh yes, I do house rule. I have many house rules. I don't use them always, but there are a few that are almost always in use (critical hits, luck points, wizards getting more spells).

ROC RPG

In my recent deep dive into storage I revisited an old game I designed in the mid-90s. It's called ROC RPG, which stands for Random Order Creations Roleplaying Game. I didn't get too creative with the title as it was just a simple system for me to use - not to publish.

I ran this system on numerous occasions between 1995 and 1999. I can't recall how many times, nor all the contexts. It was not robust in the technical sense. It was just a skeleton of a game, but it was enough for me to use in pursuit of the fine art of "wing that mother".

The game was this:

You get 20 points. You write down whatever skills, abilities, and special things you want and distribute your points between them. These are called traits. When you take action, you roll 1d20 + the points for your relevant trait. The GM would have a target number in mind or written down that you had to beat. At the end of an adventure you would earn maybe 1-3 points that you could use for more skills or to improve old ones.

That was the entirety of the game. I think the way I handled combat, wounds, and death was wing-that-mother. If it felt like you should be killed, you'd roll 1d20 + trait to avoid death.

Over time I added some crunch. Not much. I added Path (class) and Ability Level (level). So I think the way this worked was if you did a thing related to your Path you'd add your Ability Level to d20 rolls. Otherwise you would just use your traits. Still no hit point or death system to speak of.

This character sheet is for a slightly more robust version of the game.

GOZR Creatures + Design Talk

In this post I talked about how I'm doing creatures in GOZR. Not much has changed since then. My stat block is the same, but I added Pack to give you an idea of how many of the creatures might be encountered.

I think I already described the fundamental game system in this post. Clearly this game owes a lot to games that came before it, so I'm going to include a section shouting out my inspirations to the best of my ability. For certain, classic D&D (specifically 1981 era) had a massive influence and some of its language is maintained herein (hit points are there, and the damage ranges are fairly in line with D&D). The Black Hack's abstract treatment of distance is something I completely stole for GOZR. But instead of a usage die mechanic I actually prefer players to just keep track of their shit. So the charsheet will have an "ammo" tracker. My own game, The Pool, has its stamp on GOZR as well. You can spend GOOZ to add "game story facts". A direct nod to The Pool and the early story gaming movement.

One game that definitely has inspired me is Mörk Borg. However, I am not sure to what extent that game inspired GOZR. I did a little archaeology and found that I had made public posts about acquiring the Mörk Borg in mid-March 2020. But my oldest GOZR document is dated March 8 and it does not mention the Swedish death metal game, despite mentioning Black Hack, OD&D, Into the Odd, and others as inspirations. So I believe GOZR predates my exposure to Mörk Borg by a week or so. After that, the game definitely hit me between the eyes and I love it. So big shout out to Sweden for the inspiration.

Regarding mechanics... I'm not sure what I lifted from Mörk Borg that I didn't find in other games. The concept of subtracting armor from damage is pretty common. But for sure the overall no-fucks-given design aesthetic of the game was inspiring to me. Because clearly, when you see GOZR finished, you will not find a lot of fucks given. It's an early 80s hard rock/metal notebook doodle game. Sort of.

I am not sure how this will all play out. Yesterday as I worked on the project I had the epiphany that this is a "sketchbook RPG". Meaning: I'm composing it the same way I would approach pages in a sketchbook, but with more of an eye toward clarity and organization. It is definitely not a game that total noobs would likely pick up and run. I do assume a lot of pre-existing RPG knowledge. I am not including a "how to play" or "what is roleplaying" section. I think I even use the term "PC" without clarifying what that is.

It's going to be a hot god damn mess but I do love it. I'm 24 finished pages in! Some of these are dense with info, some are less so. Thus, sketchbooky.

I don't know the final page count. I was kinda hoping 28. But I haven't even got to the equipment, weird magic and tech items, weapons, random encounter tables, or adventure yet. Holy shit. This might hit 44 hand-crafted pages before I'm finished.

See you in 2025.

GOZR: Belt Buckles

I was sitting here working on GOZR one fine morning when I thought to myself "that white space could use a fine belt buckle". And so was born the gooz cultural fascination with them.

Like many things in the game, this is just some random table shit. See that half moon by the title? Wherever you see that moon you know that's a table you can roll on, if you feel like it. It's optional.

Troika! RPG Review

PREAMBLE

Way back in the stone age days of G+, there was this weird game that fermented and grew in my peripheral view called Troika!. I ignored it. Not because it didn't look cool or whatever, it's just that it wasn't D&D and wasn't interesting to me at that time. The guy who made it, Daniel Sell, was also a peripheral figure in my view. I had read and been greatly inspired by Daniel's blog post "How to be an adventurer" on his blog What Would Conan Do. But my brain didn't connect those dots at the time.

The game was also associated with Jeremy Duncan, another figure looming in the periphery of my brain but who I just didn't know much about. Turns out he drew most of the original weird art for it.

Soon Troika! seemed to be the talk of the town. There was a Kickstarter. There was something about a "Numinous" edition. G+ died somewhere in that time zone and I'm honestly not sure which event came first. At some point I finally got a copy of the game and read it and was quite inspired. It's a damn fine game, and I'm going to talk a little bit about it here.

THE GAME

Troika! is a hack of Advanced Fighting Fantasy, a popular British RPG that originated as a choose-your-own kind of adventure book series. I'm not sure the author likes referring to it that way or not as I'm not terribly involved (like... not at all) in Troika! comings-and-goings. In a guest post at the blog Thoul's Paradise, Daniel said this:

"Troika is the inevitable hospice of a tired mind."

And this:

"It was built as a strongly worded objection to the vogue of transparency and usefulness. It still holds immediacy, since anyone can play the game in a matter of hours if they want. They just need to go limp and enjoy a state of comfortable confusion. The book doesn’t need to tell people that it expects them to decide what is happening for themselves since it offers few answers and the answers present are contradictory."

So it seems the author is not a fan of clarifying the intent of his game. Not only do I respect this, I admire it.

The game is a bit like this:

You have a Skill score and some Advanced Skills that represent what you are good at or about.

There are two types of rolls.

Roll Under means roll 2d6, trying to get under your Skill + Advanced Skill.

Roll Vs. means rolling 2d6 + Skill + Advanced Skill vs. an opposing similar roll, probably made by the GM.

For combat, you have Stamina. This functions like hit points. When it runs out you are dead.

Initiative in combat is determined by pulling stones from a sack or cards from a deck or something similar. I used the Troika! initiative cards, which I highly recommend. You put x number of cards in the stack for enemies and each PC gets 2 cards. You draw out a card and that person goes next. There is an end of round card that is mixed in as well.

There is a Luck score. You can spend Luck only for a couple of benefits, including extra damage on a hit. You can also make Roll Under Luck rolls, which are kind of like D&D's saving throws. So, as in DCC RPG, when you spend Luck you run the risk of being out of Luck when you have to make that fateful Roll Under Luck test.

Over time, you get to roll 2d6 vs. your various Advanced Skills, trying to roll OVER them. If you do, you get to improve them by 1. This is how you advance and learn new skills. But advancement isn't a big concern with this game. I don't think the game is meant to play in "campaign mode".

Casting spells costs Stamina points. Your wizard will become quite weak and fatigued if you try to blast everything around you all the time like Tim the Enchanter.

For character creation, you roll on a d66 table (36 results) to see which background you get. Each background is like a little evocative description of a character at one place in time. You get a little flavor text, some skills, and some items. From there you can mold the character in any way you wish. The backgrounds ARE the setting for Troika!.

Ok, that's pretty much it.

THINGS I LOVE

d66 tables: Love 'em. I've adopted their use in other projects I've been working on. While Troika! is not the first time I saw a d66 table, it is definitely the game that made them loom large in my mind. I also started using d44 and d88 tables as well.

Backgrounds: Love 'em. So much flavor and world-building can be stuffed into these simple little portraits. You can, and should, write d66 background tables AS SETTINGS. I've written two of them myself. It's god damn fun.

Damage tables: Love 'em. They allow you to have a pretty wide variety of weapon damage only using 1d6 per damage roll. It's a nice visual artifact too. You could add a secondary 1d6 table to your weapon for weird FX. Like if it's a strange esoteric device maybe it sometimes zaps, sometimes burns, sometimes freezes. Interesting idea. See how this game inspires?

Inventory system: Love it. I am absolutely stealing it for my own games from now on. If you want that hand grenade handy, put it at the top of your list.

Spells: Love 'em. Very simple and direct. We don't need to know about how many cubic meters a wizard can burn. We just need the broad strokes.

Monsters' miens: Love it. Like a mini reaction roll table tailored to each critter.

Initiative stack: Love it. Quick and dirty and doesn't get in the way. Initiative systems always irritate me because they slow things down. This one does not slow things down. But see below.

The actual physical book: AWESOME. If you don't have a copy of the hardback Numinous Edition, GET IT. Lovely little tome that feels good in your hands and has delicious art by Jeremy Duncan, Dirk Detweiler Leichty, Sam Mameli, and Andrew Walter.

THINGS I DON'T LOVE

Initiative stack: I LOVE the concept and it plays fast. But it has mixed results. It can lead to long stretches where one player is unable to act at all. Which leads to kind of ridiculous results... Mid-combat, you are literally in the face of the enemy but somehow 4 other PCs and 6 other enemies take actions before you. I know this is a GM fiat thing. In that situation, the GM should just let the player go next. But that means ignoring the initiative rules, which invites the question "is this a good system or does it need work?". Players in my Troika! adventures seemed to be on the fence about it.

Skill and Advanced Skill: The language is clumsy. It's straight from Fighting Fantasy, I believe, so this is carried over. But it would be easier in play if it was something like Level and Skills or Power and Skills. Skill and Skills = a bit of confusion.

Roll Under/Over: Similar to Skill/Advanced Skill, the fact that your core mechanics require you to roll under for some things and over for others is confusing at the table. It is very simple and easy to grok, I know. And it damn sure works. But over the years I've been running games this problem has always reared its head whether it's old school D&D or Troika!. Players who aren't familiar with the game and who probably won't school themselves on it will ALWAYS ask "Do I roll high or roll low on this one?". And it is annoying to have to answer it over and over. So I prefer game designs that don't mix and match these mechanics.

OVERALL

I love the shit out of Troika!. It's a solid, fun game that plays fast and loose. It is endlessly hackable and inspiring. I'm all about inspiration, so I tend to gush about this game. It captured my imagination in a way that very few games ever could. So far I have published two books based on the game and plan to do more.

GOZR Character Sheet Sketch

This is my first doodle of a GOZR character sheet. The game keeps evolving as I write/draw it. Right now it is as simple as it's been so far and I like where it is heading. But I'm gonna need a separate character sheet for wizards...