Justin Achilli

Month: June, 2011

26 June 2011

Post-Morality?

Don't judge the book by its cover. Maybe this guy has something you want or need.

One of the things I enjoy about the swords and sorcery genre and about much vintage weird fiction is that it doesn’t bother itself with good and evil. The rogues and warriors are morally ambiguous, and often wicked or selfish, but both the writing and the character possesses a charm that makes you come back to their travails anyway. Sometimes the struggle is between law and chaos, while at other times it’s a less overt setting device invoked by barbarism, the decadence of society, or some sort of historical lacuna or frailty of man.

The picaresque is a great gameplay-adaptable narrative model here, in which a scoundrel (or pack of them) selfishly ambles through life, occasionally helping people or places through no conscious choice, but without the predatory motive typically associated with evil. Treasure, booze, women, weird cults, momentous forces of society, savages, customs, and weird creatures all fall before the wiles of the protagonists with often nothing more complicated than an exciting tale told. There’s no greater comment necessary. It’s just fun or exciting.

If it's not the focus of the detail, where the skulls come from isn't as important as the presence of skulls.

Moreover, in game terms, this freedom from confinement to a moral role opens up avenues of activity and problem solving. I’ve been rereading the updated Judges Guild classic Caverns of Thracia, and the way into the darkest depths of the dungeon involves four sacrifices. Now, these don’t have to be sacrifices of damsels in distress or unblemished virgins — any four sacrifices will do. Gnolls? Sure. Lizard-man? You bet. Hapless retainer? Okay, if that’s how you want to play it. Sacrifice isn’t going to fly with a paladin (probably), but for a Conan, Cugel, or Mouser type, it’s just a detail before moving on to the next action sequence or moody set-piece. It shows that these are bloody times, and that hard men drive them. Moreover, they don’t linger on the details of the sacrifice with unsavory zeal. They have no good or evil component of their own.

And a lack of moral compass makes for other dramatic elements that have their own weight. For example, what of the adventuring party that puts its torchbearers through the ominous portal first? Hardly “heroic,” but certainly “adventurous.” What about the seemingly doomed last stand against the monstrous hordes that — improbably! — survives and makes its way out of the dungeon only to pass the corpses of two other PCs who fell to squabbling over treasure and knifed each other during their exit? It completely invalidates the sacrifice in a morality tale, but it’s a perfect element of an adventurer’s story that gives a lingering redolence of gallows humor. Dark times for hard men, indeed, but high adventure doesn’t have to invoke shining knights. The Pagan Lands are like this. They don’t care for good or evil, but rather rely on concepts of empire, the melancholy of dying cultures, and the impermanence of the memory of Man. Morality doesn’t often enter the equation.

This is certainly at odds with my work on Vampire, which was almost wholly a morality passion play under my stewardship. My Frostholm proposal, similarly, revolved around turning up the morality in standard adventure gaming. Using this different focus doesn’t take anything away from those other efforts. It’s just a different exploration of game content that results in very different stories being told around the table.

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19 June 2011

Evil as Adversary Motivation

One of the things that never sat quite right with me about fantastical theology is the idea of evil gods. Sure, you kind of need them to make the cosmology work in a good-versus-evil themed storyline, and maybe they work for the more primitive monstrous cultures, but the idea of people — civilized people — venerating openly evil gods just doesn’t work for me.

Paladins of the Bull-God preparing for the bloodletting.

It can work, sure, but it needs a layer of sophistication. Degenerate, selfish gods who are evil, sure. But the cackling God of Destruction archetype is more suited to worshippers who are insane rather than evil. I suppose these are built on the idea that the evil-faithful will want to reign in whatever hell the evil gods brings about after Armageddon, but that lacks an immediacy that makes it impossible to take seriously. Is the GM really going to shift the focus of the campaign to Hell on Earth if the characters don’t manage to squelch Sycorax the Apostate? Probably not (but if they do, more power to them), and that’s where evil gods fall flat to my tastes. I don’t care if the orcs worship Blood-Eye, because if Blood-Eye’s apocalyptic plans come true, that’s where the game goes. But people? People genuinely wanting to annihilate the world and hope that their Darke Loarde gives them a castle in the ruined aftermath? I don’t buy it as a motivation.

With that in mind, here are a few of the themes and elements I use when employing evil morality as an ingredient in my games.

Evil as Selfishness: Rather than cackling holocaust, evil characters in my games usually serve their own ends first and at the expense of others. That’s what I find evil. In this sense, you can have “evil priests” like Thulsa Doom (as portrayed by James Earl Jones, but even somewhat in the original Kull story) who may or may not be faithful but enjoy the power they wield over their gullible or desperate thralls. The evil god, which may or may not be real, is simply set dressing for the selfishly evil individual. Whatever fills the ol’ collection plate; the end justifies the means.

Evil as Placation: Borrowing a bit from animism and mythology, some “evil gods” are actually spirits or other forces of nature or the world. They’re not divine, but they’re not above pretending to be or even demanding a little tribute. I especially like this as it blurs the line between these spirits and demons and the fae, in that the “Good Folk” also occasionally wanted to be courted and flattered. We used a bit of this in Vampire, envisioning the Slavic entity Kupala as a demon. No one (sane) worshiped the Kupala as presented in Vampire, but it sure did command tribute and sacrifice. An evil that wants to be placated is grasping, bullying, and potentially wholly alien, as its relationships are so so different from those of people.

Evil as Nihilism: I hesitate to overburden the already groaning adjective “Lovecraftian,” but the idea that the gods out there in the great void don’t cherish men’s souls but instead often cannot even notice us — now, that’s a place where an evil individual can wield great power. Perhaps he’s siphoning off some of their uncaring potency, or perhaps the gods are simply pushing incomprehensible icons of power around a cosmic game board. Whatever the case, an evil priest taking power rather than venerating it and being given it, well, that’s all kinds of unwholesome right there.

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12 June 2011

An Upcoming Political System

You may or may not be familiar with Tera. I wasn’t, but then I took a look at this E3 piece about it and it piqued my interest.

I don’t care about any of the classes and races. They seem pretty standard, and look like they reinforce the tank-DPS-healer trinity that’s largely behind why I wasn’t paying much attention to Tera. What caught my eye was the politics system.

There’s an interesting hybrid happening here. On the one hand, you can just grind your politics points — which is fine. That’s their core gameplay, and there’s the reward. On the other hand, though, players can award other players points, effectively having a voice in the political structure akin to a vote.

Devil-Elves of the Underwear Frontier League

Early on, Aion promised something like this, but failed to deliver at launch. Players were supposed to be able to good-karma other helpful players by way of appreciation, so if you were friendly and helpful to the community, you would have a bunch of those points that you could spend in the shops. A pretty cool way to incentivize and recognize helpful behavior in a medium that’s usually sorely missing it. But, yeah, they shipped without it and I don’t know if it ever made it in.

Back to Tera, it’ll be interesting to watch where this goes. If the system is poorly designed, it’ll be easy to put my faction on top and never lose that privilege. But if the system is interestingly designed, it can make for shifting play conditions, a gameplay benefit to socializing with other players, and a real sense of a living world. The persistence and transience of reward can really make a feature like this shine. “Let’s log on today, guild — we’ve got to protect our influence. Oh, no; we lost it to our rivals, and now we have to either earn it back or play under their terms!” Awesome.

If you’ll indulge me, I don’t have high hopes for it based on the other pieces of Tera I’ve seen, but let me tell you, I absolutely love being wrong when a game really delivers on a feature it promises to make its own. I think EVE’s free-form territory development gameplay is a great example of this, but it’s not the only way to address the design.

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2 June 2011

More Economy Systems Design

This money thing won’t be so easily beaten.

In an MMO, there’s a real economy, and the stuff I need has a price that’s adjusted either for gameplay (WoW level model) or by the activity of players (EVE market model). In a single-person or closed-participant CRPG or tactics game (Diablo, Warcraft/ Starcraft), it’s set by gameplay, too.

But in tabletop RPGs, it’s static based on design with the implicit understanding that the GM can monkey with the cost lists. That’s fine and good for a worldbuilding and narrative perspective — “The Guild has prevented metalsmiths from making weapons. Now all weapons are triple the listed price.” — but it still doesn’t create the money sinks that make money a reward, nor does it actively encourage the spending of money on the part of the player.

This is how nature says, "build a fighter stronghold or a cleric's temple here."

Recently, I’ve played a fair bit of Swords & Wizardry, which cadges from its parent D&D the idea that found treasure equals experience. I like this mostly, because it literally makes money a reward by tying it into the level progression. No need for a “fix” there. But what it doesn’t do is account for the behavior of that money afterward. There’s no sink, and no causality afterward. 15 GP could just have easily been a pair of sleeping orcs in terms of effect.

So here’s a modification I’ve been considering: Money found does not equal experience, but money spent does. You don’t have to spend it on anything functional in-game, but doing so gets you a double reward of the XP at issue and whatever the money buys. So it makes for cool situations like:

  • I spend my money drinking and whoring, like Conan, Fafhrd, and the Grey Mouser.
  • I tithe my money to the Church of [Womble or Whomever], like a good cleric or paladin should be doing anyway.
  • I invest my money in magical research, and create magic items as a result (particularly in terms of the D&D 3.5 ruleset, even though it doesn’t decree that found money is experience).
  • I sock it away in preparation to buy my stronghold (an investment that then provides event opportunities, whether in terms of the stronghold, or in terms of the scoundrels with whom I banked it skimming off my deposits).

"People of Wintergris! I give you this statue, which commemorates the time my buddies and I chased off the werewolf incursion! Don't let your peasant teenagers vandalize my statue."

  • I build a monument in town (maybe even to myself, like in Fable II).
  • I conduct research, potentially creating some weird fiction type device or breakthrough that may impact the world. All those odd things in the world come from sone industrious inventor, after all.
  • I become a patron to an artist or movement, like a Medici. (This could have great impact in a campaign like my Belluna homebrew, which chronicles the transition of a crime family into legitimacy, like the premise of the Godfather novels. With similar results….)
  • I hire retainers and hirelings.
  • I invest it in a non-stronghold property (as per Ethan’s comment in the previous entry) and doll it up a bit.

I give it to orphans. I pay taxes. I practice largesse in the base town. Whatever. Spend the money to earn it as XP, don’t just find it under a lizardman’s corpse.

I know a few games have mechanics like this, such as Barbarians of Lemuria and one of the house rules to Iron Heroes, and I think it can add a lot to a sandbox-style RPG campaign, regardless of the setting.

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