Make Ancestries Distinct By Giving Them Mastery of Their Domain

What do dwarves like? Brewing beer and mining gold out of the earth? Yeah, so what. Humans like those things too. 

What about elves? Music and magic? Humans. Love. That. Shit. Too.

If you want ancestries to stand out, don’t just make them the best at their thing. Give them exclusive dominion over it.

Dwarves 

Of the surface peoples, only dwarves can mine beneath the earth. They are not just the best at it, or the ones who do it most frequently. They are the only ones who can do it. The earth quite literally rebels against the efforts of surface folk to excavate its riches. Cave-ins, monster attacks, and even earthquakes greet those who try. But dwarves enjoy a mutualistic relationship with the earth, like plovers cleaning crocodile teeth. They can burrow into the ground and sense which riches can be removed without agitating the angry earth. Only dwarves can mine.

Elves

Of the intelligent creatures of the world, only elves can play music. They’re not just the most talented; only they can do it. Other creatures literally can’t carry a tune. Musical notation is gibberish to them. Instruments are like alien artifacts. Music is a force as much as magic is, and like magic, it can be a demanding master. Elves have some gift for it, reaching back into the prehistoric past, when the gods divided up their gifts to the peoples of the world. Only elves can make music.

Humans

Of the civilizations of the world, only humans can build cities. The dwarves have mountain strongholds and the elves have forest sanctuaries, but only humans build cosmopolitan gathering places defined by cultural exchange and mercantile trade. Only humans build cities.

Gnomes

Of the craftspeople of this land, only gnomes can build machines. For other ancestries, inherent process inconsistency means that ideals of engineering rigor and industrial production elude them. But only in the hands of gnomes can machinery work like it does in the real world. Only gnomes can build machines.

Tieflings

Of the peoples native to the prime material world, only tieflings can travel the planes. The otherworldly blood flowing through their veins is the ink on an invisible passport each of these plane-touched strangers carries with them at all times. Portals open only to their touch, and Plane Shift reliably sends them where they want to go. For other creatures, planar travel is an uncontrollable (and usually deadly) misadventure. Only tieflings can travel the planes.

The Player Rebellion

If you tell a group of players that things work in a certain way in the game world, at least one player is going to immediately want to create a character who breaks that rule. They may bristle at restrictions as a matter of principle, or find that ancestry-exclusive cultural or societal domains are too close to real-world stereotypes about nationalities or ethnic groups being "best" at something. So it’s a matter of when, not if, a player will want to break the rules.

And… that’s great! Let them! 

The first human in living memory who can perform music? A great hook for a character. A group of elves and humans and dwarves who embark on a quest to travel the planes, the metaphysical constants be damned? Those are some stakes for an adventure.

Deckbuilding in the Stygian Library: The First Layer

Last week: Exploring the Stygian Library as a Deckbuilding Game

Before we get into our first location, we have one important unanswered question. What are Felix and company looking for, exactly? Let’s stick with Knave 2 (“K2”) and roll on the Books table on page 40. We get 47: hunting. They’re after an ancient tome that details ways to hunt terrible, long-extinct monsters from deep under the sea. At least, everyone thought they were extinct. Lately they have revealed themselves to be dangerously non-extinct, so the value of this previously obsolete book has gone through the proverbial roof. Under The Stygian Library’s (“TSL”) distinctions of how hard a book is to find, we’ll put this at 30: “Obscure information, the sort of thing known only to a few scholars and jealously guarded.” Of course, Felix is happy to grab anything else that looks valuable; but this book is the specific reason his patron sent him into the library.

The Display Case

To begin, we’ll generate rooms strictly by the TSL rules. We certainly could create cards for every option on the primary roll tables, to populate rooms through a deck. And we may decide we need DM-facing deckbuilding components in the future. But in the interest of keeping it simple and iterating quickly, I’m going to limit the deckbuilding to immediate adjudication, and keep it away from elements that might be handled during prep in a non-procedural dungeon crawl.

Felix, Clotilde, and Guinevere crawl through the utility panel and tumble into the library’s first room:

• Location: The Display Case. Interesting Shoes.
• Details: Candle Sticks.
• Random Events: Something turns up - it’s unfriendly.
• An Ink Elemental and d4 Inkblots.

No easing our adventurers into this one. We immediately enter a potentially dangerous scenario, with “unfriendly” monsters present in the space. A few questions immediately present themselves:

• The random encounter is “unfriendly” -- how unfriendly?
• How far away? 
• Who sees who first?

Of course, these are the same questions handled by the traditional D&D rules of reaction and distance. Let’s try handling those with cards. For purposes of testing, I’m using dry erase playing cards, which are readily available online. They can smudge with shuffling, but are easy to erase and reuse. Index cards also work fine as a cheaper option, for those less particular about shuffling hand-feel.

We already know from the TSL result that the ink elemental and its blots are “unfriendly,” so we’ll limit reaction results to the negative end of the spectrum. Using the K2 reaction rules, that includes 2-7, everything from (gulp) “kill the PCs” to “Ignore the PCs.” We label the cards, shuffle them, and draw, for…

Gif by Shivur

“Ignore”! The best possible result. Phew. A TPK in the first room would have been underwhelming.

What do we do with this card, as well as the other reactions that we didn’t draw? Let’s set that question aside for now. Deckbuilders can incorporate the results of a scenario into the fiction in a number of ways. We could shuffle the “ignore” card into our player’s deck, and perhaps interpret its re-emergence later as the return of the original monster. Or we could preserve only the remaining reaction cards, suggesting that future encounters will face a dwindling pool of options. We’ll see if the answer reveals itself as go forward.

How far away are the creatures when the party encounters them? Traditionally 2d6x10 would give us a distance in feet for a dungeon encounter, but I don’t think we need to label 11 cards to resolve this. In many cases, cards are going to want to condense options to relatively fewer, broader choices, relative to dice.

For now, let’s just label three cards as close, medium, and far. We flip a card and get “medium”; the inklings are neither close nor far; they’re across the room, within a stone’s throw, but not right on top of our party.

Finally, is either side surprised? K2 treats surprise a little differently, with an opposed wisdom check (interestingly, this is a lot closer to modern/5E D&D than typical old-school rules). Felix has a +2. The Ink Elemental requires some conversion. We’ll halve it and round down, giving it a +2 on this check. There’s some more nuance suggested by K2 that we may or may not want to use later. For now, let’s just keep it simple and make four cards; monster surprised, party surprised, both surprised, neither surprised.

We draw and get… "monster surprised." The cards are really favoring the party so far. The adventurers spot the ink elemental and its satellite ink blots before the monsters know the party is there. Felix holds a finger to his lips and trio lays low. Since the monster’s default is to ignore them anyway, we don’t need to get into any kind of stealth adjudication. Our party also doesn’t need to spend much time in this space, as Felix quickly surveys the collection of unusual shoes and determines they aren’t worth stealing (per TSL, the value is 100 silver times the layer; since this is layer zero, these shoes are interesting, but worthless). The party uses the candlesticks here to light a torch, which Clotilde will carry. 

With no desire to linger here, the party delves deeper into the library. We’ll roll d20+1 (the layer they’re going to) for a location result of 5 (Chained Lectern) and a details result of 8 (Lamp-Post). We’ll pick up their adventure next time.

OK, So Where Is the Deckbuilding?

So far, all we have really done is replace die rolls with drawn cards. This is an intentionally slow start, because we want to gradually discern mechanics from gameplay, not dictate mechanics to the game and assume they'll just work out well. We'll build in more deckbuilding in future installments of this series.

Exploring the Stygian Library as a Deckbuilding Game

I’m a fan of deckbuilders, whether as video games (Slay the Spire, Inscryption, and others) or physical games (Dominion, Star Realms, and many more). I’ve always wanted to see deckbuilding in TTRPGs, but if that game exists, I haven’t found it yet. The closest I know of is Meromorph’s Atma card-based RPG. That game does a nice job of using cards to inspire unexpected scenarios in a TTRPG format; but it’s not a deckbuilder.

I’ve mocked up several different TTRPG deckbuilding systems, but finding time to test games with other people has been a challenge. My players would be happy to test something if I asked them. But any such ask comes at the expense of the other TTRPGs and board games we could be playing when we get together. That's a high bar to clear.

While I still plan to look for opportunities to test multiplayer deckbuilder TTRPGs, I’ve also decided to test a solo deck builder concept. When I see an interesting question like this generate zero replies, it suggests to me that there is untapped space that game designers should explore.

We’re going to keep this as simple as possible by only introducing deckbuilding mechanics when we really need them. The theory is that it’s easier to start with a very simple system and confirm it works ats a basic resolution system before adding really creative tweaks and neat subsystems. In short, we want to create a game that works like other solo TTRPGs, but uses the randomness of card draw instead of dice for moment-to-moment action resolution, as well as the concepts of deckbuilding for both the progression and consequences of dungeon adventure.

As I learned when my Dungeon23 project lapsed, trying to do a big project with a single output is a recipe for disappointment. A project is more robust if it can serve multiple purposes, so I made a list.

• Test if the deckbuilder model can work in a TTRPG
• Get some use out of adventures and other products I have purchased, but rarely or never run
• Experiment with solo RPGs
• Produce some blog posts

That feels pretty good, right? Let’s go!

Library of Babel gifs by Isaac Karth

The Stygian Library

The Stygian Library (“TSL” for short hereon) by Emmy “Cavegirl” Allen is a great example of a “depth crawl,” along with their similarly structured adventure, the Gardens of Ynn. Players explore a place that is generated in part procedurally; there is no fixed dungeon map.

I have used TSL before as a prep tool for my D&D games, where quite a few sessions revolved around a Borges/Prachett-style arcane library occupying a liminal extradimensional space, which could be accessed from different places. But I have never used its procedural generation tools in-session, as they’re primarily designed to work. Time to change that.

“Put enough books in one place, and they distort the world. Space bends in on itself, forming a sort of wormhole, linking the library to other libraries likewise afflicted. The space between is a sort of pocket realm, budded off from reality, maintained by the sheer power of books.”

Emmy Allen, The Stygian Library

TSL is particularly well-suited to this project because the procedural generation of the dungeon makes it easier to run as a solo exercise. The dungeon is not a pre-defined space, so in using TSL for solo play, the player has to do less work to disentangle their player knowledge from their DM knowledge. 

Delve One

We begin in The City’s largest bookshop. Someone was murdered here last night. That’s unfortunate for Someone, but it is very fortunate for us, because we want to access the Stygian Library, and an entrance will only appear in a location that contains both (1. many books and (2. a recent death. Did the patron who hired us for this job simply take advantage of an accident that happened here? Or did they create the opportunity, by orchestrating a murrr-derrr? Best not to dwell on such questions.

Investigating the far corners of the bookstore, we find nothing on the first, second, third, or 13th search of the space. On the cusp of giving up, we find a barely visible door – not much more than a utility panel – hidden behind the heaviest shelves in the place. The key to the front door of the bookstore unlocks this lock as well, which makes no sense; a warning of what’s to come. We enter the Stygian Library.

Library of Babel gifs by Isaac Karth

Our Brave/Foolish Explorers

“Tell you what, if it's a high card, I'll tell you who I am. But if it's a low card, I'll tell you who you are. Is that a deal?”

Deadfall (1993)

I am using Knave 2 (“K2” henceforth) for character generation and ideas, due to its simplicity; general interoperability with other games; and its use of slots, which are a good analogue for cards. I have run quite a lot of the original Knave, but this will be my first genuine experiment with K2. Here is my PC, with no rerolls.

Felix Digham

• A CON of 1 and a WIS of 2 (yes, I happened to roll the same results as the example in the K2 rules)
• Level 1, 0 XP
• 11 item slots
• Bag of spice
• Lamp oil
• Knife
• 2 rations
• 50’ rope
• 2 torches
• Mail shirt
• Helmet
• War scythe (two-handed, d8 damage) (slot 1)
• War scythe (slot 2)
• Poison
• 2 HP
• Careers: Merchant, Thug
• AP 2
• AC 13
• Personality: Truthful
• Appearance: Rugged
• Goal: Serve a deity
• Assets: Smuggles goods
• Liabilities: Known con artist
• Possessions not carried
• Strongbox (hidden in the bookstore and holding the below items)
• Scales
• 10 coins

I was a little confused at first by the merchant/thug and truthful/con artist dichotomies, but the assets and liabilities cleared that tension up. This is a person who has lived in the gray area between legitimate commerce and outright crime. No surprise that they are now employed in such dangerous and shady work.

Felix has spent 100 of his starting 110 coins to retain two hirelings for five days each. Should he survive one or more delves, he hopes to gather enough money to hit level 2 and retain some more sturdy companions to accompany him on future delves.

Clotilde Delamorn, hireling

• AC 11
• HP 3
• Level 1
• Attack punch d2
• MOV 40’
• MRL 4 
• 10 item slots

Guinevere Westerfield, hireling

• AC 11
• HP 3
• Level 1
• Attack punch d2
• MOV 40’
• MRL 4 
• 10 item slots

They carry some cheap sacks for loot, and nothing else. We’ll sketch out more about Clotilde and Guinevere (and Felix, for that matter) if they survive long enough to warrant our interest.

Next week: Deckbuilding in the Stygian Library: The First Layer 

Library of Babel gifs by Isaac Karth

Roleplaying Games Are Nomic Games

Roleplaying games, particularly in their most freeform state, are often a kind of Nomic game. Per Wikipedia:

Nomic is a game created in 1982 by philosopher Peter Suber, the rules of which include mechanisms for changing those rules, usually beginning by way of democratic voting.[1] The game demonstrates that in any system where rule changes are possible, a situation may arise in which the resulting laws are contradictory or insufficient to determine what is in fact legal.

…

Initially, gameplay occurs in clockwise order, with each player taking a turn. In that turn, they propose a change in rules that all the other players vote on, and then roll a die to determine the number of points they add to their score. If this rule change is passed, it comes into effect at the end of their round. Any rule can be changed with varying degrees of difficulty, including the core rules of the game itself.

Peter Suber’s book, The Paradox of Self-Amendment, is available here. Appendix 3, beginning on page 199 by the PDF pagination, is about Nomic. But the Wikipedia summary is sufficient for understanding the basics.

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

The logic behind Nomic subtly influences many kinds of games. Calvinball from Calvin and Hobbes is, of course, explicitly a Nomic game. It lacks the rigor of Nomic, as well as enough players to incentivize negotiation through voting, something Nomic’s rules specifically identify as an issue: 

Two can play, but three or more make for a better game. With only two players, there is no (initial) difference between unanimity and majority rule, which takes away a lot of the fun. 

But in spirit, it is so accurate to Nomic that I wonder if Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson read the original Scientific American article and got the idea there.

Other, more conventional games have Nomic qualities, insofar as there is almost always a socially navigated layer of agreement above the actual rules of the game. Common games played with standard decks of playing cards, for example, typically have many variations or house rules. The game cannot begin until the players agree on the rules they are using.

Even if the rules and procedure of the game are unambiguous, unforeseen events can arise that can only be resolved by group concurrence; which is to say, through a Nomic overlayer. What happens when a card is accidentally revealed? Do the players shuffle it back into the deck? Discard it? Is it replaced or not? Even a decision as simple as ending a board game before anyone has won involves a group discussion of whether to just conclude the game without a victor, or set the pieces aside to continue later. 

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

But TTRPGs are perhaps the most natural type of game to incorporate Nomic aspects. Even the loosest RPGs have some structure or rules; otherwise they would simply be freeform improv sessions (and there is nothing wrong with that; but it is no longer a "game"). And even the tightest TTRPGs, with the most intense procedure and the strictest rules, will inevitably require Nomic negotiation to amend and patch the rules, because as a game system, a TTRPG is an engine that produces corner cases, contradictions, and exceptions.

Nomic games cut directly to the idea of the social contract that is crucial to TTRPGs. Suber's anecdote  about removing the rule that says "follow the rules" in the Paradox of Self-Amendment is instructive:

After Nomic was first published in Scientific American, a German philosopher wrote to me insisting that Rule 101 (that players should obey the rules) should be omitted from the Initial Set and made part of a truly immutable shell. He missed an essential point of the game. Rule 101 is included precisely so that it can be amended; if players amend or repeal it, they deserve what they get.

 Surely everyone who has played TTRPGs – particularly at a young age – has encountered this problem, right? When my friends and I were kids, and D&D took the place previously held by purely freeform imaginary storytelling, we learned that while the rules were optional, we had something to gain by the constraints they imposed. The need to abide by rules to keep a game coherent is obvious and intuitive with a board game, and even more explicit with a video game, where (short of cheats and mods) one typically cannot alter the game’s rules much, if at all. 

But TTRPGs give the players more freedom than almost any other type of game. And with that freedom comes responsibility. There are no guard rails preventing you from changing, distorting, and ruining the game. And that’s what makes TTRPGs so fascinating.

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

Bonded Skills Through Flashbacks to Scenes of Bonding

I previously wrote about the disconnect that occurs in RPGs when the player doing most of the talking isn’t controlling the character with the best social interaction skill or ability modifier. I proposed several solutions to this source of dissonance. Here’s another. I have not (yet) tested this in a game.

When the PC doing the talking rolls to determine their success in a social scenario, they can use another PC’s superior modifier (or applicable skill, or die size, or whatever, depending on the system). In exchange, the two players must either collaboratively describe or act out a brief flashback between their characters.

The flashback should be short – five minutes is good. It should be something new; it can’t just rehash already-known events. It should have at least some indirect connection to the current social interaction. It doesn’t have to be direct and explicit; it could be indirect, or even metaphorical. But the two PCs need to establish some kind of connection between their characters, and explain how that past bond helps the character acting in the present exceed their solitary skillset.

An easy example is mentoring. Picture a scenario where the crude barbarian has to make a speech to the frog parliament. The charismatic bard would normally speak for the party, but the frogs want to hear the barbarian speak in their own words. The barbarian’s player would like to take advantage of that bard’s modifier on this roll. So the two players collaborate on a flashback to a month previous, when the barbarian reluctantly sought out the bard for speaking advice on some completely unrelated matter. That advice and mentoring now comes through in unexpected ways as the barbarian makes a still-crude – but surprisingly effective – argument to the assembled notables.

That’s a pretty direct example, but players could absolutely run with less literal ones. A flashback to an inconsequential chat during a quiet moment of downtime or the long boredom of travel could prove surprisingly relevant to an unanticipated scenario in the present. Players could put the focus on events that are certainly important to their characters, but rarely come up “on camera” in session; eating a meal together, for example. A flashback could also do double duty and resolve a loose thread, e.g., dealing with a minor antagonist from the characters’ early days.

Flashbacks like these are done best in small doses. Too many flashbacks can drain urgency and focus from the present scenario. Once per session, or less, is probably good for most games. Or, alternately, include a rule that each PC must do a flashback with each party member once before clearing their tally and having the option to “bond” with anyone once again. That would ensure that players don’t strictly conduct flashbacks just with the one character with the most desirable skills.

This idea could be applied to various kinds of skill and ability checks, with enough creative imagination. But social interaction is the space where I see players struggling with this player/character disconnect the most.

Turning the Wizard Question Around to Better Understand Our World

Last Week: Ignoring the Real World to Instead Learn to Cast Ninth Level Spells to Impress a Bunch of Wizards on an Internet Forum Whose Opinions’ Are Now Very Important to You for Some Reason

So if these wizards are not concerned with what the common people think, whose values and opinions would they care about? The Discord conversation concerned, in part, how humans naturally seek the attention and approval of their fellow people. Certainly this motivates real-world humans, and plays into many of the things they seek to accomplish in the real world. But I don’t think high-level characters necessarily see the broad population of other humans (or other sapient humanoids, more generally) as their peers. I believe wizards would care about status as measured by beings whose power equals or exceeds theirs; gods, extraplanar immortals, and, of course, other high-level wizards.

Following the logic of these ideas can take us back to the basic concept of domain play in classic and old-school D&D. Fighters rule land, clerics gather followers, wizards research knowledge. There is some overlap between those ideas, and exceptions, to be sure; a world should have an occasional witch-king or Merlin-style advisor. But in my conception, those are rare exceptions even among the already very small population of high-level adventurers.

So that’s my take – but I concede it is limited to certain assumptions about the metaphysical workings of a D&D world, how rare NPCs with class levels are, and the prevalence of magic. The approach of many high fantasy worlds – where NPC wizards and clerics in the double-digit level range seem happy to serve as government administrators, small business owners, and local troubleshooters – is not my approach. But it’s not a wrong approach, and it may suit certain styles of play. “It depends” wins another argument.

But it’s also interesting to turn this question around, and try to draw a more universal conclusion about the real world. Why do people seek status and power within nations and other organizations in the real world? Precisely because they cannot “level up” and access magic and supernatural power. Real-world historical rulers surely aspired to be like the 20th-level PC of their mythologies – Hercules or Gilgamesh or Merlin. But they were ultimately just mundane, mortal humans. They could not harness magical power or superhuman mastery of weapons. They had no choice but to build powerful societies because there was no other way to extend their influence and power far beyond themselves. 

In a fantasy world where magic and supernatural power exists, people would have that choice. That’s why I believe governments in medium- or high-magic worlds would be weaker, smaller, shorter-lived, and with less state capacity, simply because some percentage of the most talented potential rulers would instead be gaining power through magical means instead of building social and political power. 

We seek status because we lack the power to act so unilaterally as individuals in the way that the fantasy of fantasy RPGs allow us to do.

Ignoring the Real World to Instead Learn to Cast Ninth Level Spells to Impress a Bunch of Wizards on an Internet Forum Whose Opinions’ Are Now Very Important to You for Some Reason

Would high-level wizards in a fantasy TTRPG setting – say tier three and tier four, in modern D&D parlance – rule kingdoms and nations, whether directly or indirectly? Would they concern themselves with affairs of state?

These and related questions came up in a recent discussion on the Alexandrian Discord. They got stuck in my brain, and a blog post is the only reliable way to pry them out.

The discussion concerned the degree to which powerful D&D characters – particularly wizards – either would or would not seek real-world status and power in a manner that would be familiar to us from historical examples in the pre-modern real world. Would developing infrastructure, taxing the populace, raising armies, and otherwise participating in statecraft matter to them? Or would such worldly concerns be irrelevant to their goals and interests? 

I am firmly in the latter camp; in my own games, a character wielding such powerful magic simply has better ways to achieve their goals. Some other high-level characters – fighters or paladins, for example – might (might…) choose this route. But not a wizard.

It was clear from the Discord discussion that worldbuilding assumptions underpinning this question varied greatly. For example, the more the material plane is the metaphysical “center of the universe,” the more plausible it is that a wizard would invest resources in controlling mundane elements of it. In a cosmology where only mortal souls on the material plane can worship gods, perhaps the conventional control exerted by temporal nations would matter to a wizard.

But in my own conception of how wizards work, they would have better ways to achieve their goals. They would isolate themselves in their wizard towers (or better yet, off-plane domiciles) and focus their work on research and exploration. They would have little time for the values and priorities of the humans of their world. And doing so would make them a target of rivals and enemies more than it would help them. 

I believe that governments in medium- and high-magic fantasy worlds would be even more susceptible to decapitation strikes than their real-world equivalents, so high-level characters would have a strong incentive to decrease their visibility, exposure, and entanglement with organizations and governing structures. Some of my earliest posts on this blog were an attempt to reason out how societies in this kind of world would differ from equivalent historical societies in the real world.

Next Week: Turning the Wizard Question Around to Better Understand Our World