Fantasy Language Review: Building, Stealing, Adopting, and Conquering Words

Previously: Fantasy Language Review: Delver Cant, Tremorspeak, Lyrical Language, and Shouting at the Smallfolk

Gnomish

Continuing the “oops, all dwarvish script” theme, we reach Gnomish as the next “standard” language.

Variations: A dwarf by any other name… Gnomes, like giants, use dwarvish script for writing, but we don’t have to jump through any linguistic hoops to explain why. They’re just dwarves. The idea of a “gnomish” language is just a misnomer (a misgnomer?) among humans and other tallfolk. Gnomish is just another dialect of dwarvish.

An alternative approach: Mechanical minds. If anything distinguishes gnomes from dwarves, it is the idea that they are mechanical tinkerers, either in the (relatively) restrained presentation we get in D&D 5E, or in the full-send steampunk version present in World of Warcraft and other media. If we want to separate them from dwarves, give them a language that is as much math as words, inextricably intermingled with artifice and machine-craft.

Get weirder: Conlag culture. Gnomes are known for their restless reinvention, right? To the other civilizations, it probably seems like their love of tinkering goes too far, and they invent things just for the sake of invention. Take that to its logical conclusion, and portray each Gnomish dialect as a language created by a particular culture of gnomes as an expression of their own creativity and inventiveness.

Goblin

Variations: Warrenspeak. Goblins typically live in twisting, cramped tunnels, surrounded by giant rats and dire wolves. Goblins don’t treat these animals as pets or working animals so much as equal members of their warren. In this treatment, the goblin language is filled with howls, chittering, barks, and other animal noises, and goblins are halfway fluent in those animal languages. 

An alternative approach: Unseemly unseelies. The dwarvish script issue puts goblins as downstream of dwarvish culture, and a lot of fantasy fiction pits them as natural enemies. But a fairy-tale treatment of goblins (from folklore up through the Labyrinth movie) views them more as trickster spirits, members of the dark fey court. Switch their script to Elvish and you’re off to the races.

Get weirder: Every word, precious and stolen. In both folklore and D&D, goblins are characterized as  thieves. Why not apply it to language as well? Their entire tongue is made of words that a trickster-deity, in the olden days, stole from other languages. This is not a form of strict mimicry, like kenku; these goblin words literally no longer exist in their parent languages. Other creatures scoff at this idea as mere myth, but the etymological evidence is surprisingly robust… 

Halfling

Apropos of nothing, did you know that when Magic: The Gathering released its Lord of the Rings set, they categorized the hobbits as halflings? MTG had already done halflings as part of a previous D&D set, and they decided to just group hobbits into the same category, rather than creating a separate creature type for something so similar. I love that 50 years after the Tolkien estate cease-and-desisted Gygax into rebranding his smallfolk, we come full circle, and Bilbo gets halfling-pilled. Anyway, about that halfling language…

Variations: Honorary humans. Halfing is the only language besides common that uses the common script. Isn’t that strange? Seeing as how common is so… common, we would expect more languages to use it. Halflings are just “slacker humans” anyway – per the 2014 PHB, “Humans are a lot like us.” So a simple solution is just to have them speak particular dialects of common, just like humans. They could have invented their own language, but that would have been an awful bother, and their human neighbors have a perfectly nice language they’re willing to share!

An alternative approach: Polite polyglots. Expand on the above idea. Perhaps halflings, as much gracious guests as they are helpful hosts, speak whatever language is predominant in the area where they settle. Many speak common, because humans are the most, uh, common neighbors they might have. But not all communities do. A community of halflings speaking a weird language like grell or giant elk would present quite a linguistic puzzle if none of the accompany monsters were found nearby.

Get weirder: The folk under the floorboards. Why do they speak common? Why are they so comfortable in human civilization? Perhaps halflings just sort of appear in civilized places, like house spirits, mending shoes and sweeping rooms. In a tolerant place with good food on offer, they gradually just instantiate into physical beings, showing up one day acting like they’ve always been here… because they have.

Orc

Why just “orc” for the language name? Why is 5E so inconsistent with the “ish” suffix? Anyway, Tolkien again casts a long shadow here, as orcs, like goblins, use dwarvish script.

Variations: Putting the pig back in pig latin. We have an easy solution available if we choose to solve the Evil Humanoid Problem by treating orcs as a subversions of other ancestries (like undead or aberrations) rather than treating them like a culture or ethnicity that should be understood in a similar way to real-world people. With this approach, their use of dwarvish script makes sense. These porcine minions might be variously descended from corrupted surface dwellers of all kinds, but dwarvish is the script they use because it is the most common written language available in the dungeons, caves, and other subterranean spaces they now occupy.  

An alternative approach: Just following orders. If orcs were created for war, uruk-hai style, language would be part of that. Orcish would be like a stripped-down version of its creator’s language, something like a series of call signs, exhortations, and barks from a military shooter.

Get weirder: Chaos manifested. If the previous idea strays too close to hobgoblins in D&D’s crowded collection of intelligent enemy bipeds, we can steer orcs in the other direction. Orcs are not frightening because they can fight, or want to fight, but because they must fight. They raid civilization not so much because they need resources, but because the very idea of civilization is a fundamental offense to them. Their language reflects this. It sounds like gibberish to the untrained ear, but those who learn to speak it see it as an anti-logic, like a record played backwards to reveal satanic messages. Their language is a mockery and a rejection of every word of common, elvish, and dwarvish ever uttered.

Next time: Fantasy Language Review: Demons, Devas, Dragons, Derp Speech

Modern Play Means Freedom From Restraint

Last week: The Big Difference Between OSR and Modern/5E Playstyles

To summarize last week's post, PCs in 5E and other modern games are free from social and political norms, institutions, and rules. And that freedom is more essential to the appeal of modern play than any particular combat loop or class power.

Examples are easy to find. Take Critical Role, one of the most prominent examples of modern-style play in the 5E age. Both the first and second seasons of Critical Role feature parties who violated laws, disregarded customs, and generally acted like real shitbirds. The characters were, to varying degrees, misfits and scoundrels. But they never faced the consequences that misfits and scoundrels would face in an OSR game. If they died, their deaths were dramatic and tragic, not mundane and tragicomic. And when they succeeded, their success was epic. Success wasn’t just a haul of gold to spend carousing in town. Both of those campaigns ended with world-spanning quests to save the world. OSR PCs who flaunted social and factional constraints the way Critical Role PCs would not save the world; they would die, quickly and unceremoniously.

Running 5E with an OSR mindset, I was constantly reminded of how many “get out of jail free” cards 5E characters had. That could be literal jail; at all but the lowest levels, most 5E PCs have a range of skills that trivialize mundane incarceration. But it also applies figuratively. Factions simply cannot hope to constrain PC action in a modern game in the same way they would in an OSR game.

Dragon by Millennium Hand

And this distinction is not unique to modern vs. OSR play. A huge part of PBtA-style games, and other story games, is tools baked into the core of the game that explicitly create leverage and seed consequences for disregarding social rules and laws, or for recklessly standing in opposition to powerful factions. Faction play is still useful in 5E; if nothing else, factions have numbers and time on their side, so they can act against PCs even in modern-style play, because those PCs simply cannot be everywhere all the time. But it takes a lot more work to make it happen.

Listening to 3d6 DtL’s Arden Vul podcast, I was repeatedly struck by how the idea that “the world reacts to your actions” created situations that the players could at best hope to endure, not overcome. When a dragon shows up and makes demands of the party, it is not a dramatic cutscene. It is not a preview of a boss battle a dozen sessions down the road, in which the PCs will almost certainly prevail. The dragon is orders of magnitude more powerful than the PCs, and if they don’t understand and appreciate that, they will die, suddenly, ignominiously, and deservedly.

To turn the question around, I have also found that modern-style players can adapt quite quickly to OSR play. When I run Knave for players who have no background or investment in the OSR, they very quickly grok the danger their characters are in, and intuit the risks of acting in defiance of the world they find themselves in. They start asking more questions, thinking further ahead, and generally taking the world and its factions seriously. Give a player a character with 2 HP and a rusty knife, and they don’t need you to explain styles of play to them; they figure it out very quickly all on their own.

The Big Difference Between OSR and Modern/5E playstyles

I ran D&D 5E for years with a behind-the-scenes OSR mentality. There are a lot of good reasons to apply an OSR mindset to a game for players with a modern (or “OC” or “neo-trad” or whatever) playstyle. Even if the players have no idea what OSR means, applying OSR principles to prep and adjudication creates a more immersive, convincing world, with more challenging obstacles and more rewards for creative play.

But systems matter, and not every OSR principle can apply to a modern game just because the DM has internalized the Principia Apocrypha. The idea that “the answer is not on your character sheet” is not going to translate when the system itself is very loudly and consistently telling players that many answers are, indeed, right there on their character sheets. And there’s no easy way to undo the super-heroic power level of PCs in modern play, without hacking 5E into a different game.

When talking about the modern style of play, as opposed to other cultures of play, we often focus on fluid, action-packed combat, where characters have specialized roles and neat action loops. And that is part of it. Certainly that’s a big part of D&D 4E and (to a lesser degree) D&D 5E. It’s part of Pathfinder. And it’s part of the new crop of games that rose in the wake of Hasbro’s self-inflicted OGL debacle.

Giant Pot-Tomb Demon by Andrew Porter

The Real Fantasy Behind Being Superman

So everyone understands that modern play features superheroic PCs who fight more like the Avengers, rather than fighting like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. But what is also interesting (and comparatively less-discussed) is how modern play changes gameplay outside of combat. Superheroes remain a good point of comparison to illustrate the difference.

A key part of the appeal of superheroes is their ability to act unilaterally, as individuals, without negotiating with or deferring to society’s rules. This expression of independence can be simple and direct. A heroic vigilante acts in defiance of law enforcement… but in a way that the audience mostly views as moral and correct. 

But it can also be a less literal form of unilateral activity, of defiance. I will posit that so many superheroes can fly because the idea of freedom from the law of gravity is a form of rebellion against law itself; in other words, flying is not a common fantasy because of something intrinsic to the act of flying itself, but because the act of flying is fundamentally a rejection of the rule of gravity.

Freedom is what really defines the power fantasy that many people explore when they first dip their toes into TTRPGs. A kid playing their first superhero RPG doesn’t want to be Superman so they can lift a bus over their head, so much as they want to be Superman because nobody can tell Superman not to lift a bus over his head.

Next week: Modern Play Means Freedom From Restraint

A Random Generator Is Worth a Thousand Hours of Prep

One of the games I ran this year involved adventurers hopping unexpectedly from plane to plane. While prepping for the game, it quickly became obvious that this was not something that I could prep in the same way I would prep a megadungeon or a scene-based mystery.

So how do we produce interesting planar content without prepping dozens of worlds in exhaustive detail? How do we make sure characters “get” each plane they visit? Especially when they’re not spending much time on each one?

Planes of existence in a fantasy world are exaggerations of the “natural” world (the prime material). They are defined by their defiance of rules or expectations we have about the regular world. To boil it down to a very simplified binary, it helps to think about the two sides of what makes a plane different from the normal world.

Concepts that epitomize the plane. Something inherent and fundamental to the place that defines it. It should usually be immediately obvious and prevalent throughout the plane.

Concepts that are antithetical to the plane. Something that is against the plane’s nature. It should either be prominent for this reason, or conspicuous in its absence.

It’s important to think about both aspects. It’s all well and good to say the elemental plane of fire is epitomized by fire. It’s hot. Fires raging, smoke, lava, and so forth. But that’s not enough. Think about near-absolute absence of water. What does the air feel like as a consequence of that? What is the weather like? Are native creatures violently allergic to water? Or is it a precious treasure to them? Possibly some of both, living side by side?

Let’s put this in motion with some prompt tables. 

What are the local landmarks? What captures the eyes of the visitor?

Epitome

• A castle, city, or other built structure. It’s composed of the essence of the plane, or its structure and function is defined by the presence and abundance of that essence.
• A mountain, body of water, or other superficially “natural” feature. It behaves in a strange or exotic way that reflects the essence of the plane.
• A vortex, portal, or other magical, extraplanar juncture or aperture. Its presence indicates the permeability of the plane, as well as its adjacency to affiliated planes. 
• The site of disaster or change characteristic of the creative or destructive forces of the plane.
• Valuables that are rare on the prime material plane are abundant here (e.g., valuable gems on the elemental plane of earth). 

Antithesis

• The absence of something we take for granted in the normal world (e.g., no fire on a frozen or entropic world).
• A concentration of a rare resource, whether precious or merely exotic (e.g., an oasis on a desert plane).
• A structure, object, or feature that was native to another plane, but was moved to this plane, intentionally or accidentally. Its original nature has been warped or changed by this plane.
• Something removed or exploited and taken elsewhere, leaving tangible absence in its place.
• Something antithetical to this plane, but reshaped by the epitomizing forces here.

What is going on there? How is the situation ripe for adventure?

Epitome 

• The plane’s essence is difficult to understand or interact with, or otherwise defies material plane logic. 
• An event (natural or social) is occurring that restricts or slows visitors’ ability to travel and explore.
• A power from a sympathetic or aligned plane is trying to influence, ally with, or absorb the plane.
• Political, commercial, or social activity focuses on a commodity or treasure that can only be grown, made, or refined in the unique environment of the plane. 
• A gift or creation of the ruler or power on the plane, unique to this place and never taken off-plane, has been damaged, compromised, stolen, or otherwise altered. 

Antithesis

• The antithesis of the plane, something that would be expected in the prime material, is totally absent. Natural laws may be distorted to account for its absence.
• The antithesis of the plane is imprisoned, contained, rationed, or besieged.
• The antithesis of the plane has been memorialized, shunned, sanctioned, or put on display.
• The plane’s enemies or natural opposites are invading.
• Magic is altered in some fundamental way by the absence of something that would normally power, channel, or enable it. 

Who is nearby? Factions? NPCs? Monsters?

Epitome

• Natives of the plane, whose nature is linked to the essence of the plane. They are not merely planar loyalists; their very understanding of the cosmos is defined by the epitome of their plane.
• True believers, either in the ruler of the plane, or the nature of the plane itself. They either transmigrated here after death, or traveled here by magical means.
• The ruler of the plane. Whether a demigod, demon-king, or something stranger.
• Created creatures made of the essence of the plane by archwizards, gods, or others who use the plane’s essence as raw materials.
• Creatures from allied planes who have come to visit, trade, or evangelize. 
• Guardians, persecutors, or judges of the epitome, who seek to destroy, expel, or dominate the antithesis. 

Antithesis

• Creatures trapped here, either intentionally by denizens of the plane, or those stranded by accident.
• Creatures that are valued or respected because – due to their antithetical nature – they can do things or provide value that native denizens cannot. 
• Invaders from an opposed plane who have come here to destroy or conquer part or all of this plane.
• Explorers seeking to secure the epitome of the plane for use as an antithesis on their own plane.

What hazards, traps, or dangers are here?

Epitome

• The essence of the plane is hostile or otherwise dangerous to travelers. Simple actions like movement, breathing, or eating and drinking may be difficult.
• An out-of-control or escalating expression of the epitome is becoming more extreme over time.
• The landscape or physical properties of the plane are changing in a way that defies material plane laws.
• Traps, barriers, or other intentional dangers have been established to keep planar visitors either from accessing sensitive areas, or out of the plane entirely.

Antithesis

• A forced merger or overlap with an opposed plane creates violent or unpredictable interactions.
• Open conflict between factions or individuals over antithetical elements. Multiple factions may seek to recruit outsiders. Innocent bystanders may be caught in the crossfire.
• Remainders of a long-ago planar conflict between epitome and antithesis persist to the present (e.g., metaphysical minefields).
• Weapons deployed in the plane broadly attack a weakness or vulnerability inherent to the epitome of the plane, endangering anyone unfortunate enough to be nearby. 
• Something hazardous was placed here for containment or safekeeping, because the nature of the plane itself or the behavior of its denizens can suppress, control, or monitor the antithetical thing.  
• Something stolen from an antithetical plane, which is disruptive or wrong in this place.

Here is our random generator that incorporates all these bits into just four prompts. We can adjust it some more going forward; maybe we want the epitomes to be several times more likely than the antithesis.

https://perchance.org/whatishappeningonthisplane

Bonus Table: How Did You Get Into This Mess? (d12)

1. A wizard did it. A spell was cast upon you. It went wrong.
2. A wizard did it (the wizard was you). You tried to cast a spell. It went wrong.
3. Portal passenger. You wandered into a portal and now you’re here, wherever here is.
4. For science. An experiment went awry. Whether you were an experimenter or a test subject doesn’t matter now.
5. Trapped! A nefarious entity created an inter-planar trap. Congratulations, you have sprung that trap.
6. Hot pursuit. Something is chasing you across the planes. You don’t know what it is, but it seems to be accelerating and salivating.
7. Left behind. You were hired for some specific job or expertise, but the person who hired you left you behind. 
8. Cursed! Whether it happened to a distant ancestor long ago, or to you personally last week, the terrible curse has sent you hurtling between worlds.
9. Debt. You owe such a vast amount that when a particularly dodgy character offered you an especially suspicious way to get out of town -- really, really far out of town -- you took it.
10. Transmigration. You died. While your soul was on its way to the afterlife, it took a wrong turn, and you are now lost. Depending on where you were destined to go in the afterlife, this may be either relatively good or relatively bad news for you.
11. Prison break. You were trapped in Tartarus, a demiplane, or some similar extraplanar confinement. You're free now but you didn't plan too far beyond your escape.
12. Sole survivor. You were part of a highly larger team that was intentionally traveling the planes. You're not in a good situation now, but you wouldn't trade places with your recently deceased companions.

Barbarian, Soldier, Conqueror, King… and then Barbarian Once Again

The Appendix N books that originally inspired D&D frequently featured protagonists charting a picaresque path through a dangerous world. In many instances, these characters would enter a given location or scenario as a humble outsider, but by the end of a given short story (or chapter, in an episodic novel), they’ve risen to a position of power or influence, usually through their cunning and guile.

By the beginning of the next chapter – often presented in media res – they are on the road again, returned to the itinerant state they began in. Such stories often do not even include an explanation of how the character left that last position of power and influence, but it’s usually easy to imagine. There’s something compelling about a character who is good at exploiting an unstable situation and rising to power, but then either becomes bored with the work of maintaining that power, or simply gambles it away with the same impetuousness that empowered their rise.

Thinking about the way these characters rise, fall, and rise again got me thinking about two otherwise-unrelated characteristics of old-school and traditional RPGs… domain building and level drain.

Pixel art by Hal0Badger

I'm Losing My Edge, but I Was There

It goes like this. When adventurers reach high enough levels to oversee a domain, the game switches to domain play, under whatever system the DM and the players choose. This could work well as a single session, where the action zooms out and the game skips over longer periods of time. It could also be done by email or Discord messages, in between conventional adventuring sessions.

Each PC of sufficiently high level to manage a domain identifies actions they would like to pursue while in power. These should be goals that would be difficult or impossible to achieve through adventuring. Politics, warfare, arcane research, proselytizing, building things; whatever they can imagine. It can be helpful to think in terms of nations, organizations, and populations (factions, in short). Some good universal prompts can include the following:

• Supporting or expanding an existing faction
• Opposing an antagonist faction, by war, politics, trade, or all three
• Creating a new faction, or reviving a fallen faction

Each goal takes an in-game year to resolve. For every year that passes, each character running a domain loses a level. This works just like classic level drain, except it doesn’t represent undeath eating away at a character’s lifeforce. Instead, it is the loss of the adventuring edge as the domain-ruling character is either softened by the luxuries of life at the top, or weighed down by the burdens and obligations of leadership.  

The rewards for pursuing domain goals should be substantial enough that they are tempting even to players who hate level drain. There should be little or no rolling the dice, and the DM should adjudicate deferentially whenever it makes sense; after all, the players are giving up something real here. They should get meaningful results.

Characters can “spend” as many levels as they wish on these domain-level actions. Different characters can “spend” different numbers of levels during domain play, or opt out entirely. When no one wants to spend any more levels, the characters return to adventuring, at whatever lower level they now find themselves at – years later, in a world changed considerably by their time at the top. 

Title screen from the 1991 video game of the same name (?)

OK, Would YOU Actually Play This?

Me? No. I’m always eager to retire a character and move on to the next character. For me, the thrill of rolling up a new 0 XP nobody outweighs the familiar attachment of a highly leveled character. I think this is typical of people who DM more than they PC, and are accustomed to treating characters more like a fun time, while they last, and less like a semi-permanent avatar of oneself.

But I also think I’m in the minority. Many players are far more invested in playing a character they love, and reluctant to just retire. The desire to gain levels is in tension with the desire to stay in the sweet spot of character progression – leveled enough to be unique and somewhat powerful, but not so leveled that domain matriculation pulls them out of the dungeon. This idea would just be a new way to resolve that tension. 

So ask your players – is the idea of gaining power, squandering it, and starting all over again compelling? If so, they may want to try being barbarians, then soldiers, then conquerors, then kings… and then barbarians once again. 

Pixel art by cibella

Ah 5E, Here We Go Again

After a year of running other games, I was asked to run D&D 5E again. While I have one big problem with 5E as a system, and many more particularized complaints with specific mechanical executions, I think 5E is a decent system. I have run hundreds of sessions with it. Thousands of hours. If I hated it, I would have found a way to get off that train. I said that I wasn't sure if I would run it again, but I'm not surprised that I am. My desire to run D&D outweighs my disdain for any particular D&D system. I have voted with my feet.

All that said, I am skeptical of the implicit presumption that 5E is the default choice for fantasy TTRPGs. When I have run other systems, with cleaner, more concise mechanical designs and ludological execution, I’ve been consistently impressed with how quickly players – whether versed in 5E, or entirely new to TTRPGs – grokked the system. I’m skeptical of the common belief that seems to exist in the TTRPG world, that 5E is the natural starting point for fantasy games, and players can then opt in to other games after they have tried out the industry standard. I don’t usually write about the 💿🐴 on this blog, but a kerfuffle over a popular actual play streamer’s defense of using 5E for games that don’t strictly fit its explicit and implicit system is instructive on this question.

I haven’t watched Brennan Lee Mulligan’s games, but I’ve wondered about the “5E as universal system” idea in other media that I have followed. I’ve been an on-again, off-again listener of the Adventure Zone, the TTRPG wing of the McElroy brothers’ podcasting family. They’ve run a variety of campaigns, some lasting dozens of sessions, and have shown a commendable willingness to experiment with different systems.

When they announced a campaign titled The Adventure Zone Versus Dracula, I thought “Ah, interesting! What system will they use? The Dracula Dossier… or something homebrewed, but still set in Night’s Dark Agents? If not, Urban Shadows perhaps? Undying? Maybe even a Vampire the Masquerade game, steering into (but also dissecting) the ‘90s edgelord reputation of that storied game?”

No. They chose D&D 5E, for… some… reason. It’s strange, because their style of play, and the podcasting format itself, really lends itself to PBtA and other story games. And the best Adventure Zone moments really sing with PBtA energy. Listening to their 5E episodes really grates my bacon, as the players, versed in PBtA play culture, wander around spamming 5E skills as if they were playbook moves. Every time someone on the Adventure Zone says “I’d like to make an Arcana check” without first framing their character’s actions in-fiction, a fairy flies into a bug zapper.

So the McElroys keep coming back to 5E. If they’ve explained why in an interview or blog post somewhere, I haven’t seen it, just like I haven’t seen that degree on Travis’ wall. I only know that it is a pain to listen to an engaged, creative, often laugh-out-loud actual play group struggle against the system they chose to play.

Fantasy Language Review: Delver Cant, Tremorspeak, Lyrical Language, and Shouting at the Smallfolk

Previously: Mapping the Fantasy Languages – How and Why 

The following approach is very intentionally “vanilla fantasy”, hewing as close as possible to D&D qua D&D. Most games should tweak or change this approach considerably to fit the setting and campaign concept in use. But as a starting point, the generic treatment is more useful than a tailored version.

Common

Common is pretty obviously a solution to a gameplay problem rather than a worldbuilding detail that emerges naturally from the fiction. The party members need to talk to each other and the game designers don’t want every session devolving into frantic pantomime. Can we do better? 

Variations: Dialects. Fantasy games have a bad habit of suggesting that human nations have cultures that vary just as much as they do in the real world… yet these cultures speak the same common language. Use the close and familiar gaps (defined in the last post) to articulate dialect differences. Human languages don’t just have to be limited to people from far-off places. Two towns separated by a handful of miles of difficult geography may have very different languages; it certainly happens in the real world.

An alternative approach: Delver cant. Common is a lingua franca, but as real-world lingua franca was used by groups who needed it for their profession (e.g., traveling merchants) fantasy lingua franca would not be the common language of, uh, commoners, but rather adventurers. This means the party can easily talk to each other, but they can’t necessarily communicate with every Tom, Dick, and Harpy they encounter on their travels. Bonus points if the players want to invent their own slang, unique to just their group.

Get weirder: Memo-virus. Use Noise Sans Signal’s idea of common as a memetic virus (this idea is very Snow Crash).

Dwarvish 

Dwarves and their ancient language are a familiar part of the common fantasy vernacular, and their written script (often flavored as runes) appears a lot in the game. We'll revisit Dwarvish script in some of the following entries in this series, as D&D uses it a lot.

Variations: Mountain homes. There’s no particular reason that dwarves should have any more lingual unanimity than humans. Rather than tying their language to nation states, like most fantasy human languages, perhaps each range of mountains has its own Dwarven tongue. Dwarven adventurers exploring a mountain home that was completely abandoned (like Moria) might need to navigate a close or familiar language gap. 

An alternative approach: Terran dialect. One way to tap deeper into the mythic nature of dwarves, and get them away from the bad Scottish accent cliche, is to tie their language directly to the capital-E earth; make Dwarvish and the elemental earth language Terran related languages, so dwarves are not just those who dwell in the earth, but those who descended from it.

Get weirder: Tremorspeak. Take the above idea one step further. Who says Dwarves have to speak their language in a conventionally verbal manner? Instead they could communicate through complex vibrations and tapping; a tactile language formed deep underground. This opens up all kinds of interesting opportunities for non-verbal communication, subterfuge, and strategy.

Elvish

Vanilla fantasy typically posits Elvish as the other very ancient language among humanoids, besides Dwarvish. 

Variations: A tongue for every terrain. Many real-world languages have different tenses and word choices for different social settings. A person speaking their language to immediate family members may sound completely different from how they sound when at work, or speaking to a stranger,  or participating in a religious ritual. Consider giving elves dialects that vary based on the place where they are. PCs may be surprised to find that the elf who is perfectly grokkable in the streets of the human city speaks a difficult-to-understand dialect when deep in the forest.

An alternative approach: Sylvan cousins. The Elvish language itself is a descendant of the Sylvan tongue. Elvish brings rigor and structure to a language that is famously mercurial when spoken in the fey lands. This complexity is not arbitrary. It holds back the inherent chaos of the mother tongue, allowing elves to maintain the connection to unadulterated magic and the natural world, without succumbing to the satyr’s bacchalia, the abandon of the Wild Hunt, or any other manifestation of Sylvan chaos. “You’re speaking Sylvan'' is an Elvish expression suggesting that someone is saying something irrational.

Get weirder: Musical meaning. Most lore about elves suggests a propensity toward art and music. Why not make it explicit, and make their language musical? Elves literally speak in metered prose or loose, interwoven melodies. This doesn’t mean that elven PCs have to constrain how they speak or come up with song-speeches (although an ambitious PC absolutely should feel welcome). It’s more just a way to drive home an alien or foreign language gap. 

Giant

D&D 5E treats Giant as one of the "standard" languages, even though the lore suggests Giant is older than any other language besides Draconic. We’ll interrogate that contradiction in our treatment.

Variations: Planar fugitives. If giants trace their origin to other planes of existence, then their languages could reflect this. Fire giants can speak Ignan, of course, but we should avoid just slapping elemental affinities on everything; elements are already overused in D&D's cosmology. Perhaps some of the connections are less obvious. If stone giants don’t speak Terran, but instead speak a language of the Dreamlands, isn’t that more interesting? If cloud giants are cagey about their native tongue and refuse to speak it in front of outsiders, doesn’t that create an interesting mystery behind these tricksters?

An alternative approach: Bound by the word. Why do the giants use dwarven script? They are among the oldest creatures, peers to dragons. Shouldn’t they have their own script? Perhaps in mythic times, they had a spoken language, but no writing. The Monster Manual seems to at least suggest this would be a reasonable inference; in one aside, the 5E book notes that fire giants “work through insight and experience rather than writing or arithmetic.” Perhaps in that mythic pre-history, when the giants were more common, they had no need to write. One day, a clever dwarven smith came to the king of the giants and asked to learn the ways of the giant metalworkers. The haughty giant king scoffed, asking what the dwarves could possibly offer in return that would equal the value of this rare knowledge. The dwarf said that his people had a form of “magic” that could compel armies to battle or stop kingdoms in their tracks; "magic" that would make warlords weep and turn modest maidens into military marauders. The “magic” was, of course, writing, and ever since that day, dwarves have known the ways of the giant smiths, and giants have written in dwarven script.

Get weirder: Deafening declarations. A giant’s size can be hard to communicate in a TTRPG. So many other D&D monsters are very large, so the idea of the giant as “really big bearded guy” can lack narrative oomph. It helps for the DM to channel the giant’s size into something besides just a height measurement and commiserate strength score. Imagine a giant who whispers and is still so loud that her voice shatters glass. Imagine giants reveling in the mountains, with the echoes audible hundreds of miles away. It is difficult to parse their language simply because it is so loud. Massive lung capacity can really play up the true size of a giant. Wouldn't it be more evocative if a cloud giant was literally blowing a PC over with a sneeze, rather than the boilerplate X/day wind and weather spells from the PHB?

Next time: Fantasy Language Review: Building, Stealing, Adopting, and Conquering Words

Mapping the Fantasy Languages – How and Why

Language is an interesting part of TTRPGs, but many games treat it as an afterthought. Other media have amply demonstrated that it’s entirely reasonable to put language at the center of a game or story. It’s been done in video games (Chants of Sennarr or Tunic), books (Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, and Snow Crash), and movies (Arrival or Pontypool).

If there’s a TTRPG out there that has done language well, I haven’t seen it (as always, pointers appreciated). Other blogs have done the hard work of unpacking various aspects of TTRPG languages (for example, see here, which also links to other interesting examples).

I have written a few posts that incidentally deal with language, but only in specific, niche cases, like using an unusual tense to flag important information, or thinking about how D&D’s old alignment languages implied interesting things about the game’s setting. But I have not done a holistic TTRPG language post. That starts now. 

Defining Interesting Degrees of Separation

Languages in TTRPGs are generally yes/no, on/off propositions. You either speak Elvish or you don’t. You understand the aliens perfectly, or not all. Many games end up with a “common tongue” or universal translators simply because such black-and-white treatments are not interesting to engage with, and are thus easier to simply gloss over.

Take a look at the Mausritter language rules, as summarized in the Knight at the Opera post linked above. Languages are defined as much by the degree of separation between them as they are by anything intrinsic to each tongue. So if we focus on the gaps between languages in a TTRPG setting, rather than the languages themselves, we can come up with three or four categories, like so:

• An alien gap between two languages means that those who do not speak it don’t just find it unintelligible; they may not even recognize it as language.
• A foreign gap means that the listener knows it’s a language, but they can’t intuit any specific meaning from the words. At best, they might infer broad intent or very, very simple concepts, as much from inflection and body language as the words themselves.
• A close gap means that the languages have some overlap or common interoperability, whether through a shared language family (see below), an abundance of loan words and social exchange, or simple cultural osmosis. Everyday conversations and simple exchanges can be understood, but nuanced or complex ideas get noisy fast.
• A familiar gap means that the languages are nearly related or intermingled, and the difference may boil down to dialect or patois. The large majority of ideas can be clearly communicated. Only concepts and conversations closely related to whatever differentiates the two languages may be difficult to parse.

Why Making Comprehension Harder Is Worth It

It’s fine if games decide they are not about language. When I’ve been a player in Urban Shadows or Delta Green games, everyone is pretty much speaking English, and unless we find some eldritch runes or something, language is not going to come up. That’s fine. But if a game is going to include language, it shouldn’t be handwaved. Language should present challenges and obstacles that make the game more interesting, just like monsters and traps and fronts and stress points do.

How can it matter in a game like D&D?

"Languages known" matters more. In modern D&D, characters receive generous additional languages from their ancestries, classes, and backgrounds. Many of these never come up in the game, because most communication is happening in Common. Emphasizing differences rewards characters for selecting interesting languages.

Spells and abilities that translate matter more. Comprehend Languages and Tongues become much more viable choices for precious spell slots when communication could hinge on their availability. Telepathy powers become much more potent. 

Pantomiming, drawing, and other methods of non-verbal communication matter more. While not every session should devolve into charades, it can be a good prompt for some creative, physical roleplay.

Hirelings, guides, and translators matter more. Absent a fluent speaker in the party or relevant magic, PCs can do what real-world people did in the ancient world; hire someone who does know the language to translate. This can provide a good hook for incorporating support NPCs into a modern game that has largely shed them.

Next Time: Fantasy Language Review: Delver Cant, Tremorspeak, Lyrical Language, and Shouting at the Smallfolk

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.