Brent P. Newhall's Blog

Imagine an RPG system that’s handled completely with digital tools. Not only is your character sheet displayed on a screen, the mechanics are handled there, too.

Imagine this: a group sits around a table, each participant holding a smartphone, PDA, or tablet.

The GM touches “Moderate difficulty” on his tablet and asks Maria for a Perception test. She touches her Perception stat; it immediately rolls and flashes the result, “19,” at her. A wireless message is sent through the ether, and the GM sees “Success!” on his tablet.

Everything would run on an app. Characters could be created directly on these devices, or developed on a desktop or laptop then accessed on those devices.

How about a virtual tabletop? This is a bit harder to envision, but it’s certainly possible that a company will build and sell a tablet that’s much larger than today’s iPads. Such a thing could easily be used as a virtual tabletop, and wirelessly sync with each players’ device to automatically show markers, bloodied creatures, etc.

These digital systems would revolutionize LARPing. Just reach into your pocket and touch your smart phone to determine if you hit or miss an opponent.

(Obviously, there’d be purists; this wouldn’t kill traditional LARPing. But it could add a new experience.)

The technology is really already in place for all of this. Would it work? That’s another post.

I recently grabbed the Dragon Age Quickstart Guide, and I love this system. Haven’t played it yet, which may change my opinion of course, but I love what I see. Were I to design D&D 4.5, I’d make something very similar to Dragon Age.

For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to describe DA in comparison to D&D 4E.

Instead of rolling a d20 on tests, you roll 3d6. This gives you a lovely probability distribution curve, so you’re more likely to roll an 9 than you are to roll a 3 or an 18. This is beautiful; it makes wild success (or wild failure) less likely. Unfortunately, degree of success is not factored into the system that I can see, so that distribution curve isn’t as significant as it is in, say, FATE. But it’s better than a straight d20.

Attributes

The six basic attributes (called “abilities” in Dragon Age) are renamed, and two are added: Magic and Perception.

Each attribute/ability can be augmented with a Focus, so your Perception might have a focus of Hearing or Tracking. The Quickstart Guide doesn’t explain the rules for how many Focuses you can have.

In 4E terms, your base attribute score is gone, leaving only the modifier. So, your Dexterity will only be 3, not 17 (+3). Since 4E has rendered base attribute scores pretty much obsolete (when was the last time you needed the base number itself?), this is a wonderful simplification.

Skills are gone, replaced with abilities and Focuses. To roll a test, you use the appropriate ability’s value. Use of a Focus adds +2 to your roll. So, to listen closely to a conversation behind a door, you’d use your Perception ability. If you had a Focus of Hearing, you’d add +2 to that.

Everything is against a Target Number, single digits being easy and teens being hard.

Combat

Combat rounds are structured like 4E’s, except that there’s no Move action. Moves are integrated into Major (equivalent to Standard in D&D) and Minor actions. You can move during your Minor action, and/or run (move double your speed) during your Major action. And yes, those stack. I like this, and am curious to see how it’d work in-game. While I like the Standard/Move/Minor split, I have certainly seen players slow down combat as they try to figure out whether they’re going to “waste” a minor action.

Defense in DA is split into two numbers: Armor Rating (which works just like Armor Class in D&D), as well as a Defense (usually 0 to +4), which is subtracted from whatever damage is dealt to you. This allows for somewhat more complex defensive situations, such armor that doesn’t much Armor Rating but greatly improves your Defense (you’re just as easy to hit, but it does less damage).

Instead of targeting defenses like Fortitude, Reflex, or Will, attacks can target any attribute and Focus. This makes a lot of sense, since Fort, Ref, and Will are built off your attribute scores anyway.

Dragon Dice and Powers

One additional tweak is the dragon die. One of your three d6’s must be a different color than the others, and that will be your dragon die. When attacking, you can use the roll on your dragon die to buff your attack in different ways, via a lookup table. This strikes me as a bit fiddly; I’ll have to see how it works out in play.

In addition, your dragon die is used as a plus in certain circumstances; if you roll a successful Heal check, you add your dragon die’s roll to the number of HP gained.

Powers are a much weaker component than in 4E, at least in the Quickstart Guide. there’s no standardized format for powers, so they’re simply written out descriptively in plain text. There doesn’t appear to be any at-will/encounter/daily power break out, either.

But that’s the only drawback I see. Overall, I love the simplifications of the system, and the additions (such as the dragon die) make immediate sense.

Remains to be seen how it’ll work in-play, of course, but I love what I see.

"Castle Durnstein (with YPaul)" by muppetspanker on Flickr

I’ve been listening to a series of lectures on historical castles, and it’s changed how I think about castles in an RPG setting.

Debate about castles rages, naturally, so take all this with a grain of salt, but:

Castles were not just fortifications. Indeed, fortification was a relatively minor element of their function. Castles were homes and symbols of power. Many of them were built to look imposing, and were actually hard to defend.

Castles became symbols of power and stability. Not only did they say “The noble is wealthy,” they said, “This noble can protect his peasants.”

Statistically, most castles were earth-and-timber affairs. Stone was just too expensive. In later centuries, many earth-and-timber castles were slowly converted section by section to stone. That conversion was, of course, messy and slow. So one might enter a “castle” that consisted of an earthen wall surrounding a stone keep.

Speaking of keeps: an important aspect of every castle was its relation to the noble who owned it. Each gate and wall was another layer keeping you from the noble, so the deeper you were allowed inside a castle, the more important you presumably were. The inner keep was a very special political place, because of what it said about anyone allowed to get inside it.

As the Middle Ages wore on, sieges grew increasingly popular, and castles became obsolete as a result of two primary practices: cannons and slash-and-burn tactics. As important as cannons were for wearing down a castle’s defenses, destroying all the surrounding property was arguably the larger problem. It does little good to lock oneself in a castle only to watch the destruction of your long-term food supply. Thus, castles became superfluous.

Implications for role-playing games:

• If running a castle siege story line, why aren’t the besiegers destroying the surrounding countryside? What do the besiegers want out of that countryside?
• How much food is in the castle’s stores? Many castles would keep months’ worth of food, but many others had only a few weeks’ worth. What happens when the besieged run out of food?
• What if the castle is in the middle of conversion to stone, or partly built? How easy is it to defend? Might the castle need human protectors for its weak spots?
• Where does the noble hold court? Where does he live and sleep? Where does he keep his valuables?

What questions would you add to this list?

"The Wizard" by seanmcgrath on Flickr

(I’m really unhappy with the way this blog post turned out. But I can’t think of a better way to write it, and I’d rather have it released than sitting in my drafts folder for months. So, here you are.)

Last night, as I waited on yet another piece of software, I looked in on the Four Winds Tavern, a freeform IRC channel gamefiend of At Will runs on his 4eAtWill.net IRC server. Folks were conversing, and I asked if they’d be interested in my running a quick story. They agreed.

We proceeded to play D&D 4E for an hour in an IRC chatroom.

I’m fully aware that this should be insane. This is about as far from the ideal as you can get. And I learned a few things:

The biggest advantage came from the players, who focused on role-playing as opposed to making rolls. We rolled almost no dice until just before combat. So the story just flowed.

Time for the evergreen refrain: combat took longer than I would have liked. That said, since there were only 2 PCs, it moved quickly enough that it never felt boring. Fortunately, too, the other players had to leave after the second round.

In the future, I plan to halve any enemy’s HP and increase damage by 50%. Combat just needs to move quickly.

Once combat began, the channel filled with mostly OOC chatter. gamefiend later suggested that we open a channel purely for combat OOC discussion. This would work far better, judging from how well that worked on my Google Wave games. There’s just that much rolling in a 4E game.

The grid posed no problems; we just described where players were relative to each other, using squares mostly to calculate distance. Precise positioning will certainly be more difficult to model over IRC, but I trust that players and DMs can be as fine-grained as necessary.

Overall, I was very happy with the time we spent. I had fun, and the players wanted to play again. Success.