[proto dnd] An endeavor inspired by Eero Tuovinen's OSR Sandbox

[Joshua Bearden]

I want to play in the style described in this thread. But I live nowhere near Sonkajärvi.  This means I'll have to start something myself. I'm  not currently a DM or even a convener of games in my community.  I'm starting this thread hoping to receive advice and/or encouragement at first and then to provide some actual play reports as things progress.


I sporadically attend a board-game night at my local game store, and play in a D&D campaign with a long time friend (the very person who introduced me to the game almost 30 years ago).  The social context of the D&D game is that play happens at his house and follows his vision (whether or not he's the DM).  Suggesting a change in play system would be difficult, inviting anyone in that group to play in a new game lead by me could be fatal.  So the plan is to claim a table at the next board game night at the game store and hope that 1 or 2 random strangers or casual acquaintances are willing to give it a try.  My thinking is that the low stakes (socially) will make it easier and safer to experiment. I don't have the experience or skill of someone like Eero, but part of what attracts me so much to his postings is the sense that he's found ways to make role-playing easy again.  Easier on the players and on the DM.



My first session is planned for July 2nd.  Between now and then I need to try to establish the minimal starting "constitution" as Eero describes it. This is something I'd very much appreciate comments on.  My impulse is to start with Eero's challenge based adventuring method and pare it down to essentials I can relate to a newcomer in 1 or 2 minutes. I'm also going to start with something along the following as techniques Eero's Primitive D&D.


I've obtained a handful of modules both old TSR modules as well as some mentioned in Eero's postings.  I'm considering some options for the "main map" or campaign setting.  I could use one of the old official TSR settings like Greyhawk or Dragonlance, or maybe I should start in "Fantasy Canada" simply using my immediate surroundings for geographical features and place name... transmuting them into medieval locations. Haven't decided yet.


I'll update this thread as this project unfolds but I welcome (or rather invite) comments, questions and suggestions in the meantime.

[Joshua Bearden]

Oops forgot to link to Eero's thread for reference.

http://indie-rpgs.com/adept/index.php?topic=63.0

[Ron Edwards]

Hello, and welcome to the forum!

It seems to me that you've begun very nicely, and I have little advice at the moment ... well, until my fingers get going. I'm really posting to provide encouragement.

But advice does occur to me all of a sudden. I'm inclined to suggest that you think small: both in terms of the fictional scenario (or location, if you prefer to think of it that way) and in terms of the social expectations. It's pretty shocking to encounter a treatise on an elaborate setting, or an imposing 30-page social constitution ... as you say yourself, something that can be easily stated in a short time, provoking nods rather than confusion, is the way to go. Oh, and another productive way to think small: go for two or three players, and that's it. You're trying something new and dealing with the fifth player's interjections and Firefly jokes ("I'll be in my bunk!") is incredibly stressful, or at least it is for me.

Anyway, I think you're going to have fun and I'm looking forward to hearing about it.

Best, Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

As Ron says, don't overdo the preparation. It's better to start preparing for real once you've got a session or two played - at that point you'll know which way the group will swing in general. You don't want to be one of those GMs who feel that they're making the game in advance, and any player who doesn't like it can go play something else; rather think in terms of building together over 4-8 sessions; only after these initial sessions will a routine be in place for the central things of a sandbox, such as what the setting is like, how adventures are negotiated, how character stables develop, what types of adventure hooks are relevant for this campaign, etc.

For a first session I might recommend something along these lines:

• A mechanical rules paradigm you can own in authorial sense; I find that D&D hurts if the GM follows some rules just because they're the rules; it would be better if you had your own opinions and reasoning to back up the rules, whatever they may be in detail. This need not be complex mechanically as long as the actual non-mechanical system of arbitration used by D&D is also firmly in place; you could play D&D with nothing but the xp system and some dice, it seems to me.
• The sort of aesthetic setting idea that you find inspiring as a GM. Specifically, what does a "home base" of some sort look like, and what are the social realities of being an adventurer or similar free agent in that setting. For example, my aesthetics for our long campaign last year was "let's see what D&D looks like in historical Europe, where each and every monster, magic and dungeon is treated as a fully valid exception and not a rule that shapes society". (You understand, that's a more exciting proposition than it sounds; the point was not to be dull, but rather to lather the game aesthetically with the full weirdness of reality, the things that D&D usually ignores - mere numismatics and ethnic issues proved quite entertaining when the GM took care to ignore the cartoony D&D traditions on these matters.) The aesthetics for my campaign before that were "a pulp fantasy city in the Levant about a thousand years before Christ, full of classic pulp imagery and a sense of a decadent, sleepy world that acts as if history has already happened, despite us as players knowing that what we consider history is all still to come".
• Three adventures suited for beginning players and 1st-level characters. (Your task will be to always have adventures "suitable for 1st-level characters" at hand, should you choose to run a pure sandbox; certain players may at certain times run characters of higher level, for whose sake you'll want to have some higher-level challenges as well, but for the most part the vast majority of your game will be about the challenges suited to normal adventurers straight out of adventurer school.)

The above is all you'll need, really. Some people would even say that you don't need to have three adventures to start with, as it would be better to start directly at the dungeon entrance of your selected opening adventure; this way players could get directly into the dungeon, without having to worry about the logistics in advance. I have not found this necessary myself, but I could well imagine that it depends on how long you have to play, how powerfully the GM keeps the players on track, and how prone the players are to fucking it up by e.g. spending four hours planning their inventory and thus never getting into the dungeon during the first session. Assuming that you think that you can get into action during the first session, go ahead and do the "a choice of three adventures" opening; it works for me just fine.

For the first session, plan to have a quick character generation (root unique snowflakery at this point, encourage quick characters the players don't care about - start caring after they survive one mission is the rule), no complex equipment buying (use whatever method suits your methodological framework; my take is to let players write down whatever reasonable things they want, but ready-made "adventurer packs" and just improvising the equipment on the flight are also fine for starting), some fun pre-scouting of the adventures (provide plentiful rumours and advance intelligence - you want the players to plan their expedition), and then a quick and brutal death once they approach the adventure they choose from the wrong vector, with the wrong assumptions (this is nigh inevitable unless the players have prior experience with old school D&D - I've met players who will learn it by instinct after first session, but never one who'd got it right from the start). Once most or all characters are dead, either make more if there's time, or congratulate everybody and tell them about what they might try next, now that the first characters are out of the way.

Incidentally, it occurs to me that if you feel uncertain about how to begin, one option is to start with a ready-made sandbox. The two best ones I've seen are Expeditious Retreat Press module "White Dragon Run", and the recent FRPG day module of Jim Raggi's "Better than Any Man". (I did the layout for the latter, but it's still one of the best D&D modules ever.) Either of those suits a 1st level party in a pure sandbox paradigm very well, and it's easy to build a more ambitious campaign over either over time. Of course they're massively different aesthetically, and in the particulars of the setting: one is cheesy TSR fantasy balderdash, the other is historical fantasy-horror in the midst of the 30 years' war.

(I would also recommend "Anomalous Subterranean Environment" as perhaps the greatest single OSR product, but despite the extremely compelling setting, it's more of a megadungeon by nature. Definitely easy to start with, but I would personally add a few minor adventure hooks as well so as to not force the players to the megadungeon.)

One idea I've seen bandied about is that if a GM is comfortable working with the hexcrawl paradigm, then he might consider starting with a setting that is merely three hexes wide: one hex in the middle representing the starting home base, and then the hexes surrounding it, with whatever adventure hooks you're offering pointing to some of those hexes, or the town itself. I wouldn't build my starting point quite this tightly, but that's because I like the travel, too.

I could also speculate about your chosen venue (it seems to me that you'd get a lot of one-off players in a game store context, and a somewhat short-ish session), but I don't frankly have any real experience of the game store gaming culture, this not being a custom in Finland, so there'd be little point. Thinking of the closest equivalent, which would be a gaming club club night game, my own instinct would be to not attempt a full sandbox, unless I was certain that roughly the same circle of people were indeed going to be there for several weeks reliably. (As for what I might do instead, that's a different story - and pure speculation, being as I haven't had to implement a solution for this social environment.)

To me it seems that the biggest potential hurdle in attempting a pure D&D sandbox is that players may fail to accomplish rewarding results: play may feel boring if the entire session is wasted in e.g. planning the adventure in town. It could also feel mean-spirited if the tactics and dice run against a party, which is not uncommon at the beginning; roleplayers are frankly pretty bad at making smart decisions in a gaming environment, most being used to it being more important to satisfy some imaginary procedure of making the GM happy.

I get over these hurdles by constantly reminding the players about the goals of the game, and by not flinching from my course, whatever may happen. Thus I will start the game by outright explaining that this is a challenge-oriented game, we'll see whether you win by looking at your score - also known as "experience points" despite them having nothing to do with experience - and it is solely up to you as to how you'll achieve a high score; the referee suggests that you start by full cooperation within your team (the game is difficult enough without some piss-head betraying the team!), scouting some adventure hooks and then trying to strike it rich somehow.

(A simple rule of thumb that some players might find useful: you may consider yourself to have won a "full and flawless victory" if you return from a dungeon alive and with enough XP to level. Getting out with any treasure is a full victory, and getting out alive is a fully satisfying outcome. Failure comes in all sorts of varieties, with Death and the bottom. Challenge, challenge, challenge - first teach the players to think in terms of using their full wit, and only then start worrying about appreciation for the fiction; most roleplayers have much more difficulty with the former than the latter, for they think that they're at the table to enjoy your story instead of killing your dragon.)

As for flinching, never cheat to favour the players (or against them, of course). That makes you feel like a chump when you're a player, a GM who just wants to see you dance and then takes away your rightful death and failure. It creates a rift between you and the players, making them objects of your abuse of power instead of equal participants in a game where they have rights. Rather, try to make the inevitable failures spectacular and entertaining; imagine that you're playing Paranoia and act accordingly. Laugh in joy when characters march to their death. Observing other GMs, more D&D has been robbed of its zing by weak-handed GMs than anything else. D&D without the glorious failure is merely a rodent wheel where you run until the GM deigns to throw you some imaginary rewards, an entirely fruitless exercise - those who desire for that will find something like say World of Warcraft to be much more entertaining.

(And yes, the above sort of play does not make all players happy. It's the wrong game for them, or they need to get over it and learn to enjoy the merciless achievement-based game structure. Many roleplayers are into it for the opportunity to cooperatively tell a story, and D&D as I understand it is not that game.)

[Eero Tuovinen]

As I've told earlier, I've taught two GMs in our oral tradition. One of them is Heikki Hallamaa, who's been running a game in Helsinki for a while now. As I moved to Helsinki myself for a bit, I've been playing in his campaign. Despite Heikki switching the mechanical rules to LotFP, I think that the heart of his campaign is in the right place.

I wrote a pretty extensive description of my adventures so far at Story Games. Been pretty interesting being a player for a change; my character got to 2nd level and became a ranger.

[Joshua Bearden]

So tonight I'll try to recruit players.

Here's the plan. I'm going to game night, bringing with me an old 1ed TSR adventure for 0-level characters  called "Treasure Hunt".  In which players start the game as slaves escaping a shipwreck on a mysterious island.  It has some drawbacks in terms of being somewhat railroady by design but I feel confident I can overcome that by removing the deus-ex-machina elements but really encouraging the players to embrace the challenge model.  Meaning I don't care if you play out the story as TSR intended, but we'll all have more fun if you seek out challenges and make valiant attempts to come out on top.

The main problem with the original story is the appearance of a goddess who warns the players she intends to destroy the island by sundown which I think puts unnecessary time pressure on the players and removes a lot of possible player goals and challenges.  Once I get rid of the goddess, (and her timeline), the island can provide an ideal sandbox starting location.  If they aren't in a hurry to escape they can stay as long as they can survive.  If/when they finally steal, build, or commandeer a boat we can begin a seafaring 'sand box' which is my ultimate goal anyways.

The very best thing about this module is that characters don't even get to choose equipment at the beginning.  They'll start with a name and 6 ability scores. No back stories even ... the pirate/slavers were feeding them all amnesiac sedatives. After escaping the drugs start to wear off. And they can summon up pertinent memories by making successful Int or Wis checks I think.  I'll see what seems to work for the players.

The thing I'm most anxious about is combat. I'm going to emulate Eero's system as described in various places around the internet as well as I can. I hope the players will be patient as it might take some fumbling on my part to find the right pacing.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Now I'm regretting not writing a clear description of my house rules anywhere yet. That combat system is a weird combination of 3rd edition foundation, Sorcerer/TSoY formalist logic and my personal understanding of the cosmos (insofar as is pertinent for combat). It's about as organic (in the sense of growing organically from my own needs and peculiarities) as I can imagine creating nowadays. Some people seem to love it (now that we've apparently ended our campaign, the players who seem to have difficulty switching back to traditional D&D others are running), but others get seriously confused, especially if they've a prior background with D&D.

If I may suggest a single point about how I've been running the system; to me it seems that the biggest problem that other people seem to have had when they've used the system is that it deconstructs and relies on an intricate understanding of "initiative" that apparently is not anywhere near how other people understand the concept. Initiative in my house system is not merely a measure of who acts first in pure chronological terms; rather, it's better understood as a measure of psychological combat-readiness (compare to Twilight 2000 if you will) and the quickness of your own OODA loops in reaction to opponent action. This makes sense when you realize that traditional initiative simply cannot be measuring who finishes their action first; the logic of the system necessarily indicates that it's as important to determine who begins to act first (literally seizes the initiative in the natural sense of the word)! My system attempts to give players elegant tools for indicating things like combat confusion, fog of war, fear effects, the effect of pre-planning on combat maneuvers, and so on.

That fundamental nature of Initiative is why I treat it essentially as a resource that may be traded in various ways for other resources. (The emblematic situation is the fact that characters in my game can have an "active defense" that is rolled instead of relying on the AC, but they pay Initiative points for using it - if you understand why you pay Initiative to defend, then you probably get what I'm attempting to achieve here.) The system "degenerates" elegantly into a traditional "count numbers and who has the highest strikes first" system when nobody's using any of the special properties (this is very much by intent - most rules I use show the same property of working exactly like traditional D&D unless exceptions are specifically called for), but I find that my best experiences with the system have specifically happened when players have e.g. bought extra actions with initiative, or forced somebody's initiative into the negatives, or reoriented in the middle of a fight. In all, I find that initiative as a natural concept is central to how I understand combat; a combatant who does not have a spatial sense of what is happening around them is almost useless, and modeling this is where my initiative system excels - if that is not an interest for you, I might recommend dropping this part of the combat system to avoid confusion.

The other confusing part of my combat system philosophy is the fact that all actions in my system technically have degrees of success while the traditional D&D "you need to roll this high to play" is also very much present. The key to making the degrees of success work in combat is to encourage the players to take responsibility for choosing responsibly how to "spend successes" or "stunt", as we call it when you roll a better success than you need to. I've seen this degenerate: a GM who is happy to allow players to mechanically add +1d6 damage per two stunts regardless of the situation is not doing as intended, and has basically allowed the game to degenerate back into "you hit, I hit"; the rule is that you may only stunt by describing fight choreography that makes sense in the fiction. (Extra damage from stunting is surely available at my table, but you need to be wielding a heavy weapon, or charging, or have some other conditions that enable it; rolling high on to-hit does not alone justify adding damage to the roll, that'd be just too easy a choice.)

All in all... I don't know, I'd rather like to play a session or two with you before I'd recommend using my system - you should come to Helsinki to playtest my recent OPD adventure ;) My combat system is great, I think (one of the best D&D combat systems I've seen), but I fear that trying to implement it by doing exegesis on my random descriptions in the Internet is surely not the ideal way to understand it. At least promise to only go with it if you think yourself that you've got it down, this isn't a system that should be tried if you're not confident about understanding what it does and why :D

(My true recommendation: whatever system you decide to use, always be critical of how it maps the fiction to the rules, and remember to make your own rulings wherever the mechanical results do not accord with how things should go. Essentially you have to create your own house system during the first 20 sessions of play, no matter what you start with. Take responsibility for the system you run; a D&D GM who does not take that personal responsibility is somebody players cannot rely on to act as a backstop when they push against the system.)

[Eero Tuovinen]

Also, I forgot to say: that's a very nice beginning for a sandbox campaign in operative terms. The amnesia and the island-destroying goddess are typical TSR wankery (with all respect to TSR; you're probably aware that I'm not exactly the biggest fan of D&D-style fantasy fiction aesthetics), but the idea of starting the characters on a deserted island has legs. Having a map of the island makes GMing easy, the players can make their own map to get used to mapping, and nothing stops you from adding a bit of adventure content if the original module seems too restrained in this regard. It is also a big plus that you can introduce new characters as "other castaways from the other side of the isle", and that the players will have a clear goal from the start in attempting to get back to civilization.

Were I running with this concept, I'd also make sure to have my random checks ready for passing ships, weather and such things; also, Jim Raggi published some tools for this very scenario in his latest Green Devil Face, I seem to remember. In general, I'd tap deeply into the literary tradition of Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels when doing something like this - plenty of adventure to be had on a strange island.

Finally, if you need more islands (a classical move in the genre is for there to be another island close enough for a raft to reach), it occurs to me that "Flaming Footprints of Jilanth" from XRP is a very nice tropical island setting. There's also "Signal Island" from Pacesetter Games (not as good, but valid for the method, which is great enough recommendation) if you want to make it a full archipelago ;)

[Joshua Bearden]

The good

I was able to recruit 3 players, 2 had never played D&D before though.  One was quite experienced (likely more than me). Given everyone's pre-conceptions about D&D they were all quite impressed when I explained that character creation was nothing more than choosing a name and then rolling six abilities in order.

Ability checks - these were fun and fast to roll. When I got to the store I tried buying a few more d20s but they didn't sell loose dice. This was enough to push me into trying 3d6 for ability checks.  (I had over a hundred d6's on hand).  I actually quite liked the aesthetic feel of the d6s but I'll need to put some more thought into setting difficulties and critical hit increments.

Roleplaying without "playing roles" -  This was the best thing ever for me.  I have a background in theatre and a great love for storytelling  however, I've always found I never enjoyed either in D&D.  By removing all pretence of such I loosened up and started to have fun.  It was much easier to keep things moving and I think plenty of story happened on its own.

Could use improvement

Pacing - Given the setting and time constraints I was really focussed on moving things quickly.  The TSR modules contain long descriptions and long long monologues for NPCs and I was hard pressed to skim them and find pertinent information to relay to the players when necessary.

Combat - I tried to keep it as simple as possible but looking back I think it was oversimple. I let players use their Strength or Dexterity score, depending on positioning factors to try to hit opponents. I converted unarmoured characters to "18" not realizing until afterwards that this resulted in my mobs hitting the unarmoured players 83% of the time, The entire party was wiped out in the third skirmish. Mind you that was after about 2 hours of play so everyone felt fairly satisfied.  I was also satisfied since they'd had two fights already to gauge the threat level and very deliberately chose the set up of the final fight.

Plan
I'm going to spend some more time both thinking and re-reading Eero's other posts.  I'm going to think more about the 3d6 "curve" vs d20's line and about how combat plays out with saves and crits.  In this game I had PCs fall down as soon as they ran out of hit points.  The first time this happened the character  was saved by his comrades, rested and was able to reroll his hitdice. The second time a PC fell down, he was quickly followed by the rest of the party and we ended the session. If any of these players come back I'll offer them the choice of rolling new characters or trying to retrieve their permanently scarred character from a prison camp.

[Joshua Bearden]

All in all... I don't know, I'd rather like to play a session or two with you before I'd recommend using my system - you should come to Helsinki to playtest my recent OPD adventure ;)

Yes! This.  If I could make it to Helsinki I wouldn't be going through any of this trouble.

My combat system is great, I think (one of the best D&D combat systems I've seen), but I fear that trying to implement it by doing exegesis on my random descriptions in the Internet is surely not the ideal way to understand it. At least promise to only go with it if you think yourself that you've got it down, this isn't a system that should be tried if you're not confident about understanding what it does and why :D

Well I've had to compromise.  I understood degrees of success, (to a degree), and in retrospect I have perhaps an improved understanding. On the other hand, I was completely insensitive to initiative during the game and only started to contemplate its importance in positioning and in giving players meaningful strategic choices after coming back to this thread.  The third pillar of your system, I think, is consequences (hitpoints, critical hits, and character death).  I focussed on this the in the game and definitely struggled. I didn't have an idea of what would happen to a PC who lost all their  hitpoints until it happened.  The players all immediately assumed it meant death and I was hesitant to back away from that for fear of not being clinical or "unflinching" enough to make the players believe the sandbox was real.

(My true recommendation: whatever system you decide to use, always be critical of how it maps the fiction to the rules, and remember to make
your own rulings wherever the mechanical results do not accord with how things should go. Essentially you have to create your own house
system during the first 20 sessions of play, no matter what you start with. Take responsibility for the system you run; a D&D GM who does
not take that personal responsibility is somebody players cannot rely on to act as a backstop when they push against the system.)

Yes, that also makes perfect sense to me. You've reminded me that "pushing against the system" is what I most want players to do.  Ahh but, 20 sessions will take me a year at least. This is why I'm eager to adopt many of your innovations.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Sounds like you're doing just fine, all things considered. Keep at it, and question your assumptions when given an opportunity.

Regarding zero hitpoints, I've found that it is important for my own D&D sensibilities to vehemently not have zero hitpoints mean death. It's just too easy and clinical, there's not enough consequences to it. It's much more sensible to have zero be the threshold from combat-functional and "light injuries" (read: meaningless injuries, mere romantic color) to the land of real clinical injury. In my game characters who fall down don't neatly "die", but they rather start bleeding from gruesome wounds and lose important physical functionality in ways that make them a burden for their friends forevermore. My philosophy is that combat should produce long-term recovery problems and permanent invalids, not just corpses.

In practice players often focus on the issue of combat-worthiness: is my character still capable of doing something on his turn, despite him being at X hitpoints or despite him just having taken a foot of steel through his gut? This is OK for me as GM, I don't mind players worrying about it. Willpower checks can be used to find out whether a character has guts enough to still crawl around or even make some desperate aggressive lunging, if it's truly so important to the player to get that one extra attack. Consequences will accrue, of course, when you push the body beyond its limits.

Of course there are many ways to achieve this ambiguity between life and death; saving throws against injury at zero hitpoints is just one method. Another elegant one that I see people use is a separation of hitpoints and health points, the latter always equal to the Constitution score and slow to heal. The most traditional method is to count negative hitpoints and derive the exact state of long-term injury from whether you happened to drop to 0 or -3 or -5 or what. (This last one's the one I like the least, personally; the math doesn't truly work.)

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Joshua and Eero,

TPK! You beast!

If anyone's interested, here's a perspective on hit points before 1982 or so, from someone who was there. I wasn't an insider playing with Gary or Dave or Marc or Steve or Greg, but I'm a pretty good witness for the facts on the ground among the ruck and run of role-players, struggling with texts, zine articles, and rumors.

Clinical death at 0 off one bank of resource points is terrible design for role-playing, but given that Chainmail wasn't about role-playing, I think it's one of the early TSR textual artifacts that got embedded in the assumptions of play and design which has required workarounds ever since. I'm certain as I can be, without having been there, that Arneson's Blackmoor game and the extensive, probably mostly unknown activities like it prior to 1974/75 didn't do any such thing.

Tunnels & Trolls (first ed. in 1975?) distinguished between Strength and Constitution - in this game, unlike D&D, the attributes were and are actually mechanics; ST is fatigue and CON is injury. At about the same time or just after, the system for early RuneQuest (generically, BRP) was pretty nuanced: Strength for acts of muscular effort, Constitution for health rolls and for setting one's total and body-part hit points, and also an Endurance track. Champions (1980) distinguished among Strength, Constitution, and the three derived scores of Endurance, Stun, and Body, in ascending order of severity.

The Fantasy Trip, specifically Melee (1977) and then Wizard (1978), mashed the whole body together again into Strength, such that your own spell-casting injured you mechanically exactly the way a sword would, but when GURPS was written (early 80s), the authors split it yet again into ST and CON.

(This history is ignoring about 800 games ... Dragonquest, Bushido, and Traveller should all be examined along with the above, at the very least. DQ was a lot like RuneQuest, Bushido mechanics were so fine-grained and nuanced it was practically a medical text, and if I remember correctly, earliest Traveller was a lot like earliest D&D where characters took a ray-gun hit and dropped dead.)

The thing is ... why have a point-based death cut-off anyway? I really think it's pure textual legacy without being play-based legacy. GMs of era fell into four distinct categories in how they attempted to reconcile the texts with functional play: by-the-book mortality but fun, like Ken St. Andre, which works best when people play multiple characters simultaneously; by-the-book mortality but no fun, like the purist Dungeon Masters whose groups learned quickly to roll up "replacement characters" frequently; seat-of-pants mortality but fun, which I think was way more common than people admit and turned into many other rules in new games; and seat-of-pants mortality but no fun, which was notoriously attuned to the presence of female players in the group, i.e., killing off the characters of perceived rival male players.

The thing is, no one wanted to admit that seat-of-pants rules for death - or even anything mechanical that simply happened not to be a resource pool for countdown - existed and were functional. The countdown-pool was "set," subculturally, despite its dubious functionality (at least in general; it's perfectly fine in T&T and Paranoia). So people kept using those rules and kluging the shit out of them at thet table, introducing add-on patch rules so "the" rules would at least sort of work.

These klugey rules like the -3, -5, et cetera mortality that I first encountered in the AD&D Player's Handbook, frankly stank - they just put off the inevitable a little and required accounting that was beyond the attention-span of anyone playing or DMing among a dozen noisy teenagers. Champions in particular suffered greatly from this - despite the rules' attempts to focus on STUN and END, people always gravitated toward the overpowered Killing Attacks  and BODY was way, way too fragile (no mook rules back then either). I think it ended up with the (bad) negatives solution too.

But boy was it hard for the collective culture to let go. I remember Toon was legendary at its release for its "when your hit points go to zero, you fall down" rule. People couldn't get over it, that was crazy! And it was only acceptable insofar as the game was about Looney Tune or Warner Bros type cartoon characters. As late as 1991 or so, in Castle Falkenstein, Mike Pondsmith had to explain laboriously, over and over, that character death was strictly a function of the nature of the conflict of the moment - the same failed roll, mechanically, could kill you if you were doing something that dangerous, and couldn't if you weren't. This proved way too hard for people to process and sure enough, some kind of point-based pool came into the rules in one or another of the supplements.

Anyway, Joshua, I recommend that you put yourself in the place of those early DMs - which is enjoyably appropriate considering that you're running one of the N series modules - and decide which of the four DMs you're going to be. The options are truly wide open; "playing by the book" is historically ridiculous, because the rules were not written from thoughtful play and no one fucking had to follow them anyway. In that context, your current solution is a good one, and your disinclination to use the negatives-method is a sign of good judgment.

Best, Ron

[Ron Edwards]

Upon re-reading my post, I found some details to quibble over.

1. Body is not a derived attribute in Champions, but a base one.  It does do what I described.

2. Castle Falkenstein was published in 1994. Also, it would have been a card played from one's hand, not a roll

Regarding the "replacement character" phenomenon, one satirical piece of gamer fiction from that era saw a character die horribly, at which point some stranger appears around the bend of the road and says, "Mind if I take the armor from that corpse and join you?" and the others kind of sigh and say, "Go ahead, it seems like it fits you already."

Best, Ron

[Joshua Bearden]

Play tested an alternative combat system on the 16th. I could describe it as a no hit points; conversely everything is a hit point. I've written a long post about the session. And as soon as I can find a way to post it. It will be here.

[Joshua Bearden]

Update. 

Everything was on hiatus for 10 days while I went to conference in Ottawa.
They have a better game store (for my purposes) and I was able buy some new
material including some OSRIC modules and (even luckier) I found a copy of
Raggi's Better Than Any Man.  Now I'm having serious questions about how/where
I actually want to start the sandbox. 

Last Tuesday night I returned to open game night to see about continuing the campaign.  Instead I ended up talking with one of the prior players J. and a friend and game designer S. about the project. Eventually they agreed to spend half an hour testing out a 'hitpoint-free' combat system that I'd been thinking about ever since reading both your encouragement not to feel restricted by D&D's arbitrary choices.  I'd had an idea and desperately wanted to try it out.

S and J to made up nameless characters by rolling 3d6 five times, recording
the results,  and making up their own names for the "ability scores".  This
wasn't originally part of my plan but I realized I hadn't yet decided what
abilities I wanted in the game.  J. picked things like Strength, Dexterity,
Intelligence, Constitution etc.  S. on the other hand had scores called
"Radicalness", "Obtusness", "Defy Danger".  Cool, I thought.

I narrated the following (The Pod Caverns of the Sinister Shroom by Matthew Finch.): "You're in a cave. The floor is covered with large leathery pods, about waist high."

J. chose to hang back.  S. proceeded to step forward and touch the nearest
pod, asking whether it was warm. He never found out.  "Something surprising will probably happen" I  advised, "which of your abilities determines your speed at reacting to surprises?"  S chose "radicalness" for which he only had a 6 and I had him roll a DC 21 check on 3d6.  Failed. He was sufficiently surprised by a pod-man to lose the initiative.

"The pod-man is gonna try to grab you.  This will be a speed contest" I said. "Choose an ability as a 'resource'.  It's got to make sense to me."  Lacking anything traditional like agility, speed, or dexterity S. gamely chose 'radicalness' again.

"Now tell me how much of this resource you're going to stake on this particular contest. You can use none, all or some of the resource. The stake will be added to your roll of 3d6.  FYI, I'll tell you right now, the pod-man is staking 8 points of speed to his roll of 3d6. If you 'go all in', you're allowed to reroll any 1's but if you still lose your resources are zeroed and you'll have lost the combat decisively.  If you win, you avoid being grabbed AND you'll have the initiative."

S. boldly went 'all in' staking his 6 radicalness points. He lost. "That's it you're completely wrapped up by the pod-man's sticky hands. You're helpless, at its mercy, and unable to initiate a new contest until further notice."

(to be continued in next post)