Proton Square Gazette

2024-07-22

Moss Woods Campaign Review, Part 2

Once more with feeling! This is the second half of my retrospective on my 15-player Moss Woods campaign (Part 1)

What Failed?

If I had to point to any one thing which killed the campaign it would be an excess of ambition. I underestimated the drain and time involved in running sessions twice a week; running one session consistently is hard enough. While I’m more or less proud of the quality of what I prepared for the game, the quantity and rate of production left a lot to be desired. I had a grand vision for the region that I wasn’t able to live up to. I’ve been in this cycle before. It takes me a long time to prep things, leading to improvising more and more of the game, leading to frustration from feeling as though I’m underdelivering, the stress of which makes it harder for me to prep. It’s a personal issue – the players don’t seem to notice or mind. I think the way to avoid this in the future is primarily to prepare material which can be re-used rather than consumed and secondarily to add new material to the game world on my schedule rather than the player’s. Part of me wonders if running the game as a true open table would have helped; because I was running three separate parties I felt pressure to ensure they found stuff in the directions they went. If I had put more explicit walls on their sandbox and let them run amok within those boundaries, I perhaps ironically might have had an easier time expanding them. I think the main benefit of this technique would be keeping a clearer demarcation between the “live” parts of the game world and what isn’t ready yet. Often, things I was working on were “real” to me in the game world even if they weren’t to the players yet, so I would mention them offhand in sessions and players would act on that information, distressing me as I was under-prepared for that eventuality. I’m not above improvising when my back is against the wall, but I enjoy running games much more with the proper level of preparation. While convenient at the table, improvisation has unseen costs afterwards as I need to take notes on what I made up for the future.

Of course there were several other factors contributing to the campaign’s end. Particularly, my advancement system became increasingly problematic as the campaign dragged on. I had adapted Spwack’s X advancement system in order to allow players to develop their own characters. They loved this and it became a hallmark feature of the campaign for them but it quickly became a source of dread for me. I had to restrict spending Xs to only be usable on perks (perks were the equivalent of feats or class abilities) to spare my sanity, especially early on when players were turning to me to come up with what the upgrades were. Even with these changes I found the dynamic uncomfortable as it often felt like my players were trying to extract as much power from me as possible as I tried to curb their power arbitrarily. I often found myself exhausted at the end of a session (already tired from work) being badgered about the precise details of upgrades. Eventually I instituted a policy of players coming to me between sessions with written drafts for their upgrades. Another problem was my tendency to give out powers requiring bespoke mechanics to be developed, sapping my time. High stats caused combat balance issues as attack ability was tied to them directly, so a system was instituted such that stat improvements cost more Xs as they got more powerful. Ultimately I think a fixed three Xs per perk or upgrade is mathematically unsustainable for a campaign of this type. Parties gained Xs as a group and the fixed cost of upgrades meant players who died would never catch up. In terms of time required for inventing perks it also meant the pressure never let up as the characters became more powerful. For future games I plan on keeping player input for perks but tying perk and stat gain to something which provides diminishing returns. That and the policies of players not bothering me about advancement right after sessions and needing to send written drafts ought to keep things more manageable. If the game is large enough I might create some harder guidelines, set up a dedicated discord channel for people to homebrew perks, and deputize players to help manage that. Needless to say I will also be decoupling stats from combat ability, or at least making it harder to achieve excessive stat gain.

My hexcrawling rules proved to be another factor in killing the campaign. Moving from place to place using these procedures sapped valuable session time and didn’t provide much in return. While I’m sure my rules could be tweaked to fix these problems, this campaign has convinced me that exploration and travel should not be using the same procedures. I might do some experiments with this and come back with a more developed post but in short I’m finding traditional hexcrawling rules work exploring for new sites or for low abstraction survival scenarios, but travel between known points can largely be handled as a point crawl instead with the benefit speeding the game along. I’m also thoroughly disillusioned with six-mile hexes and watches as the main unit of time at this point. They’re too much of an awkward middle ground between scales when compared to hexes that take an hour or a day to move across. Going forward I’m going to use three mile hexes for local hexmaps. This will mean travel can be handled in hours instead of watches, which has the knock on effect of making the time to perform pioneering activities such as making canoes, felling trees, or digging holes more meaningful than handling such activities in four hour segments. I’m aware that my frustration with hex crawling might come off as similar to attitudes about travel and random encounters first seen in the 3rd edition crowd (seeing such things as speed bumps to the “real” game), but I’ve been trying to make hexcrawling work for years and it’s time to try something different. I see this as an extension of the idea that characters can move faster through rooms they’ve explored in a dungeon than when they’re exploring new rooms and expect it to provide similar benefits.

What succeeded?

Timekeeping with multiple parties was a concern of mine at the start of the campaign, to the extent I wrote a whole (somewhat incomprehensible) post brainstorming different methods for handling it. I ended up going with the one-to-one time system described there. Even though it technically affected the game, the timekeeping didn’t make a huge impact. Some things were tied to real world time such as the passing of the seasons and moon phases for some types of wizard, but the parties pretty much went off in other directions and managing their comings and goings relative to each other has been trivial. Earlier in the campaign I was much more diligent with timekeeping and parties bumped into each other here and there and passed messages and items. If the parties were interacting more it would be a bigger deal. I’m wondering if it’s possible to switch to a lazier method of tracking time where the events of sessions are just assumed to not overlap and the one-to-one time is only used for world events like holidays, seasons, moon phases, and faction turns. One of the big reasons to have one-to-one time was to be able to bring patrons into the game, but running three parties hasn’t left me with the time I would need to run those extra players. I suspect those games with patrons aren’t running as many sessions per week as I was or had some other method of running them which was less GM intensive. Still, I consider the timekeeping system a success even when handled loosely. That said, I still have at least one player ardently annoyed by the idea of not being able to pick up sessions immediately where they left off. And there have been some times where that would have been convenient. I’ve been able to divine from this post that the BrOSR ¹ actually uses a locking mechanism for locations as described in AD&D, so my previous understanding of locking and one-to-one time being separate techniques was faulty (therefore so was my assertion that Gygax clearly didn’t use one-to-one time as the BrOSR insists. I think it’s an open question at this point). It seems that such locking could be further utilized to allow the same party to explore a dungeon more fully. I can’t imagine any way to express this to players in character and I’m not sure that’s necessary; it is a meta constraint after all. One thing which I noticed with nominally one-to-one time was how messed up my own sense of time is with regards to the agricultural year. If players capture a herd of sheep the temptation is to allow the sheep to be sheared regularly, but of course if realistic time is to be used this only happens once a year. Some things like this require longer periods of seasons or even years to pass as downtime. That could be something I tie to my prep cycle – if the foundations are sound instead of ending the campaign when I need a break or time to prepare more material I could gather people’s downtime and go onto hiatus, skipping extra game time during the interim. This allows me to deliver on the promise of plans which stretch over game years without having to commit to running the game for that amount of time and allowing myself breaks in the process.

One to one time ties directly into downtime, which was much more manageable than advancement and extremely rewarding. I do want to keep doing downtime for this style of game as it helps draw player investment, but next time it will need to be mainly self-serve to preserve my sanity. I should be able to hand players the downtime rules and have them declare actions without my input. Or again deputize players to help me manage that aspect of the game.

Mechanical Thoughts

Here are some things I struggled with from a system/campaign design perspective which I want to touch on briefly.

First of all, I struggled to support my magic systems. The last game had three: arcane, divine, and spirit ². I still like that trifecta for a more classically fantastic game. My main struggle was providing enough mechanical “hooks” into these systems in the game world. An example of needing hooks would be ensuring treasure hoards have spellbooks for casters in a system where they don’t automatically get spells from leveling up. I did an alright job of this for the arcane magic system, and there were a handful of hooks into the divine and spirit magic systems, but the majority of my prep was done before either were in my ruleset. I still want to expand on those systems but will need to ensure there are more altars and spirits about to interact with.

Secondly, I feel like the combat could have been better. The biggest changes from traditional OSR rulesets were making movement in combat zone-based and having a two-action economy. I think both of those changes worked out well enough but need some light refinements I might discuss elsewhere. However, with the zone based movement I was having a hard time making ranged combat feel “right”. Ranged weapons in RPGs tend to bother me by being too short range, but I also don’t want them to totally dominate. I think long ranged combat outside the reach of melee requires its own procedures, which might be as simple as tracking the relative distance between two parties. A penalty for attacks at longer range is required, and I still need to figure out how to model cover and people moving up to melee range while under fire in say, a forest, but I think the bones are there. I’ve found GURPS to have the best ranged combat in RPGs and am taking notes, though I aim for a simpler system. Another concern was making combat more dynamic. A lot of my combats have boiled down to “I hit the guy” on repeat. I had previously thought that having Dark Souls style active defenses such as dodges and parries would be a good way to spice things up and still find that tempting because “I dodge the attack” is something every new RPG player tries. But my explorations of that design space have ended up unsatisfying and I’m instead of the opinion I need to add a stunt roll similar to that seen in this post. I also need to be more deliberate about ensuring that combat itself is tactically interesting alongside mechanical changes, especially when it comes to terrain. A lot of the fights in this campaign happened in vague and undefined woodlands which should have affected fights more and should have had more terrain features.

Finally, an open problem is how best to handle bookkeeping. I’m fully onboard with the OSR maxim of counting torches and tracking items thoroughly, but I consider this a cost which has to be paid for the benefit of interesting logistical decisions. Certain innovations such as inventory slots ease bookkeeping for items immensely, but there must be other ways to speed up this part of the game. Tracking every single little item is a lot of effort for an often dubious reward. I’m of course aware of the idea of overloading encounter rolls to also deplete resources, as seen in Errant and elsewhere, but have never liked that approach as it makes depletion rates inconsistent. I think my players would agree. The two approaches I’m currently considering are increasing the level of abstraction for resources once a certain scale is reached – looking at Ultraviolet Grassland’s sacks of supplies as an example, and looking further into resource dice as seen in the Black Hack. I’ve played Forbidden Lands, which uses a resource dice system that ties the dice to slots. While rolling the dice adds another step to the depletion process, I feel like this is mitigated by the decreased frequency of updating the ledger. Other than those two mechanical ideas, I’m also looking to introduce explicit player roles. Some parties do this naturally but in others it falls entirely on one person, which bothers me. Explicitly demarcating the roles of quartermaster, scribe, and mapper into separate players lightens the load for each and emphasizes the importance of doing these things.

Footnotes

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2024-03-25

Thoughts on Magic Realm

Magic Realm is a 1979 board game which badly wants to be D&D. Players take the role of adventurers seeking gold and glory in the titular realm. I’ve been digging into it over the past few weeks using Tabletop Simulator and the fan-made Book of Learning tutorial¹. During that time it established a firm grip on my mind, to the dismay and mild concern of my friends. I think what I find so attractive about it is its sheer hubris. It sets out a fantasy world in miniature complete with monsters, adventure sites, magical items and loot, and even several factions of NPC you can hire and trade with. The game is designed to be incredibly replayable and provide a unique experience each time. Unfortunately it also kind of sucks to play and especially to learn. I’m probably going to come back to it at some point, but for now here’s some things I like and dislike about it.

Like

• Map generation. Tiles are large hexes with several clearings on them, and roads leading to the hex faces, generating a point crawl which meanders through several of the tiles.
• The chit system, despite its clunkiness. Other than special rules characters are defined by a “hand” of chits of various types. These mean each character plays completely differently. Action chits have both a strength and a speed, both of which come into play in combat. Wounds and fatigue are modeled as losing access to chits, giving interesting texture to attrition.
• The magic system. Casters need to know a spell, have a magic chit, and also have access to magic energy or “color” to cast a spell. Magic users can sink magic chits into providing color temporarily, or gain it from artifacts, map locations, or even certain calendar days. Spells have a magic school and color. This leads to neat characters like the Magician, who has one magic chit corresponding to each school allowing them to effectively cast any spell but forcing them to rely on outside sources of color.
• There’s a character called the Witch King which has no action or move chits, only magic chits. This leads to them being unable to carry items or manipulate the world except through their spells.
• Players write down actions for the day before they execute in a random order. Reminiscent of Diplomacy.
• The symbols for the characters and magic schools in the redesigned version I played. They just look sick as hell.
• I’m a big sucker for PvPvE and I wish there was more of it in games.
• I can call it “D&D at home”

Dislike

• Combat against monsters is mostly down to RNG rather than tactics, with more important decisions being about whether you should fight instead of the fighting itself. PvP seems like it could be more interesting and tense.
• The former combined with the fact that you’re going to need to fight at some point and that dying will basically end your run means combat is an exercise in frustration in my limited experience. Upon further play reframing the game as a roguelike experience helps but doesn’t make the game feel any more fair.
• Teaching the game to others. I was playing with players from my campaign and it quickly became a GM-like role, except instead of the game just working I had to dig into the rules I wasn’t sure about myself. I guess I should have understood the game better myself before teaching it.
• My impression based on the Book of Learning is that the game kind of relies on you already knowing exactly how it ticks from a strategy perspective.
• You only get two actions per day in caves and you’re going to have to pass through them in order to access other parts of the map.
• How close the name sounds to “Magical Realm”. If you know you know and I daren’t enter.

Although Magic Realm is a cited inspiration for Root (which borrows some of its terminology such as turn phase names and clearings) it most reminds me of Nemesis. Both are focused on replayability, genre emulation, and have a similar PvPvE element. Mechanically it’s even somewhat similar, as unique characters defined by their pool of card-like resources move between various rooms in a pointcrawl. A “refresh” of Magic Realm would lose the charm of the original and be wholly unnecessary, but cribbing mechanics from Nemesis wouldn’t be a bad idea.

It’s also an interesting artifact of its time, in a couple ways. There was a brief window where the Really Complex Game could exist, after people had the free time to play them but before video games were invented. You see the same thing with RPGs. Magic Realm exists in this space, but also in a unique space where RPGs had only just taken off themselves and began to carve off sections of the board game space which might otherwise have existed. It doesn’t seem particularly influenced by D&D to my eyes but I could be wrong. It’s also interesting in the sense that many of the various conventions and techniques in board game design hadn’t been established yet. I always enjoy digging up games like that, whether video games or tabletop to see “what might have been”. If D&D hadn’t existed maybe we’d all be big Magic Realm nerds who knows.

There’s a feeling of atomicity here, that the game cannot be tinkered with without losing something. It’s something I’ve only come across a couple of times, with other examples being Ars Magica and the little glimpses I’ve seen of Runequest and The Dark Eye. These are games you have to adjust yourself around rather than vice-versa. I wonder whether this feeling is a property of these games or a stage on a journey of understanding. Would mastering these systems allow me to open the hood and make alterations, or would they still be lessened by my meddling? The OSR hacks I’ve spent a lot of my gaming like tinkering with have the exact opposite feeling - they beg to be altered, modified, customized. Can you intentionally design a game (or other sort of system) to have either of these properties? I think that the modularity of the OSR is mostly accidental, and the atomicity of these other games a symptom of complexity and years of refinement through play that most RPGs don’t get. Intentionally tapping into either of those currents would be a difficult task.

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