Scarily I’ve noticed a trend that the majority of my postings as of late have been about D&D. I wonder if that means I am spending too much time on D&D? Perhaps so. Scarily, I’ve got at least another three or four RPG-related posts stewing in the background. Perhaps I ought to reorganize my WordPress categories with “RPGs” rather than D&D specifically.
I just primed a group of miniatures and will, with luck, be doing a bit of painting of them later on today. I have managed to make some headway on making backstory material available on my campaign website, but it’s not nearly enough. The major things that lie before me are the complete overhaul of the Magic system and fleshing out the main areas of the city in which action is centered. Both of these are huge projects and, to be honest, I can’t see myself completing them even within the month. I simply have too many other things on my plate.
Our group hasn’t met for roughly a month now, and I’m wondering whether I should email everyone and tell them that we are on indefinite hiatus until I can get things more in order — I’d feel very bad to do that considering I have given every indication thus far of taking this campaign much further, but I can’t justify continuing to play in this game as I’m rewriting the rules. And rewriting D&D rules, as important as it may be, is just not as important to me as some other things I could be doing with my time. Funny how I’ve essentially made up my mind on the issue as I’ve written this post.
Despite, I suppose, my newfound decision to put off my campaign for the time being, I’ve been thinking a lot about alternate mechanics and such.
–One of the things that I thought of and decided to implement was a system whereby I would send out a small quiz during the campaign’s off-week to try and maintain some interest in the campaign. This was also a system whereby I could reward attentiveness during the game sessions and also a system whereby I could reward characters with additional skill points (or other benefits) to round out their characters. This seemed like a better option than simply saying that I was granting extra skill points, either restricted or unrestricted in use.
–Another thing I recently decided to do was to try and create some sort of aid for my players, who seemed to, in my eyes, flounder as far as portraying themselves went. I heard plenty of justifications along the lines of “I’m evil!” but very little along the lines of, “My character is doing this because…” I decided that since my players were primarily using Alignment as a sort of personality descriptor that it might help them conceptualize their characters by requiring them to give a set of goals to their character, which they would receive benefits for pursuing.
Both of these are pretty ad hoc processes, not for everyone I imagine. I’m interested to see how they work out, but I probably won’t have a chance to in the near future.
On a somewhat related note, one of my major reactions to discussions at The Forge is just how much what people talk about doesn’t seem to jive with my sense of reality. The sense I get from discussions about Design Patterns in RPGs, as much as I think that’s an excellent idea overall, is that they want some sort of pure game mechanics and ignore the ways in which RPG systems come into conflict with storytelling. As much as you accept a certain degree of randomness within the context of a game, in my experience there is always the chance for a story to go completely haywire when extreme mechanics results come in a series.
–Bankuei posts what I think is an excellent house rule (”gamehack” as he calls it). This is a seriously good idea, as the only D&D games I’ve seen that didn’t have problems with excessive magic items were games without magic items. I’ll definitely be thinking about creating a set of rules along these lines in the future.
–Reading over the Nobilis system of powers makes me envious of how freeform it is, and yet how sensible. Division into distinct and intuitive categories: Creation, Destruction, Protection, Discernment, or Alteration. I crave making something like this
–For a long time I’ve been eager to introduce the alternative Shield Combat rules that the A Game of Thrones D20 setting provides. Maybe I’ll be able to introduce something like that when my campaign reconvenes. If I do that, I think I’d need to offer the opportunity to revise characters.
–I’ve been using the Sanity system of Call of Cthulu, and I’ve been using my own Karmic system to adjudicate effects that normally depend on alignment. Neither of these systems are deeply bound to the game mechanics though. Sanity, in particular, is strange. I need to think of a way to make its effects tangible without being overly specific or overly strong.
–I strongly desire to create a system where having millions of different core and prestige classes is unnecessary. As I have been writing this I have touched about the idea of a sort of dynamic allocative system. Essentially the idea is to give a set number of points out at each “level up”, points which would be spent on better saves, better Base Attack Bonus, skills, or special abilities. The catch would be that a character wouldn’t have enough points to purchase in every area. Presumably organizations with strong resources could provide training (translates to lower cost) against the default, encouraging factioning. The immediate pitfalls would be potentially a lot of conflict if characters aligned with radically different factions, and factions with political power but not otherwise powerful.
–Last but not least, I definitely need to create some kind of comprehensive document, maybe a “playchart”, detailing the various ideas I’m mulling over implementing here.
