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Sturgeon's House

The Design-an-RPG thread


Toxn

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You can also have scientific magic if you want.

 

Macumba in Brazil have a cure rate of cancer of around 25%.  A warrior who is blessed by a priest has a lower bleed rate for minor wounds as his capillaries actually close.  I stand in front of students and tell them Kennedy was shot by a man in a bear suit and they all write it down, and half will answer that on a test.  Magic need not be magic.

 

But yes - one aspect of your adventures can be seeing what the world is like beyond the civilized lands.  And imagine treasure.  "ferro quod noricus excoquit ignis..."  Nordic steal swords were considered rare and deadly even when they were spread through the empire, and you find one in a tomb at Eborucom.  

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One question, by fall of the Roman Empire do you mean Sack of Byzantium 1453, or sack of Rome 410 - 560.

 

Somebody gets it :D

 

The death throes of West Rome and the glorious mess of successor states.

 

I think if you mean the western withdrawal phase of the Roman empire then I can help you work out a REAL cool story line for a historical model.  It means I have to bone up on my old Welsh though.

 

The final fall of Rome is also fascinating, but harder to sell to people who have never heard of an Ottoman except to assume it is a fancy French couch.

 

The fall of East Rome is incredibly awesome, and the Emperor stripping off his imperial iconography and going off to fight with his men as a regular soldier is how it's done.

 

Britain beyond Rome seems like an interesting place to have games, I was taking a look at, for example, Gaul in 583, which was split into Austrasia, Neustria, and Burgundy, and the various shenanigans around Gundovald, where a Duke in the Austrasian court, Guntramn Boso deserted him with the gold sent by the Eastern Empire to support the revolt, was arrested by King Guntramn of Burgundy and released upon promising to capture a general who had deserted Guntramn and was in an Austrasian city. He raised Austrasian troops and met Guntramn to start a siege after failing to capture the general through force or persuasion. It then came to the King of Austrasia's attention that one of his dukes was using his soldiers to assist the King of Burgundy in sieging an Austrasian city to take a general who later events indicated was likely sanctioned in his defection. Whoops.

 

It lends itself to some interesting ideas for social ties being power to some degree, as well as giving me nice reassuring vibes of Rogue Trader.

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In keeping with the escalation of violence aspect of the discussion. Why is it that literally every movie, game and story involves the hero starting out by killing anonymous henchmen, working his way up the hierarchy of badguys, knocking off lieutenants, the main baddies right-hand man before finally the main villain (who often treats the hero to dinner where he explains his secret plan) meets his end. And along the way, literally every single badguy henchman in the horde will give his life for the cause. I mean, you'd think after the first 10, 20, 100 of your comrades got swatted, number 101-200 would think twice about the beauty of life and the state of their retirement plan and whether the career path that they chose was really correct and maybe they should have studies more at community college.

 

Oh, sure, there is always the one henchman who tries to chicken out and he is usually killed trying to escape by the main badguy in order to show just how bad he is. But there isn't ever really a point where the henchmen as a group say "Fuck it" and develop some sort of collective resistance to being victim number 11, 21 or 101 in the movie's killing spree. 

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Why is it that literally every movie, game and story involves the hero starting out by killing anonymous henchmen, working his way up the hierarchy of badguys, knocking off lieutenants, the main baddies right-hand man before finally the main villain 

 

 Paradigmatic archetypal shorthand.

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Don't you know? Age of Empires is a 100% accurate depiction of the period between the Fall of Rome (which for your convenience is a single date not a process) and the Early Modern period, and the tech tree was an essential part of daily life.

 

It's probably got a lot to do with yearly refreshes on technology being totally incompatible with having an idea of how much more of a difference quality made to effectiveness than form, for example (and a profound misunderstanding of things leading to the idea that all examples of a technology that eventually wins out are superior to all forms of an earlier technology). That and DnD is not based on the middle ages. DnD is based on a pop-cultural idea of the middle ages heavily filtered through Tolkien.

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Wait. You mean the ultimate infantry squad does not consist of a rogue, a ranger, a wizard or sorceror, a bard or cleric, a monk or paladin and a couple of meat shields like a fighter and barbarian?

 

*Rolls dice and and checks charisma bonus against the results table to see if the audience laughs.*

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Don't you know? Age of Empires is a 100% accurate depiction of the period between the Fall of Rome (which for your convenience is a single date not a process) and the Early Modern period, and the tech tree was an essential part of daily life.

 

It's probably got a lot to do with yearly refreshes on technology being totally incompatible with having an idea of how much more of a difference quality made to effectiveness than form, for example (and a profound misunderstanding of things leading to the idea that all examples of a technology that eventually wins out are superior to all forms of an earlier technology). That and DnD is not based on the middle ages. DnD is based on a pop-cultural idea of the middle ages heavily filtered through Tolkien.

 

As a writer of fantasy you do not take the world progress that really happened, but instead place words on technology that the people have in their hands that describes what you see in your head.  In my own book Memories of an Older World, My main character is an officer fighting against a Barbarian horde.  During the war he is gifted the yataghan owned by his lieutenant on the man's death.  I was written many florid letters filled with hate about this because 1) medieval underlings did not gift weapons in Frankish or other germanic cultures in Europe, and 2) yataghans were a weapon developed from very strong early steel by the Ottomans but not present before the 1820s.

 

It was hard to tell them that on the world of Virdea (err, so that's how the name came about) the people, who are descendants of genetically birthed space travelers from a long range seeding ship, do not happen to have a culture or a technology that is precisely European medieval.  Gifting a weapon is a Dagorian cultural practice that says "you must carry my fight."  The yataghan was a weapon of peacetime Dagorians, used for its dash and good looks on a civilian outfit, and it carriage by a soldier like the lieutenant was a declaration that his occupation of war was not his fondest dream.  When the main character takes up the yataghan he accepts a dual responsibility of both taking up the fight, but also finding a way to leave the fight when it was over.

 

You are right that many people took Middle Earth as some prototype of medieval period, but Tolkien never intended this - the people were medieval in technology but their thinking patterns were alien to the people of Europe as they were all walking myths.  Tolkien's clever ruse was to tell a story that would later become lost except for hymns and poems.    

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Yeah. Nice try old man. What Tolkien REALLY wanted was nine hours of orcs and goblins running randomly into the swords of heroes, an Elf/Dwarf love affair, 92 seconds featuring Beorn, the Worms of Dune and Smaw-ooog getting killed by...

Oh screw it, I'm still pissed.

 

 

We got better than we deserved in the first three movies.  Fact is, that Hobbit was never a three movie epic.  

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In terms of games we have your setting, now we need a model.

 

Card games are expensive because cards have to be printed.  Here the server client model might work.

 

Your characters are defined by what is known as le milieu.  Who is it possible to be in this world?  A christian priest, a mendicant monk, a warrior, a stripling looking to break out of life, a bard who has traveled into the christian lands?

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If you choose a class system then these become your classes.  If not, then you have a classless system and your character builds a character to face challenges.

 

There are known sins in many systems.  Min/maxing is one.  Shop window design is another.  Game players will go all out to max their characters for fighting, then discover this is boring and quit a game never knowing their own choices made them quit.  

 

What is success in the game look like?  What is an adventure?  

 

The original DnD defined itself by one adventure that would later be called In Search of the Unknown.  Mike Carr took the basic concept of what Gygax did around a table and distilled it with a minimum of fuss, threw in some simple expositor about Roghan the Fearless and Zelligar the Unknown, and the Caverns of Quasqueton, and you were off.  That module represents around 250 hours of playtime when it was first released, sheer genius, and it defined the entire game from then on it, both on what it did and what it did not do.

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I've been wondering that myself. I think we are just so darn polite that there's no one to say alright you screw heads, this is how it will be.

For me as a "consumer", post-fall of Rome Britain sounds great. Any game mechanic that works there can be transferred to other geographical settings. We'll be seeing an increase in public interest for the time period considering that BBC has a new series coming out based during Alfred the Great's time.

Any combat or battles is usually low key involving a handful of individuals. We have external and internal threats. As you mentioned a wealth of different characters and/or races.

But again, this is more Toxn and gang's baby. And I'll be gone I assume for most of the heavy lifting over the summer.

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If you choose a class system then these become your classes.  If not, then you have a classless system and your character builds a character to face challenges.

 

There are known sins in many systems.  Min/maxing is one.  Shop window design is another.  Game players will go all out to max their characters for fighting, then discover this is boring and quit a game never knowing their own choices made them quit.  

 

What is success in the game look like?  What is an adventure?  

 

The original DnD defined itself by one adventure that would later be called In Search of the Unknown.  Mike Carr took the basic concept of what Gygax did around a table and distilled it with a minimum of fuss, threw in some simple expositor about Roghan the Fearless and Zelligar the Unknown, and the Caverns of Quasqueton, and you were off.  That module represents around 250 hours of playtime when it was first released, sheer genius, and it defined the entire game from then on it, both on what it did and what it did not do.

My system is classless, but as I've pointed out we're actually dealing with a few approaches that need to be winnowed.

 

Maybe we should start out by telling the ideal story we want to see in this game. Here is one:

 

"The forests which ring our little circle of light are dark and full of wordless menace. Wild people live there; men savage and degenerate. Worse things, too: creatures not described even in our myths. Things which crawl in the dark and worm their way amongst the cold pines. Things which speak with voices that whistle and moan like wind through leafless trees.

 

And our little circle of light, this last vestige of civilization, is fading. The empire is dead, my friend. No ships have come. We may be the last civilized men left in the entire world. And year on year, as our walls crumble and our roads become weed-infested, we become like the savages beyond our borders.

 

We have hard choices ahead of us now. Do we gather ourselves to face the looming dark, trusting in the virtues of our old ways? Do we try to forge a new path for our people in a time of change? Or do we change and become the savages we have despised?"

 

The kicker being that the Romanised Britons aren't exactly reliable narrators for what's going on around them, and might label as savages any number of different people. Hell, it might simply be that the guys next door are simply being pragmatic about transitioning their societies away from trade with a dead empire. Or they might actually be old-school, hair-liming atavists from the misty north...

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Stop making me want to take a week off work to cram books into my head.

 

That's a setting as much as a story though.

 

Unfortunately I'm suffering from a massive case of writer's block so bad it's affecting my coding as well as actual writing, and I can't just get ideas together, but the idea of walking into the shadows encroaching around the last guttering light of the remaining Romanised British rulers, where fearsome and uncivilized peoples may lurk, to secure the reaches and prevent that light from growing dimmer sounds pretty cool, as does playing power games against other self-proclaimed powers.

 

Even something as simple as survive could lead to some interesting problems when combined with barbarians, the demands of an ever-increasingly beleagured populace and rival pretenders trying to build their own claim. Then work from which way the players push, whether they want to form a bulwark against the encroaching barbarians or they want to stab backs to rise to the top of Romano-Britain and hope that there's still one to be on top of by the time they're done.

 

Also what exactly do you mean by shop window design?

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