invisible, figmentary, and dead: that damn turtle

Without a doubt, the greatest fumble result in gaming is tripping over the unseen imaginary deceased turtle. Below, under the last result for 2-handed fumbles, is the oldest version of it I have in my game collection, from the earliest combined edition of Arms Law & Claw Law, which I'm pretty sure is the second ed of both books.

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I love those handwritten charts! They make the later RM charts seem cold and clinical by comparison. Note that under these rules fully five percent of all 2-handed weapon fumbles involve tripping over the non-existent turtle. With a morningstar's 8% fumble range that means you'd hit this result every 250 attacks or so. That's more often than you'd hit any sort of fumble under the Arduin Grimoire, at least if I'm interpreting Hargrave's rules correctly.

Personally, I love the MERP version of this fumble even more. Check out the last result on this list.

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That "You are very confused." cracks me up every time.

a double dose of medieval awesome

So I just finished reading Margaret Wade Labarge's A Baronial Household of the Thirteenth Century and I gotta share two bits from it or else I'll explode. First up, we have a throwaway mention of something that would make a cool-as-hell artifact for a modern weirdness campaign:

No English [chess] set was quite as rare as the one sent to St. Louis at Acre by the Old Man of the Mountain, chief of the Assassins of Syria; it was of crystal and amber with filigree of gold.

A chess set presented by the Grandfather of Assassins as a gift to a Saint-King. How can you not love that?

The other passage that I'm in love with describes a fad that developed among wealthy clerics of keeping pet monkeys and apes.

One of the northern chronicles, alluding to a bishop of Durhan's practice of keeping monkeys, described it as being "the custom of modern prelates for occasionally dispelling their anxieties."

Much of the time I can take or leave the cleric class, but I'd love a chance to play a clerical ape-keeper!

Clatto Verata Necktie!

I subscribe to Paizo's newsletter, though I must admit that I rarely read it. But the most recent issue's subject line caught my eye with the words Critical Fumble Deck. Now I know that a lot of gamers hate fumbles, but for me they are a cornerstone of Retro Stupid play. A lot of fun can be had tripping over imaginary deceased unseen turtles and accidentally mangling your friends and whatnot.

Wigs? Tea?

So thanks largely to Doc Rotwang's cheerleading for the random tables in it, I finally got myself a copy of Castle Zagyg vol. I, Yggsburgh, the setting book for Uncle Gary's Castles & Crusades-powered attempt to finally get Castle Greyhawk into print. (As a note to local readers, I ordered my copy through Armored Gopher Games. Special orders with them are fast and hassle free.) I'm really digging this book. The old Gygax charm is there in spades. And the random tables are as awesome as reported. There's a set of charts where not only can you roll up a random encounter with a bear, but you can then determine that the bear is wounded and angry. How can I not love that? And there are all sorts of nice little touches, like giving the heraldry of all the great knights of the realm and even going to the trouble to explain some of the trickier coats of arms in plain English. And the big pull-out map? One word says it all: Darlene. In my experience no other game cartographer combines form and function so flawlessly. If only the hexes were numbered, the map would be perfect.

But one thing is kinda freaking me out about this book. The general period of history being riffed on is way later than I usually dig in my D&D. Believe me, I'm no stickler for medieval accuracy at all. At the game table I tend to mix and match bronze age Conanery and faux-medieval Athuriana with whatever else happens to float my boat. But tea with breakfast? Nobles wearing wigs? That's just a little too renny for me. Not that I loathe renfaires, but rather that sort of late period game reminds me too much of the art and adventures of the sanitized, homogenized, and generally vanilla 2nd edition AD&D era. No doubt I'm extra sensitive to this concern right now because I'm also reading Margaret Wade Labarge's A Baronial Household of the Thirteenth Century. The 13th century comes off as positively barbaric compared to a world of perrukes and earl gray.

Still, the book is great. And ignoring the two pages devoted to fashion isn't going to break my brain. And on the other hand, I could maybe see trying for a more renaissance-inspired look in a Hackmaster game. Refusing the PCs an audience with a lord because they aren't properly dandified sounds like the sort of thing that could happen in Hackmaster.

The Font in the Stone

Gameblog reader GrayPumpkin asked if I ever found this font:


Yes, I did find it. One of the users at What the Font identified it almost immediately as Herkules. Big thanks to Some guy named Sam for sending me to them!

The Art of Imperfection?

Earlier this month over at theRPGsite we had a thread about OD&D. As is often the case, the old complaint about non-variable weapon damage resurfaced. In case this is new to you, allow me to sum up: Before the release of Supplement I: Greyhawk all weapons did d6 damage. This annoys a lot of people used to each weapon getting its own damage range based upon how kill-rific it is supposed to be. "Why would you ever wield a two-handed sword if it was just as deadly as a dagger?" is the inevitable question. Any OD&D ref using the weapon-versus-armor chart and weapon speed rules in Chainmail can handily answer that question, but it appears to me that the games that actually used Chainmail with OD&D have always been in the minority. Here's how I fielded the issue on the thread in question.

For my next OD&D outing I plan on using the following scheme for damage:

Fighter Types

Light weapons (club, dagger): roll 1d6
Most weapons: roll 2d6, take better roll
Two-handed weapons, lance: roll 3d6, take best roll

Clerics, Normal Men, and most Humanoids

Light Weapons: roll 2d6, take lower roll
Most weapons: roll 1d6
Two-handed weapons, lance: roll 2d6, take better roll

Magic-Users, Kobolds, and other wimps

Most Weapons: roll 2d6, take lower roll
Two-handed weapons: roll 1d6

The basic goal here is to keep damage ranges in the 1 to 6 zone of the original rules, but to allow for variation based upon both weapon employed and relative bloodthirstiness of the wielder.

The OD&D ref community spins out things like this all the time. I can't really claim this schema as my own. I'm basically riffing off Philotomy's awesome house rules combined with an idea from a dude over at Knights & Knaves and leavened with a bit from an old thread in the Dragonsfoot Classic D&D subforum, all of which came to a bubble over at the Original D&D Discussion Forum, or as I like to call it Odd74.

Indie dude Levi Kornelsen has been talking this sort of thing over at his livejournal, particularly here and here. He observes two features that can make an RPG system really juicy: having something cool to do between sessions (fiddling with houserules, making new monsters, laying out subsectors, tweaking your PC build) and having a game that's imperfect and incomplete in inspiring ways. The combo of fun things to do plus either critical gaps or unnecessary elaboration is why I keep plugging away at games like Encounter Critical and the older, crappier versions of D&D.

In my opinion 2nd edition AD&D was mechanically superior to 1st edition in many ways. Stripping out the succubi and half-orc assassins made the game a lot less cool, but the system ran pretty dang smoothly. Similarly, the Rules Cyclopedia is probably the single best incarnation of the game ever published. But I rarely open my copy of the RC, much less play it. And I don't even own all the 2nd edition corebooks. Why? I'm starting to think it's because those games are literally too good for me.

Clearly no one needs a mechanically perfect game to have fun playing RPGs, or we'd have all quit a long time ago. But thinking about why I like the games I like, especially in light of Levi's comments, and now I'm wondering if maybe I don't want a mechancally perfect game. The tinkerer in me is better served by an engine that isn't already purring like a kitten. And at the table a broken game only encourages me to operate more by the seat of my pants, which is when my GMing is at its best.

I'm not arguing that More Broken equals Better, by any means. Game designers, please keep working and playtesting and all that stuff! I'm just offering a counterpoint here to the "System Does Matter" and "Design is Law" types out there. Yes, your game system is important, but sometimes maybe the hardcore of the hobby fetishize the perfect system when a lot of that energy can go towards just making up some shit and running with it.

Am I making any sense here? I feel like I'm kinda all over the map in this post. To start the posty by showing off my shiny new OD&D houserule and to end it with arguing that system matters less seems pretty dang stupid.

This saves me some typing.

Today I planned on writing a bit about Pathfinder, the newly announced 3.5 successor game from Paizo. But it turns out that Trollsmyth has already said everything I had to say, so go check out his blog for my opinion. Funny how that works out.