It has happened a number of times over the years that players in my games have made friendly contact with a devil. Invariably, someone brings up the possibility of soul selling. After all, that’s kind of the whole role of devils in this genre. My standing policy at this point is that—once friendly contact with a devil has been made—1 soul given by free contractual agreement may be exchanged for 1 wish. Devils are Libertarians in the American style. Some player usually takes the deal (often my sister Lily who seems to dislike having a soul). This is the objectively correct decision for these players to make, because up until now I’ve never been good about enforcing any penalties on characters without souls.

When discussing this problem with others, a common suggestion is that characters without souls should receive no benefit from magical healing. This makes good sense after all, since magical healing typically comes from good gods, a group the soul-seller has now actively scorned. One could even go further and deny the character benefit of any divine magic, good or evil. If such a character were to try and cross the red sea while it is parted, why wouldn’t god cause a bit of water to run free and wash them away? As for the evil gods, I figure the whole purpose of letting humans use clerical magic for them is to gradually and subtly taint living souls so they can be harvested after death. Once a soul is gone, why bother with the person attached to it?

Sensibly thematic as this option is, I hate it and I’ve never used it. It’s just too harsh a price to pay for a single wish. I don’t think anybody would sell their soul if it meant being stuck recovering 1hp/day for the rest of their character’s life. I’d prefer a consequence that would tempt my players. So finally this morning, after literally years of putting it off, I sat down to think my way through the problem, and I’ve resolved on what I call the Devil Die.

See, good gods are forgiving motherfuckers. For as long as the mortal beneficiary of a devil’s bargain stays alive, the devil’s investment is in jeopardy. You never know when the asshole might fall down on her knees and repent of all her misdeeds, thereby robbing the devil of their justly-earned soul. So, after the devil’s side of the bargain has been executed, they’ll immediately set out trying to get you killed so they can secure your soul for themselves.

When a player proposes their wish to a Devil, the referee tells the player how many Devil Dice the wish will cost them. Usually this will only be 1, but I figure it’s good to leave the door open for more if the player makes some absurdly grandiose wish. For each Devil Die a character has, the referee may force the player to reroll once per session. If they roll well on a save, or deal just enough damage to kill a dragon before it gets another breath attack, the Devil slips in to try and fudge the result.

My players’ lives do not often hang on the result of a single roll, but they can. This is a dangerous risk, but it’s the sort of risk I think my players might take. I also like the implication of a game being played between the Devil and the Soul-Seller. The Soul-Seller recklessly confident in their ability to dodge and outsmart the devil, confidence bolstered by each session they survive. The devil knowing time is on their side. They only have to win once, while the Soul-Seller has to win every time.

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For those unfamiliar with the rules I use for social encounters, they’re fairly simple. The reaction roll (2d6 modified by Charisma) functions as an analogue for the attack roll. The base target is ≥9, which can be modified up or down as circumstances merit. It’s something I’ve discussed on the blog frequently over the years, perhaps most usefully in No-Prep Social Encounters. The current iteration of the system is fairly loosy-goosy, but it evolved out of a highly formalized one with codified social actions that each had unique mechanics to govern them. That sort of formalization doesn’t work well for me at the table. However, it’s still useful to think about how different approaches to social encounters might be categorized. How might one approach succeed when another fails; what different consequences might result from one style over another?

Take for example the act of persuasion. The player characters are trying to talk a non-player character into doing something they may not be inclined to do. Whatever their specific phrasing is, it can probably be boiled down to something like this:

Shame — Probably the least effective method for an individual to employ. Shame is much more likely to result in the target lashing out in anger, or lapsing into depressed inactivity. Community is also a pretty effective shield against shame. If the players try to shame a goblin for eating babies, all her goblin friends are going to reassure her that eating babies is normal and that the adventurers just have a pro-baby bias.

Entice — Luring someone to take action in order to achieve something they want is going to be much more effective than shame is, but it’s also bounded by some strict limitations. First, it has to be something the target actually does want. Players cant just incept desires into NPC’s heads. Second, they’ve gotta believe it’s something they’ll actually get if they do the thing the players want them to do. The more abstract the benefit, the less likely they are to think it can be manifested. (Players are always trying to convince NPCs to let them do stuff “because in a few years things will be better for everyone, and that includes you!” or some such nonsense.) Third, the amount that they desire the thing needs to be outweighed by the risk and effort involved in getting it. Everybody wants a shiny gold coin, but their time and safety are worth something to them.

Cajole — Attempting to make the target view the desired action as normal or trivial. Hinges entirely on how charming the PC is, and how much the NPC values their bond. “C’mon, we’re friends, right? C’moooon.”

Threaten — Pretty much only effective for the shortest of short-term gains. A threat will gain you advantage for a moment, and an enemy for life. And you only get the advantage if your threat is credible! Of course, threats can be institutionalized to work over the long term…

Legal — Really just a sub-form of Threaten that involves extra steps. The target has got to be someone who lives within a system of laws, they’ve gotta believe you posses the standing necessary to press legal claim against them, and you’ve gotta demonstrate that the they have some relevant legal vulnerability. Of course, that last step can be skipped if you’re just doing…

Fast Talk — In content, fast talk tends to resemble one of the other approaches. In form, though, it’s all about tricking people into making a decision before they’ve actually thought about it. Frighten them with spurious legal threats, entice them with fantasies, cajole someone who doesn’t actually like you much, etc. Once the target has a moment to think they’re likely to realize they’ve been bamboozled, and people do not generally like people who bamboozle them.

Of course, these are just the ones I came up with in the shower this morning. No doubt I’ll get a few suggestions for ones I missed.

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Combat takes up too much space in the game. I’ve been thinking for awhile now that I’d like to resolve all combats with a single roll, or a simple system of 3 rolls. Really reign it in so that play remains more firmly rooted in the exploration and planning phases. Yet also, combat involves so many fun intricacies to tinker with. I’m about to advocate for increasing its complexity, presumably further stretching out the time required to resolve any fight. At some point I ought to sit down and ponder a resolution between these two opposed desires of mine. Find a synthesis between them that really makes me happy. For now, though, I am satisfied merely to acknowledge my own inconsistent moods on the matter.

Most of the games I’ve played in tend to gloss over the space required to use a given weapon. These are typically objects designed for battlefields! A longsword or flail needs enough space to be swung effectively. Arrows and thrown spears need enough vertical space to arc through the air. Halberds and other pole weapons are such great massive things that moving through an interior space with them may often be impossible, or require the sort of effort that getting a couch into a 3rd story apartment does. All of these weapons would be rendered nearly useless in the subterranean vaults which adventurers commonly frequent in their search for lucre.

To be absolutely clear: I’m not advocating we pursue a faux-realistic dungeon delve ideal where daggers are the only functional weapon. Big swingy weapons are cool. Dungeons are cool. Cool + cool = more cool. That said, dungeons contain variously sized spaces. A rule as simple as “medium weapons work well in dungeon rooms, but attack with disadvantage in corridors” adds a valuable wrinkle for players to consider when looting a tomb. They may want to scout corridors, or run away from corridor encounters towards the nearest room. They may want to enter the dungeon equipped with smaller weapons specifically so they can ambush weapon-wielding monsters in corridors. It’s a little thing, but whenever I’ve managed to be on top of it in my games (which hasn’t been often, I admit), we’ve had a lot of fun with it.

Secondary weapon characteristics like this have always been a fascination of mine. All the little things that differentiate them outside of their damage range and number of hands required to wield them. In the past I’ve been strongly drawn to intricate systems of codifying these. This weapon has the “Basher” and “Smasher” traits, that one has the “Trippy” trait, that sorta thing. Having played with such systems under a few different referees, and run one myself, it unfortunately seems to wind up being one of those things that’s too tough to keep track of at the table. I tried going the other way with in when I ran Fuck the King of Space back in 2018. That game used d6 damage for every weapon, with an explicit encouragement for players to propose unorthodox uses for their weapon during play. Despite that game including an all-star list of the most creative players I’ve ever run with, that approach was just too open-ended to work, and wound up being frustrating for all involved.

I think the best approach for me may be to ‘stay in my lane,’ so to speak. As referee, I can consider how my player’s equipment choices may result in bonuses or penalties to their declared actions. If it gets them thinking about unique applications for their gear, so much the better.

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Failed attack rolls are one of the more irritating parts of normal play. Somehow there always ends up being some poor schmuck at the table who has nothing to do but sit quietly until it’s time for them to roll a d20, announce they missed, and lapse back into bored silence. No amount of encouraging creative play or constructing interesting encounters prevents it entirely. I’ve become convinced that it is a genuine flaw in the game’s structure. It’s okay for the game to be frustrating, but it shouldn’t be be boring.

In all likelihood, Ava has the correct idea by simply removing attack rolls entirely from Errant. In her version of the game play moves directly from announcing an attack, to rolling damage. But let’s say we want to solve the problem while maintaining the traditional form of Roll to Hit, then Roll for Damage.

In the past I’ve suggested that failed attack rolls deal half damage. I do think this would be an improvement. Players can consistently rely on being able to contribute something, even if it’s just whittling away the foeman’s hit points a bit. The downside, though, is that it flattens out the drama of combat, right? Misses become less tedious, but hits are made commensurately less enjoyable as well. A hit no longer means overcoming a miss, no longer makes the difference between progress and zero progress. There will be times when a player misses, then rolls 8 damage which gets halved down to 4; then the next round they hit and roll 3 damage which doesn’t get halved. In the long term it is always better to hit, but it is less better than it used to be.

So I’ll propose a new solution. Missed attacks deal no damage, as in standard play. For each combat, players should keep a tally of their missed attack rolls. If they miss 3 times during a single engagement, their next attack is automatically a critical success. Which, in my game, allows them to automatically maximize their weapon’s potential damage (so, 8 for a d8 weapon), as well as perform a combat maneuver of some sort, like tripping their foeman.

The 3 misses need not be consecutive. Landing a blow does not reset the tally, but the end of combat does. I’ve settled on 3 as the number because it’s big enough to feel well earned when it occurs, but also small enough that it never feels too far away. Also, by my estimation, most combats in my games only last 2~4 rounds, so I figure this would be a fairly uncommon occurrence. My goal is not to make the players want to fail, but simply to give them some consolation prize to keep them engaged when they do. A sort of miniature barbarian rage as reward for enduring an enraging situation.

If a character earns their auto-crit, but doesn’t get to use it before the end of combat, they can keep it to use in the next encounter. When a player has an auto-crit, though, they must use it next time they attack. It can’t be banked for the most opportune moment. Also, I think the definition of “a single combat” can be a little flexible here. The aim of this limitation is to avoid a running tally that guarantees everyone a few auto-crits every session. But if the players roll 2 encounters in a row which both devolve into brawls, I think I’d count them as a single combat for the purposes of this rule.

*Unless they roll half of 1, which gets rounded down to 0 in order to differentiate it from rolling a 1 when you hit successfully.

This prompt seems like a good opportunity to expound on something I mentioned yesterday about my players adopting kids. Because one of those kids, Bluepie, has had a dramatic impact on how I run the game.

Bluepie is a Torture-Demon. In the natural course of events she’d grow up to devise special suffering for condemned sinners in Hell. While playing through Bad Myrmidon, my players came upon Bluepie’s parents doing what they do to some poor travelers. The party killed Bluepie’s parents, then got the bright idea to look around for a lair. They found one, which I hastily generated while they were busy climbing down a sheer cliff face to reach it. Within, they found 6-year-old Bluepie. One of the PCs, a Patchwork Boy named Ecco the Enduring, lied to her about discovering her mothers’ murdered in the road and hunting down their killers to take revenge. She believed him, and he adopted her. Bluepie has been with the party ever since. She is a strong contender for my favorite NPC in any game I’ve ever been a part of, ever.

At first I was uncertain how I wanted to portray Bluepie, but I settled on playing her as a 6-year-old first, and a demon second. I think that decision was largely influenced by the way Ecco handled her. I don’t think he’s ever chastised her on moral grounds, merely on practical ones. Never “You can’t kill that person because it’s wrong,” just “You can’t kill that person because they might be useful to us later / people will see and kill you instead.” His approach always struck me as one that would resonate with this precocious and reckless monster baby, and so she gradually adapted to life with a group of amoral adventurers who (probably) do more good than evil in the world. She’s able to go into towns and even occasionally play with other children because Ecco has made such a consistent practice of responding to her shenanigans with honest attempts to be the sort of parent she needs.

So for several years now I’ve been in the curious position of figuring out what a child is doing while the party fights off an ogre ambush, parleys with goblins, or does whatever else adventurers tend to do. Other hirelings and NPCs who travel with the party can usually be relied on to follow the players’ lead, but kids will be kids. Often I roll 2d6 to determine how foolish Bluepie is going to be at any given moment. On a particularly low roll she might throw herself into danger. On middling rolls she’ll follow Ecco’s lead. On a particularly high roll she perhaps spots an opportunity to contribute to the party’s current struggle, without calling down some horrible consequence on herself.

(This 2d6 roll to determine a hireling’s foolishness comes in useful a lot, actually. The only difference being that each NPC tends towards different flavors of foolishness. For example, Hibub Karate has internalized a lot of toxic ideas about masculinity, and is prone to acting foolishly in his attempts to be macho. He’s getting better, though.)

From my perspective, the best part of having Blupie in the party is that I get to use her to inject all sorts of chaos into tense situations, and the players let her stick around because she’s Ecco’s kid. For example, on multiple occasions she has whispered bad advice into another NPC’s ear explicitly because she thinks it will be funny to see them get killed. She is, after all, a demon! Whispering bad advice into people’s ears is a natural talent for her, and has nearly gotten a few good torchbearers killed at inopportune times. Another example are the times she’s rolled a 2 or 3 on the foolishness check, and wound up on death’s door after trying to backstab an ogre. She’s only got something like 4 hit points, and no plot armor beyond the injury rolls I allow to all characters in the player’s party.

Bluepie is a fun NPC for me to play. She’s a highly motivating NPC for my players. She’s a tool through which I can inject chaos into the party’s ranks during tense situations. And, as her presence in the party has now spanned several years—both real and fictional—it’s neat to watch her grow up. It feels odd to say it that way, but I can’t think of a better one. Aging doesn’t usually come up that much in my games, because the difference between a 30 year old PC and a 34 year old PC is negligible. But the difference between a 6 year old child and a 10 year old child is huge. Before too long I might need to consider giving her class levels of her own!

In fact, Bluepie has been so much of a joy to play with, that it’s basically a foregone conclusion I’m going to try and tempt future parties to adopt children of their own. Street urchins on the run from local child-gangs; apprentices who want nothing to do with tradecraft; homonculi on the run from the wizards who made them. Pitiable things which prey upon the player’s sentimentality. Convince them to take a tiny chaos engine into their midst for me to leverage against them in amusing ways.

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“You can not have a meaningful campaign if strict time records are not kept.” The phrase has become a meme. A way of poking fun at a self-important racist who receives more credit than he deserves for getting the ball rolling on this hobby. There’s a nugget of wisdom in his bloviating, though. Having some metric for the passage of time in a campaign is vital if you want to model the long term consequences of the player’s actions. This is particularly important for me, because I am a highly campaign-motivated player.

That said, the extent to which it’s relevant to track a thing will differ from game to game, or even from session to session of a single game. In discussing yesterday’s post about ammunition with my friend Eric Boyd, he pointed out that a character will rarely empty a quiver during a single-day dungeon delve. If you’re running that sort of game (which I am), tracking ammunition may be perfunctory. However, if the characters were to spend weeks or months venturing overland away from skilled fletchers to refill their quivers, ammunition becomes an interesting concern. A flexible approach, using different methods suitable to a given situation, is best. The same holds true for how closely we ought to track time.

My Saturday morning campaign, Dangerous Neighbors, is an exercise in playing through published modules. There’s very little of my own bespoke campaign design going on. No elaborate system of downtime, no room for the players to set lofty long-term goals for themselves. For Dangerous Neighbors, the setting is just a fluffy connective tissue that exists to get us out of the end of one published adventure, and into the start of the next one. None the less, after 3 years and 74 sessions that connective tissue has a personality. The players have adopted children, romantic interests, ongoing theraputic projects, and little cottages where they keep watch on the road between adventures. Sometimes they travel through the space occupied by an earlier module on their way to a new one, and they get to see the aftermath of their adventuring. It’s nice for the world to feel like it’s moving, for those adopted kids to grow older.

So I set a simple rule for the campaign: each adventure module we play takes one season. Journey to the Rock takes place in summer. When it’s done, we presume the players hang out at home for a bit before the next call to adventure arrives. We have a casual conversation about what they do with those weeks and months, which might be more or less involved as the mood strikes, but doesn’t include any kind of formal downtime action system. By the time they begin playing through The Sunless Citadel, the leaves are starting to turn and they must adventure in Autumn weather.

This method would be too lax for many other campaigns. On a Red World Alone, which was heavily focused on the players attempts to transform society, needed a much more robust calendar and downtime action system. And those systems are a ton of fun, too. There have been a couple of times when I set out on misguided attempts to graft such a system on to Dangerous Neighbors, because I miss playing with something like that. Thankfully I’ve always stopped myself. Different games have different needs, and this one works better with a loosier goosier setting.

Now I just wish I did a better job at remembering to think about the seasons when I’m running a session. Our current adventure is taking place in deep winter, and I’ve got a terrible habit of forgetting the players are supposed to be trudging through wasit-deep snow until we’re far enough into the session that it’d break the flow of play for me to actually enforce it.

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There was a time when blog posts were simpler for me. Typed hastily using the scant few hours between dragging myself home from work, and collapsing into unwilling sleep. No proofreaders were consulted, no rewrites, no editing passes, no research, no lofty expectations. Blogs were a method of conversing casually with the scene, used the way discord, mastadon, or twitter might be today. I can’t go home again—nor would I want to—but we can occasionally indulge ourselves. Better yet, we can revisit old forms to see what new life we might find there. So, prompted by Dyson, I’m initiating No-Effort Dicember on Papers & Pencils this year. One post every day. Their subjects won’t be thoroughly considered, their structure will ramble, their sentences will run-on, and typos will frequently go uncorrected.

I had set the notion for myself that I’d try and draft a rough procedure for each of the prompts, but already here on day one I can’t do it. Ammo is a solved problem for me. Brendan solved it way back in 2012 by attaching an exhaustion die to each quiver (or other unit of ammunition storage). There are a few good permutations on the idea to choose between. For example, the exhaustion die may be rolled each time a shot is fired, or it may be rolled at the end of an encounter. A 1 might indicate the ammo is depleted, or simply that the exhaustion die changes to one with fewer faces, or a 1 may mean the character only has a single shot left. That last one is my favorite. Lends itself well to creating tense situations.

The only real trouble I have with running ammunition this way is that it requires the referee to be somewhat strict about encumbrance and economy. Those are both aspects of play that I admire, but struggle to implement consistently. It’s not a problem that can be solved by a better ammunition tracking rule.

So instead of coming up with a procedure for ammunition, I’ll reminisce about a game in which ammo was meaningful for me. I was playing in Brendan’s Pahvelorn game with Ram, Gus, and a few other folk I’ve lost touch with over the years. This would be circa 2011~2012. I was at this time thoroughly enchanted with the play style of OSR games, but my own mindset was still stuck in a video-gamey, neo-trad perspective from years of playing WotC’s 3rd Edition. Our party was adventuring overland, and encountered a monster way too tough for us to deal with. A giant or some such paragon-level encounter. The sort of thing that takes planning, potions, and maybe a GMPC to overcome via an hours-long combat encounter in the games I was used to playing at the time. We were considering fleeing when Ram’s cleric* archer Satyavati fires a great big black arrow of doom at the monster, who instantly pops away into nothing.

In another game it might have been considered an anti-climax for this great big party-annihilating threat to be felled so easily. But it was a GREAT climax to the story of finding this arrow deep in the vaults of Pahvelorn, saving it, and knowing just when to deploy it. I remember feeling amazing, and I wasn’t even the one who did anything cool. This is a sort of ammunition tracking that is often easier to manage. Arrows and bullets are simple tools that move in and out of a character’s inventory so frequently that tracking them is difficult to make fun. Single-use magic ammunition, though, gives a player that experience of managing scarcity, without verging on the tedious.

(Apparently Satyavati was actually a Magic User? I don’t know why I remember him as a cleric.)

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