A much simpler drawing today. This ogre has had a big day gobbling up human adventurers, and has tuckered himself out. Like all the art I’ve drawn this month, it’s freely available for use in any RPG projects that would benefit from my doodles.

I’ve just about run out of steam with No Effort Dicember, I’m sad to say. I did accomplish the goal I started out with. I wanted to indulge myself by returning to a simpler form of RPG blogging. I did that, and in so doing I connected with the joy of writing in a way I hadn’t for awhile. But daily blogging is a lot of effort. It’s starting to feel like work, and cutting into the time I’d rather be using for other things. I might write a few more as the month goes along, or I might not. Either way, this was a lot of fun!

Big shoutout to Dungeons and Possums, who has been absolutely killin’ it with these prompts every day. Definitely give that blog a look.

Today was the first time in maybe 4 months that I set no expectations for myself. Was gonna skip this too, but the mood to doodle came up on me, and I figured the Dicember prompt was as good a subject as any. To be honest, today’s break has been so nice that I’m at serious risk of plunging into a bacchanal of sloth for weeks. No ragrets.

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Ice and snow as two separate prompts!? That’s conceptual double-dipping, Dyson!

Alright, uh…snow falls in winter…winter is a metaphor for old age… Let’s talk about retired adventurers. (The concept, not the blog.) This is actually something I’ve been tinkering with for months now. I’ve still got some further development to do before it’s ready for the table, but maybe sharing this half-finished version will generate some criticisms useful to my thought process.

Low level adventuring is fun. I think this is a common sentiment among my peers in the OSR. Levels 1-3 have more tension. Characters are more fragile so they’re more likely to die, and they’ve got less emotional investment in them so it’s less of a bummer when they do. These levels also include the most relatable form of play. The things characters are able to do are more closely analogous to what real human beings can do. The powerful magic items and spells and potions don’t come in until later.

Domain level play is also fun. At least conceptually. It’s neat to move from being a pawn tossed about by the whims of the game world, to someone with the power to change that world. I’ve had a lot of fun with domain play, but I’ve never felt at home with it. Never reached that comfortable back-and-forth where both players and referee know what they want, and what to expect of one another. Part of the issue is that it takes so long for a campaign to reach the domain stage that I haven’t practiced with it much at all. Another part is the dearth of writing on the subject. Rule books usually make only a token gesture towards supporting domain play, and the blogging scene doesn’t often engage with it. There are some notable exceptions to that, like this post from Joseph Manola, and this one from John B., but I’m surprised how many of the blogs I read return no results when searching for “Domain.”

It would be nice to engage with domain play earlier in a campaign, while keeping the focus on grotty, low-level adventuring. That’s the impetus behind this idea.

Characters gain experience only by spending money to gain resources or connections as part of building their future prospects as a ruler of a domain. In practice this just means taking numbers out of the “money” column, and placing them in the “experience” column. Their investments have no form or function within the game until thy reach level 5, at which point they become a Boss. Bosses are too busy with important affairs to bother with dungeon crawling. They send underlings to handle that sort of thing for them. The player of a new boss should roll up a new 1st level character to serve as their Boss character’s underling. The player is now their own questgiver.

Bosses remain in play, but act only during a meta-game “domain turn” which takes place at the start of each session. After the domain turn ends, players control their underling characters in much the same way they normally would: delving dungeons and exploring wilderness. Now, however, they gain experience points by turning money over to their boss to help grow the boss’ empire. Again, this has no tangible benefit in play until the new character gains enough experience points to achieve level 5, at which point they too become a boss. The player now has 2 bosses, perhaps working as partners, or more likely, the first boss has grown powerful enough to need an under-boss. The player again rolls a fresh character, and may continue this cycle as long as they wish. Over time the domain turn will likely become longer and more intricate. The dungeon delving portion of the game may eventually become displaced completely, at which point it might be appropriate to introduce an “underling management” minigame, but that’s even more speculative than the rest of this, and well beyond the scope of this post.

For each Boss a player has at their disposal, they may make take 1 action during the Domain Turn. Additionally, the number of Boss’s at a player’s disposal should roughly set the scale on which they operate. I figure players with 1 Boss operate on the level of a mercenary captain, or Archon of a small town. 2 Bosses might make you a city Mayor, army General, Archbishop in your church, etc. Sometime around having 5 Bosses players would be operating on the world stage.

The Domain Turn, like its sibling the Exploration Turn, is not a set length of time. It is as long as it takes to achieve the results of a Domain Turn action, which may be an hour or a year. As a matter of maintaining the structure of play, it ought to occur once at the start of each session, regardless of how much time passes during the more traditional mode of play. It’s important that the timescale in the two modes be able to float a little bit relative to one another.

The structure of the domain turn as laid out below is strict, but only because this mode of play is too unfamiliar to be loosy goosy with. When a player is told they can do anything they want, many will experience analysis paralysis. When told they must choose from a set of 5 actions they’ll often opt to invent a 6th. This is desirable behavior. I imagine a group that became comfortable with this system would abandon much of this formalization.

The domain turn occurs in 3 steps, each of which have some chance to influence the steps which come after:

1. Domain Encounter is rolled. Only a single encounter is rolled for the whole group, but it has to be rolled first because it has a good chance of altering what the players what the players want to do in the later two phases. This would be adapted from the Haven Encounters I used in ORWA.
2. Boss’s projects are updated. Done second because this phase has the greatest potential to be dull. Hopefully not, but if it is, at least the turn starts strong and ends strong. Some project updates will be simple. A progress bar moving one step closer to the end. “You hired a crew to build a tower in the woods. It’ll take 3 domain turns. This is turn 2 of 3.” Other project updates may require the player to roll. “Check a d6 for that spy you put into your enemy’s entourage. On a 4 or 5 they send you information, on a 1 they got caught.” This would also be a good phase to generate adventure prompts which the players could assign to themselves in the other phase of play. “The caravan of supplies you sent for was attacked by bandits along River Road. Half the goods were stolen. Do you want to send someone out to recover the rest?”
3. Domain Actions. Performed last, because it’s what players will be most interested in. Bosses only get a single action per session, but those actions are more abstracted than in normal play. “Convince a local aristocrat to fund my scheme.” would be one action. Boss Characters are competent. Their actions succeed or fail with much less need to fiddle with the details than the actions of the low-level schmucks players control during normal play!

Before attempting to use this system at the table I’d like to have a codified list of domain actions, and how to resolve them. The sort of thing where if the player knows exactly what they want to do, I can say “ah, that’s an example of X action; let’s resolve it according to those rules.” And if they don’t know what to do, I can say “Well, here are the types of actions you can take, which one seems most useful to you at the moment?” Ava’s rules on Conspicuous Consumption are a particular guidepost to me here.

And that’s about all I’ve managed to accomplish with this system so far. I kinda wanted to push my development a little further today, but I’ve had to write this post in full twice because of an odd computer crash. I am now a Class-B Grumperton, and also over an hour behind schedule on work today.

Check out the hashtags #DICEMBER or #DICEMBER2021 on your social media of choice to see other participants.

Y’know how, in Star Trek, they solve problems with technobabble? At its best the technobabble is built on the established physical properties of Star Trek’s world. As a viewer, I understand that the Deflector Dish can be modified to direct a variety of different types of energy, I understand that the Bussard collectors gather up interstellar particles, and I know that tachyons are particles that move backwards through time. In the real world this is all varying degrees of nonsense. None of these tools are defined well enough to hold up to close scrutiny, but within the fiction they have a comprehensible function that allows me to see how they fit together to overcome a certain problem. So when good technobabble happens, the solution feels earned.

That’s a feeling I’d like to create within my games. In particular I’d like for magic users to feel like this as they command the elemental forces to conjure their spells.

Right off the bat I have an advantage over Star Trek’s writers because I’m using magic. Magic makes no pretensions to being science. Its underlying logic is already entirely vibes-based, and nobody expects it to hold up to close scrutiny.* That said, I’ve got some hurdles to deal with as well. Most notably the fact that while I want magic users to feel like they’re cleverly manipulating a complicated system of tools and principles, I don’t want to make them learn a complicated system of tools and principals.

Now, I’ve written about magic systems a few times before. Okay, more than a few. I’ve written about magic systems a lot. I’ve even got a new method I’m developing through playtesting. This desire has always been what I’ve been trying to drive towards I think, even though I definitely wouldn’t have always been able to phrase it clearly for myself. Part of what has helped me figure out what I’m driving towards has been the fairly recent development of Chris H’s oozes.

Chris H. is a highly skilled player. He doesn’t have a public facing blog or social media presence for me to link to, but there’s a good chance you know him anyway because he plays in so many online games that I get stressed just thinking about having a schedule that packed. In my Dangerous Neighbors campaign he plays a magic user named Wob, using my Magic in the Moment system. Early on Wob acquired the magic words “Animate,” and “Ooze,” and this has basically defined his strategy through the whole campaign to this point.

Chris has taken to treating any form of slime, sludge, mud, or goo as treasure. He carries sacks of flour, empty buckets, and a whole collection of odd substances in mason jars as part of his normal load of gear. Every few sessions he mixes a bunch of stuff together to magic up a slime servant to get the party out of a jam. When he throws “powdered vampire ashes” into the mix, it functions exactly like good technobabble in Star Trek. Everyone understands its function well enough that the results of creating a slime with it feel earned.

All this good play is more a result of Chris’s personal playstyle, and our relationship as people who’ve played together for many years and have a certain simpatico with one another. It can’t be credited to Magic in the Moment. Hopefully, though, I can figure out how to write simple rules that best encourage the sort of play that Chris is pursuing, thereby making it something that others can more easily slot into their own games.

*Except people who read too much Brandon Sanderson. Haha, sick burn.

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The leapfrogging chain of thoughts which led me from today’s prompt to the thing I’m actually going to write about is too labyrinthine to justify. I’m not even going to try.

Social play tends to be central to the games I run. This wasn’t originally a conscious choice on my part, but rather the emergence of a dominant strategy. As a referee, I don’t like mindless or animalistic monsters, I’m bad at enforcing language barriers, and I’m a sucker for a well-stated argument. My players discovered that these factors mean parley is often the most effective way to get what they want, so they do it a lot. This works for me. I enjoy running parleys, and I’ve leaned into it as my personal style. It’s common for creatures like wolf packs and zombies to talk in my games, just for the sheer pleasure of parley.

In order to better support this central aspect of play, I’ve begun incorporating Objects of Social Significance on my treasure and shop-population tables. I first mentioned this in my post about The Goblin Bazaar, but there was a lot of other stuff to cover there so I glossed over it. When the players visit a shop or find treasure, and I roll “Object of Social Significance,” what does that mean?

The first step is to figure out who this object is significant to. I’ll roll a random creature or faction, and sometimes I’ll instantaneously know what the object should be from that. For example, it has been established in my game that the Boastful Bovines (a faction of horrific cow-horse-human hybrids) are film buffs. They’ve got a working projector, and 6 movies they watch and re-watch ad-nauseum. So an Object of Social Significance for them would be a new film which the players could use to improve their relationship with that group.

For other factions no specific object will jump to my mind. In those cases I’ll usually just roll again, and whatever Object I roll can be Socially Significant to that faction somehow. This happened fairly recently when the party killed a nest of giant centipedes, and discovered Objects of Social Significance for the faction of giant spiders on level 3. The spiders haven’t been developed much, so I rolled for treasure again and got jewelry. This meant that the party came upon a number of spider corpses in the centipede nest, and those corpses were wearing jewelry. The following session the party visited the spiders to deliver the jewelry of their fallen kin, and the spiders were touched by their decency. The spiders now like the party very much—though after getting to know the spiders, the party actually hates them and is waiting for a good opportunity to betray them.

Of course, these objects can also function as normal treasure in varying degree. The jewelry could be sold at any shop in exchange for hard currency if the players didn’t want to bother with its socially significant aspect. There’s nothing wrong with that. Heck, I haven’t done this yet, but eventually I’d like the players to find an Object of Social Significance that they’ll be inclined to keep at their peril. They could find a wand of 100 fireballs with “PROPERTY OF MELCHIZAR THE MALEVOLENT” written clearly on the side of it. They’d definitely keep the wand, and Melchizar would definitely be annoyed if they ever found out.

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Just this past Wednesday I wrote that I wanted to be better at checking in with the whole party during Exploration and Travel turns. For the uninitiated, “Turns” here refers to a fungible amount of time that’s used to measure the length of an action during different modes of play. Exploration Turns—often just ‘Turns’—are where my game spends the most time. It’s used most commonly while the players are exploring an adventure location like a dungeon. Each Exploration Turn is approximately 10 minutes, though it’s best not to try mapping turns onto literal clock movements. Travel Turns, or Watches, are used mostly when players are moving across a vast distance, or when they’re exploring a relatively safe environment like a city. They last about 4 hours, but again, not literally.

In both of these game modes the party tends to behave as a single unit. This is especially true for Watches (“We go North.”), but happens during Exploration as well. The party may discuss what they want to do, but often it’s only a single character who actually does something. None of this is necessarily bad. The only issue is that when the party works as a unit, more outspoken players unintentionally push shy players onto the sidelines.

While pondering today’s prompt, I was thinking about how John B. approaches teamwork. (A second reference in one week. John’s outsize influence on my thinking is well documented.) I’ve wanted to integrate better incentives for teamwork & assistance into my own games for awhile now, and it occurred to me that it could be done as a matter of refereeing style, rather than as a written rule.

When the players are in Exploration or Travel Turns, and a situation arises in which one member of party is doing something, the referee can quickly indicate the other members of the group and ask: “Is there anything you want to do to help them?” If they can come up with something good, maybe the person taking the action gets a bonus, or gains safety from some potential consequence. It may also happen that a player doesn’t have anything to do to help, but does have an idea about what their character wants to do while the rest of the party is occupied. Or maybe the players will simply say “no,” which is fine. Characters don’t need to be acting constantly, so long as players are given frequent invitations to act.

What qualifies as good help may be handled more or less seriously. I’ll end with an anecdote from when John was playing Doctor Trevor Science in my FKOS game, years ago. Another player was hacking a computer, and Dr. Science wanted to help. So as the other player hacked, he played some heavy synth music on his phone, and flashed the lights dramatically.

Obviously the hacker got a +1 to their roll.

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The last few days have been restful. Didn’t realize how much it was needed! I fully intended to just skip a couple prompts and move on. Then my partner invited me to sit and draw with her for a bit. It was a chill evening of tea and synthwave, and I figured the two prompts I planned to skip could be my subjects. My illustration skills are thoroughly amateur, but if either of these illios would be useful for filling out some space in an RPG project, take them with my blessing.

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Today’s prompt brought to mind how overnight rest during wilderness travel is handled. Being in the woods in the dark is scary, and it would be nice to reflect that scariness better in my games. Simply rolling a single encounter check for the evening feels inadequate, since the players typically roll 3 of those during the day!

This led me to considering John B.’s Roles and Tasks for PC Groups. It’s an option I’ve always liked, but never made use of. Specifically here I’m interested in the Quartermaster, whose job includes drawing a diagram of the party’s camp layout each evening. Tough to do in online games, but it seems like it’d be a fun ritual to mark the end of each adventuring day if the whole group were together around a real table, with convenient scraps of paper nearby. The full procedure was laid out in A Procedure for Exploring Wilderness.

And now, because it is Night, I will take a Rest from daily blogging. I enjoyed revisiting these old posts of John’s, I encourage you to do the same, and now I’m going to go spend the day with my family.

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I don’t spend enough time thinking about the presentation of my games. By which I mean the way I manage myself at the table, the patterns of speech and body language I use, that sorta thing. Even today, after deciding explicitly to think about this topic, my brain keeps sliding off it. I caught myself again and again having wandered off on some unrelated chain of ideas. I lack knowledge of the core concepts that would give my brain something to grip as I turn these ideas over. I would probably benefit greatly from taking some sort of debate course, or public speaking, improv, or theater. Really anything that teaches how to manage the impact of your words and actions. I probably will never do that, but if I did It’d be good for me.

This isn’t to say I want my sessions to be more intense and focused experiences. I definitely, One-Hundred Percent (100%) do not want that. I value conversational tangents. Games where everyone stays strictly focused on play the entire time make me uncomfortable. But I do want to be better at reigning those conversations in when they’ve gone on for too long. I want to be better at not starting them myself when we’ve already had enough of them for one night. I want to recognize when I’m in a giddy/chatty frame of mind, and be mindful enough to control myself.

Maybe it’ll help clarify what I’m talking about if I list some of the strategies I already use to help with my game’s presentation?

• If the players seem uncertain of what to do, or if I need to make clear that I’m done talking, I’ll suggest a set of boring options to them. For example: “Do you want to attack the dragon, try to steal its gold without waking it, or sneak past it to the next room?” They never actually choose the options I lay out. The point is to let them know it’s ‘their turn.’ Giving them explicit prompts helps to prevent analysis paralysis, which can be created with more open-ended questions like “what do you do?”

• Calling on players directly, rather than the group in general. Often this is just for incidental stuff like rolling encounter checks. It doesn’t matter who rolls it, but if I didn’t specify an individual everyone would quietly wait for someone else to do it. And since I’m calling on individuals anyway I may as well rotate who I call around the table. Keep everyone engaged with the game in small ways as well as big ones.

• Balancing the time between split parties so nobody feels too disconnected from the action. (Prismatic Wasteland wrote on this subject, and goes into more and better detail than I could.)

• Asking a few meaningless clarifying questions in order to obscure important clarifying questions which might give the players undue warning. For example, I might ask “Which order did you put your boots on this morning? Right first, or Left first? And did you wear your wet socks, or go sockless?” The answer to the first question doesn’t matter, but by asking it I make the second question seem less consequential, and the player is less likely to pick up on what sort of unknown danger is prompting me to ask these questions.

Having thus gestured towards some aspects of game presentation I manage well, what are some I wish I managed better?

• Keeping everyone at the table invested in the game. I can’t claim sole responsibility for this. As someone who frequently loses track of the action when I’m a player, I know that players need to be responsible for their own engagement. But when a player’s attention wanders, they can quickly fall so far behind that they don’t know how to start participating again. I want to get better at looping players back into the action, and doing so without embarrassing them, or burdening them.

• Enforcing limitations on the players. I’m really bad at saying “No” consistently enough. I enjoy being a player in games with strict referees, and I want to run the style of game that I enjoy playing in, but I am a softhearted boy. I recall Ava saying something insightful about this once. About how she writes very strict rules for her game explicitly so the rulebook can be the ‘tough parent,’ and the referee can be the ‘fun parent.’

• Inquiring about player actions during Exploration Turns and Travel Watches. I always make a point of finding out what each individual player is doing when the game’s action is in Initiative Turns, and I do the same thing during Haven Turns, but I rarely think to do it during Exploration and Travel. It’s sensible in a way, because Exploration and Travel are the two modes of play in which the group is most likely to move and act as a single unit. I don’t want to go around the table just to hear everyone say “I walk next to everyone else.” At the same time, this is a mode of play where less outspoken players frequently get lost.

With a little more time and effort (two things explicitly banned during No Effort Dicember!) I’m sure I could come up with even more aspects of presentation that frequently cause me to stumble, but I’ll be curious to hear if anybody has coping strategies for the ones listed here?

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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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