Some Random House Rules for 5e D&D

I tend to run games pretty close to Rules as Written.  Part of that is because I like many different kinds of games, and I like to see the ways in which their design translates into the play experience.  But the bigger part of it is that I'm not incredibly interested in being a game designer, and I don't feel like that should be part of my job description as a GM/DM--I'm paying you for this game so I don't have to do the design work.

The exception to this seems to be D&D 5e.  I don't view myself as a 5e Hater.  I like a lot of what the game does.  But there are a handful of things that really bug me about the rules, things that reflect some (I think) weird and kinda inexplicable design choices.  But because I like the game, I want to try to fix what I see as problems, without throwing up my hands and going down the road of "5e Bad."

To that end, I figured I would put out some of my house rules for 5e that I have been working on, along with a explanation of my thought process.  There are four of them--the Rest rules, XP, low levels, and Inspiration.  

Rest Mechanics

Let's lay out the basic problem with the rest mechanics as written in the Players Handbook.  PCs can take a Short Rest or a Long Rest, and every class ability in the game that requires a recharge refreshes on either a Short Rest or a Long Rest.  Because the Short/Long Rest system is so deeply grounded in all player-facing mechanics, it is extremely difficult to change around the actual mechanic itself without rebuilding the class mechanics completely.  For example, if you have a Warlock in the party, the effectiveness of the Warlock visa ve the other classes is heavily dependent on  there being opportunities for Short Rests, as the Warlock's more limited spell selection is balanced around the idea that spell slots refresh on a Short Rest as opposed to a Long Rest for the other spellcasting classes.  Meanwhile, we are told that encounters are balanced around the idea of six to eight "medium" difficulty encounters between Long Rest, and two encounters between Short Rest (so encounter, encounter, Short Rest, encounter, encounter, Short Rest, encounter, encounter, Long Rest).  To activate a Short Rest, the PCs must take one hour of in-game time to rest, while a Long Rest requires eight hours of sleep by the PCs in-game.

The interface between the last two elements means that there is an expectation that PCs will engage with six to eight encounters in a 24 hour period.  That makes some sense in a pure dungeon crawl scenario, but its hard to justify in most other story contexts.  In an urban exploration scenario or a wilderness travel scenario, it's pretty easy for the PCs to take rests between every encounter (at least Short Rests), which means that the PCs will be at or near full strength for every encounter.  Which requires the DM to throw tougher challenges at the PCs, which makes combat more swingy, more unpredictable, and more of that "rocket tag" phenomenon that was a big issue in previous editions.  

So, what do you do to solve this problem?  One idea is to borrow from the rest mechanics for 13th Age.  Whereas 5e requires you to take a particular amount of time to rest (one hour/eight hours of sleep) to trigger the recovery, 13th Age ties recovery directly to the number of encounters completed.  In 13th Age, this is balanced around the idea of a Quick Rest (the 13th Age version of a Short Rest) after every encounter and a Full Heal Up (i.e. Long Rest) after three to four encounters.  This way, the PCs never get out of sync with the encounter balance guidelines built into the game.  If you were to import this over the 5e, you would simply say that PCs get a Short Rest after every two encounters (no matter how much time passes in between encounters) and a Long Rest after six.

The objection to this approach is that it makes rests an entirely dissociated mechanic.  You are keeping the rest economy consistent with the gamist encounter design principles, but there is no consistent thing happening in the world that is triggering the recovery of PC resources--no consistent amount of time passing, no consistent PC action.  The degree to which this bothers you is a matter of personal taste.  It never really bothered me running 13th Age, but I see why people object to it on principle.  It also removes any sort of tactical thinking on the part of the players with regard to rests, as they just happen automatically.

On the other side, there is the "gritty realism" approach described in the Dungeon Masters Guide, which requires eight hours of sleep for a Short Rest and 7 days of rest for a Long Rest.  My problem here is with the 7 days for a Long Rest, as I think it creates a new set of pacing problems for stories.  If the PCs have to stop cold their adventuring for an entire week to heal up, it's hard to maintain any sense of tension and urgency.  And if you as the DM contrive to prevent the PCs from taking Long Rests in the name of maintaining tension and urgency, I think players will eventually become resentful, as at the end of the day 5e is about using your cool character abilities.

The final approach I've seen is in Cubicle 7's wonderful (but, at least for now, out of print) Adventures in Middle Earth, which is built on the 5e chassis.  AiME keeps the basic time lengths for rests, but adds the restriction that a Long Rest can only occur in places where the PCs have "safety, comfort, and tranquility."  In other words, no Long Rests in the wilderness, or in dungeons, because those environments are unsafe/uncomfortable/disturbing.  In other words, you can basically only take a Long Rest in a protected place like an inn, or (in Middle Earth terms) some place like Rivendell or Lothlorien.  I like this a lot, and it makes perfect sense (and is very thematic) for Middle Earth stories, but I think it is also a little too punishing for most standard 5e campaigns to say no long rests at all during wilderness journeys.

So, taking all of that together, here are my Rest rules.  

• A Short Rest is eight hours of sleep, as per the gritty realism rules;
• A Long Rest requires: 
• 48 hours of uninterrupted rest or
• 24 hours of uninterrupted rest if the PCs are in a place with "safety, comfort, and tranquility" as per AiME--their homes, an inn, a castle of a friendly noble, etc. 

What I like about this scheme is that it incentivizes players to look for places of safety, without making it completely impossible to get Long Rests in a wilderness or other unfriendly environment.  It has the advantage of being very easy to explain in-game--it's not hard to see why resting in a place of comfort and security is more refreshing than camping in the wilderness.  It also keeps things moving in-game--"you've rescued the daughter of the local baron and returned her to her family.  After a day off to recover while taking advantage of the hospitality of the baron, you are off to continue your quest for the Crown of MacGuffin.  Reset to full health and spells."  Finally, I think this hits a good middle point between the base rules on one hand and the "gritty realism" or AiME rules on the other.  

One quick note--I would allow a Ranger to make a Survival Check to create a "place of safety" in the wilderness in their favored terrain as part of the Natural Explorer class feature.

Experience Points

There are two basic problems with XP in 5e.  First, RAW, the only thing you get XP for is killing things, which strongly incentivizes "murder hobo" play and disincentivizes the other "pillars of play" that are much talked about in 5e but not really mechanically supported.  Second, while 5e is better about this than previous editions, counting out XP from different enemies defeated by the PCs is a pain in the ass for the DM, with little obvious upside to anyone.

On the flip side, many folks (including the Adventurer's League, 5e's organized play campaign) have abandoned XP altogether and have gone with a story milestone approach, in which PCs gain levels after progressing through a pre-set amount of story content (FWIW, 13th Age works this way as well).  Story milestones are, in my opinion, lazy design, as they don't really reward anything other than showing up to play the game.

So, here I would borrow some ideas from other fantasy games.  This particular scheme is based on Dungeon World via Adam Koebel, and it happens to be similar to the approach used in Forbidden Lands (which I reviewed here).  At the end of the session, the DM asks each player six questions about what their PC did during the session.  For every question that the player answers "yes," the PC gets 1 XP.  The questions are:

• Did you overcome a challenging enemy? 
• Did you gain a magic item or other significant treasure?
• Did you discover a new location, secret, or piece of interesting lore?
• Did you gain a valuable NPC ally?
• Did you express a unique element of your Race, Class, or Background?
• Did you express your Bonds, Flaws, Ideals, or Alignment in a way that complicated your life?

The first four questions are group oriented (i.e. the PC doesn't have to overcome the challenging enemy alone to get credit), while the last two are more individual.  You can only get one XP per category per session--so, if you defeat two challenging enemies in a session, you still only get 1 XP.

To advance to a level, PCs must acquire XP equal to their current level + 6.  Once they hit that mark, those XP are "spent" and the PC level's up, with any left-over carrying over as a head-start on future advancement.  I find that the simplest way to handle things, but if you wanted to keep the D&D standard of constantly increasing XP, you could easily do that (i.e., Level 2 requires 7 total XP, Level 3 requires 15 XP, Level 4 requires 24 XP, etc.).  "Current level + 6" is also a flexible metric that the DM can tweak to control the speed of advancement.  One note here is that because you can only get 1 XP per category per session, if your sessions are short, the PCs will gain XP faster relative to story elements, so it might make sense to increase the thresholds in that case.

I think this system does two things.  First, it rewards, and thus incentivizes, a wide variety of player behavior and play situations.  A tense diplomatic negotiation with zero combat and heavy RP can earn just as much XP as a kick-in-the-door dungeon crawl.  Second, it allows the DM to completely abandon the tedious task of adding up all the XP from all the monsters and then dividing it by the number of players, especially if the DM is doing that with an eye to maintaining some kind of advancement pacing.  The questions take 5 minutes at the end of the session, the numbers are small and easy to keep track of, and players know exactly what the need to do to gain XP.

1st and 2nd Level

As I previewed here, I don't like low-level 5e play very much.  Bounded accuracy means that you can use the same spectrum of enemies at 3rd level than you can at first, except that fights at 3rd level are more fun and more consistent than they are at 1st.  Plus, a PC doesn't get the full scope of character abilities until (depending on the class) 3rd level.  To be fair, everyone from Mearls on down says that 1st and 2nd level are basically the D&D version of a video game tutorial, except that the rules don't really reflect that if you look at how much XP, and thus how many fights, it takes to go through those levels.  *Shakes Fist at the Sky.*

So, I would handle 1st and 2nd level the following way.  If I was playing with an experienced group of 5e players, I would skip it altogether and have them make 3rd level characters.  If I was dealing with people new to 5e, I would start at first level, but make the first two sessions explicitly tutorial by setting the XP threshold for advancement at 1 XP, and awarding 1 XP if the PCs did any of the things on the normal XP list.  So, a campaign would basically have two tutorial sessions to slowly on-board the new D&D players to the game and their characters, and then when they get to session 3/level 3 the real game begins.  I would also allow unlimited class rebuilds through the end of 3rd level for new players, so that a player is not stuck with a suite of options they don't really like.  So, if a new player who starts with a wild magic Sorcerer and then decides after a couple of sessions they don't like the Sorcerer or wild magic mechanics, I would let them just pick something else at any time before hitting 4th level.

Inspiration

Last one is inspiration.  My problem with Inspiration is that I hate mechanics that empower/require the DM/GM to grade a player's roleplaying and give some benefit based on that grade.  I think it is disempowering to players, while putting the DM in a weird power position--after all, the players don't get to grade how well the DM is roleplaying the NPCs.  In addition, if the concern is getting PCs to role-play at all and/or making Ideals/Bonds/Flaws meaningful, the XP mechanics I sketched out takes care of that problem while putting the judging in the hands of the players themselves.

The simplest thing to do here is just cut Inspiration out altogether, which is what I normally do, as PCs in 5e are pretty robust for the most part and don't really need the free Advantage.  Instead, I would port over a variant of the "Fight in Spirit" rule from 13th Age.  When a PCs is unconscious or otherwise unavailable during a combat round, on what would be their turn (in addition to rolling Death Saves, if necessary), the player of the unconscious PC can narrate how they are or have bolstered one of the other PCs in their current situation.  The bolstered PC then gets a floating Advantage that they must use sometime in that encounter or it is lost.  An out-of-action player can only bolster a particular PC once per encounter, but if they are out of action for multiple rounds they can bolster multiple PCs.

What I like about this rule and the original "Fight in Spirit" rule is that it keeps players of unconscious or otherwise non-participating PCs engaged in what is going on at the table.  Rolling a Death Save takes a few seconds, and otherwise their turn is skipped.  Now, they have something to do.  It also somewhat cushions the death-spiral that tends to occur when one PC drops in a combat. 

D20 Deep-Dive--the Combat Mini-Game

Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons is enormously popular and successful, ushering in a level of visibility for the game (and for ttrpgs as a whole) that hasn't been seen since the early 80s.  Moreover, it's good--it is simple, accessible, the mechanics mostly work the way they were designed to work, and provides that inchoate but important "feel" of previous editions of D&D.  Many, many people--both new to the hobby and old veterans--are playing it and enjoying it.  And I am one of those people, as I am currently running Waterdeep: Dragon Heist with my "online" game group.  I'm having fun, and I think my players are having fun as well.

But 5e is not the only d20 game out there (let alone the only kind of ttrpg).  For veterans, that's likely not worth saying, but there are so many people who have come into the hobby recently via 5e who may not know that there are other options out there.  The biggest alternative in the d20 space in terms of player base is Pathfinder, but Pathfinder is in a bit of limbo right now as we wait for the final version of the 2nd edition of the game (especially as, according to my wholly unscientific survey of discussion on the Interwebs, reaction to the playtest has been very mixed).  But there is also a vocal and dedicated Dungeon Crawl Classics community (a game I have played enough to know that it is a very well done version of a particular tone and aesthetic of D&D that is very much not my cup of tea), and everyone says Shadow of the Demon Lord is great (which I have not read or played).

But, for me, the truly outstanding 5e alternative out there is 13th Age.  I have a lengthy review of 13th Age that I wrote a while ago, and I recently talked about the new 13th Age in Glorantha expansion.  In those, I talked a little bit about the differences between 5e and 13th Age, but  in this series I would like to do a deeper dive into the design of those two games.  What is particularly interesting to me about the two side-by-side is how they each embraced different solutions to the same fundamental design goals and design challenges.  This is not what actually happened, but one could almost imagine that someone (Wizards of the Coast, I guess) gave the same design document for a new edition of D&D to two different studios and had them work on the project independently.  This resulted in solutions that were both similar in some ways and very different in others.  It is these similarities and differences that I want to explore in depth.

The goal in doing this is not to argue that one or the other is better.  As I said, I really like both.  If you put a gun to my head and made me pick, I would pick 13th Age, but there are real strengths and weaknesses to both.  And it is certainly not to convince 5e DMs and players who are enjoying 5e to switch to 13th Age.  Instead, by highlighting the differences and similarities, I hope to do two things.  The first is to speak to some subset of 5e players and DMs, especially new ones, who are struggling with 5e not doing what they want it to do and not understanding why.  For those folks, 13th Age may solve their problems, or at least point them in the direction of other games that will solve their problems.  The second group is the people, again especially the brand new folks, who are very happy with 5e but are looking to understand a little better how it works and why it works the way it does.  Digging into 13th Age puts a spotlight on the design decisions behind 5e, allowing players and DMs of 5e to lean into the strengths of their game.

In doing this comparison, I am going to use two other points of reference that I think are helpful in understanding why the two games are designed the way they are.  The first is 4th Edition D&D.  I have noticed of late that 4e is undergoing a bit of critical re-evaluation (examples here, and here), which I think is both inevitable and justified on the merits.  Nevertheless, both 13th Age and 5e were designed in large measure as a reaction to 4e and the complaints and problems people had with 4e, by people who knew 4e and worked on 4e, and thus had a good understanding of what those issues were.  As a result, 4e acts as a kind of foil for both designs, setting the boundaries for what both games were trying not to be (though, as we will see, in different ways).  The second point of reference is Adam Koebel and Sage LaTorra's Dungeon World, the most popular and relevant manifestation of the "indie," "narratively-focused" design school as applied to D&D-style fantasy.  Both games, but especially 13th Age, are reacting to the ideas and design ethos that informs games like Dungeon World, incorporating them into the "mainstream" of game design.

[Note:  I understand that "Dungeon Master" and "DM" are copyrighted terms and are strictly speaking only applicable to the person who is running D&D.  For this series, however, I am going to avoid confusion and refer to the people running all of these games as "the DM."]

So, let's get to it, and talk first about combat.  There is a panel discussion involving Matt Mercer, Matt Colville, Koebel, and D&D 5e Creative director Mike Mearls that is fascinating and well worth your time (they had a second one as well).  At about the 25 minute mark, they get into a discussion about the interaction between narrative elements and game-mechanical pieces of D&D, especially the game mechanical pieces surrounding combat.  What they are speaking to is what I call the "combat mini-game"--the way in which combat is a distinct mode of play that is walled-off from the other interactions in the game (Koebel uses a great example of the Final Fantasy games, where the screen flashes suddenly and you are dropped into a different sort of game view, with different rules).

Not all role-playing games have a combat mini-game.  Dungeon World is designed very intentionally to make the combat interactions just like all other game interactions, using the same rules.  Perhaps the biggest marker for this is that you don't roll initiative in Dungeon World, which (as Mike Mearls mentions on the panel) is the normal signal that the combat mini-game is kicking in.  So, while there is combat in Dungeon World (or, at least, there can be), there is no separate combat mini-game in Dungeon World.  Similarly, the Cypher System games like Numenera have very little in the way of a combat mini-game--while they do have an initiative roll, there are very few combat-only rules.

But Dungeon World and Numenera are, of course, not d20 games (though, both are inspired by D&D/d20, in different ways).  Generally speaking, D&D in all of its incarnations have relatively robust combat mini-games.  But even in the d20 space, there is a sliding scale of how "strong" the combat mini-game is from game to game--how distinct the combat experience is from the rest of the play experience.  This reflects the fact that there is a clear trade-off involved between stronger and weaker combat mini-games--the stronger the mini-game, the easier it is to build robust, fun combat systems (because you have a closed sand-box to design in) but the more combat will feel disconnected from the rest of the game experience; the weaker the mini-game, the more the game will feel like one continuous experience, but the greater chance you have to run into problems and discontinuities between combat and non-combat.

In the panel discussion, Mercer made the case that the discontinuity between the combat mini-game and the rest of the game was one of the problems with 4e.  And 4e, without question, has a very strong combat mini-game, and Mercer was not alone in disliking the discontinuity between combat and non-combat.  The vast majority of 4e powers were explicitly and exclusively designed for use in combat, expressed in purely game mechanical terms.  By expressing the powers in very technical, game-mechanical terms, you limit their application in the more free-form non-combat situation.  And if most of your powers are exclusively for use in combat, you don't have all that much to do in non-combat situations from a mechanical standpoint.

Fifth Edition, taking cues particularly from 2nd Edition D&D and earlier, blurs the lines between combat and non-combat abilities, "weakening" the combat mini-game to promote a smoother transition from combat to non-combat.  One way it does this (as pointed out by Colville in his excellent, generally pro-4e, video beginning at 33:30) is by going back to natural language descriptions of spells, which makes it easier for players and DMs to apply the spell results to non-combat situations.  In doing so, you sacrifice precision for purposes of combat in favor of utility in the non-combat space.

While I think 5e succeeds in bridging the gap between combat and non-combat, this design decision is not without trade-offs.  Consider the kerfuffle around the spell Healing Spirit, found in Xanathar's Guide to Everything.  Healing Spirit is a 2nd level Druid/Ranger spell that conjures a spirit that appears in a particular 5 foot square up to 60 feet away, has a duration of 1 minute (with Concentration), and can be moved by the caster using a bonus action to a different spot within 30 feet of the original position.  Anyone who passes through the square heals 1d6 HP, and you can juice it up with higher level slots.  In combat, which is the environment that the spell was clearly designed for, it works fine.  While it does provide the potential to heal multiple party members at range, it brings with it several downsides--Concentration means the caster can't have any other buffs up and is subject to having the spell ended if the caster takes damage and flubs the Concentration check, there is the opportunity cost of using your bonus action to move the spirit versus other uses of the bonus action (especially for a Ranger), and there are the tactical considerations of getting people that need healing to the spot on the battlefield where the can be healed.

The problem is that all of those downsides melt away when you are out-of-combat--all of the party members can just sit in a 5 foot area for a minute and heal 10d6 HP, at the cost of a 2nd level spell slot.  After some back-and-forth, 5e rules guru Jeremy Crawford eventually suggested the ad hoc fix of limiting the number of times the spirit could heal people.  And, I mean, that's OK, but it speaks to the basic disconnect between the combat and non-combat modes of play.  Because the combat mini-game has more elements and moving parts, the rules designers have a bigger toolbox to limit and balance abilities in combat than they do in non-combat situations.  And if you balance a spell around those combat-only limitations, like Healing Spirit does, you are opening yourself up to non-combat problems and abuses.  It's hard to balance combat and non-combat uses of spells because, while the combat mini-game is weaker in 5e and in 4e, it's still strong enough that the rules for combat and non-combat are different, while the design ethos of 5e says that a spell has to work in both spheres.

And it is here that 13th Age is most different from 5e.  Rather than weakening the combat mini-game visa ve 4e, 13th Age if anything strengthens it.  It is always dangerous to speak to design intent when you are not the designer, but my sense from the game and from interviews with 13th Age's designers Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet is that they viewed the problem with 4e not in terms of the non-combat elements being different from the combat elements, but that the non-combat elements in 4e were not sufficiently robust.  Thus, 13th Age grafts onto the d20 chassis a set of mechanics that are inspired by narrative-oriented games--backgrounds and Icon relationship dice and One Unique Things and the Montage system (which wasn't in the Corebook but is a key part of their published adventures and is in the short but very well done GM advice book that comes with the GM screen).  There is a lot more to the non-combat elements of play in 13th Age than in 4e, and so if your critique of 4e is that the DM had to wholly improvise everything outside of fights (except for skill challenges, which was a cool idea from 4e that never really worked right in terms of the math--see the next post about game math), then 13th Age brings much more to the table, and thus solves the problem.

Meanwhile, the combat parts of 13th Age are every bit as walled-off from the rest of game as they were in 4e.  Arcane casters get cantrips that do minor effects, Wizards can get a Utility Spell that does out-of-combat stuff, and there are a handful of other class-based non-combat abilities.  Oh, and some casters can cast spells as rituals, which is basically taking an existing spell and using it outside of combat in a thematically similar but basically unstructured way.  Otherwise, character abilities are designed for the combat mini-game, just like in 4e.  Now, to be clear, 13th Age combat is much simpler than 4e (all of the tactical movement elements and powers are basically removed), but within that simpler space it is much more like 4e's walled garden than 5e's fuzzier lines.  In doing so, you are not going to get Healing Spirit-style problems, because 13th Age equivalents of Healing Spirit are presented to only work in combat, eliminating the problem from the beginning.

In fact, I don't think it is overstating things to say that 13th Age is close to two conceptually different games, combat and non-combat, existing under a common umbrella.  When you are fighting, 13th Age is basically a stripped-down version of 4e; when you are not fighting, you are playing something that is much more like Dungeon World and its inspirations and successors than a standard d20 game.  Whether this works for you is going to depend primarily on how you define the problem with 4e.  If like Heinsoo and Tweet, you thought the problem was that non-combat part of 4e was just kinda undercooked, then the two very distinct modes is a great solution.  Narrative-inspired mechanics and concepts provide a much larger toolkit for fleshing out the non-combat portions of play than what you normally get in a d20-style game.  If you like those sorts of open-ended, quasi-story game mechanics, then this has them in a form that is accessible and integrated into the rest broader d20 game structure.  By bringing together these two modes, you get a non-combat play experience that is better than a purely d20 experience can ever be, and you keep all of the advantages of the strong combat mini-game from 4e.

But if, like Mercer (at least as he presented it on the panel), your core problem was how different the two modes were in 4e, then 13th Age makes the problem worse, no matter how cool the Icon relationships and the other narrative pieces are.  13th Age makes you learn two essentially different ways of playing the game, with different sets of rules and core concepts that relate to one another only tangentially.  There is no question that 5e does a better job of integrating combat and non-combat modes of play into a single experience with a unified set of character abilities, without going as far as Dungeon World and dissolving the distinction between the two entirely.

So, the combat mini-game is one of the big conceptual differences between 5e and 13th Age.  13th Age goes all-in on the combat mini-game, as far or even beyond where 4e goes.  Fifth Edition reins back in the combat mini-game, without getting close to Dungeon World and its all-out rejection of the mini-game. 

Up next--the math.

The "Seven Cities" Campaign--Basics

I've been working on an idea for a new type of campaign, which I am calling (for now at least) a "Seven Cities" campaign, after the Seven Cities of the Midgard campaign setting where I plan to set the first incarnation of this idea.  By "new type of campaign," what I mean is a new type of campaign structure--the organizing principle that undergirds how the campaign functions.

To explain what I have in mind with a Seven Cities campaign, we have to start with a discussion of a "West Marches" campaign.  The idea of a "West Marches" campaign was developed by Ben Robbins.  (Matt Colville has a good video explaining more about the idea).  As Robbins describes it, a West Marches campaign is designed to do two primary things (1) encourage/force the players to be more pro-active in directing the campaign, as opposed to having them just show up and wait for the GM to shovel content at them, and (2) be more flexible from a scheduling perspective, accommodating the fact that it is hard to get everyone to a single session at a fixed time.  To do this, a West Marches campaign uses a large group of players (at least eight, and preferably in the teens) who group up into more normal sized adventuring parties and self-schedule sessions with the GM.  The adventures that the specific group will undertake are selected by the group from among a list of possibilities put forth by the GM in the form of a common "treasure map" that all of the players have access to.  As an example, Bob decided he wants to go to the Goblin fort in the Dark Woods, so he rounds up Susie and Pete and Mary, and they schedule Tuesday at 8 p.m. to get together with the GM to go to the Goblin fort.  Meanwhile, Steve and Dave and Karen want to defeat the trolls over in the Bleak Marsh, so they schedule Saturday at 1 pm to go do that.

The Seven Cities campaign is a deconstruction of the idea of a West Marches campaign.  I want to keep both of the goals of the West Marches campaign, especially the first one, and put the onus on the players to drive play and determine the direction of the adventure.  However, (1) I don't have enough players to pull off a West Marches style game, and (2) instead of a exploration focused "hex crawl" which you get in a West Marches game, I want to do a more story-driven style of game, with an emphasis on politics and a world where events move forward as the campaign progresses.  What I want, from a narrative perspective, is for the campaign to be like Game of Thrones, with multiple storylines going on at once in a shared, dynamic world.

One of the problems conceptually with creating a Game of Thrones-style story in a tabletop RPG is the spotlight problem.  In a TV show, if you want to have an episode that focuses on a particular character to develop that character's individual storyline, the writers can just put the other major characters on ice for a couple of episodes, and then bring them out of storage after the subplot is addressed.  That's very hard to do in a tabletop RPG, because putting a character on ice means putting the player on ice as well.  You are basically telling the player not to play, which sucks.  So, instead, most GMs will do a "soft" version of this, where the GM takes the subplot and weaves it into the overall story that impacts all of the characters.  But that's tricky to juggle, and it limits the sorts of subplots you can have, because it requires the subplot to at least peripherally involve all of the characters.  Instead of trying to keep these balls in the air, the Seven Cities campaign spotlights the stories of the individual characters one at a time, while giving the other players ways to be involved in those stories as they wait for their "turn" to be in the spotlight to come around.

So, here's how it works.  Each player begins by creating a character that they intend to be their "Core Character."  This character is going to be a major protagonist in the overall story.  In Game of Thrones terms, this is Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, Cersei, etc.  These characters then play through a short arc (no more than a half-dozen sessions) that is pre-scripted by the GM and designed specifically to be an introduction to the world that sets up the major antagonist factions, the major NPCs, and the current state of play.

Once that is done, each player tells the GM and the other players what their Core Characters goals are, and what they want their Core Character to be doing.  Having done that, each player then creates a "Secondary Character" for each storyline other than that of their Core Character.  One-by-one, the storylines for the Core Characters are resolved, with other players playing their Secondary Characters on the Core Character's adventure.  The GM and the players then keep spinning the wheel, jumping from storyline to storyline.

While all of this is happening, the GM is moving events forward in the world, using tools like Fronts from Dungeon World or the Faction turn from Stars Without Number.  The adventures that the players select are going to impact the advancement of those background factions--if Core Character X decides she wants to wipe out the Hobgoblin Empire and succeeds, then the Hobgoblin Empire is eliminated as a threat, but the other antagonist factions that were not targeted advance their plans without opposition, and so grow in power.  Since goals are ultimately in the hands of the players, the players can react dynamically to how different factions have advanced their objectives--Core Character X might, after defeating the Hobgoblin Empire, realize that the threat of the Evil Necromancers is now the biggest challenge, and decides to go off and do that.

The idea here is that, by rotating whose Core Character is in the spotlight, each player is allowed to develop a full subplot for their character, while giving the other players a way to participate while that subplot is being resolved.  It does require the players playing Secondary Characters in a particular session to accept the idea that it is the Core Character player's show and defer to them, but since everyone is going to get a turn in the sun, that should be easier to swallow.  It also gives the player more freedom to develop their Core Character's arc, because they no longer have to keep the story in the same narrative space as that of the other player's characters.  It also opens the possibility that Core Characters to be working at cross purposes to other Core Characters, without raising all of the issues that are normally associated with PvP--in session #1, Core Character A is trying to do whatever it is he is trying to do, and then in session #2 Core Character B is advancing her contrary objectives, but Core Character A and Core Character B are not directly fighting or otherwise in conflict during a particular session.

It also allows for the campaign to handle player death easier.  If a Core Character is killed, then at the end of a complete rotation of stories, the player can promote one of the Secondary Characters to Core Character status, or create a new Core Character.  In doing so, the GM can be less afraid of throwing deadly challenges at the players, because even a TPK for one particular Core Character and their associated Secondary Characters doesn't derail the campaign as a whole.  It also allows a player who wants to retire or sideline a Core Character to do so without mucking things up too much, as the player could promote a Secondary Character to Core Status and develop subplots for that new Core Character.  All of which is very much in the narrative spirit of Game of Thrones.

Finally, it creates more flexibility in terms of scheduling.  If a player who is not in the spotlight in a particular session can't make the scheduled game, then there is just one less Secondary Character on that particular adventure, which is not nearly as big a deal as if a normal PC is absent.  You still might need to explain why a particular Secondary Character isn't present, but I think it is less consequential, because at the end of the day it's a story about the Core Characters.

So, that's the idea.  The beta test of the idea is scheduled to kick-off in September, once we get done with our Torg arc.  I plan to post campaign notes and other information here as we go along. 

Why This Game Is Great--Powered by the Apocalypse

This decade has been a pretty innovative decade in terms of tabletop RPGs.  The highly successful and critically well-received 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons came out and revitalized the flagship tabletop RPG.  As I mentioned in the last post, the Cypher System and MCG came onto the scene.  The next post in this series is going to discuss 13th Age, which is probably my #1 RPG right now and came out in 2013.  And there are a number of games that I have not had a chance to look at in depth that other people rave about--the Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars line, Torchbearer by Burning Wheel HQ (bough the book at Gencon, haven't read it yet), Dungeon Crawl Classics by Goodman Games (which I played at Gencon for the first time), as three examples.  It's a good time for new stuff in the hobby.

But it seems to me that the most influential game of the recent period is D. Vincent Baker's Apocalypse World, which first came out in 2010 and is in the process of getting a 2nd edition (as an aside, Baker's first "big hit" was a game called Dogs In the Vineyard, which I have been trying to get my hands on for a while without success).  Putting aside the merits of Apocalypse World as a game itself (which we will get to in a bit), it has spawned a universe of games running on the same basic game engine, referred to as "Powered by the Apocalypse" games ("PbtA", in the lingo).  Probably the most prominent of these is Dungeon World by Adam Koebel and Sage LaTorra, which basically attempts to recreate the feel (or, perhaps, a feel) of classic editions of D&D.  I actually came to the Powered by Apocalypse games via Dungeon World, and I am much more familiar with Dungeon World than Apocalypse World, to the point where I have only read, but not played, Apocalypse World.  So, I am going to talk about the PbtA games as a whole here, not just Apocalypse World.

But, not all trends are good trends--are these PbtA games cool?  Yep, definitely, in at least three different ways.  First, the PbtA games really provide a very character-driven, somewhat gritty, narrative play experience.  The rules mechanisms are both relatively simple and constructed around discrete, somewhat self-contained "blocks" called Moves.  These blocks are easy to pick up, but they also do a good job of fading into the background during most of play, which allows the story to take center stage.  This strikes me as exactly what you want for a narrative game--the rules come into play in at a meta-game level, and in specific circumstances where you need some mechanic to resolve conflicts, but otherwise the story created by the players and the GM is not going to be bogged down by lots of rules intrusion.

Now, narratively-focused games are not everyone's cup of tea.  For people formed by games in the style of Dungeons & Dragons, they require you to shift gears a bit (especially, I find, for the GM).  But if you are going to go down the narrative road, I think the way that the PbtA games approach narrative play is the way to go.  They still feel like tabletop RPGs in a way that some of the more experimental narrative games do not--you still have character stats, you are still rolling dice to determine actions, etc.  On the flip side, some of the other narrative-focused systems I have read have relatively complicated rules sets that I had a bit of a difficult time wrapping my head around.  On a certain level, that seems to defeat the purpose of having a narrative game in the first place--if you are still tripping over the rules in your "narrative" game, you are taking away one of the biggest advantages in playing a narrative game.  I have found very little of that in the PbtA games, and it allows them to showcase the advantages of this style of play.  

[Side bar.  If you are looking to get a feel for how the PbtA games work in play, or you just want to hear a fantastic tabletop RPG actual play, you absolutely should check out the Friends at the Table podcast.  Their first season utilized Dungeon World, the second season utilized a couple of different systems including The Sprawl which is a PbtA game, and the third season is going back to Dungeon World.  Friends at the Table is awesome, and you absolutely should check it out.]

Second, the PbtA family has created a slate of very innovative, hyper-focused RPGs that I don't think would have come about otherwise.  For example, at Gencon I played a short session of a PbtA game called Night Witches, in which you play members of the all-female Soviet 588th Night Bomber Regiment in World War II.  That's it--as written, you can't play members of the companion Soviet all female fighter regiment, or any other air squadron, or anything else.  Moreover, the structure of the game presumes that you will follow the Night Witches through various events that the squadron participated in during World War II.  I am sure you can take pieces of Night Witches and repurpose them for other scenarios, but as presented the game tells one story in one location at one period of time.  Likewise, there is a game called Sagas of the Icelanders, which I haven't played or read, in which you are a towns-person in 9th Century Iceland.  Not fantasy Iceland, but real Iceland--the whole game, as best as I can tell, is about having interactions with other villagers and playing out your social roles in 10th Century Icelandic society.

On the surface, this hyper-focused quality seems to be at odds with Apocalypse World and Dungeon World, both of which are extremely open-ended in terms of setting.  But the commonality between the PbtA games is the experience of play, even if the nature of the setting and how it is constructed are different.  In other words, while the setting of the some of the games is very focused and some of them are very open-ended (and, in any event, very different from game to game) the kinds of stories that end up getting told through those games and the tone of those stories is very consistent.  Also, I am not aware of any other game system that tells the kinds of stories that PbtA games do.  If you tried to run something like Night Witches in another system, it would end up being far more combat-oriented and cinematic, which would cause you to bump up against the constraints of the setting much faster (how many times can you tell the story of near-suicidal bombing runs before it gets boring?).  By digging deep into the character-driven elements, it allows these focused settings to be playable and interesting, where for other games the premise would be too tight to make a workable game.  As a result, PbtA has opened up new conceptual spaces for tabletop RPGs, which is always a cool thing.

But the final part is the part that can best be ported over to other tabletop RPGs, and that is the approach to GMing that it has.  Probably the number one barrier to entry for people getting into RPGs is finding someone to GM, and figuring out how to GM is probably the most intimidating part of getting to the RPGs.  This is compounded by the fact that most tabletop RPG books have the paradoxical quality of being useful primarily to people who already know how to play.  For example, take the GMing section in the Numenera corebook, which is generally seen as being quite good (and I agree).  It has pages and pages of information on how to GM Numenera well--how to emphasize the discovery component of Numenera, how to keep the themes of Numenera at the front of the game, etc.  But it doesn't really tell you how to GM from a blocking-and-tackling perspective, besides some pro-forma description of "what is a roleplaying game."  It just sort of assumes that you understand what the GM is actually supposed to do to make a tabletop RPG work, and goes from there.  If you were totally new to RPGs, watching ten minutes of Matthew Mercer GM on Critical Role is probably more useful in figuring out what to do on a basic level than reading most RPG books.

PbtA games avoid this problem by actually telling you how to GM by giving the GM specific rules to follow that lay out what you are supposed to do while you are sitting at the table.  For example, the GM is told in Dungeon World to "address the characters, not the players"--in principle, if you don't do this, you are GMing Dungeon World wrong.  This is helpful to brand-new GMs because it is a concrete task that communicates exactly what the GM is supposed to do when you are actually running the game on a minute by minute basis.

There is a segment of folks, especially old-hands with RPGs, that are rubbed the wrong way by being told how to GM in such explicit terms.  Moreover, the PbtA games are very opinionated about the right way to GM, and the point-of-view espoused is not one that is universally shared among fans of RPGs.  In particular, Dungeon World goes out of its way to say that prepared adventure plots, in which the GM sketches out ahead of time what will happen to the players, is Doing It Wrong.  That's a controversial idea, as a big portion of tabletop RPG product consists of prepared adventure plots.  But, I think if you think of the advice as "this is how you should play this game" as opposed to "this is how you should play every game," I think you can accept the approach they are offering without internalizing it as an attack on every previous RPG experience you have had.  Moreover, I appreciate that they are trying to provide some concrete guidelines on how to GM, and taking a stand on how to GM is a necessary part of providing that concrete advice.

[Speaking of GM advice, one more plug.  Adam Koebel, one of the authors of Dungeon World, has a great GM advice show on his Youtube channel.  Also very much worth checking out].

Plus, you owe it to yourself to give their approach a shot.  PbtA games provide a robust set of tools to help you set up a structure inside of which you can have a free-form game that dynamically reacts to player actions.  In particular, Dungeon World and Apocalypse World introduces the concept of "fronts," where the GM prepares antagonistic factions that have their own internal goals and methods that advance through the campaign.  So, the GM might set up four fronts early in the campaign.  If the players focus their attention on one of the fronts, they might be able to shut that front down completely, while the other three fronts are advancing their agenda off-screen and getting closer to their nefarious objectives.

The concept of fronts really changed the way I think about running campaigns from the GM perspective.  Rather than try to funnel the players to a pre-set plot, you throw a set of options in front of them and let them pursue their own objectives.  It makes the players feel like they are dynamically engaging with the world and are the masters of their own destiny.  It also makes the world feel more alive--the decision to focus on the evil wizard had the consequence that the swamp cult grew in power and influence.  Plus, because the fronts system is entirely fiction-grounded and not dependent on the PbtA mechanics, the concept of fronts is entirely portable and can be used in most other RPG systems.

Even if you never play Apocalypse World or Dungeon World, even if story games are not your cup of tea, I think the PbtA games are worth taking a look at, especially if you are a GM.  I think the ideas in PbtA games will help anyone approach GMing in a different and better way, even if you never play them.  The PbtA show the scope and creativity of tabletop RPGs, and that makes them great.