Hope everyone had a happy Halloween last night. I did,
for the most part (the knob on my front door fell apart(!) but we were able to
get it back together after an hour or so of minimal tinkering). I’m feeling a
little hung over from all the candy “sampling”…or maybe it was that single “Bud Lite” I consumed that one house
was giving away as “treats” to parents. Wow…how anyone can drink that dishwater
on a regular basis is beyond me. Even the non-alcoholic beer I’m currently
stocking my fridge with (something called Buckler)
tastes more like beer than that
swill.
[some might ask why
I’d even bother drinking it…well, wasting beer is something hard for me to
abide. Normally, I would have passed on a Bud completely (thus not taking it
home, thus not having to worry about “wasting” a beer at all)…but the sheer
novelty of getting a beer while trick-or-treating with my kid tickled my fancy.
Having said that, though, I’d point out that if they’d been handing out Coors I would have passed. As
I’ve stated on multiple occasions, I’d
rather take a silver bullet than drink one]
Man, I am sniffling and sneezing today like I over-taxed
my immune system with sugar and chocolate…which is probably true. It’s funny
(well, to me, anyway): back when I used to play AD&D as a kid, and we were
so hard-core about following
the Rules As Written (weapon length
and speed factor, helmet rules, wandering monsters even in town, etc.) the one
thing we didn’t use EVER, as far as I can recall, were the rules for disease
and illness given in the DMG. Maybe the whole concept of illness was
counter-productive to the escapism of the game: as a kid who had more than his
fair share of head colds, did I want to worry about my adventurer needing to
blow his nose? No, not really.
Not that the rules for disease and illness in the DMG are
terribly realistic (I use the
adjective loosely, with regard to fantasy adventure games). One might imagine
that “historical” type folks were of hardier constitution and were sick less
often than us pasty-types living in the over-stimulated, stressful society of
the 21st century. And yet the lack of modern medicine meant
illnesses, when acquired, tended to be a lot more deadly.
And it’s not like adventurers are carrying around a tube
of Neosporin to slather on the
lacerations they get from goblin blades. Hell, I use that stuff on any burn or
scrape I get!
But in designing a game…any game, in fact, though here
I’m speaking about RPGs…it’s important to consider what you want your game to be about when deciding what to include
in the rules. Do you WANT your player characters to have the possibility of
death by tetanus or infection of
some sort? Is the Black Plague a
part of your pseudo-medieval setting (I’d imagine that’s the basis for rats
inflicting disease in D&D…but
what about other rodents?). And if that’s a possibility (due to say, an
attachment to “realistic” hazards of the ancient world)…how big a possibility do you want it to be?
Should adventurers be sterilizing their wounds with fire after every battle?
Should infection-killing ointments be made available at the town apothecary?
These are rhetorical questions by the way…my urge to play
something as complex as even AD&D has faded as I’ve gotten older. Not so
much because it’s uninteresting to
consider such things in the game, mind you, but because in practice it tends to “bog down” play.
Allow me to diverge on a short tangent. As I wrote a couple
days ago, I’ve been a little busy for the blog-o-sphere I usually surf, so I
missed any debate of “light” rules versus “heavy” till I was catching up my
reading of The Tao yesterday. As
usual, Alexis raises some good points…the best one being the one about
simplifying a system leading to a dependence on DM fiat which has the potential
to be grossly unfair.
Looking back at the disease/infection thing, for example:
what if I (as a DM) think it’s both appropriate
and interesting to include a chance
of PCs dying from an infected sword wound...yet am faced with a game system
(like B/X) that doesn’t provide rules for such a hazard? Well, I’d suppose the
usual response would be “make something up.” I might require any wounded PC to
make a saving throw versus poison after any fight in which they took damage, or
a certain amount of damage, or lost a certain percentage of hit points. I might
give any PC a straight 1 in 6 chance (or 1 in 8 or 1in 10 or whatever) of
developing an infection anytime they take a wound from a monster in a certain
dingy dungeon location. I might simply say, “these goblins are using rusty,
filthy blades that ABSOLUTELY WILL give a character a nasty infection on a
successful attack roll,” or on two successful attack rolls or whatever.
The point is the hazard that I, as DM, would like to see
can be addressed in any number of arbitrary ways, but A) there’s no guarantee that my ruling would be fair and balanced,
and B) there’s no guarantee that the
inclusion of such rules would be fun.
In fact, the odds of even accidentally hitting on a “fair” way to implement
such a thing (we’ll talk about the “fun” part in a moment) are pretty infinitesimal because I am not designing
a new game from the ground up, but instead “patching” an existing game, without respect to the ideas, concepts, and
objectives of the designer. I’m doing what I think “feels right” when
one might (logically) presume the designers didn’t include such rules because
they were inappropriate, unnecessary, and/or unwanted to the game itself as
intended.
Maybe the PCs are
supposed to be heroes of mythic proportion with a destiny that doesn’t include
dying from an infected sword wound. Maybe the only type of misadventure peril
they’re supposed to face is a glorious death in battle, or incinerated by
dragon fire, or the venom of a hydra…hey, the latter was a good enough death
for Heracles, right?
Regardless of the intention with regard to concept, it is very difficult to try
patching rules once the rules have already been set (like concrete). I look at
the XP system in 2nd Edition AD&D, so different from earlier
editions…a system based on the idea that it’s “more correct” or “appropriate”
for PCs to gain XP for different activities than gaining treasure and slaying
monsters…and the train wreck that the game devolves into. Leaving aside the
absurdity of it, such a system creates a conflict of objective within the
player party, doing the opposite of encouraging “cooperative play,” all in the
name of patching the treasure hunter mentality that is the foundational design
concept of the D&D game.
But even without THAT issue (i.e. the issue of trying to
design for a game that’s already been designed), there’s the question of who
actually benefits from these new rules? Who gets to experience the “extra fun”
from their inclusion? Yes, I understand that a long-term game can get stale
after a while (and back in the day, new “options” culled from Dragon magazine
provided much enjoyed injections of “freshness” to our campaigns), but I’m not
talking about the addition of a new monster or a random table for determining
what’s in the pockets of the citizen being picked by the party thief. I’m
talking about straight-up rule changes that transform play into something (the
DM deems to be) more “realistic” or “appropriate.”
I suppose some
players might think it’s cool to have a chance to die from an infected sword
wound, or to bleed to death from a severed artery, or to suffer “critical hits”
that break bones or shatter weapons. But I’d guess most players would be hoping
none of these things happened to their
particular characters. Given a choice between having more “realistic,” complex
rules and being left with little to worry about except their dwindling supply
of spells, HPs, and torches, I’d imagine most players would opt for the
latter...especially when the only option for the former is to have them
implemented in an arbitrary patch fashion by the DM.
However, these things ARE
interesting (if only "fun" for the cackling DM and bystanders), and people who read
adventure stories or watch fantasy movies can see these types of challenges
arise to their favorite characters. And because the characters in our favorite
fiction encounter these difficulties and overcome them, they are more heroic
(and more beloved) for their effort. In Wendy
Pini’s ElfQuest comic series, we find the main character, Cutter,
hallucinating and dying from an infected squirrel bite that he suffers while
doing nothing more innocuous than walking in the woods. The infection lasts the
length of the issue, and allows the writer to further the plot of the series in
a number of ways…but this is (comic) literature, not role-playing. Do you want
this kind of thing to be a part of your game?
 |
| Surprisingly dangerous. |
If you do, or if you want other interesting complexities to
be included in the rules, then you really have only two options: run a game
that includes those complexities (so that they are an objective part of the
game, incorporated with regard to the game’s design concepts), or have your
simple game “boosted” by arbitrary DM fiat and house rules. For some people
it’s interesting and important to know how much rock can be quarried by the charmed
hill giant, and the speed with which the castle wall can be raised (to keep out
the approaching barbarian horde) is important to the game at hand. You have
rules for this in Advanced Dungeons &
Dragons; objective rules written by a man who (presumably) tested his own
system to make sure it worked with the rest of the game’s parts.
On the other hand, if you’re playing a simpler game like
Moldvay’s Basic you can have your DM “wing it” – either using a 50-50 die roll
or perhaps using some elaborate self-made system – or you can ignore such
complex scenarios in your game play. Stick to your dungeon delving, in other
words, if you don’t want your DM just making shit up.
It may be difficult to tell from reading this just which
side of the debate JB is on. That’s because I’m not picking a side. Oh, I have
a preference for running a simpler game system, mainly because I want something
easy to run and easy to teach (to new players, for example). But I tend not to
tinker too much with a system as written, because I think it invites a lot of
the problems that proponents of more complex systems detest. My “fix” for a
game that’s getting stale or that doesn’t address things I want address is to
play a different game (duh, I like to play different games), or write my own,
from the ground up.
Hmm, this “little tangent” has turned into yet another long-winded
digression. I guess I’ll talk about resources in another post.
