If you’ve been following my blogging and tweeting (and if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you have) then you may have come to the conclusion that I’m not a big fan of D&D. I’ve been very critical of the game lately, especially since the announcement of the next edtion of the game.

Here’s the thing: I criticize because I care.

D&D is responsible for a huge number of fond childhood memories for me, and quite a few more recent memories, too. For me, D&D is the total collection of all of these memories, a sort of hodge-podge mosaic of gaming. I remember dropping magically created walls on my enemies from the back of a dragon, spelunking my way through Undermountain and Dragon Mountain and Mountain Whose Name I Cannot Remember. I remember becoming the DM, the instant where the roles were reversed and a whole new world of gaming openend up for me. I remember poor Japhed, the NPC rogue who died at the fangs of a summoned snake, and I remember the kobold sorcerer who almost caused a TPK (don’t laugh; he was a badass kobold and probably had some serious anger management issues due to a massive inferiority complex).

For all these good memories there are plenty of bad ones, but these are mostly generic frustration with the rules and other assorted bullshit. I have to look this spell up again? I have to recalculate my hit points? This combat has taken TWO FREAKING HOURS and is only HALFWAY DONE?! Yeah, not all good times.

But for all that, D&D holds a special place in my mind, memories, and heart. It’s the game that put me on the path I walk now. It’s the vehicle through which I interact with many of my friends to this day. It’s a common language, a common ground, a form of shorthand for when I’m explaining my hobby to outsiders (you know, those people who look at you funny when you tell them you play role-playing games).

For all the frustrations I have (and have recently expresssed) with D&D, I owe it quite a bit. This is partially why I’m expressing my concerns and frustrations so vocally; I want it to be the very best game it can be. I want it to be able to provide me with more of those great memories. But I owe it many things, not the least of which is the benefit of the doubt.

When it has no mechanical weight.

Alignment can be a touchy issue for gamers. Some people insist that it’s a great way to inform roleplaying, a starting point for your character. Others think it’s an unrealistic straight jacket, that nobody’s always good all of the time or wholly and irredeemably evil. It could be either of these things but most of the time it seems like an afterthought, a vestigial rule that lacks meaning for modern gamers.

Why does it lack meaning? Are the concepts of good and evil no longer relevant in a society of moral grays? Is it unrealistic to think that a character can be a shining beacon of his or her beliefs, an example to others? I kind of doubt that this is the case; I think these ideas are just as relevant now as they always were, and may actually be appealing to many because of their simplicity, their black and white nature. The problem, I think, is with implementation.

Let’s look at the current incarnation of D&D as an example. Alignment exists but it has very little effect on the game. Yes, your cleric has to be of an alignment compatible with his or her god, but what does being Good or Lawful Good or whatever actually mean? It can inform roleplay in the right hands but there’s no incentive to let it do so. I think a lot of people probably forget that it’s even on their character sheet; I certainly had to remind the paladin in my group that he’d find torture repugnant on more than one occasion.

Past editions gave it some weight: your alignment could be detected, certain weapons would respond well (or not so well) to certain alignments, and violating your alignment came with some sort of penalty. But even this isn’t a great way to incentivize alignment. It’s like working at a job you don’t care about: the threat of being fired will keep you working just well enough to not get fired, but you’re unlikely to do anything beyond that.

The solution (my solution at least) is incentive. Reward. I talk about incentives an awful lot for a reason: mechanical incentives are how you encourage the behavior you want in your games. If you want the Lawful Good paladin to uphold the law and oppose evil, you need to provide an incentive to do so that’s more attractive than the alternative. This could be as simple as providing bonuses to skill checks, attack rolls, damage, and so forth whenever the spirit of the alignment is being actively pursued. It could involve bonus XP. It could involve earning some sort of points or tokens that can be cashed in for benefits later. The exact incentive doesn’t really matter.

The important thing is that, if alignment is an important part of your game and the characters within your game, there needs to be a reason to pay attention to it. Punishment will help but will only get you so far; players will work a lot harder for rewards, things that make them better.

Alignment without mechanical weight, without incentive, fails to fulfil its purpose in the game. It might as well not even be there.

What’s this? It’s another preview for Becoming!. Following the philosophy of “show, don’t tell”, I’m going to give you a sample turn of the game, along with a little bit of setup. I won’t delve too much into specific mechanics, but it should give you an idea of how the game plays.

Setup: Our Hero is a peasant named Carter whose home has been destroyed by a dragon. He used the Words of Virtue provided with the Quest to come up with a backstory for himself and his village, as well as three Virtues, to which he assigned some dice.

This turn is a few rounds in, in the second Act of the game. He’s lost some things and had to sacrifice some things to come this far, and the Chorus is starting to really put the screws to him. In addition to Carter (the Hero), there are three players in the Chorus: Fear, Pain, and Doubt. Pain is the current Choregus.

The Turn

Pain looks at the current Scene (entitled “Trouble”) and its associated Theme Words. She takes a few moments to gather her thoughts, then frames the scene.

Pain: You sit upon your horse, slowly following the path through the woods. An ominious presence bears down on you but you pay it no mind. When you look up, though, you find that you are surrounded by men wearing wolf skins, wielding naked swords in their hands.

A large fellow steps forward and speaks. “With a horse like that, you likely have other things we might want. Hand it all over and we won’t take your life, too.”

To illustrate the point one of the men behind you steps forward and swings his cudgel, knocking you from your horse. The challenge is simple: fight through the pain and drive these men off so that you can continue your quest. This challenge has a difficulty of . . . oh, let’s say twelve.

Pain slides some tokens into the middle of the table.

Carter: Yikes. Okay, let’s do this. I struggle to my feet and stare the leader in the eyes. I know that my family is depending on me to slay this dragon, an I can’t do that if these bandits kill me or take my weapons away. I’m going to use My Family Needs Me to grit through the pain and stand up to them. That gives me three dice.

Pain: Okay. There’s the very real threat of death here, though. I’m going to invoke one of your Flaws here: Fear of Widowing Your Wife. That gives me . . . let’s see, six more tokens. Difficulty’s up to eighteen now.

Carter: Uh oh. I could use some help here.

Doubt: You’re not sure you can do this. It might be easier to just let them have your things and go back home. You can always say you tried.

Doubt slides forward two more tokens.

Doubt: You might be able to fight past this, though. I might be willing to take these tokens back and give you a die for this challenge, but it’ll cost you something. To fight past your doubt you’re going to have to fight dirty. That’ll cost you a die from your Honor.

Fear: Not so fast. You’re pretty scared here. There are, like, seven of these guys and only one of you. Like Doubt said, you’ll have to fight dirty, but fear can give you power. You feel all that adrenaline coursing through you? That’s fear. If you give me that Honor die instead of Doubt, I’ll give you three dice for this challenge. How’s that sound?

Carter thinks for a few moments, then replies.

Carter: I’m going with Fear on this one. The difficulty will go up to twenty, but I’ll have six dice on my side. I like my chances.

Carter slides a die from Honor over to Fear, and Fear gives him three of her own dice. Doubt slides two of his tokens into the center of the table. Carter picks up his six dice and rolls them, coming up with 18. Not quite good enough.

No! Oh, man. That didn’t go well for me.

Carter takes two of his dice and gives them to Pain for winning the challenge. Then Pain and Doubt, who both had tokens in the challenge, get to put some of them on Carter’s Flaws. Fear gets her dice back.

Pain: You swing your sword wildly, killing two of the men and driving the rest off. However, one of them managed to give you a nasty cut across the ribs, and you injured your leg falling off your horse. I’m going to give you a new Flaw: Badly Injured.

Things didn’t go well for the Hero in this turn, but he’s got more chances to make that up. Doubt will be the next Choregus, and a new Scene begins.

I’m going to be running some games at Dreamation in February, and I just got my schedule. Here it is:

• Saturday at 9am I’ll be running “The Dragon Slayer”, a playtest session of Becoming.
• Saturday at 8pm I’ll be running “Cynners and Saints”, a scenario for Jeremy Keller’s Technoir.
• Sunday at 10am I’ll be running “The Long Road Home”, a second playtest session of Becoming.

I hope to see you all there!

Below is a rough draft of some of the introductory material for Becoming. I got inspired and wrote this tonight, and I thought I’d share.

What Is This Thing?
Becoming starts with a question: what does it mean to be a hero? A hero is someone who saves lives, protects others, and fights those who would do them harm. A hero stands up for what she believes in, suffers through great hardship, and wins the day no matter the cost. But what is the cost?

Being a hero is not easy. It requires pain and sacrifice; it comes at a steep cost. The hero often has to give up the things she holds most dear, the very things she is fighting to protect. When the hero comes back from her quest, she comes back changed. She has faced hardship and torment that her friends and family cannot imagine, and she is no longer the same person she once was. She is more, but also less. She is an outcast, and she cannot truly go home again.

That’s what Becoming is: it’s the story of the hero facing adversity and overcoming it at a steep cost. Sometimes it’s a story of triumph over impossible odds. Sometimes it’s the story of a fall from grace. It can be an exciting adventure or a heartbreaking tragedy; often it’s a little of both.

But Becoming is also a game. It’s a framework of rules that helps you tell these stories, your stories. It’s meant to be exciting and tragic, but it’s also meant to be fun. You may see the hero lose everything she has, but you’ll have a good time doing it.

It’s a special kind of game: a story game. During play you’ll each contribute to a shared narrative, building the characters and the world in turns, showing each other your own vision of the story and meeting in the middle to create something that is more than the sum of its parts.

Be not afraid, hero.

What Do I Need?
To play a game of Becoming, you’ll need a few things. First, you’ll need this book. This book contains all of the rules you need to play the game, as well as the Quests that you’ll use to help you tell the story.

You’ll need several six-sided dice in four different colors. You’ll need nine of one color (for the Hero) and five of each of three other, different colors (for the Chorus).

You’ll need tokens for the Chorus in three different colors. Each member of the Chorus needs twenty tokens in a single color. Poker chips work well for this purpose, as do glass beads. In a pinch, you could even use three different denominations of pocket change.

You’ll need some index cards, probably about ten or fifteen of them. If you don’t have any, you can use scraps of paper. You have paper, right?

You’ll need friends, three of them to be precise. Becoming is a game for four players exactly. If you don’t have friends you might find some at your local gaming store, supermarket, or homeless shelter.

Finally, you’ll need some pencils or other writing implements.

What Do All These Crazy Words Mean?
Becoming uses some mechanics that you may find unfamiliar, and certainly some of the terminology is unusual. Luckily, I’ve decided to provide a list of terms and their in-game definitions. Some of the words are weird, but it’s really not a hard game to learn to play.

The Hero: the protagonist of the story. The Hero is the one who goes on a journey, defeats evil, protects his loved ones, and saves the day. He’s also the one who has to sacrifice everything important to him in order to succeed.

Words of Virtue: a list of nine words, specific to the Quest being played, that provide inspiration for coming up with the Hero’s Virtues.

Virtues: a Hero starts with three Virtues. These are things that are important to the Hero, things he draws strength from. They are used to overcome challenges, but they can also be sacrificed or lost.

Flaws: when the Hero loses challenges, Flaws are introduced. Flaws represent the Hero’s weaknesses, his vices, or direct manifestations of Fear, Pain, or Doubt.

Quest: a collection of scenes to be played out in order, creating a cohesive story in which the Hero is the main character.

The Chorus: these three players provide opposition and temptation for the Hero. They frame scenes, present challenges, and offer bargains. There are three members of the Chorus: Fear, Pain, and Doubt.

The Choregus: first among equals, the Choregus is the active member of the Chorus. It is her job to frame the current scene, present the challenge, and decide upon its difficulty. The Choregus is a rotating position; each member of the Chorus will get a chance to play this role. Three, in fact.

The Stasimonos: the members who are not the current Choregus are known as the Stasimonos. While they do not provide direct opposition to the Hero, it is their job to tempt the Hero by offering bargains, aid for a cost. They can also threaten the Hero.

Act: the game is played in three acts, each containing three scenes. Things are relatively easy on the Hero in the first act, but the stakes get higher with each subsequent act.

Scene: there are nine scenes in the game. During a scene, the Choregus uses theme words to help frame the scene, setting it up and describing the situation. Each scene also has a challenge, presented by the Choregus.

Challenge: a conflict of some sort where the outcome is in doubt. The conflict grows out of the framed scene and is informed by it. It need not be a physical conflict; Fear and Doubt are motivators just as powerful as Pain.

Theme Words: a collection of nine words specific to a scene, used as inspiration for the Choregus while framing the current scene.

Challenge Tokens: chips or other small markers that the Choregus uses to indicate how difficult a challenge is to overcome. They can be wagered, lost, and bartered throughout the course of the game.

Bargain: the heart of the challenge mechanic, the Stasimonos offer the Hero aid in exchange for things the Hero holds dear. Nothing is free in Becoming, and all bargains are binding.

I got this image this morning from Christopher Barley, an amazingly talented illustrator and member of Meetup of Doom. I just wanted to share it with everyone because I had trouble peeling my lower jaw off the floor when I saw it this morning. This image exemplifies the mood of the game in a way that’s difficult to articulate. Kudos to Chris for capturing it so well.

Today Monte Cook posted a short article entitled Mechanics Supporting Story. I clicked on the link immediately. One of the things I love about most indie games is that their mechanics are informed by the story and built around it, and they not only support the story but are often inseparable from it. I was excited to hear what Monte would say about this idea and how it applied to D&D. I thought, “Man, wouldn’t it be great if D&D actually did mechanically support story telling, rather than having it just be the thing that you’re doing when you’re not rolling dice?”

I was disappointed. If you haven’t read the article, go do so. It won’t take long; it’s only a couple of paragraphs long.

Why was I disappointed? Because Monte wasn’t talking about mechanics that support story; he was talking about racial bonuses. He was talking about dwarves that get a +2 to damage with axes, or gnomes that get a +1 to hit against kobolds, or bards that . . . get a +1 to being dapper in fancy clothes. Or something. Yes, these things do offer some mechanical support to concepts found within the established fiction of D&D. But do they support story? Not really.

Let’s take the example of dwarves getting a +2 to damage with axes. This is supporting the concept of “dwarves use axes”, which is a concept that I know is near and dear to all of our grognardian little hearts. Great, so my dwarf uses an axe and gets the bonus. Where’s the story? The story — the only story so far — is that I have a dwarf who uses axes like 99% of the other dwarves in his hold. Not very interesting, is it? I’d argue that this kind of mechanic actually runs counter to supporting story; it discourages making characters with interesting and unique concepts, like dwarven wizards or rogues, because if you take one of those classes you’re not getting the full benefit of your race. It may not be punishment per se, but it skirts awfully close to that territory. Beyond that, though, the fact that my character uses an axe or a sword or a ship’s anchor is an expression of who my character is, but it doesn’t tell me anything about his motivations or his story arc. It does virtually nothing to mechanically support any story I have in mind, unless that story is, “I like to hit things with an axe.”

Now let’s look at that second one: gnomes and their bonus against kobolds. That one’s a little better because at least it implies some sort of emotion. Gnomes hate kobolds. Great. Do all gnomes hate kobolds? Even the ones who have never met a kobold? Even the ones raised by kobolds? Again, we’re discouraging alternate character concepts by rewarding the stereotype, to say nothing of the fact that we’re basically mechanizing racism.

My point is this: if you want to support story, support story. Don’t hand out some stereotypical racial bonuses and call it a day; that’s a half-measure at best. Give the players tools with which to express their characters, with which to tell their stories. Give them ways to take hold of the narrative and steer it in directions they think are interesting and fun. Let’s not forget that the DM is not the only storyteller at the table.

I was listening to an episode of the Giant Bombcast and they started talking about D&D and other tabletop RPGs. One of the people being interviewed mentioned that, in his current game, people tended to avoid combat because they felt that combat removed a lot of their agency within the world.

It’s an interesting idea, and it made me think about player agency and its relationship to the rules of a game. In D&D you can have quite a bit of player agency during role-playing scenes. This is dependent in a large way on the DM and his or her personal style of running the game, but in general you get to choose what you say, where you go, what you do. Occasionally you’ll have to make a skill check to see if the guard believes your lie or if the count is swayed by your honeyed words, but more than a few DMs will grant bonuses or even hand-wave these rolls for good role-playing. You have a lot of control over the narrative and over your character’s personal role within that narrative.

When combat starts, the dice start playing a much bigger role in the game. Success and failure become a lot more important, and this does tend to reduce player agency. You can say that you run up to the orc and stab it through the gut but if the dice don’t say that’s true, it’s not true. You can say you jump up into the air, grab the chandelier, and swing to the other side of the room, but botch your Acrobatics check and that simply won’t happen.

There are two issues at work here, I think. The first is that, the more the dice are involved, the less control you have as a player over narrative flow. You can describe your actions as much as you want but the dice are the final arbiter of what you’re capable of, and they can be fickle. To be fair, this is the case in most role-playing games: you describe what you want to happen, but the dice might disagree. Some games, though, give you a way to buy out of an unfortunate roll.

Fate, for example, has much the same sort of resolution mechanic that D&D does: you describe what you want, you make the roll, and if you’re successful it happens. The difference is that, in Fate, if you fail the roll you can invoke a few aspects to buy back your narrative control. You get to decide how important that particular part of the story is to you and, if it’s important, you can make it happen regardless of what the dice say. D&D doesn’t really have a mechanic to mitigate failed rolls, so the loss of narrative control is that much more potent.

The other issue is that failure is often boring in D&D. In some games you get to describe how you fail to perform your action. This means that, even though you didn’t get exactly what you wanted, you still get to push the narrative in a specific direction. In D&D, failure often means that nothing happens. Fail your to-hit roll? Oh, you missed the orc; move on. Fail your Arcana check? Oh, you don’t know anything important. Many DMs probably house-rule this away, and doing so is pretty easy. I can’t help but think that interesting options for failure should be a part of the game to begin with, though.

So what do you think? Do you feel a loss of narrative control in combat (or any other time when dice are a major component of the game)? Is that important to you? How would you like to see it change?

At Metatopia I heard a quote that I can’t get out of my head. I’m unsure who to attribute the quote to (it could be Ken Hite, Fred Hicks, Rob Donoghue, Brennan Taylor, Joshua A.C. Newman, or any number of smart people; I just don’t remember), but the quote itself strikes me as a set of words for a game designer to live by.

“If you want your game to be about something, you need mechanics supporting that thing.”

The corrolary of this is: If you do not mechanically support a thing, your game is not about that thing. You can say it is and you can support it with your fiction, but the grim truth is that, if you do not incent players to do the things you want them to do in your game, they may never do those things.

When it came time to design mechanics for Becoming, this quote was rattling around in my head the whole time. I knew what I wanted my game to be about. I wanted Becoming to be about what it costs to be a hero, not just in terms of the adversity that the hero must overcome but what he or she must give up to overcome it. The game is, at its core, about heroic sacrifice. At least, that’s what I wanted it to be about; I needed to make sure the mechanics said that too.

Becoming has a dice-based resolution mechanic where the Hero rolls dice to try to overcome a static difficulty set by a member of the Chorus (roughly analagous to a GM, at least a little bit). More dice equals higher chance of victory, and failure means that the Hero must pay a cost of some sort. I knew this much, but it wasn’t enough. The mechanic was sound, but it didn’t encourage sacrifice; it was a simple pass-fail mechanic that required sacrifice as a result of failure, but it wasn’t enough. In order for the Hero’s sacrifice to be meaningful in this game, it had to be a choice.

That’s where the bargaining mechanic came from. The Chorus is made up of three players, and there’s a very good reason for that. While only one player at a time may place a challenge in front of the Hero, the other members are not without purpose during that scene. In most cases the Hero will be outgunned, or at least daunted, by the difficulty of the challenge in front of him or her. Success is going to be a slim possibility.

That’s where the rest of the Chorus come in. The Hero can bargain with the other two members of the Chorus, giving up pieces of him/herself in order to gain aid from them. This aid comes in the form of additional dice for the most part, but it costs the Hero some of his/her own dice that are not currently being used (the Hero can’t bring all of his/her dice to bear on a single challenge). In most cases the Hero has the ability to pull off a victory, but it will come at a cost. The interesting bits come when the Hero has to weigh the cost of victory against the cost of failure, and decide which is the lesser evil.

Yesterday I sat down and wrote all of the mechanics for Becoming. The specifics of how to do things had been eluding me for a while even though I’d had some notes on things I wanted to achieve. Once I sat down to actually write them though, it was shockingly quick and easy. This is because I believe I subscribe to what I’ll call the “Just Goddamn Do It” school of game design.

What do I mean by that? Thinking about game design is great and talking about it is better. You can come up with all sorts of great ideas on your own and, just like no good plan survives contact with the enemy, you can’t help but change and generate ideas when you actually have someone to bounce ideas off of.

In the end though, thinking and talking about game design, while valuable, are not game design. There is simply no substitute for sitting down and writing your thoughts down, forcing yourself to actually think through the problems and come up with solutions. Writing it down makes the mechanics concrete, exposes many of the flaws, and causes you to see where your ideas need more development. I had a lot of ideas in my head but it wasn’t until I sat down that those ideas became a game.

I’ve also applied the “Just Goddamn Do It” philosophy to my freelance writing and I think that’s part of the reason why I’ve seen so much success lately. I was told not too long ago that the biggest reason that I got a particular job was because I responded to my email quickly; this is very much a manifestation of JGDI. Similarly, when asked if I want to work on a new project, I usually look at the work that I’m currently doing, consider for a moment, and say “what the hell?”