Rhetorical Combat

   The pen is mightier than the sword. That’s what they always say. But it’s just a saying – because who’d want a pen-wielding character in a game, that’s lame.

   “Merchants say there’s a dragon up north, somewhere in the mountains.”

   “Okay, I’ll write a pamphlet against it.”

   That is not a good adventure-starter.

   Still, fighting an opponent with words instead of swords has been around for thousands of years. Ancient Greek philosophers did it all the time. Courtiers did it during the reigns of Kings Louis XV and XVI. Mandarins did it in ancient China. Rivals did it in tribal Madagascar. Rhetorical combat is a very old thing indeed, and it’s a shame we can’t get a real taste of it in tabletop role-playing.

   When your character fights, technical attention to detail is at its peak, but when your character talks, there are zero technical details. It’s not at all balanced. Some Dungeon Masters told me: “If you wanna talk, talk. Use your tongue. Talk for real.” PCs have to do that, do they? My character gets an audience with the High Priest, and that High Priest decides to disagree with the way I plan to go about my next quest. So, I have to argue for real. But if the Temple Champion then attacks my character with his flaming mace +4, I don’t have to fight for real against a mace swinging brute... Why do rhetorical devices have to be “for real” in the game, and not physical combat? Your character is a level 12 Knight in the king’s court, but maybe you are not physically fit: that’s okay. Your character is a level 12 Mandarin in the emperor’s court, but maybe you are not good with words: that should also be okay. This is why I designed the following system; now, anyone can bash their opponent verbally.

   This “Mandarin System” is very loosely based on the many rich Rules of Rhetorics established by the Greeks. First off, you have to roll up the rhetorics section of your character’s skills – a section that can be added to almost any character record sheet. It goes like this:

Logôs (Proposition)	Base score: 1d10 (%)	+5% per point of INT
Apologôs (Refutation)	Base score: 1d12 (%)	+4% per point of WIS
Apophasis (Irony)	Base score: 2d8   (%)	+2% per point of CHA

   You can adapt it into White Wolf with “dots” and Willpower and Wits. The basic idea stays the same: a To Hit skill (Logôs), a Parry skill (Apologôs), and a full Dodge skill (Apophasis). Dodging an argument is less formal than parrying it. Apophasis is more of a jest: you are not really debating the topic – you’re just fooling around. Apologôs is a real counter-argument.

   “Men of faith only endorse reform when it is not anathema to their beliefs.”

   “Or when it doesn’t impede the anatomy of their relief...”

·        That’s an Apophasis. Dodge.

   “Men of faith only endorse reform when it is not anathema to their beliefs.”

   “It is not up to the clergy to caution reform – which is, in truth, a different faith.”

·        That’s an Apologôs. Parry.

   Your character also have Rhetorical Hit Points, or RHP, and a Renown score that can either go up or down, depending on the number of arguments / debates he or she won or lost. Rhetorical Hit Points are usually restored after any reasonable amount of time spent away from argumentation and debating. Lost Renown, on the other hand, can only be restored by “coming back” and winning new arguments, be it against the same previous adversary, or against another contender. The assumption is that these “arguments” always take place in public, with lots of witnesses – like in the days of Greek philosophers, or at the court of King Louis XVI, et cetera. It was considered fruitless to win arguments in private.

   Damage is always 1d4 + Renown. Subtract from defender’s current RHP. When someone renowned makes a valid point or a good counter-argument (i.e. Obama’s “we also have fewer horses and bayonets”), it carries more weight than if a dude in Dudestown had made the exact same point. Note that Renown cannot drop into a negative score; you can’t have 1d4 -4 rhetorical damage. So, zero renown is the lowest, but you always have a chance to deal some sweet rhetorical damage anyway.

   Here is how a “combat” should go:

   Mandarin #1 has 71% Logôs, 66% Apologôs, and 65% Apophasis, with 14 Rhetorical Hit Points, and a Renown of 4.

   Mandarin #2 has 58% Logôs, 60% Apologôs, and 51% Apophasis, with 11 Rhetorical Hit Points, and a Renown of 1. (I didn’t want to research the Chinese equivalents for “Logôs” and “Apologôs” and “Apophasis”, so just bear with me here.)

   Mandarin #1 opens with a resounding Proposition, and rolls 22% on his 71% skill – it’s a “hit”. Mandarin #2 goes for a Refutation, but misses (rolled 89% on his 60% skill). Mandarin #1 rolls 1d4 “damage” and scores 2, plus 4 for his Renown. Mandarin #2 subtracts 6 from his 11 RHP, so he now has 5. It is then his turn to “attack”, and he rolls 40% on his 58% Logôs. Mandarin #1 tries irony, and rolls 74% on his 65% Apophasis – a miss! Mandarin #2 rolls damage and scores a big fat 4, plus 1 for his Renown. Mandarin #1 drops his RHP to 9 (from 14). Then he launches another Proposition and rolls 95% on his 71% skill. Miss. Mandarin #2 immediately follows with his own Proposition, rolling 33% on his 58% Logôs. Mandarin #1 attempts a Refutation and gets an excellent 07% on his 66% Apologôs. Successful “parry”. No damage.

   And so on, and so forth.

   When one of them hits 0 RHP, his opponent wins the argument. Applause and warm congratulatory cheers from the many witnesses all around. Loser drops 1 point of Renown, and cannot debate again in 2-5 days.

   You decide if you want to allow skills increase by XP, or not. (Mandarin #1 wants to raise his Logôs skill from 71% to 80% and how much experience does he has to spend in order to do so. Depends on which core system you play in.)

   You also decide if RHP can go up, and if so, are they linked to ordinary HP increase (when the character levels up), or can the additional Rhetorical Hit Points be “bought” separately with XP. All choices are acceptable.

   So, there you have it. Mandarin System. That’s my proposition.

   Now, try to refute me.

Blibdoolpoolp

   I have this idea of creating a real-life color picture of the Kuo-Toa goddess, using Sabrina Maree as a model; it has never been done before, because that result would of course show up whenever you google Blibdoolpoolp, and it doesn’t. I’ve seen nice homemade minis, but never a real image... All you really need are Hi Def pictures of lobsters and a signed letter from your good pal Holly Randall, authorizing you to use one of the amazing shots she took of Sabrina Maree (and I guess you’d need her green light too). Then it’s just Photoshop for a week – I’m not that good with Photoshop but not that bad either – and here comes the real Blibdoolpoolp!

   Oh, I forgot: you’d also need some sort of written permission from WotC, because the goddess of the Kuo-Toa is “Product Identity” and I don’t know what that is, but you shouldn’t mess with it.

   Wizards of the Coast lawyers are lawful good lawyers but porn industry lawyers are probably lawful evil lawyers, so that is where I have most of my doubts...

   And what about a Blibdoolpoolp RealDoll? Let Your Freak Flag Fly, right? But do you have to pay a fee to “use” the goddess?

   I really should go to law school.

DM vs Video Game Level Designer

   I design very complicated chambers and rooms: it’s one of my flaws. For example, a few months ago I had this one room that was a huge natural cave full of stalactites and stalagmites, with a drider living high up on the ceiling, hidden among all the stalactites. He fired barbed arrows at the PCs below as soon as they entered his line of sight, but the PCs couldn’t spot him in the gloom, with all those rocky fissures and spider webs. Only way to retaliate was for the two magic-users to send their familiars – an owl and a crow – and have them fly up close to the drider, in order to see it through the eyes of the birds – and then use that knowledge to help the ranger aim and fire his bow in the right direction. But the closer the familiars got to that elusive drider, the more vulnerable they were themselves (an arrow can be lethal when you only have 4 Hit Points). I even made a little chart for it. One familiar @ medium range = low chances To Hit, need 17. One familiar @ long range = lousy chances To Hit, need natural 20. Two familiars @ close range = good chances To Hit, you only need 14. Etc, etc.

   What do you think happened? Players can’t figure out complex shit like that right in the middle of a stressful combat scene. In video games, sure, no problem: game release date is May 2, and on May 4 there is already a teen somewhere in Philadelphia who got to level 19 and figured out that “drider’s cave + familiars” thing and put a 35-minute walkthrough up on the Internet for everyone to see. But that’s video games. It’s different. It’s taken much more seriously, and players are generally alone in a basement, with ample time to think. But a bunch of forty-year-old guys around a table on a Saturday afternoon, with all the excitement and Doritos and beer and coffee and cigarettes? I don’t think so. Not a suitable environment. Waiting for one of the magic-users to say: “Hey, I’ll risk my familiar’s life and send it up the cavern to try and spot that damned archer! Stand by with your own bow, my ranger friend!”

   Not going to happen.

   I had another room which I called “The Ossuary”, and I didn’t even use it in a game. It was somewhat of an extreme affair. Basically, it’s a regular ossuary, in which thousands of skeletons are packed in tight niches and stacked on wooden shelves – the skulls up front, facing outward, and the bones / ribcages behind, in no particular order. When PCs enter that place, nothing happens. They can explore the entire room, and even get to the treasure cache at the far end. That’s when the monster awakens: twin skeletons, and they instantly attack the intruders. Now, when these two special skeletons withstand any damage (half the damage with edged weapons), they don’t crack or break, but instead, random ribs and femurs shatter here and there on the various shelves of the ossuary. Fact is, ALL THE BONES in there are actual Hit Points (or fractions of Hit Points) for those two “invulnerable” skeletons: the whole Ossuary is just one nasty monster with 180 Hit Points.

   The solution is for the fighters to tackle those physical skeletons, while all the other PCs run freely around the ossuary with their clubs and daggers and staves, and smash skulls + bones as quickly as they can. I thought they’d each roll 1d6, every round. On a roll of 1, no bones are smashed that round, and the PC takes 1d8 points of electrical damage: the room’s Ritual tries to “protect” itself. On a roll of 2 through 6, I’d substract that many Hit Points from the Ossuary’s 180 total.

   A group of 7 characters have something like 50 Hit Points between themselves (level 2 or 3, let’s say). So, it’s their 50 against the room’s 180...

   This picture shows how I playtested it all – twice! First playtest: I had the players find the “trick” on round 2, and at the end of the scene, the cleric was down, the Dwarf only had 1 Hit Point left, but the group survived. Second playtest: I only had the players find the trick on round 6, and the PCs all died in the end. Having “the idea” is definitely key here; figuring out that any character can start shattering bones in the niches and alcoves really makes the difference between Everyone Dies and Everyone Lives...

   Too risky for my own taste. Seven player characters die because no one had the right inspiration at the appropriate moment? That’s crazy.

   If you work at Blizzard, Rockstar, or whatever, do that: create complicated puzzles, have fun with space, distances, time windows, lines of sight, and all that. But if you’re a good old DM in a good old tabletop RPG, calm down: just design a room with a pile of gold at the far end, and monsters standing in the way; want the gold? fight the monsters! Puzzles are unwelcome in tabletop RPGs, except maybe in Cthulhu because that vibe is different and atmospheric. But in D&D, anything past a basic riddle is a total waste of time, slowing the game to a stall. Riven was very cool, but it was certainly no RPG. My word of advice is simple: keep it simple.

Time to Play Tournament

   I now realize how much Gen Con got it right back in ’74 (literally from the start) with Tournament Play, and participants who often didn’t know each other. Because, let’s face it: time wasted is one of the main afflictions – if not the main affliction – in tabletop RPGs; and why, I ask, do players waste time? Two reasons:

   Reason #1. Players waste time because they’re in no hurry. If they don’t get to the evil sorcerer’s lair tonight, they’ll get there next month, or in three months, when they play their next game session. There is no deadline: why rush in? Tournament play solves that completely. “Here’s the situation. This is happening, and these goblins over there are digging something up in the crevasse, and that warlock begun his ritual to summon up something nasty... You guys have six hours. It starts now. What do you want to do?”

   Reason #2. Players waste time because they all know each other. They’ve all been friends since ’84 or so. They are glad to see each other. They’re fired up. They brought wine. They’re thirsty. They start talking about Windows 8. Then they talk about Cuba and going south in January. Then someone says the word “Linux”, and that’s another hour vanishing... Tournament play solves that, too. The players sit down, introduce themselves, let the DM have a look at their character record sheets, and start gaming almost immediately.

   It’s still very cool to play with your old gaming buddies, though. Sometimes I’ll put someone new in the lineup – one of my cousins, or a coworker – but at its core, it stays mostly my old friends. I couldn’t really solve that time wasting aspect of the game, so I’ve decided to definitely solve the other: I now give each scenario a time limit. Forget long mods like Tsojcanth. Now it’s mini-games, playable in under 8 hours. A beginning, a middle, and an end – all in the same game session. If it’s a dungeon crawl, there’s gonna be less than 10 rooms to explore, and only between 3 and 5 fight scenes. Still, if they don’t have enough time to “finish” the dungeon, that’s that, and it’s just too bad.

   November 29, I ran my second game of AD&D in 28 years. I talked about the first session in a previous post, and the results were dismal. Now, there’s improvement. But there is room for further improvement – as always.

   After years and years of multisession adventures, it’s hard to pick up the pace. We were accustomed to extensive analysis and brainstorming; we even invented a new word for it: metagaming. This is when players are out of character, discussing the difficulties / challenges / technical aspects of a particular scenario. It’s annoying sometimes, because real medieval warriors wouldn’t think that much, but that’s the world we live in: what can you expect when every one of your friends is a network programmer or a teacher? If you hate the OOC shit, just get yourself a bunch of actor friends – theater majors, that kind of people. They will really play the Elf or the wizard or the monk. Meanwhile, work with what you have, and what you have is metagaming, which we also called tobyism, because of Tobias who really did it a lot.

   But now that I want to switch us back to good old tournament play – i.e. with a time limit –, the guys need to reacquaint themselves with the forgotten arts of “winging it” and “going in blind” and other brands of instant decision-making. I was asking myself: why do I always cringe, and not them? Because they don’t know the rooms still left to explore, but I do. It gave me an idea...

   What about if I handed the players a complete map of the dungeon right at the beginning, with all the rooms, but no clues regarding monsters or traps? They’d have a visual reference as the game progresses, and they’d be able to see all that’s still unexplored.

   Like I wrote four months ago, it’s a question of identifying the “profitable” part of any sandbox-ish scenario. Where is the good stuff stashed away? In this case, the good stuff waited in three pocket dimensions accessible through a magical stone slab in the mansion’s basement. But THEY DIDN’T GO of course – except for the bard who entered one of these dimensions alone, but am I gonna bust the lich and his five mummies just for one PC? (Huge exaggeration here about the monsters, but you got my whiff.)

   Tournament is definitely the way, but I think there ought to be some visual aid for the players – a sort of “Dungeon Completion Chart”. Nine main rooms, plus a number of corridors and stairwells and possibly traps. We’re already two hours in, and we only cleared two main rooms out of nine. We’re behind schedule, guys!

   I’m sure there is some way to integrate this in the story.

   Tournament is not logical. “Why do we only have six hours to do this?” Well, why not? Dungeon crawls aren’t logical anyway. You go on myth-weavers.com and click “generate dungeon”, but what is this damned dungeon exactly? Who built it, and why? Wanting to go logical in D&D is a slippery slope indeed. Like I used to say: everybody killed Drelnza, and then met in a tavern to swap stories about how they killed her...

   Please check your logic at the door.

   If at least one of your friends is an adept of vaping, and if he brought his e-cigarette (you know he did), then you have access to amazing special effects during your combat scenes, like in this photo: mansion’s on fire and they’re all fighting the evil intruders in a thick cloud of smoke!

Batman Cthulhu vs Mickey Thor

   Been many years now since that weird Arkham / Gotham merger occurred, and to celebrate it (and the elegant absurdity of it), here is the Dark Knight’s investigator card for Arkham Horror – next game, trust me, I’m using it!

   Arkham is now a district of Gotham City, nothing more. They kept the Asylum, sure, but not the Miskatonic River nor the University, nor the Witch House and other cool eerie spots. HPL’s Arkham is just plain gone, and it makes me very sad.

   It’s like saying that the Dragon Isle of Melniboné and the Isle of Númenor are one and the same – or that Camelot is in Lankhmar – but wait till it is Public Domain, though! Why do you think there are so many versions of the same stories in Greek mythology or Arthurian mythos? It’s because writers constantly rip off previous writers. Vergil cannot leave Homer alone, so he tells a different story of the same damn Achilles. Malory cannot leave Chrétien de Troyes alone, so he spins a different tale of the same damn Lancelot... Five hundred years from now, our own pop culture will also be a huge mess, perhaps even bigger: Hastur the Unspeakable will be the Joker’s BFF, and together they’ll plot the destruction of the Klingon High Jedi Council of Minas Tirith...

   Who invented Gotham City anyway? Is it Bill Finger? Is it Herron & Kirby? We know that Lovecraft created Arkham in 1920. Gotham City is first mentioned in a 1940 issue of Batman. So, is Arkham older than Gotham, then? But wait, Washington Irving made use of the name “Gotham” back in 1807, didn’t he? Borrowed from someone who borrowed it from someone else who borrowed it from... where?

   Both names are Public Domain – because both Irving and Lovecraft died such a long time ago. If I decide to write a Cthulhu novella set in Arkham, with “Gotham City” being the name of the outskirts of Arkham, north of the Miskatonic, nobody in the world could say anything, right? The name Gotham doesn’t belong to DC Comics.

   Today’s TV could be called the Public Domain Media. Elementary, Sherlock, Grimm, Dracula, Once Upon A Time... Who’s falling into Public Domain next? Orwell? You can bet there are three TV shows already in the works, then... Big Brother is watching you, Public Domain, and he wants to make money without paying any money.

   I refuse to do any research about Disney. What I’ve heard is that they now own every Marvel superhero, just like they own everything Star Wars. Is that so, or just a truckload of crap? I don’t really give a rat’s ass. So, hypothetically, Disney owns all of Marvel’s characters, but not Marvel Studios proper? And Marvel Studios now produce Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. which is set in the same “Marvel Universe”, but you never actually see the Hulk, Iron Man, or Thor – although they are mentioned from time to time... Eighty-seven lawyers brokered this lucrative deal? It’s almost creepy. Armies of suits square off against each other in order to get their filthy hands on our geek dollars.

   Someone else told me that Spider-Man still belongs to Marvel – as long as they keep releasing new material every two years or so; if they stop the flow of new Spidey material, Spidey then becomes Disney’s property. Is that yet another truckload of bullshit? I don’t know, and I honestly don’t care researching any of that. It’s too depressing. Even a half-minute Google search is too big a waste of my time when it comes to Disney. Consider this my #DisneySide.

   My nephew is six years old and now totally loves Star Wars. Six, that’s how old I was in ’77. Accordingly, the little guy was amazed when he saw that I knew these characters inside and out. And of course he wanted to show me his toys... This is when I realized how Star Wars nowadays is not exactly – not at all – the thing I used to know and love. There are Jedi Angry Birds and Sith Little Pigs and Star Wars Angry Birds video games, and Star Wars Lego webisodes and video games, and it’s impossible to keep track of everything in there. Luke Skywalker in on Naboo. Jar Jar goes to Tatooine. Han Solo meets Boss Nass. Darth Maul builds the Death Star. It’s an incredible, intractable, invincible mess.

   Disney / Hasbro / Lego / Rovio / Retoy: an orgy of cash, that’s what it is.

   But I did something fantastic, something I’m very proud of: I never said anything in front of my nephew. Let him have his Star Wars trip, right here in 2014, just like I had mine in ’79. Why should I even bother, since there’s absolutely nothing I can do about any of this... Angry Bird General Grievous now helps Lego Lando Calrissian in his fierce battle against some cheese-like substance...

   Why do we write? What’s the goal of it? To create interesting characters, right? But if you create an interesting enough character, it turns to crap for sure – sooner or later. So what’s the answer? What should we do? Never get attached to any character, ever? Not the ones you create, nor those created by others.

   For example, right now, I’m getting attached to Reese and Finch and Shaw, and I shouldn’t, because they’re bound to be turned into crap. It’s not a question of if, it’s just a question of when. It can take some time indeed. With the Star Wars characters, it took more than 20 years. For Mulder and Scully, it didn’t happen yet – but it will, mark my words. Disney or some other shit factory will acquire the rights to The X-Files, and that will be it. Goodbye. Sayonara. Ciao.

   I call this phenomenon “the great wood chipper”. We throw everything we have in it, every piece of our culture. Scott Fitzgerald, Victor Hugo, Alan Moore, Tolkien, Conan Doyle... We even throw our previous crap in that crap-maker to make it crappier still – Carrie, Total Recall, Robocop...

   Making money is the only virtue in our society; Hollywood and Disney succeed thoroughly. Sometimes, someone tries to grab the bonus audience of an adjacent fanbase, like DC did when they included Arkham and its infamous Asylum: they try to lure in the Lovecraft fans.

   Or am I insane?

  

Pirates & Plunder

   Don’t mess with Texas – even in tabletop gaming! Yes: I love Yaquinto Publications, and still have a lot of fond memories about Pirates & Plunder, which I ran from 1996 to ’99, and it was the only “fantasy” game I ran with absolutely no magic in the entire campaign – very refreshing. Everything else I ever ran had magic in it, except for one or two short sci-fi or James Bond campaigns. But not having to bother with magic is truly like a DM’s paid vacation...

    One player tackled the role of young Captain Joshua Tew, a (fictional) brother of the infamous Thomas Tew of the Amity. Josh Tew’s own ship was the Marmaduke, with a crew of 38 ruthless sailors, mostly Englishmen from the Bahamas, with some French outlaws thrown into the mix... Captain Tew was a good leader, bold, charismatic, just sneaky enough, and not as insane as most (if not all) of the other PCs.

   Second player was a crazy Quaker priest obsessed with converting Indians and Pirates alike to the True Religion – his own. He wasn’t a coward, though, and took an active part in every battle, slashing around with his sabre, and jumping like a madman right in the midst of Spanish soldiers whenever he had the chance. Sometimes he even went bananas and drew his blade during non-fight scenes, like at a dinner party in Tobago with some rich tobacco farmers and their families...

   Third player was a young chap who never seemed to own enough gunpowder and weapons and muskets and pistols and sabres and rapiers and knives. He was a fifteen-year-old walking arsenal, and never wasted a single round recharging any gun. He just lined them up along the railing prior to a fight, twenty or twenty-five loaded guns, and nobody else would dare touch ‘em, and he was all set then – because, honestly, what RPG fight scene ever lasted twenty-five rounds?

   Fourth player was an old hand: an experienced French sailor who never wore any armor. His Constitution / Toughness score was so damn high that his (hairy) bare chest was less likely to suffer a wound than the Captain’s with his leather brigandine and silk shirt. Old Jacquot owned two weapons – a regular sword, and a seventy-year-old musket with a slightly bent barrel. A cask of rum once fell onto the gun, and Old Jacquot kept it and patiently trained himself to aim with that bent barrel. After a few years, he’d mastered “the bend” and could fire his musket with a normal hit probability – but anybody else suffered a -30 penalty if they ever tried to shoot with this particular gun, and Jacquot himself had a -25 penalty when aiming with any firearm other than his own.

   They played long adventures on the Mosquito Coast, in the Bahamas, in Jamaica, Tobago, Maracaibo, and on more than a few tiny islands and cays. One time, they completely destroyed the small port of Matthew Town in the Bahamas – an operation that required almost three hours of sustained cannon fire, along with thirty powder kegs stashed in advance near city hall, the church, and the jailhouse! And all of that was just because one guy they needed to kill was hiding somewhere in town, and they couldn’t find him...

   I’ve heard quite a few Dungeon Masters talk about running the “best game of their life”. They think about it, they plan on it, talk about it... but is it going to happen? Or maybe the question should be: has it already happened?

   If you took up DMing at age fifteen, by the time you hit thirty you already have way more experience than EGG himself when he was running that legendary Greyhawk campaign in the early seventies. Here’s a little equation to measure that. You take the year you first started DMing, add fifteen to it, and that’s your “DMing Peak”. Now, what were you running right around that time? Look it up.

          Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!

Which RPG is the best?

   If I were to pick pieces and parts of various role-playing games and then put them back together to fashion one “perfect” RPG, this is what my little Frankenstein’s Monster would look like.

   From the get-go, D&D gave us very good “To Hit” mechanics: this is a kind of simplicity I like. With one die roll, you know. Monster’s Armor Class, and there – you need 15. And the hit location doesn’t matter. Head or toe? Don’t waste any time rolling for that crap – the amount of damage you deal gives you a fairly good idea of where you struck your opponent, and that’s enough. In the White Wolf system, it’s much more complicated. Attacker rolls his seven, eight, or nine dice, says “four successes”, and then the defender rolls his Parry or Dodge, seven more dice, and says “three successes, you got me”, and now the attacker rolls his nine damage dice, says “five”, and the defender rolls his four or five Soak dice, says “two”, and registers three points of damage on his character record sheet (five Hits minus two Soaks). So, fourteen dice were rolled before any damage was dealt, as opposed to the one die with D&D. And that’s just one sword swing, mind you. Imagine the dice-rolling extravaganza if four player characters square off against six bloodthirsty scimitar-wielding ghouls! (When I’m gonna lay on my deathbed, at age 90, I’m gonna be able to say: “Well, one cumulative full year out of those ninety was spent rolling 10-sided dice!”)

   D&D also gave us the “levels” mechanics – and this is the kind of simplicity I don’t like. Players can’t spend XP where they want to, because all XP are automatically funnelled into levelling up. New spells, improved skills, augmented Hit Points, it’s all bundled up together. Too generic. All sixth level thieves are identical: they all have 45% in Remove Traps and 92% in Climb Walls, unless they’re Halfling, in which case they have 50% and 77% respectively.

   Level is the big impediment, here. Without it, you can have “spendable” XP, but you cannot have a one-die “To Hit” roll, because one-die To Hit is based on the monster’s (or opponent’s) Armor Class, and the character’s level. So if there are levels, you’ve got that easy breezy beautiful one-die To Hit, but won’t be able so spend your hard-earned XP as you see fit – they’re all gonna go straight into levelling up... Unless your To Hit is simply made into a skill (a skill you can therefore improve with XP).

   I prefer XP to be spendable separately and anywhere. Get a new useful spell, or boost Dexterity by one point? Increase your Drive Cart and Orientation skills, or get three more Hit Points?

   With Games Workshop things were certainly less monolithic, but Chaosium and White Wolf really unbundled the XP and it was great. “Increased Toughness can wait until the end of the next adventure, but I really need to improve Perception – for Initiative – and Missile Weapons – to defend our new stronghold from wandering goblins.” This way, each PC is totally unique and original.

   Skills are important, but AD&D had very few of them. What’s the roll if you’re trying to hear guards whispering in the next room? What’s the roll if you’re trying to remember which narrow alley you came out of when you escaped from those haunted sewers five nights ago? With Oriental Adventures, AD&D included “non-weapon proficiencies”, which are basically Skills. Newer editions of D&D added things like Perception and Will. You need those. Can’t play without those.

   Now, the magic system – that’s a headache. Oddly enough, I think the best magic system was the one found in Star Wars: the role-playing game. You only had three things there, called Sense, Control, and Alter. That is what you do with magic, isn’t it? You “sense” someone or something, you “control” natural or supernatural phenomena (a wound, a ghost, whatever), or you “alter” mundane or magical stuff. In the very good Ars Magica system, that would translate into Intellego (sense), Rego (control), and Muto (alter) – the other two forms, Creo and Perdo, being different combos of Control and Alter.

   That is a fine, simple system. And it also gives you a dice roll to see if you cast the spell correctly – a thing gravely lacking in D&D. And last but not least, to get a perfectly good magic system, you need Magic Points (thank you, Chaosium). To hell with that “cast and forget” thing; just consider how many Magic Points you’ve got, and you manage from there. Need to cast three fireballs in four rounds? Go right ahead, Quick Ben, but it’ll cost you thrice the Magic Points, of course. But it’s your spell. You know it. You’ve spent weeks studying it – not just the words, but all the inner workings of that particular sorcery. You won’t forget it every time you cast it. That’d be annoying. And what about magic-users learning a spell twice? How can you know by heart the lyrics to a song twice? It makes no sense.

   Magic Points, definitely. And when you level up (or spend enough XP), you add more to your base score. Easy. Like Hit Points. And those magic-user players will still need to “rest” often, not to relearn the same spell for the hundredth time, but to replenish Magic Points.

   To sum it up, the best RPG system would have:

• A one-die “To Hit” roll.
• No hit location.
• Skills.
• “Spendable” XP.
• No experience levels.
• Magic Points, and a spell casting dice roll.

   Some games came close, indeed, but I’ve not yet encountered the one with 6 out of those 6 specificities.