Deep Down on Lightless Streets

Little Menaces - Bug Tea Party - Star

If I'm being completely honest, I just don't think I'm the right person to ask about it because, while I do have a bunch of thoughts about the underlying political implications of the gameplay structure of dungeon games, I'm not particularly inclined to try to fix them.

I have accepted that a lot of the elements of dungeon games whose underlying implications I find to be ideologically questionable are the exact same elements that make dungeon games fun for me from a gameplay perspective. The entire shtick of PCs in a dungeon game is essentially "get rich by plundering Uncivilized places and bringing that wealth back to Civilized places", and some of the most fun gameplay happens when you lean into that job description. The entire dichotomy between "wilderness" vs. "civilization" where Civilized places are small havens of safety in a sea of untamed wilderness, which is dangerous and unexplored and waiting for brave adventurers to plunder it and extract wealth from it which they then bring back to a Civilized place is like. Dripping with settler-colonial implications no matter how you slice it, and yet it makes for a very satisfying baked-in gameplay loop.

Simply put, a lot of the things that make dungeon games fun for me as *games* come from things that, at the core, don't align with my real-world politics, and will never align with them even if I were to try to spend all my creative efforts trying to hammer them into that shape. And I'm fine with that. It's not even like dungeon games are unique in that regard. You could say the same about like. The vast majority of shooters. Or survival crafting games. Or like almost every single action movie I have ever enjoyed. I choose to simply acknowledge this and sit with that discomfort rather than spending my creative efforts trying to square that particular circle.

A lot of D&D5e defenders on here like to claim that asking someone to learn a new system is "gatekeeping" somehow, but I'd argue that acting like one game is emblematic of the entire medium to the exclusion of people who don't click with that one game is way more meaningfully a form of gatekeeping, even if it's fully unintentional.

The Call of Duty games are actually popular not just in spite of their quality, but they're actually well-crafted games. However, there is merit in critical analysis of them that goes beyond "how many graphics" and "how much gameplay," but also looking at them via their quite real connections to the US military and how they basically mirror the ideology of the US military. This doesn't mean that you should treat the Call of Duty games as infohazards which will turn anyone who interacts with them into drones for the US military, but as reflections of real ideologies that are larger than the players themselves.

And like, there's a lot of art that carries ideologies that when transplanted into the real world would be morally repugnant to me, but as works of art they are worth engaging to me. Old-school D&D doesn't actually describe a real world but the fictional folks and structures used to populate it still say something about the people who made it, their priors, and what concessions they were willing to make in the fiction for the sake of gameplay.

This is something you should keep in mind when someone makes a point like "well the orcs/bandits/cultists deserve it because they did bad things in the fiction." These are in-setting justifications, ultimately come up with to frame the narrative of the game as heroic. There's not a lot of interesting ground to be covered in discussions of "how do we find an enemy in D&D player characters can kill without it morally compromising players" because the game isn't a cursed tome that'll turn you evil for engaging with it. What's more interesting is "what kind of priors went unexamined to uncritically make bandits/cultists/orcs the default enemies instead of, say, the lord's soldiers?"

And an unwillingness to think about these things doesn't make anyone morally deficient; however, in my opinion an unwillingness to entertain these ideas or an aggressive and vitriolic rejection of these lines of thought may be indicative of intellectual incuriosity and ultimately I feel it emerges from a similar place as "D&D must be woke or it'll infect me:" D&D must be protected from evil criticisms because otherwise D&D may seem morally deficient. Which is like so far besides the point.

Equiping an armor tutorial

1) Figured this out.

Like I was reading Fabula Ultima and they make a point that the players should be heroes, not hack and slash tourists, and explicitly make the point that 0 HP means "defeated" which can just as easily mean knocked out or disarmed or scared off or surrendered or dazed and falls into a garbage can as it can mean kill, and the players should not only consider if they should kill, but have to specify when they are killing someone. Which then gets me thinking about how Unknown Armies' chapter on combat opens with several paragraphs about how to de-escalate a fight or get what you want without violence. Both of which make it very conspicuous that in D&D the default assumption is that you're killing people unless you specify you're dealing nonlethal damage (or going for a knockout in editions without nonlethal damage), and that HP is some nebulous abstraction of literal flesh wounds and lucky dodges and morale and exertion from blocking and dodging, but hitting 0 still means lethal injury.

Obviously there would still be implications to violence both in how it's used and who it is used against, but I think one of the core snarls here is that a lot of D&D players operate under the assumption of pulpy lighthearted adventure heroes who beat up bad guys, while also indulging in gratuitous bloodshed and juicy depictions of killing ("how do you wanna do this"). A dissonance on par with "Looney Tunes but when Elmer shoots Daffy his brains actually get blown out". And that maybe shifting from "enemies killed" to "enemies defeated" like it's a SNES RPG that's not allowed to say "die" might preserve the "loveable rogues" angle you're going for.

Combat is just one thing that some Death Bed characters might engage with, but Fatigue is involved in almost everything physical the PCs do.

So, while NPCs in Death Bed do have conventional “HP,” Death Bed PCs do not. Instead of a number that goes down, they have a track of squares that get filled in from right to left when they take damage and gain Wounds. When they exert themselves, they gain Fatigue, which fills in the same squares from left to right. If all squares are filled, the character dies. (Yeah I stole this from the Dark Souls Board Game but that’s because it’s a genuinely good way to represent a “stamina” system in turn-based combat.)

Fatigue is gained from any action that the performance of - once or repeatedly - would be considered “exercise.”

Wounds are relatively difficult to remove from the track, but Fatigue is removed from the track gradually over time at a rate determined by how much Weight the PC is carrying.

Fatigue also gradually starts building up when the PCs have gone too long without eating or sleeping.

This system overall provides a gradual attrition to overexertion in the dungeon (even though just walking around the dungeon outside of combat does not cause Fatigue in and of itself) and while long-distance traveling. In a long hike, the pace is usually going to be set by whoever in the party has the lowest tolerance for Fatigue accumulation.

The Fatigue system is really interesting in combat, because movement and actions cause Fatigue, which fills in and shortens a PC’s health bar. At the same time, the more Wounds a PC gets, the less Fatigue they can afford to accumulate.

Finally, with very few exceptions, there is no actual limit on the amount of movement and actions that a PC can do on their turn. If a PC has 20 squares on their health track, and an attack with their weapon causes 3 Fatigue, they could attack 6 times in a single turn. The obvious tradeoff to this is that with each attack they are essentially reducing their HP, and making 6 attacks will leave them with the equivalent of 2 HP until their next turn when their Fatigue reduces by 1-4 points (depending on Weight carried), at which point they will then have the equivalent of 3-6 HP. (It is also worth noting that an “attack” in Death Bed represents many consecutive swings because rounds in Death Bed are more like a full minute instead of a few seconds like rounds in Eureka.)

Also since I mentioned combat, “hit” and “damage” rolls in Death Bed are the same roll, and based on the weapon being swung, with modifiers based on the PC’s skill and advantage/disadvantage based on the circumstances.

PCs use rolls for their attack and defense, most NPCs use flat numbers. Armor is damage reduction vs attacks, and HP values are overall very low. Most human-sized enemies will have only 1 HP, meaning their Armor(which often also has their skill at fighting wrapped into it) is just a number that the attacker must roll above to defeat them.

I want Death Bed to be really strategic in this way, where, pretty often a kill on any given individual enemy can be guaranteed (like if a PC has a sword with an attack power of 1D8 and +4 from their combat skills against a weak enemy that only has an Armor of 3 against the damage type of the weapon), but there will never just be one weak enemy. Does the warrior take as many of the guaranteed kills as possible in a single turn, causing a lot of Fatigue and potentially leaving him vulnerable from exhaustion, or does he fight defensively and pace himself? What if there is an enemy whose armor has a chance to protect against a light attack, but would have no chance against a heavy attack which does more damage but also causes much more Fatigue?

Is that anything?

One of the dirty secrets of tabletop RPG design is that setting per se is almost entirely meaningless from a rules perspective. The rules have opinions about what player characters do; the setting only matters insofar as it imposes descriptive constraints on the answer to that question. That's how self-proclaimed "universal" RPGs get away with it: they're just as opinionated as any other game about what sorts of shenanigans player characters ought to be getting up to, but they take care to provide a game-mechanical model of those shenanigans that's compatible with a wide variety of settings.

(On the flip side, it's also how you end up with a lot of really shitty licensed RPGs. The fact that a given set of rules can construct a game-mechanical model of the characters and setting of a particular piece of media doesn't inherently mean that those rules have anything interesting to say about what those characters spend their time doing. I could very easily construct the cast of Pride and Prejudice in D&D, but the player-facing affordances of D&D's rules would never produce Darcy's proposal!)

I was wondering if you have any suggestions or advice on how to approach and digest a dense rules text to better internalize it. I'm very used to just treating the game like an open-book test, referencing it to find specific rules as they become relevant, but I feel like if I want to GM (if only because that may be the only way I can play some of these games AT ALL), that isn't gonna cut it.

Thank you for your work, regardless! I appreciate RPGs as an art form much more thanks to your posts. :)

No, you’ve pretty much got it, and if anyone thinks that makes you a bad GM, they’re the wrong ones.

Whenever I play any TTRPG, even ones I wrote myself and am therefore intimately familiar with, I also treat it like an “open book test.” I read the material all the way through beforehand, then keep the book open and reference it any time I am not absolutely 100% sure of a ruling. Not only does this make sure I get the rulings right in the moment, but it helps me memorize the rulings better too (this is why open book tests are actually better for learning than convention school tests too) and so the more I play the less I need to look things up.

The only reason this would be considered a bad thing is if you’re poisoned by toxic D&D5e and “actual play” play culture and expect the GM to be what @jburneko would call a “magician,” an entertainer more than a player or referee who is taking it upon themselves to be the game more than the game itself, and “keep the story moving” even at the expense of the gameplay. The magician never lets you see the strings, never pauses the “act,” and performs for an audience more so than plays a game with friends. The magician never expects the audience to commit to any participation beyond standing there and being amazed. The term A.N.I.M. usually uses for this kind of GM is “servitor GMing.”

“Well won’t that slow the game down and make it boring if you have to stop and look something up every five minutes?”

I have several answers to this question.

1: Imagine you’re playing a video game instead of a TTRPG for a minute. Would you rather have 15-30 seconds of loading screens every once in a while for a game that works perfectly, or would you rather have no loading screens but every time you pass a point that would normally be a loading screen, nothing is loaded and the textures are blurry and the collision bugs out and items despawn and so on? The game might even crash (this is your GM burning out and not being able to continue). Rulings made on the fly just because you don’t want to look something up (I’m not talking about when the rulebook doesn’t account for an edge case or something) can really screw the game up and lead to outcomes that really shouldn’t have gone that way, and makes it harder for players and GM to develop the ability to make informed decisions in play because the rules will not be consistent.

2: The more you look things up, the faster you are at looking things up, and often the more concretely you memorize the things you have looked up a bunch of times. So yeah maybe the first few sessions will have some stumbles and long pauses, but it won’t be like that forever.

3: Here’s the real secret. That thing I said about how I always keep the book open during a session and reference it constantly? I don’t GM that often. That’s me as a player. I know that the toxic play culture of the magician/servitor GM has deeply ingrained that only the GM needs to know the rules, but that’s not true. Players should know the rules, players should know the rulebook, and players should look up the rules. This spreads the burden of knowing the rules out around the entire table rather than relying on just the GM (who is already usually doing the most work out of the whole group).

If your players are adverse to learning the rules, try to convince them with the following arguments:

1: It’s just courteous. Like, the GM is already doing the most work, and the GM is presumably your friend, if reading a few chapters of a book would make it significantly easier for your friend to do something they’re doing for you, why wouldn’t you do that for them?

2: Even if they’re so selfish as to not want to read like 10-100 pages of text to make it easier for a friend to do something for them, in the vast majority of TTRPGs, players knowing the rules gives them much greater agency in the game. When a monster attacks, knowing the rules can save their PC’s life! If the PC is likely to get shot at, and the player knows how to identify “Cover” and being in Cover makes their PC less likely to die, they can position their PC in Cover before the bullets even start flying.

Of course both of these arguments rely on the players understanding that rules matter and make a difference to the play experience in the first place, and that the GM will actually enforce the rules rather than always bending them last minute to stop PCs from dying, both of which are counter to the zeitgeist of much of the hobby right now, but if you’ve got them to the point where they’re even going to consider another game at all, you probably already have a foothold there.

Oh and finally, for anyone who doesn't already know, there is a "tick" for more quickly navigating PDFs (that is not just CTRL+F).

Part 1: Marketing, and How Hasbro Sells You Your GM's/Your Own Labor