Bard of Valiant

A new contributor here at Bard of Valiant, Anarkeith is a fellow Steven Brust fan from Seattle, WA. This post is in response to Lord Oz’ discussion on an a la carte system for 4E. Anarkeith has an Obsidian Portal page which can be found here.

A few years ago I was running a stagnating 3.5 D&D campaign. It was stagnating for several reasons, including my own creative malaise, and the rules system. I burned out, and dropped the campaign. There was a bit of grumbling from the players, but I told them that when I felt re-energized, I’d run a game again. Months went by.

Then, on a vacation at the beach with several families and their kids, a storm came up that kept us all indoors for the day. The parents collectively freaked out at being kept in close quarters with their children. I looked around, found a d6, a notepad, and a pencil and announced we were going to play some D&D.

“What kind of character should I be?” said a kid.

“You tell me,” I said.

“What weapons do I get?”

“What do you want to have?”

It went like that for a bit. We ended up with a Dwarf with Wolverine claws, a rabbit-girl,  and an Elven wizard who started the game named “Snape”, but changed mid-game, among others. I concocted a legend about a village terrorized by vampires, drawing on local place names. The dungeon was cobbled together as we went, and included my favorite tricks and traps from years of DMing. At one point, the kids found a box of animal cookies. (There happened to be a box on the kitchen counter at the time. You know, the red one with the little string handle, and the animals in cages on it?) They ate a few before discovering that the cookies would magically animate into life-sized versions of the creatures they represented when thrown into combat.

In short, we all had a blast. The other parents, who had little experience with D&D, were amazed (and relieved). The kids wanted to keep playing, even after the weather cleared and the beach and all its diversions sang their siren song.

The whole experience rekindled my enthusiasm for D&D. But, I realized that it was the essence of the game that was important to me and the players. That is: the story, a character with whom the player has a personal connection, and a chance to engage in heroic adventure. The rules often got in the way. So, I wrote my own rules. Or rather, I cobbled together a variant of the d20 rules that formed the d20 System Reference Document. No sense reinventing the wheel after all. I called it “Primitive DnD”. (I should note at this point that my development was going on prior to the release of 4^th Edition D&D. In retrospect, I feel that many of the issues I had with earlier versions of D&D  must have been shared by the 4^th Edition developers.)

My design goals included a fundamental simplicity: players controlled the narrative. The players needed to be able to look at their character sheets, roll a die, and tell the game master whether or not they had succeeded at the task at hand. As a game master, I would describe the situation, and the players would then take over, telling me the story of what happened next. If the task wasn’t something covered by the character sheet, I resolved to adjudicate it on the fly, without agonizing over it. The continuity of the story was the priority.

Based on a homebrew rule set that a friend of mine had run successfully for many years, I determined that I wanted to use a point-buy system for character skills. There would be no classes per se. If you wanted to swing a sword, you bought the “melee — sword” skill. Experience points formed the “coin” with which skills were purchased. I divided the skills into groups, labeled with traditional names such as warrior, spellcaster, rogue, ranger, and sage, to allow players to translate the free-form character design into terms with which they were familiar.

The more experience points you invested in a skill, the more “training” you had, and the lower your target success roll. In an attempt to inject a certain level of realism, my first version rules (I’m currently finishing up version two) used a table to determine the cost of the training that included increasing costs for higher modifiers, and varied costs depending on the character’s ability as it related to that skill. Each skill had an ability associated with it. For example, a character with high strength spent fewer skill points to train the “melee — sword” skill, because it was a strength-based skill.

I placed no restrictions on what players did with their points. Would I have players who put all their points into one skill? Yes. Was that a problem? This was where I had to change my attitude about the game, and remind myself of my core objective. Thinking back to the kids at the beach, what made it work for them was their ownership of their character. Each of them had a chance to shine, to be the hero, at some task. My job, as game master, was to present a variety of tasks so that each of them would have that chance.

In the year that I’ve been running the system so far, we’ve made many adjustments. I told the players in advance that the system would be fluid in that way. Subject to change. In many of the RPG blogs over the past year, and in WotC’s new Dungeon Masters Guide 2, I’ve read about the importance of saying “yes” to players. It’s funny that such a seemingly simple lesson should have taken so long for me to understand. Thanks to some bad weather, the enthusiasm of an imaginative group of kids, and a group of friends dedicated to role-playing, I’ve been able to re-discover the excitement that D&D held for me when I first started playing.

Stay tuned to Bard of Valiant, next Friday Anarkeith follows up this idea with The Language of RPGs [Simplified Rules], where he discusses his design philosophy. “My goal is that with simplified mechanics, and encouragement, my players will look beyond the rules system to the world they are inhabiting to inspire their choice of actions.”