The Viking Hat GM

  While designing two contrasting roleplaying systems,  Conflict  and  Yes, But , I developed mechanics that, quite independently of formal academic reading, have turned out to mirror core psychological theories of resilience and stress. What follows is an attempt to articulate these theories and how they are expressed, often implicitly, in the mechanical structures of the games. I. Two Games, Two Models Conflict  is a tactical system, oriented around immediate crises. Its core mechanic, Readiness, determines whether a character can act usefully in the opening moment of a violent or high-pressure situation; it adds to the chances of surprise, adds to initiative, and determines the number of actions in a combat round. Without Readiness, a character may be physically unharmed but psychologically frozen, their lack of experience, training, or background renders them inert. Yes, But , by contrast, is a drama-first system. It incorporates combat, yes, but always in t...

Musings with my players after the recent play session . In the previous play session, a thief had died - slain by the poison on the coins he rummaged through. He ignored my description of them as "glistening and wet." But from that dungeon the players had got some gold, a magical sword and armour, and a Robe of Blending (which acts basically like the Predator's cloaking/chameleon ability). The fighter claimed the sword and armour, the Robe of Blending was unassigned. When the player rolled up another thief, they offered it to him. The Robe of Blending is worth 3,500xp if you take it, or up to 35,000gp if you sell it. Being a 1st level thief with 1 hit point, he decided to take it - but not without some discussion first. This brought him to his xp cap of 1,250xp - but the party lacked the 1,500gp (or 3,000, if training alone) necessary for him to train to level up (likewise for the fighter with the magical sword and armour). So they continued adventurin, hoping to find eno...

The Weapons vs AC table in AD&D 1e is one of the many examples in gaming of a good idea executed badly. It was very obviously an afterthought, unplaytested and shoved in at the last minute because some gearhead player demanded it.  It is a good idea because on the face of it, weapons should have some variation between them other than the sheer amount of damage they do. After all, historically some weapons were developed to deal with certain armours, blunt weapons to deliver blows through armour which could not normally be pierced, hooked weapons to pull armoured knights off horses to fall on the ground, and so on.  It was poorly-executed because no player was going to write down their to-hit rolls vs various ACs on their character sheet, which meant more time in play looking up charts and adding up numbers, and people would of course argue about AC2 coming from plate mail and shield vs it coming from some other armour plus good Dexterity, and so on.  This is the reaso...

  Too often, combats in roleplaying games take plain in a featureless terrain in bright sunlight. This then reduces the combat to a contest of who has the biggest numbers - the most combatants throwing dice, the biggest to-hit or damage throw, and so on. In Conflict  we suggest a more substantial approach. There are many aspects which can make combat more interesting, and make players and referee think  - and make it more than a competition of dice throws and numbers.  For game purposes, the environment consists of weather,   terrain and noncombatants .  Weather  - and shelter In the Western world most people have lived literally sheltered lives, always with sufficient and appropriate clothing and housing. Housing may be understood as very large clothing, and clothing as portable housing. Both serve the purpose of sheltering a person from extremes of weather, from getting frozen, cold, wet, hot or burned. Until a person has spent a lot of time outsid...

  Cliched? Yes! That's why we like it! Outland is a scifi movie made in 1981, and is of the same vintage and style as Alien and Blade Runner - and Classic Traveller ! As many have noted, it is essentially High Noon in space. A federal Marshal comes to the mining colony of Io run by the interplanetary conglomerate Con-Am, and finds the place violent and corrupt, and the men abusing stimulants to work harder. Scientifically, it falls down in three places: lights inside helmets, explosive decompression, and the composition of Io.  "I can feel schlock crawling all over me!" Scifi films have lights on in people's vacc suit helmets for the same reason medieval films have the hero not wear a helmet at all, so we can see the face of the actor the producers paid all that money for. Explosive decompression, where a sudden loss of pressure leads to people exploding, simply does not happen as depicted; this puts Outland partly in the schlock scifi category. As for Io, in th...

  Too often players and DM come to the game table imagining some solitary friendless hero who charges off by themselves. Should the DM not be soft, weak and useless and fudge the dice to save them from their foolhardiness, this would-be Rambo typically perishes horribly sooner rather than later. The wise player realises that they are part of a  party , a team of adventurers who work together to accomplish their goals of gold and glory. As the dwarves in  The Hobbit  put it, Far over the Misty Mountains cold To dungeons deep and caverns old We must away, ere break of day To seek our pale enchanted gold We  must away - not "I", but "we". In the early days of D&D, players often came from wargaming clubs, and so this could be taken for granted. Now when players are coming from watching movies with solitary heroes or playing first-person shooters, it cannot be taken for granted. This is a style forgotten by most, and so we bring in house rules which encourage s...

I work as a physical trainer, so I try to keep up with the latest exercise science. A study came out about naval special forces climbers. They're surprisingly big compared to civilian climbers. I discussed this with my trainer friend and he pointed out: "Military climbers aren't going up the hardest routes. They're trying to find the easiest." That's a very important insight. In sports we try to make things as hard as possible, in the military and warfare we try to make them as easy as possible. We both have ex-military backgrounds, which will be where our approach came from. This is an important insight for me, it explains why people like me and my friend are so out of the mainstream fitness industry - they're trying to make things harder, we're trying to make them easier. In mainstream fitness you get better so you can do harder things; with us, you get better so you can do ordinary things more easily. The sports climber wants to get stronger etc so ...