On a Roll: A Quills & Pixels Submission

My university has a few publications run by students/faculty. One of them is called Quills & Pixels; furthermore, one of my friends was asking me to make something for it. The parameters is that the piece needed to be nonfiction [not made up]. My reply to that was, "NONESENSE!" In response I wrote about me and my usual group's first combat encounter: mixing imagination, story telling, and reality.

After I submitted it I did realize one mistake, I misremembered the name and class of one of the characters as the one they played a couple sessions later, but oh well. There are probably a couple typos too because the publication has a graduate class tied to it where the students review submissions and do editing work, so I wasn't as cautious as usual. It's a quick 1268 word piece. Do enjoy it.

On a Roll

            Once upon a cliché in media res opening we recognize our heroes traversing down a dusty road with towering shrubberies on either side. A clattering of plastic on wood echoes and they ready themselves to fight. A goblin—ugly and grotesque with green bark-textured skin and vacant red eyes—falls out from behind a boulder and lands face first into the road in front of the ox driven cart announcing, “I am hiding now,” in a monotone voice.

            “BWHAHAHAhahaha. . .” Everyone at the table responds. Jim, a rotund but burly ex-bouncer, questions while rubbing the bridge of his nose in a snicker, “This is what ambushed us?”

I the game master—general referee and narrator for this table-top game—struggle to keep a straight face. “Look he rolled a critical fail on his stealth check,” even though goblins in Dungeons and Dragons have a +7 added to their stealth roll results, a natural one [dice landed on one] is still supposed to play out as the worst possible scenario. I slip into an improvised shrill voice of another goblin attacker, “Look I know he’s weird but Gary’s my cousin so be a little more P.C. about it, okay?”

My brother George, who is playing a human cleric chimes in, “okay so my initiative rolls puts me first.”

“What do you plan to do brother?”

“I’m gonna pop open a wineskin and just chill in the back of the cart,” he motions to the other three players: Jennifer, the Female Human Barbarian; Jim, the Male Human Fighter; Dena, the Female Halfling Rogue. “They got this.”

“Heh, then Dena it’s your turn.”

She wipes some of her well-groomed curls out of her face and begins shaking her lone twenty-sided dice in her hands as if she is about to do a craps shoot at a casino. “Okay, where am I?”

I lean over my notes to a well-aged piece of paper with a road, cart, and trees crudely drawn on it. I point to a hastily scribbled S on it, “There.”

“Alright, Sharp is going to use burning hands,” her dice goes clattering across the table.

As the clanking of wood and plastic echoes the battlefield, Sharp, the spry halfling, stands atop the cart and places her hands in front of herself. She makes a strange series of somatic gestures, involving her middle fingers. She recites a quick yet powerful incantation, “FUCK OFF!” A horrendous conflagration of flame streaks out of her palms into the faces of two goblins. Then everything freezes in place.

“What am I supposed to roll now?” I ask bewildered, flipping through the Player’s Hand Book pdf on my computer.

Dena is peering through her spell list, “Uhhh. . . no, uhmm. Okay, so ‘Each creature in a 15-foot cone must make a Dexterity saving throw. A creature takes 3d6 fire damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one.”

“Thanks,” I reply then my brow furrows, “what am I trying to beat then?”

“I think my spell damage or something. . . 14.”

            Back on the battlefield the scene continues with the same artificial echoing as before, the characters don’t ever seem to notice it. The two goblins cry out in pain from the magical flames. Their green skins become a viscous black slim as the flesh underneath chars. One of the goblins behind a tree cries out, “Tom, Harry!” He draws his short-bow back and looses a black arrow at Sharp, striking her in the shoulder.

            “What a dick,” Dena comments while subtracting four from Sharp’s overall health.

            Widening his eyes in a disturbed glee Jim states, “My turn!” He rolls his 1d20—a single twenty-sided dice—to see if he hits Gary the Goblin. “Does nine hit him?”

            I double check the statistics for goblins. Seeing their armor class (A.C.) is eleven, I state, “No.” I begin to gesticulate a swinging two-handed sword. “Bruce rears up his mighty blade, and. . .

            . . . the brave hero barely misses the goblin as it was trying to stand back up. Gary the Goblin had tripped and collapsed face first into the dirt again proclaiming loudly, “I am stealthed!”

            Bruce Nightvale rears his head back, “Bwahaha, come on.” Gary begins to gather himself back up again but faces the opposite direction.

            The barbarian of the party, Olga the Dainty, jumps out of the cart and throws a javelin at Gary. The dense yet well hewn oaken stick wizzes through Gary’s obnoxiously large golden ear loop.  The goblin places his hands over his eyes, “I am stealthed!”

The scene freezes once more and Jennifer exclaims, “Dang it, we’re just a fanning the goblins at this point.”

The scene continue as Father Marks, the cleric, stands up from his resting spot and recites an incantation known as inflict wounds. A nearby goblin is struck by acrid purple lightning. The goblin cries out as a series of small yet ever growing wounds spread across its body until the poor creature collapses on the ground in a heap of flesh. Father Marks then goes back to resting in the shade of the cart.

Sharp spins around from atop the cart and looses an arrow in revenge at the goblin who hit her. The creature clutches an arrow sticking out its side. As black blood oozed through its gnarled fingers, a javelin from Olga impales its throat. Bruce Nightvale misses Gary the Goblin again.

“Gary continues to walk around the battle just shouting how he is in stealth and hiding,” I tell them as a new round of combat begins.

“Is he not going to fight back?” Dena asks.

“No, it’s funnier this way. Gary is too dumb to die.” I point to my brother, “He’s the only one left so it’s back to you.”

He gets up to get a glass of sweet tea from the kitchen, “Nah, I’m good.”

Dena’s dice rolls across the table, “What, I missed too.”

“Gary stands oblivious to the threat but peers over at his cousin’s corpse. ’It is quite breezy today, hey Chuck are you sleeping on the job? Silly chuck,’ Hehehe. . . I like how this is going.”

Dice roll across the table but fall off, “If it’s a twenty I’m keeping it,” Jennifer reaches down and grabs it. “Nope,” then shakes the 1d20 in her hand and drops it onto the table, “Eight, crap. Maybe if we fan enough he’ll freeze to death.”

Bruce’s 1d20 clatters across the table. Glancing to the dice Dena confirms, “Twelve.”

“Okay, that hits him,” I reply.

He slaps his hand on the table, “Finally!” Jim goes into character with a menacing laugh, “hEhEhEEee. . .”

“Well what happens Jim?” I query to my friend.

“Bruce Nightvale pulls out a javelin and impales the fucker and stomps its head into the dirt for good measure.” His dice for damage roll across the table, “I did nine damage.”

Leaning over I ‘X’ out Gary the Goblin on my crude battle map. “Alright y’all have won your first combat encounter in Dungeons and Dragons.”

“Wewt,” George states with mild interest, “What’s the loot?”

I go through a list of what items Goblins are stated to carry as my players go about dividing it up and figuring out where to store the items. The experience points, basically score points tracking character power progression, are calculated in total then divided amongst the party also. We continue to roll on with the adventure, “Okay, now on for the next bit. . . Roll your perception or investigation. . .”

Fin

Writing Process: Part 1 - Rambling

Ever wonder how to start making notes or ideas for a campaign? I mean, I have mentioned it before but this post is just more casual. Really I would say this advice I have is for more than just being a game master or player, but any form of writing. It is called free writing. What does that mean?

Ignoring the more boring academic meaning, in practice free writing is an act of brainstorming that involves vomiting words onto a page without really stopping much to think on them. In fact this whole post is a free write. It will be sloppy, error ridden, disastrous, and have sudden changes in topic.

Why? Am I lazy, yes; am I trying to teach something, yes; am I just throwing ideas out there, yes. Look, I really don't give a shit about how many people see this Blog simply because I have no advertisements up yet to generate money, so I can just ramble. The 1800+ views I do have is certainly nice though, and I hope someone out there had an enjoyable read of my amateur blog work.

Speaking of bad transitions, have you ever just wondered why you are drawn to table-top games? There are probably an uncountable number of known and unknown variables at play, but a major reason. Is it simply to socialize, to express creativity, to try something new, to take part in a story, or other? I have found myself considering certain aspects of table-tops, and I have honed in on this aspect of agency, which is just having options.

I know from courses I've taken on game design and usability that agency is very important. People like options, being forced to do something upsets us in games. Why is that though, is it derived from evolutionary aspect of survival somehow, is it from environmental conditioning to have options, is it just us not liking to be told no? A good part of it could be tied with the idea people like immersion in game, yet immersion in a game is different from immersion in a book.

In a book you have no agency, no options, no nothing, except arguably whether or not to turn the page. In a game, players are the character. It dosen't' matter if they are simply a "You" word in a text based game, a vertical bar in a Pong, a character in a point and click adventure, or even a character in an RPG [table-top or otherwise]. By simply being the character, the player takes on immense amounts of immersion for they now have a role to play in the story. That simply could be why so many people dislike cutscenes or anything that "breaks" immersion, because the immersion in a game is tied to agency. While in other media, audience agency isn't necessary.

Well I'm bored with that speculation. Let's look into some other ideas bubbling in my head. First is that I've really wondered if I could just take older experiences from the game or even play through Ruination of Bran and have either a webcomic, though my artistic skills suck, or short story excerpts of play sessions. I know the best thing to do with it would simply be to have it be very fictional with some meta jokes. The more interesting thing to do would be to have both players and fictional characters involved in the story.

It would be very difficult as one would need the players themselves to stand out and also their characters or sloth out and have there be no real role play in terms of personality between the players and their characters. The webcomic idea is simply because I'm curious if I could manage that. My favorite artistic style is realism, make everything realistic looking because that shows immense skill. My skill is not like that, so I would most likely appear an Order of the Stick mimicker.

In either case the stories wouldn't have weekly updates, maybe monthly, simply due to my own time constraints. The best way to go aobut it is to make several posts set up ahead of time, and then do what you can to keep yourself ahead, with an initial backlog of two months of posts. I don't know, just thinking out loud because it's a freewrite.

Anyway we'll see in a week or more what the next stage of the writing process is. Yes there will be more of this, but far less rambling because brainstorming is over!

Asteria Rising: Update 8

I've spent a lot of time working on a new roll system for Asteria Rising. "Why a new one?" Well audience member I made up to answer a question. . . Initially I did start off with just making a D&D homebrew campaign, then I began changing rules here and there. My last update talked about a major overhaul of some features but didn't elaborate on them. I'm spoiling for you all the dice roll system as it currently stands in Alpha version 0.13.

I decided I wanted to incorporate aspects from another table-top-role-playing game, King Arthur Pendragon by Greg Stafford. All the reviews of his game and my own watching of YouTube channels playing his game indicate a very robust system for combat and maintaining character. One problem for D&D has always been people staying in character. Hey, it is not easy especially when you need to talk to people outside and inside of character throughout a session.

Going off those aforementioned YouTube channels, I reversed engineered my favorite components of the fighting system and character personality system. The issue is that those don't work when spliced with D&D. To fix it, I decided to mark down players going through rounds of combat in the videos to determine loosely what occurred on a mechanical scale. I know I'm not on par with what Greg Stafford uses, nor do I want to be. Asteria Rising can burrow and be inspired from other sources, but it shouldn't be a copy in all but aesthetics. Now with the context in place, feel free to view the below excerpt [with formatting for the blog] from my Asteria Rising Game.

Dice Rolls

Ateria Rising uses dice in order to determine the outcome of player actions. Dice rolls affect character creation, combat, social interactions, and so forth. The roll system focuses on players increasing their skill levels in order to reduce their chance of failure when performing actions.

An example is that a character may have Modern Firearm of 15; as the image below shows, the skill level indicates that the character can have a successful roll between 2 and 15. Rolling any more or less than that results in a failure.

This method also means that low skills, such as 2. Will results in the only success being a critical success at 2. If that skill became a 3, then 2 would be a success at 3 a critical success. Ways to increase skill levels are covered more thoroughly in the Skill section.

While normally rolling above your skill level will result in failure there are two exceptions to the rule. First, if your character has 1 or 0 in a skill then you must roll a 20 in order to have the effect count as a success. Rolling a 1 with a skill of 1 is still a critical failure. The rule is so characters maintain a chance of success with every skill, even those that they have little aptitude with.

Second, if your skill level is above 20, usually caused by a modifier or condition of some kind, then the success chance is still 2–20. However, the critical success chance changes, as the above image suggests. Count the excess over twenty back and everything over that number is a critical success.

E.G. your character has gained an advantage in a situation and has a skill level of 24. Their critical success rate now ranges from 16 [20 subtracted from 4] to 20. This exception exists so players aren’t punished for getting a bonus to their skills in a situation [fight, social interaction, et cetera] at higher skill levels

End of Excerpt for Alpha0.13

Now I try to keep everything concise and clear in the rule book, as you can tell from above, but I wanted to give more reasoning for why I'm using this system. One is that I decided to incorporate a system for skill increasement, which means characters can progress through their own agency rather than just a table. That idea worked better with the new roll system rather than the D&D system.

The roll system also removes the need to calculate modifiers. At the end of the day Asteria Rising is meant to be played with my friends, and most of them don't like having to calculate modifiers in character creation. It also reduces number crunching in combat to an extent. Rather than continually adding pluses and minuses, a character rolls their weapon skill to see if they hit. Success, they hit, AC absorbs damage. To be fair that system for hits and damage isn't an upgrade from D&D's, merely a sidegrade [on par].

The new system also opens up further avenues for me to expand on how armor and weapons relate to each other, creating a tactical necessity for certain items. If the item section is ever finished confidently I will post that section as well. I did need to modify quite a bit of previous existing mechanics, and the monsters I created still need a stat overhaul. So, the change did not come without a price. I still feel confident in this change because the system simply makes more sense to what I want to do; therefore, even if I'm wrong that confidence will allow me to get the job done quicker.

Remember, the system is new and in alpha still. I will most likely need to modify it, but the above are the core rules to the rolls. In news, I will also be launching another page, and it will contain links to the various Asteria Rising updates. Some of my preexsisting pages will also go under review to be scrapped or combined with another to conserve space. Also, if I ever get off my bum [it means butt/ass/rear/rectal pillow], I will make a new background for the site. So far, the issue is that the image itself needs to be 1800x1600 pixels yet still only 300 kilobytes. I'll figure something out, eventually.

Have an amazing day.