Well that lasted long. I've hit a snag with the mechanics of the system. Gonna take some figuring to get it to function properly over multiple levels. The reasoning behind it is still sound, I feel, but the implementation I worked up seem to encounter issues of scalability. It works fine as a single level thing, or even a few levels, but beyond that the system breaks down one way or the other, mathematically. It's only a setback but a rather annoying one thus far. It might mean I have to adjust things a bit. The thing I don't want to do is sacrifice any of what I'e come up with thus far as it all makes sense. I really don't want to have to pitch sensible design for math - I want better math to make the vision possible. Thus far I've been looking into alternatives to see what might be viable but I'm hitting a few dead ends and my enthusiasm for the project is wavering a bit as a result. In general today I've been in a crappy mood so I'm certain that's not helping at all. *grumbles*

Blood, Sweat, and Tears...

When I began exploring the idea of creating a roleplaying game I knew it was going to take a lot of work to get right. But I also knew that this project felt right.

Now I've had that feeling before. And in my experience the feeling of excited satisfaction rarely lasts. I hit a snag or I see a flaw in my thinking and the the whole feeling of excitement over the project begins to unravel. That's how it ends most of the time.

But not always.

When I created the Citadel of Storms 4th Edition adventure I knew something about it felt right overall. I knew it would require a lot of polish and I knew that I could probably continue polishing it forever if I wanted to but I recognized that there is a time to just be done with a project and move onto the next. It's possible to overwork a thing sometimes. In this case I still feel like there is more that could have been done or better ways to approach things but, in the end, it was, and is, a project that I am rather proud of and likely always will be. It was a labor of love in many ways.

So this role-playing system I've been working out feels right still, even after a few weeks and nonstop work on it during my free time. It's been a pleasant obsession as of late and I'm enjoying the process. And I want to talk about it here a bit.

In the beginning I needed to start with the basics - player stats. The simplest components to begin with. In D&D this meant six different scores. But I didn't want to begin with these without first examining what way I needed to define a person or character in the game. There's a bazillion different ways to define what makes up a person. And I found that the more fine you sliced these attributes up in an attempt to cover all of the bases the more trouble you ran into. Take dexterity for example. You could divide that up into hand-eye coordination, balance, flexibility, speed, reaction time, etc. and all this gets you is trouble. You get more and more questions about what stat does this particular skill fall under? Doesn't that conflict with how I'm dividing up this other thing? And so on. So the simplest thing I found, it to narrow all of the complexity of a person down into three stats.

Yes that's correct, three.

I find it to be a much more elegant solution for defining a make-believe person because the categories are so broad it is easy to see where something fits - not a struggle to arbitrarily pigeon-hole something into pre-defined, limited categories with lots of verbal overlap and obscurity.

The stats are:

Fitness
Prowess
Cognizance

Fitness is the overall shape your body is in in both strength and health. I think we all have an idea of where we fall in that category.  And it defines the basic structure and makeup of your body in one easy number.

Prowess is a nice and easy catch all for your ability to do something. This includes the knowledge of how to accomplish it so it represents not simply Dexterity, not simply Intelligence, but the application of both towards accomplishing a task.

And Cognizance, how aware of your surroundings you are and how well you are able to put that knowledge to use, representing both the wisdom of decision making and the ability to learn as well as skill in social interactions and personal charisma.

Together these things: blood, sweat, and tears, make up the basic three pillars that support the foundation of your character.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "These categories are too broad!" "The fewer the ability scores the more alike all characters become because of reduced variability!" and uh... so on.

 Not true.

At least not if you do not solely rely on only these things to define a character overall. But there are oh so many more ways do define your character's characteristics.

There's a bunch more stuff I could go on about but it's still in the works. I do have to say that thus far it is coming along rather nicely. 15,000 words thus far. Lots to go yet. But I do like what I've some up with thus far.

You are meant to be a somebody... not a nobody...

I've been playing D&D for nearly 25 years now and I suppose I've tried a couple of other gaming systems during that time I suppose, but somehow they never sat right with me and I always returned to D&D. But something about D&D has never sat just right with me either.

The idea of a role-playing game was that its rules give you a vehicle to escape - to live as another for a time. And to that extent the rules for your character were there to build for you that person to live through. To make someone that had different traits than you but to do so with a vague sense of realism so it could accomodate your actions. But with D&D there has always been a certain... problem... with that, in my mind. And perhaps the problem has more to do with my group's particular style of play than it does with the game itself. Maybe. But if it does it was built on the foundation of inadequacies of D&D as a system and on the definitions it has given us over the years. The problem I have is that... it really doesn't feel real when it comes to measuring a PCs power versus the average man.

For me this has always come up in the idea of levels and, in particular, the notion that someone even at first level is better than the average person. I forget what edition the following notions come from but bear with me while I describe what I sort of feel like defines the vast majority of NPCs.

These NPCs are 0 level commoners. I think there were some rules about them once - even classes of a sort. Warrior was one, I believe. It was used to describe your average member of the militia or city guard. These individuals had like... well.... hardly any HP. One hit with a longsword - two hits, tops, and they were through, most of them. These weren't supposed to be kids, mind you - these were, in our real world equivalent, cops and military recruits. Only with swords and armor. The idea that they pose little to no real threat to your average band of PCs once they were 3rd level or above - probably less in 4e which gives more HP at first level - bothers me. Though I do not believe they made rules for "0 level" NPCs there that I can recall. They sort of ignored them entirely in 4e to be honest.

Why does this bother me so? It bothers me because the vast, vast majority of people who play this game are, in real life, 0 level NPCs. And the notion that we are useless and powerless in a world bothers me. And it truly interferes with story telling sometimes. The useless and powerless part bothers me less than the fact that this notion of PCs and the general public - Us and Them - are so divided. And that bothers me less than this concept underlying D&D and interfering with how I run a game. How does it possibly do this, you ask? Here... let me show you.

Your wrongly accused fifth level PC is suddenly surrounded by ten 0-level city guards with swords and readied crossbows trained on you. What happens next? Well we all know... You escape and probably take a few of them with you - leave the scene not in custody as they planned and likely with not very many wounds.

Now...

What happens in stories, movies, and books with a hero in it that has comparable skill to your PC? He probably gets taken into custody at least some of the time, right? Same as we would if we, ourselves, were surrounded by that sort of threat. Or were jumped upon by 10 other guys. I would fully expect to see the toughest fighter that lived taken down and beaten by 10 guys all working towards taking someone into custody. Now some would argue this isn't the case - the hero in a story might just as well kill a couple of guards and that they would be frightened and that he would escape. True. But the idea of PCs as uncapturable save by cutting and bashing on them until they reach negative HP and then stopping their bleeding and hauling them off seems... odd... to me.

'But you could just say that city guards are, say, 3rd level and that would solve the problem,' you are probably saying to yourself. That I should just redefine what the guards are to up the threat. Yes, this is true. But by the definition of an NPC warrior these average guards responding to a person who has just been seen committing a crime by a member of the guard would only be warriors. Or  0-level. Bones, as we sometimes call them in my group. Or gones (rhymes with bones). Short for boneheads and gonads I suppose. Derogatory terms for non-threats. There's no respect for them because they pose, in the minds of both myself and my players, NO threat. And via the system defining them the do indeed pose no threat.

But they should! If I raise them up to third level I get players complaining that this city has guards that are ridiculously powerful because they are all "special" and have levels. Somewhere someone broke down how often one encounters even a first level character in the fantasy world - most likley because they were looking to raise an army or to define the population of a city in terms of leveled NPC. To help the DM. To give a sense of "realism." Yeah, right.

So I hate this dichotomy of the leveled and the unleveled. I hate how there's distance between those two groups, even at low levels, which grows to tantamount to a higher order of species in mid to upper levels. Why? Because the PCs are special.

Well I've always thought that NPCs can be special too. That they can be a threat. Because this is how the real world feels. That each person can pose a threat if they want to. That each person can fight back and that a bunch of them can overpower even the strongest if they have the will - not the skill... not the special training... not the magical blessing of the PC... but simply the will to work together to take down a threat. 10 guards jumping a PC and hauling them off in chains. We all know that this is how it would probably work in the real life. And I think it needs to work that way in the game too, to a certain extent.

I am happy to say that in the RPG that I am making I have devised a system to determine base abilities for anyone of any age and that the PCs start off by using that system, just the same as anyone else in the world. In the system you could play a kid or a teen and have a measure of ability. You could play an adult. You could play someone elderly. The system accounts for the difference in development and decay for those ages and starts everyone off with a reasonable amount of health to make them count in a fight - even for just a time. The system allows you to track your character's abilities from birth all the way to death - gives a method by which you can determine your state when you age and even what your death from old age might come from for that matter. It fits us all into a tidy little system. And it gives a method to account for experience and to add levels. There are no restrictions for advancement... for ANYBODY. Each NPC has a chance to be something more. Most won't be. But there is no "0-level Class" that they are shunted into. No "useless" label applied to them. No second-class citizenry that they are shuffled off to so as to leave the PC free to dominate the world of the useless.

You can, instead, play an average person with some innate talent that simply hasn't been thrust into an adventure yet. A lot of good stories start off just like that. Think of the hobbits in the Shire before leaving to travel the wilderness... Think Luke Skywalker on his farm looking at the twin suns with the music swelling up behind him....


Think you.


You want to be someone special? Be better than average? Good. This RPG system has a method for making that happen in your stories. But in the game, like in life... you must work to get it. And the abilities you have at the beginning before that experience comes still count for something. The strength, mental and physical, that lies with each of us still counts. Each of us are but seeds - full of potential... full of promise... full of desire...

and spring has come to test us all...