It was a lovely afternoon yesterday , and my son has finished finals, so we took a long drive to get some high quality ice cream to celebrate. As we were enjoying our treat, I realized we were fairly close to the Calvert Marine Museum. It’s a really amazing place full of sea life and Megladon models and adorable otters. We had not been there in several years, so it seemed like a good time to go back. I’m delighted that we did.

There were a lot of great things to see, but one caught me by surprise. In a display on naval conflicts in the Chesapeake Bay, they had a few weapons on display (pictured above, full credit to Mike Fitzpatrick) and among the familiar boarding pikes and blunderbuss was something I didn’t recognize. It looked like a spear shaft with some sort of tube strapped to the end in lieu of a blade.

It turns out, this was something called a Congreve Rocket, and it’s an absolutely fascinating piece of technological history.

(If you already knew about these, that’s awesome, but I absolutely did not, and that is not going to dampen my enthusiasm).

Functionally, it is more or less a polearm sized bottle rocket, with exactly the kind of accuracy you would expect from that. I found some videos of people launching them, and I was slightly disappointed to discover that you don’t hold it in your hand and point at the enemy, but despite that, I remained delighted enough to go read some more about them. It just got better.

• The initial technology was actually from India, and I want to take a moment to shine a spotlight on the use of these in India by quoting a passage from Wikipedia:

  “Some of the rockets had pierced cylinders to allow them to act like incendiaries, while some had iron points or steel blades bound to the bamboo. These blades caused the rockets to become very unstable towards the end of their flight, causing the blades to spin around like flying scythes, cutting down all in their path.”
  
  Just try and tell me that’s not hella metal.

• The application of these rockets against the British provided motivation for William Congreve to make his own copy, and the British started putting them on their ships.
  • So far as I can tell, the rockets range and damage capabilities did not offer any real advantages over actual guns. Rather, the advantage they offered was that they required very little setup, so you could fire a lot of them in very short order. As it turns out, this was a pretty good way to start a fight.
• These saw use in the early 1800s, including in the Napoleonic Wars, and apparently were knocking around in conflicts through 1870 or so. However, the specific use that resulted in them appearing in the Calvert Museum was their application in the war of 1812. These are the rockets of the famous “rocket’s red glare”.
• Some efforts were made to use them in whaling. The lack of accuracy was an issue, but a whale is a big target, and it turns out that rocket sticks are really good for killing whales.

Unsurprisingly, my thoughts turned to how these could be used in games – I could 100% get behind this kind of dragonlance. Two big threads popped out.

The first is that this is one more thing to add to the bucket of things that all simultaneously exist in the late 1800s, in case you just need one more element for your cowboy/samurai/victorian game.

The second is very specific to Blades in the Dark. As soon as I read about the applicability to whaling, I can no longer imagine a Duskvol where these weapons don’t exists. Sure, you won’t see them on the streets often, because that’s such a terrible idea, but I think we all know that simply being a bad idea is not enough to stop much of anything in Duskvol. They’ll need a different name, of course, and I will absolutely run on the idea of stolen technology with these, and think about who used them first. My instinct is that they’re Iruvian, and the original rockets included flaring versions of their sacred flames, making them tremendously useful against ghosts and such. Applying the technology to more mundane murder seems very on point for Duskvol.

Anyway, it’s a very small thing, but it was a delightful reminder that the world is full of inspiration that is just waiting to smack you upside the head.

I’m running an Amber game for the household, and I’m using the following system. It’s a super rough writeup, but I wanted to get the draft version up somewhere.  There’s a very minor power system I’m not getting into right now, but the heart of it revolves around a iceless system where you roll dice after success to determine the position the success leaves you in.

Core Stats

The 4 stats^[1] are:
Fire (Spades) – Covers actions relying on physical speed & nimbleness.

Air (Diamonds) – Covers actions relying on intellectual horsepower or pure perception.

Water (Hearts – Covers actions of personal presence or understanding what is known.

Earth (Clubs) – Covers actions of physical strength or toughness.

When taking an action, if it falls under one of these stats, the character gets the stat as a bonus. If two stats might apply in different ways (such as using clubs or spades to hit someone with a stick), use the one that aligns with the player’s description of the action. When two or more stats both seem applicable (such as spades and diamonds in a question of how quickly you notice something) use the lower of the two. 

Characters start with 2 points in each stat, and have 12 more points to spend. This number is the default for an Amber like game, but might be adjusted up or down. 

Descriptors

Characters have 3 descriptors. They’re freeform, so go nuts. If a descriptor is applicable to a situation, then you get a +3 in that action. If a second descriptor is applicable, the bonus drops by 1, so you get +5 (that is, +3 and +2). If all 3 are applicable, then it drops again, and it’s +6 (+3, +2 and +1).

NPCs

NPCs have descriptors, but very rarely have stats. However, they have another mechanic to give them a little variability – Tiers.

NPCs can have a tier from 1 to 5, and the tier represents:

1. How many descriptors they can have
2. How big their starting descriptor bonus is. 

So, a Tier 4 NPC might be a, I dunno, Brave, Bold, Knight, General, and in a fight he’s going to be running around with a value of 10 (4 + 3 + 2 +1) so he’s KIND of a badass. 

Tier	Represents
0	Inexpensive furniture. Lunchmeat. Very small rocks.
1	The woefully inadequate. Children. Exceptionally fierce squirrels.
2	Most People
3	Heroes, adventurers, general badasses
4	Demigods, paragons, Isekai protagonists
5	Dragons, Gods, all that jazz.

As a double cheat, the GM is not obliged to sketch out all of an NPC’s descriptors, and they’re free to re-use them for simplicity. Which is to say, you don’t need to flesh out that Tier 3 Bandit. Just give him a 6 on banditing. That’s what he’s there for. IMPORTANT: This is just a trick for sketching out nameless characters. Anyone important enough to have a name merits a little more attention to detail, especially because for those characters, it can start mattering what descriptors they have or don’t have. 

Resolution

Higher number wins.

I mean, yes, sometimes there’s no an opposing number, in which case the number is “what kind of person could successfully do this?”, and then higher number wins. If you need guidelines, consider that a tier 2 human doing the thing they’re best at has a big old 3, so 3 is a pretty good default. 5 is good for something pretty hard. 9 is pretty much best in the world sort of stuff. 

Couple rules of thumb:

• Set the difficulties as if they were for NPCs, and that allows the characters to benefit from their stats, which is what they’re for.
• There’s a whole thing here about the role of narration in resolution. If players are clever or use tactics or find other ways to shift the situation, you can very reasonable make up a few points difference. This is, however, very subjective and that’s deliberate. If you don’t want it to be subjective, you probably want more numbers. 
• Tools done provide bonuses, they just change the difficulty. A cliff might be really hard (5) to climb on its own, but much more doable (3) with rope. The same logic applies to things like taking time, having help and all the other ways that people tackle problems. 
• For all that I’m committing page inches to them, static difficulties are largely boring. Even if players can’t immediately overcome such a challenge, a little extra effort will usually be enough, so try to assume success, and just fold in things like extra time.
• Opposition, on the other hand, tends to be a little more interesting, at least it can be. 
• MOST of the time, there’s no actual “resolution”. You know what the character’s numbers are, and you are going to stop to trigger the system when the logic of the narrative is obvious.

BUT WHAT IF IT’S INTERESTING?

When it’s interesting, or there are uncertainties, the GM can call for a roll. Critically, you only call for a roll when the character is going to succeed. If not, stick to narration and description. But when success is certain, but other questions are open, that’s the time to call for a roll. Possibilities include:

• Going into town to ask around about a person
• Crossing swords with a notable opponent
• Breaking into a well guarded villa
• Relying on magic for…well, most things.

The purpose of the roll is to see how the situation unfolded – has it revealed new opportunities, or has it sprung unforseen complications?

A roll is made with 2df, so the potential results range from -2 to +2, and the results are interpreted as follows:

Roll	Means
+2	Everything’s Coming Up Milhouse. A happy coincidence introduces a major opportunity.
+1	A lucky break. Things go well, and a minor opportunity is revealed.
0	Business as usual. The scene plays out by the numbers.
-1	Bad Break. Minor complication
-2	Oh @$^%! Major complication.

OPPORTUNITIES & COMPLICATIONS

Opportunities & complications are both elements that move the scene forward – they either introduce a question that the player must answer (like: The building is on fire, what do you do?) or an opportunity for action that had not previously been available (like: You spot a secret door, do you want to go through it?). 

Opportunities are generally easier to adjudicate. A minor opportunity might take the form of a little bit of extra information, a friendlier reception, a nice tip or the like. A major opportunity is a full on lucky break – run across a friend, discover a significant piece of information or generally be in the right place at the right time. 

Complications are trickier. They can suck, but it’s important that they not negate the underlying success. If the complication offers a choice, the choices should not include (effectively) retroactively failing.

As an example, the character sneaks into a castle to steal the Maltese Frankfurter. They have the skills to succeed, but there are a lot of variables in this, so the GM calls for a roll, and the player gets a -2. 

The GM’s first instinct is “You grab the Frankfurter, but then every alarm in the place goes off. You have only moments to flee ahead of the guards”.

Now, that might be a fun scene, but it raises the question of what the player was trying to accomplish. If their goal was GETTING the Frankenfurter, this is probably fine. But if their goal was passing undetected, this pretty much flips the bird to that. For that character, the twist emerging after they get out might be more appropriate. 

A minor complication sours the result a bit. You succeeded, but…perhaps you took a minor injury, or the prize had a catch, or you didn’t end up right where you hoped. A minor complication tends to not be about a choice but is instead just a little extra badness that was outside of the character’s control.

A major complication take one of two forms. First, they might be a consequence – an injury, a loss of resource or some other complication they need to proceed in the face of. These are fine, and if you can think of a good one, they’re cool. Otherwise though, consider a force: the complication create a situation the character must respond to, such as an imminent threat, and asks “What now?”

Options:

• Roll for all the good stuff – If a scene is particularly cool, such as a duel with a nemesis, the outcome might be sure to be failure, but it might be fun to allow them to throw in a die roll to see where it goes. 
• Bad Stuff – If using this rule, characters are allowed to take one more descriptor (though they can still only use 3 of them on a given action). This descriptor is flagged as “Bad stuff”, and in any situation where the character actively uses it, a roll is appropriate, and if the roll take a bad turn, the bad stuff descriptor is almost always the problem.

Anaway, as I said, it’s a work in progress, but I want to capture the bones of it here.

1 – I could not tell you how many variants on these 4 stats I have used throughout the years.

I’m always intrigued by the idea of mechanizing language, but I usually think about it from the player side, where certain phrases are designed to trigger mechanical effects. Things like aspects and moves, yes, but it also is a big part of games that require a lot of learning to engage – “I cast magic missile” is a sentence that is absolutely dripping with mechanical hooks. “Cast” is an action which engages mechanics. “Magic Missile” is a specific set of effects laid out in the rules. Once you understand those things, then the sentence feels natural and organic, and the volume of rules kind of fade from view. It’s a good trick, and one worth deliberately pursuing.

Last night I ended up thinking about this from the GM side. Now, the GM has somewhat different responsibilities in her language. Yes, the rules mechanics are also in play, but the GM is also the proxy for the characters sense of the world. She is their eyes and ears, so to speak, and the decisions related to how to communicate the world are incredibly important.

Specifically, because the GM cannot convey every piece of information about what’s going on, she must be able to shorthand it efficiently. Consider a scene where our bold adventurers enter a room – the GM describes it in a quick sketch (“About 30×3, with bare walls and a door on the opposite wall”) but then goes into great detail about a specific piece of furniture, let’s say a desk. The GM has just signaled to the players that the desk is important and would be interesting or useful to engage with.

Or so we hope.

This is one of those areas where the history of adventure design has worked against us. In older, more competitive games, that sort of thing would be viewed as cheating, or the GM giving hints, which was bad sportsmanship. That lead to two specific patterns that have kind of dirtied the water.

First, adventure designers and GMs started deliberately subverting this expectation by applying loving detail to things that were distractions or ultimately hazardous. This, in turn, made players very wary of anything the GM drew attention to as a probable threat, which in turn inspired GMs and Designers to make things worse. Not a great scene. Hopefully, newer players don’t have as much of this baggage, but this is one of those areas where a new player can be quickly scarred and taught not to trust the GM, so its worth being mindful of it.

Second, it lead to an idea that descriptions needed to be “neutral”, with no cues from the GM. This is not super practical because it requires that the GM either go into excruciating detail, or that the players must ask questions about every single thing until they happen to hit upon the right thing, in a weird variation on one of those computer puzzle games where you need to get the mouse on exactly the right pixel to solve the problem. Not fun for anyone.

The solution to this was to move it to the dice. Early perception skills were mostly a way to skip this process and answer the question “Do you find the cool thing?”. Obviously, the topic of perception skills has evolved a lot since then, but I hold it up as what is ultimately a pretty convoluted way to avoid a fairly simple mode of communication.

I’m not necessarily saying that you should forgo perception checks in favor of GM cues, but I’m definitely suggesting that you COULD.

Note to self: Do not decide it’s time to start writing immediately before the world descends into plague lockdown.

Ok, so I knew I had not written here for a while, but firing this up this morning reveals that my last post was in November, and that’s a bit mortifying. Clearly, the clever answer is to dash off a brilliant post right now in an explosion of good intentions, but I know that’s a losing proposition, so I’ll beg a little more patience. I am in the midst of changing a bit of my situation in hopes of re-enabling a bit of writing time, because I deeply and genuinely miss it.

Wish me luck.

Quick thought over coffee.

Almost every mechanical problem becomes easy to solve if you know what a player cares about, because once the player cares you have the tools to offer meaningful choices with real costs.

Unfortunately, as useful as that information would be at design time, it isn’t. It comes up at the table. This is one of those reasons I tend to rate GMing over design in the priority stack, but that’s a whole other thing.

So the designer has two options: first, she may assume the player has only self interest and design mechanics that put consequences into the character. This is pretty shallow, and a way to hack it involves putting more things onto the character sheet. It’s not a bad hack, but it’s got some awkward edges to it, and when it breaks it is not graceful.

The other option is to presume that players are invested in something the designer values and just sort of hope the game finds the audience for which that is true. It may well do so, since that design decision is a flag for those players, so it may be fruitfully self fulfilling.

(An alternate version of this is to make it the player’s problem to care, and just throw up your hands if they don’t. That has an appeal, but is not quite my jam,)

Looking at those two-and-a-half options, I admit I’m wondering if there’s a third. So much of the judgement about care needs to happen at a personal level, I wonder if there are explicit tools to offer the GM to work with this. Some of the “put it on the sheet” mechanics feel like they might be usable in this fashion, but it’s going to take some thought.

Ok, I have a new theory of crunch.

Kahneman & Tversky did a whole lot of super smart writing about how we think, and one of the takeaways is that we have two main modes of thinking, system 1 and system 2. There’s a great book on this (Thinking Fast And Slow) that sold a ton of copies, and some Nobel prizes floating around, so this is a pretty commonly known model, not some weird fringe thing, so bear with me a moment.

System 1 is Fast, automatic and intuitive. It’s what we use most of the time to just function in the world to walk, talk and generally interact. System 2 is slower and used for reason and analytics. Our thinking is generally dominated by system 1, but we engage system 2 when we’re forced to by circumstances, such as high stakes situations or problems that we lack heuristics for.

The part that is weird about this is that system 1 is really capable. It’s easy to imagine it as just sort of dumb autonomic stuff, but the reality is that it can do a LOT, and it’s super good at creating narratives to make everything around you make sense. System 2 is what we tend to think of as thinking, but it kicks in less often than we think.

Lots of implications to this and stuff that’s way smarter than anything I have to say, but I was thinking about it recently and considering the prospect that a lot of the System 1 stuff sounds similar to what some people enjoy about gaming (flow, creating narrative and so on) and that when they talk about the game just “getting out of the way” that seem consistent with the game being a system 1 operation. On the other hand, there are plenty of games and players where the enjoyment seems to be explicitly in engaging system 2 (for complicated problem solving and so on).

And I think that has given me a new handle to think about what “crunch” means – it’s system 2 play.

This feels very satisfying to me because it embraces the fact that there is no bright line distinguishing crunch from the alternative – rather, it is a function of comfort and familiarity. If you learn a system well enough for it to require less thought (allowing System 1 to do the lifting) then you stop needing system 2 for it, and it stops being crunchy.

It also makes it make a little bit more sense, because some people enjoy system 1 play, but not system 2. Some enjoy system 2 but not system 1. Some enjoy both. That maps to my experience of how people end up enjoying games (and how they end up complaining about crunch or about other things).

Now, there are some odd gaps to this. Some of the other things that can trigger system 2 are emotional, and I’m not sure how the intersection of that and FEELINGS larps works into the model, but I also don’t have a good model for those in general, so I just flag it and move on.

Anyway, I’m not sure if this is a useful perspective, but I definitely intend to try it out for a while and see how it goes.

Another look at the thing in my brain right now, specifically a page out of my current notebook.