Tag: RPGs

#REVIEW: Making Enemies: Monster Design Inspiration for Tabletop Roleplaying Games, by Keith Ammann

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

We’ll begin with my absolute favorite thing for book reviews: Disclaimers! First, that I got a copy of this book for free (it comes out on Tuesday) and second, that I’ve known the author for a vaguely shocking twenty-two years, and not in the usual parasocial Internet way that I know a fair number of authors but in a “he’s been in my apartment and we’ve worked on grad school projects together” sort of way. There’s a review of his book The Monsters Know What They’re Doing here; this is actually his fifth book, technically part of a series but, given that they’re all roleplaying sourcebooks dedicated to helping game masters for TTRPGs do their jobs better, there’s no reason to feel like you need to read them in order. I admit it; I have not read the books in between, although I intend to.

Here’s the thing about Keith, guys: Keith is one of the smartest motherfuckers guys I’ve ever met. He’s ludicrously well-read and he’s got a mind like a steel trap. If he had been born seven hundred years ago he would have been a monk and would have discovered something that we all take for granted by now; if he’d been born in the 1810s instead of the 1970s you would never have heard of Gregor Mendel. However, he was born in the 1970s, so instead of more or less inventing genetics as we know it, he writes about roleplaying games.

Making Enemies is, ostensibly, about creating home-brew monsters for your TTRPG campaign. He doesn’t limit himself to Dungeons & Dragons with this one; attention is paid to Pathfinder, Shadowdark and Call of Cthulhu, along with another system that I have to admit I’ve never heard of called the Cypher System. Each section of the book begins with a more generic introduction to/discussion of the aspect of monster design being discussed, such as morphology, abilities, size and number, quirks and weaknesses, etc; and then there will be sections afterward dedicated to the differences you’d see among each of the specific systems. I felt like Call of Cthulhu got a little shorted, as it doesn’t quite work the same way as the rest of the systems (You Are Fucking Doomed is more or less Call of Cthulhu’s entire thing, and this book is about making good enemies for your players, not killing them in seconds) and of course D&D gets a bit more attention than the others, but there’s good stuff here for everybody who plays TTRPGs.

Nothing I’ve just said is sufficient to prepare you for just how deep this book gets, over and over and over again. The chapter called Weird Nature, about monster type and morphology, could be copied and pasted into a biology textbook with barely a sentence changed. The book interrogates the entire concept of “monster” over and over again in a way that is completely fascinating and yet in some ways entirely unnecessary to a book about TTRPGs, which are generally much more lowbrow than this. There are interviews scattered throughout the book with professional game designers, and it’s stunning how high-level, no pun intended, some of these discussions get. I would love to know how much actual research went into this book that had no direct relationship to TTRPGs. My guess is: lots.

(Memo to Keith: go whole-hog on your next book. I want four hundred pages on your theory of game design. Do it.)

But seriously. I feel like I should have been taking notes and adding Post-Its into the book while I was reading it, and the reader of this book should be prepared to see the occasional quotes from genuine academic works of philosophy and then less than a page later an anecdote about The Muppet Show. That’s not to say that this book doesn’t have a ton of good old-fashioned in-the-weeds nerd math, because it does. Witness:

I’ve talked about this before: I love enthusiasm. My favorite thing about TikTok is how great of a vehicle it is for people to share activities they love with other people. And the reason I feel so comfortable recommending what by rights ought to be a very niche book to literally everyone I know who reads is that Keith’s incredible enthusiasm for game design and TTRPGs shines through every page of this book. I enjoyed The Monsters Know What They’re Doing quite a bit and recommended it, but I was clear (and so was the book!) that it was a book for people who ran TTRPG games. I think there are people out there who would enjoy this regardless of what they’ve done in the TTRPG space; if you consider yourself an autodidact and an intellectual (dare I say “polymath”?) you may find yourself skipping the weedier sections here and there that get into specifics about the systems, but the interviews and the beginnings of every chapter and the relentless attention to careful thinking throughout are going to bring a smile to your face.

Making Enemies comes out October 7th. Check it out.

#REVIEW: The Monsters Know What They’re Doing: Combat Tactics for Dungeon Masters, by Keith Ammann

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Reading, Reviews5 Comments

This is a new one: I’ve started reviews before by pointing out that I know the author, but in this case, I really know the author, as in “he knows my real name, was in my ed school grad program, and he’s been to my apartment.” Keith and I essentially had the exact same day-to-day schedule for two solid years, and while we’ve fallen out of touch other than occasional social media interactions since graduating in 2005, it’s simply not possible for me to leave my relationship with him aside while talking about this book. The Monsters Know is, in a lot of ways, possibly the Keith Ammanniest thing Keith Ammann could possibly have written, and while that’s a compliment, it’s very likely not one that’s going to be salient to anyone other than me.

Here’s the tl;dr: If you play Dungeons & Dragons, and especially if you’re a DM, you’re highly likely to really enjoy this book. If you do any sort of fantasy roleplaying that isn’t exactly D&D but is D&D adjacent, it’s probably going to be useful anyway. The book– five hundred-plus pages– is filled with essays on what feels like the entire Monster Manual (it probably isn’t, but still) breaking down various fantasy monsters based on their provided stat blocks, and providing suggestions on how they might act, what tactics they might use, and how they might react to any number of possible actions by your player characters.

There is also math. I’ll get to that in a bit.

Now, to be clear, I did not read this entire book. Why? Because it’s more of a sourcebook than something you sit down and read straight through, and if I have a criticism of it it’s not of the writing or the subject matter but the physical format of the book, which looks like a novel or, like, a “regular” book, when I really feel like it ought to be formatted more like a roleplaying sourcebook of some sort. I probably read … half of the entire thing, skipping around to different monsters I was interested in and occasionally occasionally passing over sections that were a little more power gamey than I’m interested in. Ordinarily I wouldn’t review something if I hadn’t read all of it, unless it was an actual DNF, but again: that’s not what this book is. The section on the kuo-toa will be there whenever you actually decide to include kuo-toa in your game; you don’t really need to read every word of that to appreciate what the book is doing. I am fairly certain that if I told Keith, word for word, “I liked your book but I didn’t read all of it,” he would not be a bit surprised, nor should he be.

Let’s be a touch more specific, though: based on, for example, the description of a species as being high Dexterity but low Strength and medium Intelligence, and the different combat abilities that a species or monster might have, The Monsters Know might suggest that this species prefers to attack from ambush, using sniping tactics and a high likelihood of retreat once injured. From there the section might move more specifically into D&D language, suggesting that Dash and Disengage actions might be used frequently in combat, and sometimes it’ll go so far as to map out a model encounter of sorts. A lot of the time it’ll then get into the actual mathematics behind various attacks, spells, etc, using those numbers to suggest which abilities a monster might prefer to use and which would provide a bit more utility and a higher reward to risk ratio. A lot of the time it’ll suggest a hit point threshold at which point a monster might retreat, too. I haven’t DMed much at all, really, but this was still fascinating to read and to think about, and I may suggest my son look through it, as he’s starting his first homebrew campaign soon. The book loses me a bit when it gets super granular about the numbers behind the abilities, but that’s the beauty of a sourcebook; you can ignore the stuff you aren’t as interested in. I was never a power gamer, and was always more interested in the abilities that felt fun or cool than whatever might be strictly the most effective move at any given time, so that stuff isn’t for me as much.

So yeah. My buddy wrote a book. If you’re into the same kind of nerdery we are, you should definitely check it out, and you can also go to Keith’s blog (the source of a lot of this material) at themonstersknow.com. If you’re in, he’s on his … fourth or fifth book by now, I think, so there’s a lot more where this came from.

On too much of a good thing

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

One random thought tonight, as it has been a tremendously sleepy Saturday and I’ve pretty much just been lazing about and reading and playing video games all day and have no thinks left: I have been tremendously enjoying Dragon Age: Veilguard, which was a great weight off of my shoulders after quitting partway through the last installment, but at 55 hours in I would very much like to put it to bed now, thanks. I just went through the trophies for the game and there appear to be five or six more story chapters, which just makes me even more tired.

It’s my own fault; if I wasn’t such a blasted completist in this type of game I could probably be done with it by now, and the worst thing is that I know I missed one– and only one– trophy, necessitating an eventual second play through. I was probably going to do that anyway to see how a bunch of different story decisions work when I make them the other way, but now I have to, at least for certain values of “have to” involving being an obsessive dork.

God, it’s good there aren’t any real problems in the world, right?

A current and timely post

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

I have been playing Returnal for the last several days, a game that, at least currently, does not allow you to save. And as I’ve been playing I’ve been thinking about the roguelike genre, which sort of incorporates constant player death into its story model, and thinking about some spoilers that I’ve heard about Returnal’s late-game story, which I won’t repeat here but which touch directly on the idea of “you” dying over and over again in a game.

And that got me thinking about Bioshock, one of the best games I’ve ever played, and a minor tweak that could have made it even more amazing.

Spoilers for Bioshock, a game from 2007, follow. Have a divider:

Bioshock has one of the greatest mid-game twists I think I’ve ever encountered. It’s basically a first-person shooter, and your character is exploring this underwater city, and you’re taking instructions and direction from this guy somewhere in the city who is talking to you over a radio. At about the midpoint of the game, you encounter the guy who has basically been your adversary throughout this journey so far, and after a whole lot of exposition that I’m not going to go into, this guy, wanting to control his own destiny, tells you to pick up a golf club and kill him with it. Well, asks, actually, specifically using the phrase “Would you kindly” in setting up the question.

And at that point it’s revealed that would you kindly is a trigger phrase that has been implanted in you, and that you’re conditioned to obey any order that follows that phrase. And the game flashes back for you to your ally using that phrase several times in directing you to go to certain places and do certain things throughout the parts of the game that you’ve played– all of which you’ve done, because that’s how video games work. Characters tell you to do things, and you go and do them. There have certainly been times where I, the player, didn’t necessarily want to do a thing that someone in a game was telling me to do, and there are games where player choice is a big part of the game itself, but you’re gonna play along, because the nature of gaming itself demands that you do so.

And so, here you are, with a golf club in front of you, your other weapons disabled, no way out of the room, and you literally cannot progress in the game unless you obey orders. And in the game, it’s presented as a question of free will, and whether free will even exists, and meantime here you are, the player, and you’re literally 100% in control of this fictional person’s actions and 100% constrained by the rules of the world the game has set up, and it absolutely blew my mind when I first played it all those years ago and frankly it still has a lot of impact.

And it just hit me this morning how it could have been better.

What if, instead of forcing you to kill the guy to proceed in the game, the game gave you the option to just … cut to credits? And then the game was over? The whole game is this extended meditation on free will and choice, right? So why not give the player to make the choice to disobey their conditioning, and by “their” I mean both the character and the player, and refuse to kill this person, but at the cost of not being able to play the game any longer? I mean, obviously you can always do multiple runs, but you’d still have to play through the whole first half again. Just being offered the chance would have taken what was already an amazing gaming moment and elevated it into the stratosphere.

It would have been unbelievably awesome, and I wish they had thought of it fourteen years ago, instead of me thinking of it now.

I can make this work

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

I finally broke down and bought a new bookshelf for the office, so I’m rearranging a few things. I think it needs some LED lighting. The statues are too dark right now.

(The rulebook on the shelf that you have Questions about is a real thing that exists and I bought it for novelty value. It is exactly as ridiculous as you think it is.)

On terrible people and my time & money

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, PoliticsLeave a comment

While I’ve been doing some DMing for my wife and son lately, the last time I spent serious time playing role-playing games was in college. I lost my group when I moved to grad school, and basically never tried to find another one after that. My college group mostly bounced back and forth between Call of Cthulhu and Dungeons and Dragons.

One of the best campaigns I was ever involved in was a published Call of Cthulhu game called Horror on the Orient Express. I have some of my best memories as a gamer from that campaign; it was a tremendous achievement in game design and, not for nothing, was expertly run by our DM as well.

I recently discovered that Chaosium, the company that owns Call of Cthulhu, was planning on updating and republishing Horror on the Orient Express in a new, two-volume, 700-page, ludicrously expensive version for their 7th edition rules. It’ll be out in a couple of months.

Did I say ludicrously expensive? I don’t care, I’m buying it anyway. This is why I have a job.

Well, it’s for the seventh edition, and while I doubt that the seventh edition is all that different from the rules I’m familiar with (and it’s not like I intend to run this; I’m buying it for nostalgia value and to reread it) it felt weird to think I was going to buy an adventure for 7th edition Call of Cthulhu without actually owning the core rulebooks for 7th edition Call of Cthulhu.

So I spent a hell of a lot of money at the Griffon yesterday. Because these damn things are pricey, even under normal circumstances.

Let’s talk about H.P. Lovecraft a little bit.

Just in case you’re not familiar with him (although I doubt that’s going to be the case for too many of you; after all, you’re here,) the Call of Cthulhu game is based on a mythos created by the works of an author named Howard Phillips Lovecraft. H.P. Lovecraft’s influence on fantasy writing and specifically the horror genre is kind of difficult to overstate. His work is a big deal, and damn near everybody who works in genre has read him. He was also an enormous, disgusting racist, and his racism bled into a lot of his work. Now, when I say that about somebody who was born in 1890, a lot of people are going to shrug. “He was a product of his time,” they’ll say. “We can’t judge people Back Then by our modern moral standards.” Nah. H.P. Lovecraft was so much of a racist that it was notable in the 1920s. Like, ordinary run-of-the-mill 1920 white people thought this guy’s ideas about race were kinda fucked up. Google the name of his cat sometime. The guy was a hell of a writer, but he was trash as a person.

Typically I do not like to spend money that will trickle into the hands of giant fucking racists. However, in the case of Lovecraft, while the overall picture is complicated, his work is mostly in the public domain by now. Furthermore, Lovecraft had no children and his wife divorced him (well, sorta) a few years before he died, so there’s not even a family that money spent on Call of Cthulhu is going to go to.

But the guy’s legacy still has to be grappled with, right? The World Fantasy Award used to literally be a bust of his head; it was remodeled in recent years to a (much better) excellently creepy full-moon-behind-a-tree version after Nnedi Okorafor, who is Nigerian-American, won the award and pointed out that the greatest award of her literary life meant that she had to look at the face of a dude who literally didn’t think she was human every day. There is a long, ongoing, and very likely never-ending conversation about whether we can separate art from artist, but we can definitely avoid literally honoring the artist when that artist turns out to have been a terrible person. If that person is still benefiting from the sale of their art, then you need to have a deeper conversation. H.P. Lovecraft has been dead for 80-some-odd years and buying his books doesn’t send money to anyone connected to him, so reading his stories isn’t as problematic as, say, reading the work of still-living garbage humans John C. Wright or Orson Scott Card.

(“As problematic,” I said. And I’m not going to spend one second trying to talk someone out of feeling otherwise; if you feel like I’m making a distinction without a difference, let me know.)

All of this may be more lead-in than this issue deserves, but I was leafing through my new rulebooks last night and, as one probably might expect, Lovecraft’s name is all over this thing. And I thought about that for a bit, and went to the first few pages of the book, looking to see what they had to say about the man himself. And I was startled to discover that the official 7th edition Call of Cthulhu rulebooks devote two sentences of a chapter called “H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos” to talking about Lovecraft’s racism, and those two sentences are basically there to utterly dismiss it. The game, remember, is traditionally set in the 1920s, not exactly a great time for American race relations, to say nothing of the sexism, and the author is one of literature’s most famous racists.

I’m a little surprised and more than a little disappointed that the game doesn’t address this more directly, is what I’m trying to say here. The newest edition of the Dungeons and Dragons rulebook has a whole section at the beginning of the book about how players of all races, genders and sexualities are welcome in the game and theirs is set in an explicitly fantasy world. Call of Cthulhu is not only based on the work of a racist but is set in the 1920s, when any number of people who might be interested in the game now might face some issues playing characters who reflect them. I can easily imagine a Keeper making the life of a Black or gay or Asian or enby or hell even female player miserable because That’s How Things Were Back Then. Maybe, in our pair of oversized-hardback, two-column, 400-page rulebooks we should take at least a few paragraphs to talk about how to navigate that? Particularly in the Keeper’s Handbook, the book for the person running the games? This hobby has kind of a reputation for being a little exclusionary; can we take some time to push back on that, please? Just a little?

I dunno. I’m not– at least not without further reading, and again I’ve only skimmed these books since buying them– accusing the Chaosium writers of being racist or sexist. Right now what I’m specifically saying is that there’s a huge blind spot here, and it’s kind of made me uneasy about shoveling more money toward this company. I may feel differently once I’ve read through the rulebooks; if I discover I’ve missed something important (and there’s 800 pages of material here, so this is entirely possible) I’ll update later. But this is squicky, and I don’t like it, and I thought that was worth talking about a little bit.

In which I turn a good decision into a bad one

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek2 Comments

I was recently able to pay off a frankly horrifying amount of credit card debt. I have finally, at 43, rectified the errors of my twenties, more or less. In the process of doing that, I deliberately slightly overpaid a couple of the cards, since I wasn’t exactly sure when the big check would go through and so I went ahead and made my monthly payment and then the big lump sum.

Then COVID-19 hit, and I don’t know if you’ve tried to get in touch with a credit card company by phone lately, but apparently one of the side effects of this disease is you call your credit card company, because I waited an hour, on two separate occasions, to try to talk to a human before giving up and hanging up. Turns out that the only way you can get them to send you a check when you overpay an account is by talking to them in person– there is no way to request it online. The other option is to wait four or five months without touching the card, at which point they send you your money to zero out the balance.

Well, I eventually gave up on getting ahold of anyone, and decided that if there was ever an excuse to blow some money, “I literally have a negative balance on my credit card” was about as good as that excuse was going to get.

Under ordinary circumstances, that money gets turned into books posthaste. But that would have been a lot of new books, and my damn unread shelf is already a catastrophe. So what else can I get? Hmm.

Enter Wyrmwood. And these fucking beauties:

You might remember my C2E2 trip at the end of February, where I came home with a similar set of obsidian dice in a bloodwood dice vault. These are made of opalite, and if I hadn’t specifically thought to myself “let’s see if they have any dice made of obsidian” after deciding that spending $400 on Damascus steel dice was obscene even for the looser “buying anniversary souvenirs at a con, with money I have saved specifically for this purpose” standard I was using for my funds, I might have come home with these instead. The vault is made of cherry, which is surprisingly light, but the dice themselves are a bit heavier than the obsidian ones.

And, oh, God, is opalite pretty when you hold it up to light. Please focus on the dice, and not my ruined fingers:

You can sort of see the orange tinges among the blue in the top picture, but looking at light through them is just amazing, and these are stunning in daylight. Which, sadly, we don’t have any of right now, but trust me.

The truly ridiculous thing is that this set and the vault didn’t exhaust my extra funds, so I have several more (much less expensive, but still cool) metal sets coming this weekend. It’s a sickness, I know. I mean, at least I’m not on heroin, right?

(Have I pledged to their Kickstarter for a set of turquoise dice? Am I considering adding to that pledge for something else? Maybe.)

2:54 PM, Thursday (I think?) April 30: 1,054,261 confirmed cases and 61,717 Americans dead. My wife commented yesterday that she thinks I’m spending too much time monitoring the ARCGIS site I get this information from, but I think sublimating my anxiety over the whole thing into the data-nerd parts of my personality is … well, might be a healthy response? Reasonably? Relatively? Hell, I dunno.

(EDIT: Holy crap, does setting a featured image look terrible in this theme.)

OUTER WORLDS early impressions

On By Luther M. SilerIn video games1 Comment

I almost didn’t buy this, because the idea of the folks behind Fallout basically trying to cross Mass Effect with a Western was a little bit too compelling; I don’t have time for a video game to eat my entire life right now, so it’s almost good that so far the game hasn’t hugely grabbed me. If you’re a gamer, “the folks behind Fallout tried to cross Mass Effect with a Western” really does tell you almost everything you need to know about this game except for the heavy dose of corporatism overlaid on absolutely everything. So maybe if they crossed Mass Effect with a Western and then crossed that with some sort of other future-tinged corporatocracy; the fact that I can’t come up with a proper analogue right now tells me that that’s the game’s main bit of originality, since otherwise the tone is really Firefly, which isn’t a bad thing.

I’ve gotten off the first planet, then went to the second place, and once I got there my ship was immediately impounded and I got hit with half a dozen new quests … and then I quit playing, because it all made me tired. If you have the time for this game, and you like the Fallout/Mass Effect/Dragon Age school of “do quests for this guy, then do quests for that guy, then collect these companions, then talk to them a lot to unlock their quests, then go do those,” you’ll enjoy the game well enough, and usually that’s right up my alley, but … maybe my alley is a bit more crowded than usual right now, and I’m more focused with cleaning my alley and getting some shit out of my alley than properly being … up … it?

That metaphor fell apart. The tl;dr version is that the game is perfectly fun and pretty to look at and there’s all sorts of shit to do and it may just be too damn much for me right now, since my head is in “give me a game where I hit shit and don’t have to think about it too hard” mode, and this is not that game. It’s why I’m still doing Dark Souls runs. I can stab the same shit in different ways. No surprises. I’m too tired for surprises right now.

In work news: I finally have a second human back in my classroom again. She walked in to witness third hour not having their best day, at all, and didn’t immediately quit, so I’m hoping everything works out. Having another adult in there will ease my workload significantly and, not for nothing, actually means the kids will get more help, which is, like, supposedly the point of having adults in the room, so that’s a good thing.

…

I need to get to bed early tonight.