Design Journal: Crescendo and the OSR

 

During my last 4e game (Why We Kept Her) I had a conversation with a friend that was fated to change my RPG experience forever. I had been really happy with the story that had been coming out of that game. It remains one of my favorite campaigns. When I talked to Andy about the game and the story coming from it he remarked that 4e was not a story game. Flabbergasted, I shot back that I was getting quite a good story with that game, thank you very much! Andy's response was that the mechanics of 4e weren't generating the story itself, but that it was simply a combat game that happened to be present while the story was being told.

He then showed me Burning Wheel.

Eight years have passed. I've played the crap out of Burning Wheel. It's been with me through the beginning of my marriage and three children. But I began to notice something odd towards the end of the long campaigns I've done with Burning Wheel. In order to keep with the advancement system of Burning Wheel we had to play a very different game than what was happening organically at the table. The endings of our stories, while they had epic problems to solve, would normally grow quieter, more reflective. One of the games in particular (The Giggling Dark) was almost frustratingly difficult to tell the story that was happening with the mechanics. Its sequel, Autarchy, took the problem and exacerbated it. The game mechanics seemed to want pride of place, something that I don't want to do.

I really didn't know what to make of my experiences. So I kept quiet, observed, and processed.

Eventually I realized I wanted to do the character evolution game my own way, and thus work on Crescendo began. I'd never really designed before; I didn't think I had anything to add to the conversation of game design. Turns out I have a lot to say. Freaking figures. From this sudden realization Crescendo, Shadow, (Lovecraftian horror) and Its Shadow Still Remains (a 4e-inspired adventure game) have emerged. 

I was more or less designing Crescendo via playtesting; iterate a draft in a week, throw it at the players and see if their noses wrinkled. I'd then take it back and work the bits they didn't like, rise and repeat. I've got really good sports for playtesters. What a blessing! The only two sessions I've tested with a group of multiple people  (the game is meant for one to three players, plus GM) didn't go well. One of my players in particular was consistently shafted, in both sessions. I felt terrible of course, and asked what she felt was going wrong.  Keep in mind I'd had a good time playing around with the mechanics and moving the bits around. I could feel I had a blindspot. What Lena said threw me:

"No story happened. I felt like I was playing a board game."

Keep in mind Lena has done a 38 session campaign of Burning Wheel with me. It's the best story I've produced with that game. She may not realize it, but her opinion matters a whole hell of a lot.

And that's when something crucial began to click into place. My game had taken on a quality I'd come to loathe in Burning Wheel: the eating up of story-telling, player creativity, by the mechanics. Play Burning Wheel with all the extras and you'll see it: a group of players wrestling the mechanics into a coherent narrative. And the weird thing was that over the years I'd begun to think of story as something that came about by solely by pushing on the mechanics of a game. That's patently not true, of course. You need players who know what they're doing and who like each other to have a fun experience; mechanics guide generation, they're not the generator of the story itself. I've no idea if that's something other "story" game folks think about, consciously or unconsciously. But I'd realized that I'd been thinking it. And that's just not what I want in an RPG. The game I really wanted wasn't poking at the mechanics and watching the dominoes fall. I wanted folks to be interacting with each other in the shared world they'd imagined and only have the mechanics kick in where there "should" be uncertainty, and thus conflict. And yes, eventually that means dominoes, but that's to get you into an unexpected spot, not an end in itself.

Something was buzzing in the back of my head; it popped into my head to look over Principia Apocrypha, one of the seminal works describing the OSR.  Most of the principles I wanted in Crescendo, as it turns out, are OSR principles. And the concepts that are a little iffy (high lethality) actually work, if you get a little creative (if not outright esoteric).

Let me explain really quickly what Crescendo's setup currently is. The default is to develop one character per player over the course of a 30+ session game, pitting a character's Arcana, Tenets, and Traits against the Setting's Movements.

Players craft three Tenets, which are beliefs that the player wants to have Conflicts about. They're generally short ethical statements, or statements about a character or organization. Make a Tenet about things you want to make trouble about.

"Death before dishonor. (St. George) d6/6."

"Grieving doesn't get things done. (Rahab) d4/2."

"My sister is a goody two shoes. (Lilith) D4/1."

When you change the story meaningfully in acting on your Tenet you get a metacurrency called Fortune, which lowers the difficulty of challenges. When you spend Fortune one of the Immortals your GM drew up does something to help you. Or it could just be some random happenstance of chance. It's up to the GM, but Fortune expenditure can be as subtle or outrageous as the GM likes. 

There's a second major element to characters: Traits. Traits are what you want to be a sticking point in the narrative; you want them to gum up the works. Traits don't have to be bad, or evil. On the contrary, Traits can be things about the character that are good, but inconvenient. Traits are summed up as one or two words.

"Jaded"

"Brave"

"Congenial"

You get two Traits at the beginning of the game and can have as many as four. If you use Traits to further the story you get Dynamis, which allows you to reroll your dice. Traits are also used to recover the health of your Tenets, keeping the character from making hard (and almost never good) decisions.

Finally, there's Movements. These are the three things going on in the setting right now, with timers attached to them that give you a general idea of their urgency. These are simple statements that show the end result intended.

"The people will rebel against the Duke.  Rahab d20"

"The Duke will find the Holy Grail.  St. George d20"

"The Mayor frames the Duke for his own misdeeds. Lilith d12" 

Players, by interacting with these Movements and either helping or hindering them, get Persona, which allows you to increase the step of the dice you're using to roll.

All these metacurrencies, once spent, become XP. XP may be spent on improving your character, but it's really expensive and can only happen on certain times. XP may always be spent on contacts and relationships (making them findable without trouble), as well as property and equipment, converting the XP into currency.

"But wait," you may say, "My sessions can go without a dice roll, at times. I like it that way!"

That's okay. At the end of each session all unspent metacurrency can be converted to XP. But it doesn't transfer back, so be careful what you wish for!

This is the general framework I am attaching to the Principia Apocrypha. Exploration and investment in the world are rewarded, you can get your XP through careful planning, you're rewarded for interacting with things you care about, and the world is unfolded as you go along.

The biggest similarly between OSR games and Crescendo is the philosophy of rolling. In a standard "story" game rolling is an opportunity to push the story in a new direction. It's not a conflict, but seeing where the story may go. I've never agreed with this mentality. That's not a comment on that philosophy, per se. Just that I'm not happy doing it. Picking up the dice has always been a tedious thing to me, no matter how many cool things can happen as a result. So Crescendo will be a more happily antagonistic philosophy. Cool stuff will still happen, failing forward is still a thing and all that, but the dice are always stacked against you and the consequences for failure always lead to hard decisions. So make good plans. You'll get rewarded either way, regardless of whether you're rolling or not!

One of the coolest things about Basic DnD is the recognition that advancement should be based upon something connected to the world; in the case of a lot of OSRs, that's gold for XP. Because of its roots in Burning Wheel Crescendo has a really enjoyable reward system already: set agenda, go for agenda, get meta currency, which lets you fudge rolls in your favor. Meta currency then becomes XP. I have no wish to change that system, I find it one of the killer apps of the game.  But spending XP on Stats and Skills I've always found to be odd; there's not a whole lot of plain ole steady progression in most fantasy stories. So I restricted advancing those two things to specific times of personal growth, and made it stupidly expensive. But you can always spend XP on contacts, relationships, items, and property. Having the aforementioned four then lowers the cost of Stats and Skills, particularly relationships and property. So if you really invest in the world you get more rewarded in the long term! The more you're a part of the setting the more powerful you can become, as you hit personal milestones.

But what about lethality? Well this is where I get into my esoteric ranting. Those who like it may find it surprising in a good way. Those who don't will accuse me of sophistry. In the medieval era death was considered another name for change. In fact the prerequisite for changing was thought to be mortality. If you were immortal you could not change.  Change is a form of death; something in you dies and something new replaces it. So does the lethality inherent in the OSR show up here? No, but there is a constant change in the character, of a substantial nature. Characters will evolve and shift over time, in fundamental ways. And you don't necessarily control when that happens or even what that may look like, at least fully. The game is quite lethal, in its own way. But instead of dying you find that your are not really as dedicated to your causes as you'd like; things you think you believe in can die on the vine unexpectedly, forcing you into hard decisions that will have an impact that you don't expect, and for much longer than you had the Tenet.

So you're trying as hard as you can not to get forced into a rolling, because if you do your character will do probably do things that aren't just unexpected, but downright distressing. Something definitely can die as you play Crescendo, and its ephemeral nature makes the death of these things you thought you believed in almost more upsetting than losing a character. Who your character was is permanently in the rear mirror, waving as your character becomes something new, something strange. Smart play, however, will reward you and help you get where you want to go, all without rolling the dice. 

Does that make it an OSR game?

I don't know. I think the labels story-game and OSR are a bit strange. There's some philosophical differences, sure, but I find it telling that the big story-game umbrella, PBTA, is much closer to OSR design principles than either camp would care to admit. I'm also painfully aware that anyone can grab a bottle of piss and call it Granny's Peach Tea.  They may actually be right, depending upon the granny and the company who came to call.

Are there RPGs that are actually Granny's piss? Besides, y'know, FATAL? Inquiring minds. Point is, anyone can claim anything. Doesn't make it true. So I suppose I won't be making the claim that Crescendo is an OSR game. I doubt most OSR players would recognize it as such and if you're tasting piss no one should be telling you it's actually tea. There's definitely some sophistry in doing that.

But I will swear up and down that the Principia Apocrypha is a good chunk of the framework of Crescendo. The fact that I'm adapting it to my game on purpose is as certain as those federally required list of ingredients that have to be on the back of peach tea bottles.

"Was made with a healthy consciousness of The Principia Apocrypha."

I mean, at that point if you decide the ingredient's piss (nevermind Granny's) you can't blame the label. I hope.

Want to see what Crescendo is all about? Head over to the Crescendo Discord! The alpha launches in January of 2022!

Choosing an OSR Base (Whitehack, Basic Fantasy, Trophy Gold)

So I was asked by a friend what I thought of Basic Fantasy. I knew nothing about it. Instead of telling him I'd never looked at it I thought I'd take it upon myself to look into the game and see what it was all about. Keep in mind that I'm a mostly "narrative" gamer, who rarely dabbles in the OSR, although Trophy Gold has definitely turned me on to the concept. Eventually it's my goal to have an OSR group to run things with. So I was curious to see what Basic Fantasy was about. And how it would hold up to the other two OSR games I own: Whitehack and Trophy Gold.

But before we get into it I need to get something clear with you, the person who's reading. A lot of systems in the OSR are deliberately interchangeable. The OSR is largely built off of BDnD, which means that the movement often resembles Model T's: you can just swap out parts and tech with very little difficulty. Even systems that aren't similar at all, like Trophy Gold and Basic Fantasy, aren't that hard to hack into each other, especially since the systems are so simple that it hardly even takes a statistic class to know what is going on where in the system.

So the goal of this little versus post isn't to say which game is better. Honestly there are elements of all three games that I would use in an OSR campaign; that is a feature, not a bug. The question is what chasis would I use? And that's a very subjective question. Your answer will not be mine. That is part of the point of the OSR. So this post will cover what I look for in a game, just in general, and why I would pick an OSR game.

So, for me, the OSR is the other half of the RPG coin from "narrative" games. When I play a "narrative" game I want characters who can survive long enough to tell a good story about them. I give a crap about theme, about the meaning of the story. I deliberately put in recurring symbols and ideas and spend a lot of my time thinking about how on earth to make something that is purposefully edifying to me, the player(s), and anyone who reads any of the blog posts (assuming I write about it). That's my goal with a "narrative" game. I want something that becomes a form of mythology for everyone at the table. I do it on purpose. I also want to strip the player characters of what they think the are, until there is an answer, way down at the core of them. So, while my campaigns can be really brutal and dark, there is a purpose beyond just making the players suffer: what's down there, way down, at the core of someone? What's their primary choice?

When I get an OSR game? I flip that around. I don't want to hold hands and prevent deaths. I don't want to sit around and ask questions about the deeper meaning of things. It's not that it's not there; I've read too much about story structure and mythology and I care way too much about it for it to not show up. But honestly? The real world is a bloodbath. And sometimes it's nice to sit down and make sure the other asshole can't get dinner reservations anymore. So I want something simple, but flexible, and definitely something that allows people to make characters again quickly, because the dungeon just chewed up the last three people and we need another sad sack to go in and feed the need. Life ain't fair, buddy, get back in the meat grinder!

I do not pretend that there are not other ways to do the OSR.

That's the point.

Nor do I think that meaningful stories cannot be constructed using those mechanics. I know they can. But sometimes a hammer is really good for bashing in a head, as opposed to making a house. And the OSR makes really, really, really awesome hammers.

So how does that square up with Whitehack, Basic Fantasy, and Trophy Gold?

Well, let's take a look.

Whitehack is a modern riff off of BDnD. I say modern because there's only one resolution mechanic (d20 roll under the character's stat), character classes are more or less balanced, and the emphasis is upon streamlining down to the bare essentials, something that older games seem to know very little about. That being said, the character classes are pretty robust for the OSR, allowing for players to really sink in their teeth and care, no matter how much they don't want to. A lot of the game is deliberately collaborative, giving the players the ability to define  the setting almost as much as the GM, right there on the fly. And I love that! You can get a passive-aggressive war of canon between the players. I like that feel. It's a good antagonistic back and forth. And c'mon, The Auction (which is a conflict resolution mechanic that is meant to be used for everything but a fight to the death) is just an amazing mechanic. I love how quick, dirty, and decisive it is. I'd like to put in some room for compromises and whatnot, but as a base system it's far superior to only having combat. I'm surprised the innovations in Whitehack haven't spread further, considering how easy and simple they are to implement.

Basic Fantasy is a modern facelift of Basic Dungeons and Dragons. No, really, the rules are almost entirely lifted off that venerable ruleset. That is not always to its advantage. Multiple resolutions mechanics that don't really mesh with each other are a pain to explain to new players. The multiple saving throws of the system also don't really make much sense to me, given how the differing throws are used for things not explicitly covered by the monikers of said throws. I find that annoying. I know some don't. But it was enough to make me not use Beyond the Wall as much as I should, so that should tell you how much I hate multiple resolution mechanics!

That being said, Basic Fantasy has a really wholesome feel to it. This sucker is cheap as hell and bound nicely. My wife normally doesn't remark upon the quality of my RPG books but she definitely took a minute to admire it, especially for its five buck price. But there's mechanical stuff in here that I like too! There's ascending AC, instead of THACO, which is nice to not have to figure out. I prefer Whitehack's system for AC but this works as well. And the bestiary is just wonderful. So many publishers sorta skimp on the bestiary, thinking about making it its own book. And that's fine. But this bestiary? Man, I love it a lot.

Trophy Gold is the weirdest of the three games. It's not a d20 system. I know that plenty of OSR games these days are not OSR, but the archetype certainly is that of a d20 game, at least for now. Hell, it's not even a "full" game, as it's still in zine form, with rules spread between two zines, Gold and Hearthfire (which is still behind the Patreon paywall), not to mention all the incursions they've made in other issues. I greatly prefer the base dice system. I don't think most d20 games take advantage of the mercurial nature of the d20 nearly enough, which 13th Age turned me onto. Trophy Gold, borrowing from such amazing games such as Blades in the Dark and Cthulhu Dark, has something I enjoy a lot more than "standard" d20.

For those of you who don't know, the system in question is a d6 dice pool, probably 1-3 dice are being thrown (3 is you being stupidly lucky). After rolling look at the highest die of that pool:

1-3 is a horrible failure. Things twist out of your control and something bad happens.
4-5 you get what you want, but something bad happens too.
6 is an unqualified success

It should not take a rocket scientist to figure out how a typical session of Trophy Gold is going to look. If you roll those dice you are done. Done. And that means you do not want to roll, at all, ever. Which I think is half the point of doing the OSR in the first place. And the thing is that I want to keep that experience, always. There's a power ramp to many OSR games, bafflingly enough. I think some OSR games handle it better than others, but I don't think most handle it as well as Trophy Gold, because of how freaking evil that dice mechanic is.

That alone is enough to sell me. And that's before we get into the awesome Bestiary mechanic, which allows you to make up monsters on the fly. The monsters are then entered into their own log, unique to the group, which passes down the group, getting added to. It becomes an artifact of the group. Which I think is just so freaking cool! The Hearthfire rules, which further flesh out the loop of dungeon to home and back, create a mood that I just cannot ignore. It's a very melancholic sorta game, where people fail a lot more than they succeed. Which just makes success that much sweeter.

Well, in theory, assuming you don't sell off your friend to a lich so you can get out of the dungeon alive. Cough.

Cough.

Trophy Gold wins, for me. It's innovative, with a fantastic set of base mechanics that keep the core experience of exploration and player skill at the forefront, and you can have wildly different bestiaries coming out of each campaign? Not to mention those Hearthfire rules? I'm sold. This, for the record, is not a dunk on Whitehack or Basic Fantasy. Both are extremely good for what they do. But I find a bit of my "storygame" roots breaking through here. I like the way that Trophy Gold in particular is set up. I'll happily hack a little bit more if it means having a mechanical experience that appeals to the tastes that I already have.

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Reflections on The Veins of the Earth

Somewhere, deep deep down in my heart, there is an opening. A tear. A lesion. Something deliciously foul is down there, and it beckons to me, by its existence I am pulled. Peering into the abyss, I don't see anything. But I can feel it, whatever it is. It calls. I crawl down, not sure what to expect. And no, I'm not sure I ever could have explained it. But what I've found down there has always terrified, intrigued, and enamored me, in equal rotating twisting parts, flapping in the slight breeze like skin on a clothesline of intestine. I never once thought these places could be described.

And then I held Mr. Stuart's book in my hands. I stared into the blackness, once more.

A shudder came over me. I could feel the figure on the cover, I could hear his scream in my mind. I knew why he was screaming. He wasn't screaming because he was falling. Falling is nice. Falling is fun. I was jumping off of high dives when I was four, if not younger. I was jumping off of porches at two, over and over and over and over and over. I'm surprised my poor mother still has a beating heart, now that I think on it. But, even now, it's still fun! I still jump from stairways when I think no one is watching, just to feel the sensation.

It's the landing that's awful.

My bones, older than they were then, hurt, even if it's just a little bit, when I land now.

And I'm not falling anymore. I find that I miss it.

It's tragic.

He knows he's going to hit the ground and hurt. 

I opened the book and my pulse stopped, for just a millisecond. Patrick Stuart had crawled through the hole too. He's seen it. He knows. For years, decades, I assumed, in my flaming arrogance, that I was the only one who had found it and managed to keep anything resembling sanity. But that was done by trying to pretend that it didn't exist, by throwing up defenses that never worked but I wanted them to work so why shouldn't they? Why shouldn't it work? If I don't look at it it isn't real. The rest of the world can get away with it, so why not me?

I think he stared straight in, and wrote down what he saw. I'm not sure how. I'm in awe of it.

Perhaps the strangest thing was seeing the Aelf-Adal, his take on dark elves. I'd seen them. I'd met them. Somehow. Don't ask me how that works, but they're real in a way that you and I are not. I know that sounds crazy, but they're something way deep down in our consciousness. For all these years that I've run games I've hinted at their existence, to myself and others. But that was all I could stand. It was all I could do. I knew the deRO, the gnonmen, all the others in this tome. I looked at them and realized that all he'd done was name what he'd found, down where the soul leaks rivers of ash and gaseous bile. They weren't my names for these entities or concepts or archetypes or what-have-you. But they were the same things, whatever they are.

I think he put down a flag in the darkness and sat there until he could write it all down.

I cannot recommend this book enough to others. There's a lot that's useful here, even if it makes the skin crawl, which can be quite good for one's soul. It's good to be reminded of the madhouse we're in at times. I don't innately see this as a horror work and would not recommend it as such. Horror is too banal for what this book does, by and large. No, this is properly a part of fantasy, which is the older genre, from which horror takes its roots. It's a danse macabre, and that's good for people, in the proper doses.

I think a healthy dose of danse macabre is more than what most people think it is.

At some point I'll write an actual review on the book. Y'know, go through its mechanical bits and why they're awesome, talk about his veins generating toolkit and why it's amazing, and talk more about these monsters that cause nostalgia in parts of me that I never thought could feel such an emotion. It's a shame I don't really connect with the OSR movement all that much, cause I'd go for Lamentations of the Flame Princess hardcore, but those are not my mechanical and philosphical leanings. Fortunately most folks don't say no to money. This book will definitely get mine.

I'm not sure one should run from what's down in the lesion.