The Seraph Omega Rangers: Session 1

 

"RISE"

So Today

I was... informed... that I was going to run a Power Rangers RPG campaign. I warned my young players that I was gonna run Power Rangers the way I wanted to, and they’d have to deal with it. They agreed. They’d already made characters: a Jackson, green ranger with a lance, and Janet, a pink ranger with a bow.

No, I did not smile at their names. They wouldn't have gotten it. But don't think I didn't chuckle.

I have had the core rulebook sitting around for a few years and they just picked it up and presented me with completed character 24 hours later. Turns out, sometimes you just have people who are ready to go.

Why Did I Warn Them?

To me, the best Power Rangers episodes were always about desperation. My blood was always pumping for that show when the stakes were so absurd that the Rangers' powers made the odds better... to just being outmatched. Green With Evil and the Psycho Rangers are fantastic examples of what I'm talking about: the Ranger powers do not actually bridge the gap, but merely make it possible for the Rangers to win by their wits and courage.

So, to hilariously overstate: Power Rangers it the kid's equivalent of Conan or Solomon Kane: eldritch horrors, kickass action, and gumption, in a bubblegum sci-fantasy wrapper.

So What Happened?

It actually went really well! I had to do a quick crashcourse, but once I'd done that, I was feeling pretty confident I could avoid borking the game.

The Crash Course

I sat down and listened to Milestone Play's excellent crash course. I didn't have the time to go through the whole thing, but I skipped around his well put-together video, and learned very quickly that I needed to have the combat and rules marked. I explained to my players that I was going to run straight out of the book, and that it would take me a minute to sometimes figure out what the rules wanted me to do. The Power Rangers RPG actually has a ton of depth to it, and I didn't want to sacrifice that depth for "fun" and "speed". I explained to my young players that rules are meant to be followed, if possible, and that taking the time to learn them was worth the effort. So we were going to ruin a tutorial session of sorts, just with foot soldiers. 

The Black/Phoneout

So we had Jackson and Janet at a park with some other people, just hanging out. They weren't Power Rangers, but just highschool students were older souls. 

Suddenly all phones lost their networks, and the streetlights, which had just turned on in the gathering twilight, went out. Janet made a stupidly high Technology roll, and Jackson made an even higher Science roll. From these rolls, I gave them the following information.

1. All cell phones, regardless of carrier, were out. This meant a pretty big infrastructural outage. The fact that everyone was experiencing it meant that everyone for about a hundred square miles was isolated from the greater world.
2. The power going out at the same meant that yet another big piece of infrastructure was down.
3. An EMP blast would have been big and ugly and extremely noticeable. Nothing big and ugly and extremely noticeable happened.

Jackson and Janet realized that either a bunch of somethings went wrong at once, by accident, or there was something purposeful going on. They stood there a moment, filled with dread, as they watched everyone else in the park just figure out that multiple carriers were down.

And then there was a horrible grinding sound

Like a bunch of concrete being dug up... all around them. And these vulture-like... things.. dug came up. Made of the red soil all around them. They immediately threw themselves at the nearest humans, and began to eat them... and flesh and hair began to sprout from the monsters' bodies... forming wings. Everyone else ran, screaming.

But not Jackson and Janet. When they asked me what should be done, I simply asked: "Do you want to die well, or do you want to die poorly?" After a second, they realized what I was saying: there were too many monsters, they were too powerful, and they were too fast. It was either go down screaming or go down fighting. Pick one.

They ran straight at the things. 

There was a nearby pond, and they each threw an earthen monster into it. The monsters struggled, getting weighed down by the water. Jackson and Janet ran at another two monsters, and knocked them off the people they were savaging. Others started helping. Jackson found a metal bat nearby and literally pulverized one of the monsters in a few quick blows.

And then two of the monsters jumped on him, and one got a big bite out of him, almost killing him instantly. Once again, the players asked me what should be done, and I asked the same question: "Do you want to die well? Or do you want to die badly?" They nodded. "Let's die well."

Janet charged one of the monsters on Jackson and tackled it to the ground.  The other people tried drag the remaining monster on Jackson off, but couldn't. So Jackson choked up on the bat, and pushed the monster over, and pulverized its head through close hits with the bat.

They both got up, to see the other people were fighting back. They weren't cowering in fear anymore! They had an example of resistance, and were following! Of the original seven, four were dead.

Grind. Grind. Grind.

And now they were back up to a dozen. Jackson and Janet looked at me, overwhelmed. This wasn't going to work! How could they win without powers? They'd literally built a tank/sniper duo, and I'd said they couldn't use their powers, because they didn't even have them yet! What on earth could be done but die?

I asked the question, one more time: "Do you want to die well? Or poorly?" They both took a second, and looked at each other. Both of these players have extremely strong affective imaginations. They were there. They could hear the screams of panic, they both had flinched when Jackson had gotten bit. They didn't get mad at me for saying "No powers, yet." They were just trying to understand what the fuck they should be doing.

"Let's die well. We're going down swinging," they both said.

"What if I told you that that question about dying well or poorly was a question your characters heard, in their heads?" I asked. Everytime I had asked the question, I had no clarified whether or not it was in-game or out of game. This one little clarification turned on the lightbulb. Suddenly they understood they were being tested.

"Now, shout 'RISE'," commanded the voice. Neither knew the other heard it.

But they did. And they shouted.

Suddenly they were in full Ranger form. Six fiery wings (Yes I know the stupid AI put on four). Jackson's bat had transformed into a lance. Janet held a bow. Fire radiated from them, and halos of fire floated above their heads. The park, which was getting dark, was suddenly illuminated by the green and pink flames.

And the dozen monsters were running, in surprise. So were the people! They thought something worse had showed up!

Jackson and Janet went and looked into the pond. They saw their new fiery forms staring at them. And then suddenly they were normal. The dark was closing in. So they went back to their houses... to find nobody had power. Or cell phones. Still.

And there were things circling in the sky. Things with wings.

The Fall of the King of Sota: Chapter One

 

So we got a limitation on these session reports: the players are still in real-time, plotting against each other, so I'm going to have be general. I will record my findings as non-spoilery as I can, even at the cost of "trust me bro". Someone wants further records, I can climb through my Discord DMs.

Ransu 21-27

So this was the first week where people started sending me orders. This was amazing to watch. More than half the players had moments where they went "Wait I can really do this?" and I simply said "Yes, and here's how long it takes for you to do so". There were multiple light bulb moments where players went "Oh wait I really do have total autonomy here". 

It was a very strange moment. I have prided myself on player choice for years. Years. You can go through all the campaigns I have posted on this blog. They're all more or less "self-directed" campaigns with players. But... just handing them 1:1 time and making PVP inherently freed the players, and they've been having a blast.

So what did they do? So far? Well, we got Laurentius trying to cause an overthrow of the Church of Elpida with his own "proper" version, and all the aristocrats he's pissing off there. Of the ten people involved, he's dragged about half of them into his decision to publicly decry the Church and the nobility as robbers.

And then we got about the other half of the group, who decided that Cleft Mountain (which is definitely haunted) is the place to go to! Whether it be Montsers who want a lair, or Heroes who want to go climbing for lost lore in the middle of a total meltdown... yeah. They just decided to do a dungeon delve. Time to pull out Appendix A, or Veins of the Earth!

And I Shouldn't Have Been Surprised By This

It is a known fact that killing people must be systemically enforced in the military. If there aren't officers right behind you, telling you to kill the enemy, right now, we know for a fact that people are highly unlikely to do it. We've recreated battles. We know that people kill a lot less than we think, because in those recreations that amount of deaths that happen are way higher than the actual death records we have. People talk a big game, but when it comes down to it... even with training, we don't want to enter into conflict and kill.

And yet conflict drives games. It is what makes them fun: conflict without the horrifying consequences of real life. This is literally why game rules exist, I am starting to suspect.  Because, once the players were put in a situation where the rules pushed them into conflict, and the Weaver assured them it was okay to do so... people started going off the rails, especially the Monster players.

Chapter One

And Then Chapter One happened. And holy shit. Everything that was built up, on that Discord server, suddenly exploded.

Laurentius just went apeshit... and was rewarded for it.

Mother Elise tried to keep the peace... and accidentally burned Lady Marie.

Lady Marie walked in with the best of intentions, and bungled things so hilariously badly that it was practically the highlight of the session... until Laurentinus set an old woman on fire to prove a point.

 

The previous issues with 1:1 time I was having went right out the window, as soon as PVP was baked into Crescendo's system. This is absolutely addictive. I want more. I need more.

I DON'T WANT TO QUIT.

Story Might Be Bigger than Scripts, Bacon

The Dude Knows His Stuff... That's Part of the Problem

I have a pet peeve: when experts forget that their expertise comes at a cost. Bacon is, in comparison to me, clearly the expert in his domain. I’ve written some solid TV scripts. He has actually launched projects — a meaningful gap in experience. That said, I’m not disputing the internal logic of his argument. His conclusions follow reasonably from his assumptions. It’s those assumptions I want to challenge. Bacon gives an excellent breakdown of how story functions under singular authorial vision — the kind required by most novels, films, and many scripted games. That part is strong. The problems arise elsewhere.

What Is a Roleplaying Game?

The medium of TTRPGs

This needs to be established, apparently, because right here is where we'll find the error. TTRPGs have a vital difference from all other games, and if it is not addressed here, the rest of my article will make no sense. I am going to use the words Participants to refer to everyone at the table, GM to refer to Game Master (GM), and Player to refer to players.

I am aware, deeply, that non-GM'd games exist. I'm not using that paradigm at the moment, and I am very aware of the limitation. The point may be better to make without a GM, but I don't have enough experience to comment terribly well. I am also aware that I am generalizing. If you try saying "Yeah but this game", you will not be addressing my general point.

The General Flow of an RPG

A fictional setting and a game is agreed upon by the Participants.

The GM decides upon a situation to present the Players.

The Players decide how to respond to the situation, and inform the GM of their decisions.

The Participants, to varying degrees, decide what happens, using the setting and the game to generate prompts they interpret.

This creates a new situation, which the Players must address.

Yeah But (Generative Procedures)-

I know, I know, I really over-generalized. I'm trying to capture a very wide swath of design (although it's not nearly as wide as you think). The biggest thing left out of this is the use of procedures to generate prompts.

And this is where the video actually falls apart, right off the bat, right in the definitions.  The above flow is exhausting to maintain for most Participants... so we generate prompts using game mechanics. Like, for instance, OSR random tables, or PBTA moves, or even spending a currency (like in Amber) or class features. These are meant to provide fuel for the imaginations of the Participants. More to the point, these prompts are part of the base DNA of an RPG. You are playing with these prompts, because they are toys.

These prompts are then interpreted into a fictional event. Even if you're using something sub-par like a previously existing adventure to tell you what will happen next, you still need to interpret those events into what's going on at the table's conversation.

The essential action of a roleplaying game is the interpretation of mechanically generated prompts into a previously existing fictional situation.

And that creates a story.

Story Does Not Require Singular Authorial Intent

The oldest and most culturally potent stories we have — folk tales, myths, The Iliad, and The Odyssey — were profoundly collaborative. As Jonathan Shay showed in Achilles in Vietnam, the Iliad served as communal therapy for the trauma of war. These works were not drafted whole-cloth by a solitary genius; they emerged from a living tradition, shaped by many hands and voices over time, then later refined. Most pre-modern storytelling existed on a continuum — performed, adapted, edited by audiences and subsequent tellers. Explicit collaboration is the historical norm. Novels and movies, by contrast, are historically atypical: powerful, technologically enabled concentrations of vision, but not the default against which everything else should be judged.

TTRPGs are not a strange offshoot. They are a gamified, accelerated evolution of that ancient collaborative tradition. Procedural generation is innovative, but it is still building on the norm rather than inventing something alien to it.

On Video Games and False Comparisons

Comparisons between video games and TTRPGs often miss the mark. Video games — even procedurally rich ones like Minecraft, Breath of the Wild, or Dark Souls — are still authored experiences with bounded possibility spaces. They can borrow TTRPG-inspired techniques, but they remain fundamentally different in intent and openness. A medieval labyrinth and a spell are both magical in their own way, yet one is designed and the other is emergent.

But TTRPGs Have Design Intent!

Of course they do. Like spells or procedures, RPG rules and settings plant seeds with intent. A love potion might make someone fall in love — but with whom, and to what end? Joy or misery? The designer/GM sets the frame and possibility space; the table discovers what actually grows. The intent is story — not in the narrow scriptwriter sense, but in the broader human sense of shared meaning-making.

I agree that many storygames have deep flaws in execution. Still, a design that consciously pursues theme and emergence is doing something more aligned with storytelling’s deeper roots than pure blank-slate improvisation.

Ultimately,

Bacon isn’t wrong about how "traditionally authored" stories work. He is simply mistaking a historically recent, technologically enabled specialization for the universal essence of storytelling. The novel and the film are powerful because they concentrate vision. TTRPGs are powerful because they distribute it. Both have their place. Both can produce something transcendent. The tragedy is when fans of one feel the need to diminish the other to validate their preference. 

Story doesn’t belong to the solitary genius in front of a keyboard any more than it belongs exclusively to the table of friends rolling dice. It has always been, and will always be, something humans do together — sometimes with one person holding the torch steady, sometimes passing it hand to hand in the dark… or rolling dice to see who carries it next.

The real question isn’t “Which medium does story better?” It’s “What kind of story are we trying to tell, and which tools best serve it?” Everything else is just territorial noise.

Bacon understands a torch. I just wish he’d remember how many hands — and how much chance — have carried the flame before him.

The Fall of the King of Sota: Prologue 2

The Fall of the King of Sota: Prologue 1

Atop the Flowering Garbage Heap

 

Welcome back! Today, we talk about the total exhaustion of finding out there's yet more trauma to recover from.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is when the mind encounters something it can't make sense of, and it squirrels away a part itself that can't make sense of it, for protection. This part, this sub-personality, is then kept going through an unconscious but purposeful and constant expenditure of mental energy. This locked away sub-personality (now hitherto "Sub") is not a separate personality, although the Main and Sub's knowledge of each other is generally hazy.

Complex Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) is when the mind encounters multiple somethings that it can't make sense of. The line between Subs and completely different personalities begins to blur, because the mental energy to keep the breaks up is much greater. Most of the time, the Subs take turns “helping” the surface personality, and sometimes take over. It is a wretched life.

Personality Disorder (PD) is when the mind encounters something so awful that it makes a completely different personality, only about that one thing, and then forgets about it. The two personalities then attempt to live independently of each other. It goes as well as expected.

The line between C-PTSD and PD is a lot hazier than you would think. At what point is keeping the Subs in tension harder than just allowing them to drift?

I am pretty squarely in that gray area. I have a laundry list of awful things that go as long as my arm. Literally. The individual counts are so high that it's actually disgusting. And I keep finding large parts of me that are so thoroughly buried that it's a marvel I find anything at all.

But there's sometimes I look at myself, and realize the wreckage.

Miles and miles of what was once a real, working, actual personality.

Not the fundamentally broken and held together by duct-tape... thing... that I run around in like it's a stolen car. It is hard, in those moments, to not fall into despair. You just... you see the damage. Years of mistreatment, codified and ratified and stratified into a mockery of stability.

The words "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me," stick in my throat.

There is nothing here, in this wreckage, that I would attribute to a good and kind and loving God. It's just... what's left. Chaotic rubble. There's nothing that I could imagine the Son of God recognizing as his own. "Mercy"? That word makes the ash in the air sweet. And don't even get me started on asking for anyone to have mercy on me.

For those of you who say God's mercy is boundless.. He will only take mercy on what you let Him. And I can't. I just can't. It's far beyond my abilities as a person. This broken misshapen husk of a personality is a mockery of God's goodness. I want it to burn. And yet, that is despair, the realization that I have judged what God has not.

But what am I supposed to do, in the midst of this? I have a conscience, do I not? Did not God make me to labor in the vineyard? And is this not a ruined vineyard? Aren't we supposed to clear away the chaff for the fire?

And trust me, I am that chaff. Do not doubt it.

It hits me just how fucked I really am.

What is there to do but sit and curse the day I was born? To beg God to strike my birthday from the calendar? To ask the sun to hide her face from that day, so that even if humanity isn't stupid enough to remove it from the calendar, they don't have to witness the sheer absurdity of my birth?

What else is there to do but sit? And ask God why He even bothered?

So, I look down. I don't ask for mercy. I can't bear to. It's too much.

And then I see it.

A hyacinth.

And I curse Wolfe, loudly, because I can never forget this line from Book of the Short Sun. It's burned into me, like a brand. I have literally had dreams of Wolfe burning it into me, and I flinch thinking about it. But friends are kind torturers. And Wolfe may be the best friend I never met.

"Though trodden beneath the shepherd's heel, the wild hyacinth blooms on the ground." 

And it's coming out from between the garbage piles. Unasked for, unlooked for, unwanted, trodden, cursed by me... but growing all the same. With absolutely no regard for my pride.

I look up. I see an entire field of hyacinths. They're popping up between the cracks, but they're there. Mercy is coming, whether I want it or not. I feel, once again, Wolfe's chuckle from the dream I had, years ago: "You're a coward". I can't help but agree with him.

But the hyacinths are there.

So, weary, I get back up. I sway with the wind a moment.

And start clearing away the wreckage.

For the hyacinths.

Wherever you are, Wolfe, fuck yourself. I'm tired. How dare you find me worth saving. 

Fine. I'll see you at the Gate. 

Properly.

Asshole.

A wind not of my making blows. The hyacinths dance. I stop and stare. My heart does something against its will. I stare, for a long time, at the colors moving through the wreckage. But they can't move quite perfectly. Some of them don't move. Not yet.

Someone really needs to move the wreckage. Maybe that someone is me. We'll see. I get to work.

So I was going to end it there, Defender. I was pretty happy with that post. 

And then a friend of mine sent me a book!

Very nice of him! Thank you!

As I was reading it, I found the following passage:

“Your heart is full of fertile seeds, waiting to sprout. Just as a lotus flower springs from the mire to bloom splen-didly, the interaction of the cosmic breath causes the flower of the spirit to bloom and bear fruit in this world.”

It is here that I leave you. If I do not see you next week, I do not blame you. It is no easy road.

The Real Problem of Storygaming

 

So I've been on Twitter for awhile now.

No, come back, trust me, this is going somewhere.

I got involved in the RPG space on Twitter immediately. It's been a lot of fun, and I've actually learned a lot about design. A lot of people, it turns out, are grappling with the same issues I've been seeing. I don't agree with them 100% of the time, but it actually feels like something closer to a conversation than what I would have had before Twitter. Now, by and large, the folks on Twitter are right-wingers who like oldschool gaming. I am a storygamer with some rather deep-seated feelings of resentment against storygaming, so I engaged in some conversations and boy did some stuff get cleared up.

I define storygaming as:

Playing a game that makes a story. As in, by playing the game, a coherent narrative emerges, which the players can derive actual aesthetic enjoyment from as its own object, both in real-time and post-game.

Storygaming can be a roleplaying game (as in, there's people who are strictly playing a limited role), or in a more meta way (which I'm going to define as a storytelling-game). This is similar to how you can have a wargame proper, or a wargame that is a roleplaying game as well (see ODnD).

Storygaming solves a problem that old-schoolers don't want to acknowledge: NOT ALL OF US WANT TO PLAY DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS, SORRY NOT SORRY.

The problem isn't that storygaming exists. That's like blaming wargaming for roleplaying games's problems. Which is absolutely absurd. The problem is far more fundamental.

The central problem of most storygames is that it assumes that simply telling a story is extremely comfortable for adults, who are the majority audience for games. Without an infrastructure to attach to, what should be a very intuitive experience gets awkward, forcing one person to step up and help guide everyone through a process they don't even really know how to do anymore.

Yes, to the storygamers who are currently protesting, I am talking about the average person.

"bUt StoRyTElLinG iS NaTUraL"

Yes, it is, but not in the context of a collaborative game. Most people tell stories to others, and don't consciously collaborate. Most games give events that people craft a narrative with afterwards. Storygaming itself promises a story that you can make, and recognize, in process. 

That's so fucking cool.

It's also the farthest thing from "natural" in the world. It's a really  cool thing to do, but let's not pretend that collaborative storytelling outside of a liturgical or party context is natural.

How Do We Make This More Natural?

There's four ways to address this: more focused rules for narration, mechanical support, ritual, and increased objectivity, without sacrificing thematic depth.

Narration Rules

It all begins here. Narration in most storygames is hand-waved. "Just say what you want to do!" There are two people I know of who, upon hearing that for the first time, did not have a low-grade panic attack. It's not that narration as the core mechanic of your game is a bad idea, per se, but if it's literally just "Well, say whatever"... most adults I know lock up, at least at first. The sheer amount of choice available isn't freeing, it's paralyzing. Adults are so used to not having that many choices that handing them the whole freaking buffet line does more harm than good.

So you use rules to help focus them. Not railroad, and certainly not restrict. Focus.

A good example is my own RPG, Crescendo: your actions have to fit the Setting's Myth and your character's Heart, according to the Weaver (GM). There are standards, some of which you wrote yourself, which you can measure your actions against as you're playing. Everyone has agreed on the Myth, and the Weaver accepted your Heart when you wrote it. Since this is all based on commonly agreed tropes and personally chosen stuff, it's easy to know how successful the outcomes of your decisions will be... and whether you even care. Sometimes players will deliberately fail, because their Heart runs up against the Myth, and they let it be messy and find it fun, because it addresses what they expected in the first place.

Mechanical Support

This is the one that most storygames do a decent, even an excellent job, at. PBTA particularly, with its reactionary Moves, pushes the story in different ways, although it's easy for it to fall into a railroad. Burning Wheel's Beliefs and Artha cycle takes the conversation that is a storygame and elevates it into a complex and emotional story. Bleak Spirit's scene structure and prompts helps push the conversation into places that are easy to run with. Mechanics reacting to narration really is an amazing kick of dopamine!

Ritual

Storygames are okay at this one, by and large, but this is where certain actions are mandated, like beginning and ending session mechanics. These help get everyone into and out of trance more easily, and that cannot be underestimated. Adults have to be coaxed, wooed, into letting go and just enjoying themselves.

Increased Objectivity

This is possibly the biggest actual offender in the storygaming world.  The setting goes from being a real place that may have unexpected edges (lots of them!), to... just be fully at the behest of the players. This is honestly the most damaging thing in storygaming as a genre. If the world is to be fully shaped by player fiat, then the simulation fails one of the fundamental tests of whether it's reality or not: being told "No". This is obviously not true in all storygames, but there's plenty of them where the setting is not a real place, which can push back and tell players "No, you will have to contend with me." This is one of the things the OSR does completely right, just about all the time.

The Good News?

We don’t have to pick sides. Storygaming doesn’t need to abandon its ambitions—it just needs better scaffolding so that normal adults can actually enjoy the thing it promises. We can keep the dream of collaboratively crafting a real story at the table while giving players the structure, ritual, pushback, and mechanical teeth that make it feel exciting instead of paralyzing.
That’s exactly what I’ve been chasing with Crescendo. The Myth and Heart system gives players clear boundaries to play against (and sometimes against each other). The Weaver isn’t a dictator, but they’re also not a vending machine. The world has weight. Failure can be beautiful. And when it works, the story that emerges feels earned—not because we forced it, but because we had enough infrastructure to let it breathe.
The RPG space on Twitter (and beyond) is full of people who love this hobby for very different reasons. Some want the thrill of exploration and danger. Others want something that feels like a story worth telling afterward. Both are valid. The real failure would be pretending these desires can’t learn from each other.
So here’s my pitch: stop treating “storygame” and “OSR” as rival faiths. Start stealing the best ideas from both sides without apology. Give narration focus. Build mechanical engines that reward good play. Add ritual that helps everyone get in the zone. And for the love of all that’s holy, let the world say “no” sometimes.
The result might not be pure storygaming or pure old-school. It’ll probably be something new, a little messy, and a lot more fun.

Dark Souls RPG Reflections

 

Welcome back! Good to see you! Today we go over my thoughts on the Dark Souls RPG, as I start contemplating the next campaign.

The Dark Souls RPG has a lot of promise. Like, the kind of promise I'm willing to hack around to accommodate. So I'm not pretending that this is a perfect game, but I'm not aware of too many games that do this one loop so well. It's half-baked, but the parts that are fully cooked are so good that I can't help myself.

The Way It Actually Works

Dark Souls is a d20 game that isn't about the d20, which is the biggest compliment I can give. D20's are swingy as hell, and this game adds in one wrinkle to the decision: Position (HP). If you fail the roll, you have to decide if it's worth spending Position to succeed. The d20 informs your decision, but it isn't the core decision. Provided the GM provides good information... you now have one heck of a dilema on your hands. Because Position is so fragile in surprise situations, how do you decide which tasks are worth succeeding or failing on? 

The decision wouldn't matter as much if it wasn't for just how brutal the damage is. Damage in Dark Souls is around double the damage of 5e, so screwing up rolls in this game can lead to insta-death very quickly. And there's that freaking Wisdom save whenever you die, that does random things to your character if you fail it.. .and you're almost assuredly going to. Each death changes you, for better or for worse, and you simply don't know what the consequences of death might be.

So the core loop, properly played, is this series of calculated gambles, to either allow the failure or to force a success. Position tells you how much leeway you have, and when you die, it changes you, making the next run different. It is a constant, low thrum of anxiety and dread.

It's awesome.

And there's nothing like it, to the best of my knowledge, in the TTRPG space. Not quite so elegantly built, as your Position is your health. Players have an immediate idea of what they're doing, when they're sacrificing Position. The tension is incredible. And if this one thing was the only thing in the game, it would be awesome. 

The combat spends for Position (extra damage and extra movement) are understated, but they're extremely useful, especially the movement one. Do not estimate how useful it is to have your speed doubled for a paltry amount of Position, especially if you have a reach weapon. It is for this reason I think the Dark Souls RPG is a grid and minis game: players have issue trying to figure out just how useful the movement spend is, unless they're looking at it and realizing "Waitasec, I can legitimately not be around for the monsters, and force them to come to me." Seeing it is better than any reminder. However, the core “how much should I spend before the GM utterly ruins me” is still quite present. 

This Game Has a Right Way to Play It

It is a mudcore dungeoncralwer. You're playing characters who are perpetually stressed-out, pushing their luck, and hoping they can bank up enough souls to level up at a bonfire, before dying. "Muh story" people really need to go find another game. It won't work like that.

HOWEVER.

The rest of the game has a hard time matching up with this loop. Some of it's perfect too. Some of it's... imperfect... and some of it's just outright bad. The fact that the outright bad has to do with the shit editing, making this a book I am forced to write in, is unforgivable. This is a pretty book and I have to mark it up. 

Steamforged, get ready for that rant. Coz it’s coming and I do not intend to be gentle. This is shameful stuff. 

The Souls System

The souls system, wherein XP and money are collected, is just on the right side of detail. The biggest change is that souls are spent to level up, resetting them to zero. This means that going from level 2 to level 3 doesn't require another 600 souls, but another 900. I cannot overstate just how profound an impact this one change has on the game. The stakes were clarified at the table so powerfully and simply, that almost this alone would have made a Dark Souls game. My players would laugh when they died, because the souls were gone, and they knew that they had screwed up. The punishment was so over-the-top and ridiculous that the players would laugh to tears... or at least I think it was laughter. They kept playing! The horrible punishment forced them to try to learn to navigate the environment. 

Skills

Skills is a spot where the game rules definitely needed to be more fleshed out... to the point where I considered just doing the 3.5 skill system, or adapting it somehow. There was some guidance on how to adjudicate challenges outside of combat in the core book... but it's not a lot. Folks, this is mudcore OSR, and that's that. And the rules for adjudicating mudcore dungeoncrawl are... adequate. They're not terrible. But they're not good. I wanted crunch here, to support me as I played. Maybe you won't, but it came up a lot for me, personally. The "talk your way through the puzzle" sounds nice, until you have to do it a lot. I get exhausted of it. I'd rather have rules to look up and learn. "Find what works for you" is nice... until you have to do it all the time. And this game actually has the depth in its loop to handle crunch... and it doesn't have it. And it should.

The Organization of this Book Makes Me Angry

Of all the things that are a sin in this book, it's the absolutely abysmal organization that does it for me. It goes from "why isn't this table featured more prominently" to "THIS IS UTTER GARBAGE".

The biggest offender, by far, is the miserable lack of page references in the Locations section, combined with the utterly asinine monster organization. There's all these tables with monsters, with no page reference numbers. Nothing. You have to climb through, (and this is true of all THREE books) and figure out where the monster is. And, since the monsters aren't alphebatized, but are instead in "groupings" like "undead", "beasts", "denizens"... and I don't think even the monsters organizations are freaking alphabetized either. It's a nightmare finding monsters.

I have to write the numbers into the book in order for the most important section in the book (for GMs) to be usable! The book's poor organization requires it, and that pisses me off. This is a premium book, one I do not want to make marks in, and instead I'm having to scrawl page numbers because the editors were utter idiots. Utter. Fucking. Idiots. Steamforged really should be ashamed of themselves, but we know that that's not something the company as a whole is good at.

It's not any better with the items. The types of items are not necessarily intuitive, and they're not organized alphabetically either. This makes finding things... really really really hard. And I hate it. It's not an absolute deal breaker, but I'm more than a few months into using this book and I am absolutely not used to it yet. It takes me so much work to do what should be a simple look up, and I have no idea why they did it this way.

The Advice is Stupid

There are.... two...?  Two, I think. Lines of good advice in the book.

Do what you want with this game, whatever works for you, is bullshit advice. It indicates a nervousness about having a vision for your game.

The game is clearly mudcore oldschool. It's not a question. The mechanics, if played straight, produce a brilliantly flawed mudcore experience.

And about two lines of the advice serves this.

The rest is just "what do you want your story to be like" and "this game is yours" nonsense.

It is most of the advice in the books. All three of them.

There is no advice on how to make monsters. You have to go find other 5e products for that. Fortunately the monster design itself is pretty darn good, so you don't have to worry about this so much but... this is an outright glaring absence in the game's advice and design.

This Game Is Flawed

There is so much to recommend this game. It is a masterclass in getting players of any experience level invested. When we got done with our short little game, the players all immediately said they wanted to come back to it, after our Pathfinder 2e excursion. One of the players and I swap GMing duties, and you don't pass that kind of thing up. However, we're fully invested in this. I'm making a bigger map. Something we can chip away at as the months and years go on. I'm putting ideas together and I'm really excited. What so few games get right (the essentials), the Dark Souls RPG lands with aplomb.

However, the rest of the game is a mess. A shamefully hard to use mess. Like, the book is fundamentally flawed in its organization, to a degree that is an outright failure on Steamforged's part.

If you're willing to put in the work, you have one of the best experiences you'll ever have for a conventional RPG. If you don't... I really can't blame you, this book's organization is a shame before God and man.

Why Do You Care So Much???

This is a fair question! Why bother?

There isn't a rational answer and I won't pretend otherwise.

However.

I don't have to care if I'm being rational, and neither do you. And the answer may be interesting to you.

Some Things Just Fit

Aesthetics are supra-rational. They are what rationality is derived from. For whatever reason, the visual and narrative aesthetics of Dark Souls is home in a way that no other pre-established setting is. And the game's mechanics for this TTRPG evoke that feeling for me: ruined grandeur, something beautiful turned to something rotted. Which automatically creates this need to make it right again, even if you doubt it can ever be done. For whatever reason this game evokes that sentiment out of me, and I am better person for experiencing it.

One day the flame will return, and all will be well.

Now, that may not be the reason to forgive a game its many flaws for you, but it sure is for me.

And it really does come down to that.

Here I stop. If you I do not see you next week, I do not blame you. It is not easy road.

Atchison: Session Two

Atchison: Session One

Atchison: Session 0

The Dragon's Fire: Reflections on a Wonderful Failure

 

Welcome back! Today I go over some of my thoughts on the latest Crescendo epic.

Games have design goals. They're meant to provide an experience, which keeps people coming back because they're having fun! The goal of Crescendo is to replicate the feeling of reading Wolfe, to take his principles and put them in a TTRPG space. Adaptation does not mean trying to replicate the original exactly, but to adapt its principles into a different medium.

So, on the one hand, Crescendo is a ton of fun. People are coming back and having a really meaningful time. Heroes are a wonderfully designed character type, and literally nothing in the TTRPG space exists that does what Heroes in Crescendo does. That's a fact. Heroes are successful. They successfully draw an arc found in Wolfe extremely well.

However, that doesn't mean Crescendo is successful in achieving the goal "replicating Wolfe's principles". And that is... not what Crescendo does. Not yet.

Let me try to explain. Let me try to show you what's wrong.

At the beginning of The Dragon's Fire, I introduced a girl-vampire (as in, a vampire who was turned when she was a girl), called The Bride. Now, I had a backstory for The Bride. She was a child who was brainwashed into thinking she loved Eous, The Big Bad. So when he turned her, as an 11 year old child, she went willingly. I didn't come up with more than that, just enough to know this NPC was evil, and liked it... and was seemingly naive about it in a way that should have been chilling.

The Bride showed up four times in thirty plus sessions of gameplay.

Four.

Now, to be clear, this wasn't exactly a problem, per se. The game does a good job of shaking up the spotlight around the players pretty thoroughly. So there was always something interesting going on, it just wasn't... well.. any of the villains, the monsters, of the setting. There were hints of what could have been depth, but nobody cared when Raphael took the Bride down, and when the original dragon vanished, nobody looked. This was because, in order to capture Wolfe's startling breadth of vision in a game, I had to put a completely different kind of workload on the Weaver, who is not a GM. As I have repeatedly stated. 

This is a problem for a few reasons:

1. Wolfe's stories manage to squeeze a lot of depth into each and every character that ever hits the page. They're not "NPCs", but protagonists in a stories that you simply can't linger on. The current set up does not support that feeling.

2. Without that depth, it is hard for players to fully invest in the setting itself. There needs to be some parts of the world that push back harder than others, in a way that preserves player autonomy.

3. Because of the chaos, the Weaver cannot focus on NPCs to develop.

4. The game is about challenging Beliefs and then holding the players responsible to the Myth. That's already a lot.

In short, I think this was the best campaign of Crescendo I have ever run, one of my best in general, and it was somewhat in spite of the game I made.

That.. doesn't make me feel good. My players were awesome, I was absolutely on fire, and Crescendo carried us pretty far... and could have carried us a lot farther.

Fortunately, there's a pretty simple fix.

Whatever you want to give depth to, you give to a player. 

GMs, who aren't having to work with half as many left-field "WTF" moments as a Crescendo Weaver, benefit incredibly from this principle (see the book on the right)... and that's going to go  triple for Weavers.

Fortunately, that's going to be really easy to mine out of Wolfe, because he gets into the psychology of monsters, a lot: they're simply creatures who don't want any change to affect them. They cannot adapt in a way that others can work with, because their very nature makes them unable to adapt in a way that's friendly to others.

Wolfe's stories do not skimp on monsters who have very deep, very complicated, inner lives... that are utterly unable to do anything other than look to their own interests. Unlike Heroes, whose development can go anywhere, Monsters can only be interested in themselves... and have an infinity of ways of thinking about their own needs.

Someone's going to go "Just stop developing already! Move on!"

No.

Let's get this clear, for anyone who's reading this and who cares. This is my hobby. This is for fun. Anyone who thinks I am trying to develop a commercial product needs to rethink their assumptions.

I am not.

Yeah, sure, there's a PDF up on DriveThruRPG. You can go buy it for five bucks. It would be nice if you did. But I also just drop the PDF on people for free, because this is what I do for fun. If it makes money, cool. If it doesn't... okay? I want this damn game to do Wolfe. And it's gonna do it. 

Because the stuff this game does right deserves to be supported. I think about King Melny the Dragonslayer, Alistair the Serpentbane, and Raphael the Hordefighter... and my goodness that legitimately makes my heart hurt, in the best way possible. These huge legends and the things they did that literally nobody will know about. The apology of King Melny, where he admitted that his evil ways were born of fear and how he wanted to be better... and how that cost him Junior. Like, that hit me really hard. Alistair trying to understand how Natasha was still with him, actually with him, even after death, and failing to do so, and having to accept that he would never fully get it. Raphael holding his friend after a good and long life and being the last thing he ever saw. 

That shit means something to me. It lives in me, in the best way possible. Those memories are the reason I run games like this. Like, sure, I want to have fun too, but... there's something so human in it, and I need that. I think people in  general need that: unplanned humanity.

My priority is that experience, at my table. And Monsters will make that stronger. There could have been the moment where The Bride doubled down on her evil, in a way that shows she literally can't think of another way to do things, eliciting pity and horror. There could have been the moment where the original dragon tried to escape her tormentors and failed. That wouldn't have taken away from the Dragonslayer, Serpentbane, and Hordefighter. Quite the opposite. It would have made those moments even better, because the pity and horror of The Bride would have made the good moment sharper.

But that requires adding things to the game, and that's fine. The design shall continue until morale improves!

So yeah. This was a gorgeous failure. Let's make the next one work better. ONWARDS.

It is here that I leave you. If I do not see you next time, I do not blame you. It is no easy road.

Letters to God

 

Welcome back! Good to see you! We're going to listen to me rant about a long-standing problem today.

I have never, not even once, doubted that God exists. It's never been a question for me. I know there's people who are like "Well, there isn't a compelling reason to think there's a God." I have never had that question. Dunno why. I just haven't.

My question is a different type: if God is real, does He really love me? Can He?

This past week has been hard. I thought I was done with flashbacks, with PTSD. I even had said goodbye to my therapist in that capacity. All had been well.

Welp.

It's been a week of flashbacks, all the old self-destructive impulses, and the crushing realization that everything I have ever written on this blog is true... and that's not necessarily making me happy. I don't know what to do with myself. With my life. The realization that it's all true and I am somehow all of it has crashed in with the sickening epiphany that I'm still riddled with nervous tics that aren't healthy, moral injuries I can't even see, and a sense of fallibility that's frankly floored me.

These are all bullshit words to try and communicate a deep panic. Imagine some poor kid on a merry-go-round, puke flying out of his mouth, as he begs everyone to let him get off for a moment... and then collapses on the damn thing as it spins and cries. And it just never stops spinning. Even as he goes catatonic.

I came home today, trying very much to ignore these things. And found myself snapping at Maria. She'd done something small, and instead of just shrugging and going "Well, nobody's perfect," I went "WHY AREN'T YOU PERFECT WHEN I NEED YOU TO BE." I mean, why not? I put in the work, why shouldn't I have some demands.

The young and stupid are nodding along.

The older and happily married are going "OH SHIT YOU DIDN'T".

I almost did.

I sorta struggled through the rest of the objectively pleasant evening. It is amazing how damaging your own sins are, to your ability to enjoy a simple evening. But man, it almost ruined me this night. I just... sat through it. Let myself simmer and stew. I gritted my teeth and was present as best as I could be. I later tried telling Maria I was sorry, and that almost started a fight, but finally I just said "It wasn't small to me."

And her response?

"I know, but I couldn't do what you wanted. I can't just be what you want."

Rage came up.

Was swallowed.

And I really looked at this poor woman who had been blindsided with a battle neither of us anticipated. I felt, for just one moment, that quiet and tired thing that kept her coming back to me, radiating off of her.  The small, still Voice was in her tiredness. It always seems to be. He always seems to be in those moments when she's just trying to love me and I'm fighting her with every last bit of strength... and still she persists. What a saint. She's way too fucking good for me.

I nodded. "No, you can't. And that's okay."

She relaxed. She could tell I meant it.

And for one second I could feel something resembling peace.

It was short-lived. It isn't always, but tonight it is. Oh well. God knows my warring heart needs something to do, I suppose. Here we go. So, I'm sitting here, later, banging this out on my keyboard instead of cleaning the fucking kitchen, and I am saying, loudly, angrily, with more hope than I ever thought I could: "I'M NOT FUCKING DONE YET. IS THAT ALL YOU GOT??? I GOT A LOT MORE IN THE TANK, AND I'M STILL YOUNG. LET'S GO!"

Is that the wisest thing?

Probably not.

But I can only be what I am, and right now I am pissed off and want to take all that's evil within me and get rid of it. And I can feel that it is obliging me in the appointment. I am going to win.

So I get up, eager. Rage sparks through my bones, getting my muscles to work again... I see the incoming wave. I know that I am going back to the war. I will need to swim through this next tsunami of exhaustion, trauma, and moral damage. It's coming right at me.

Oh, Defender, if only you could see what I see, as I see it!

I can't run. The wave is too big. I wonder if it'll take me out. For one second there's a twinge of fear.

It turns to aggression, raw defiance: if I go down, it's going to be charging. Let's go. I start a run. Right into the darkness. Again.

Who knows? Maybe the eagles will come in time, this time. I keep seeing them, circling. Hopefully those aren't vultures. That would suck. Oh well. Only one way to find out. Hopefully God does love me, and those are eagles.

I suppose God loves vultures too. He gives them food, too, specifically those who don't make it. Even the bones of the fallen are used to benefit someone. Should I despair of God's love as He provides for the vultures?

Fuck it. Time to go live.

It is here I leave you, until next week. If I do not see you again, I do not blame you. It is no easy road.