leapfrog tables

Since my last post on eliminative progress tables, I've been playing around with some worldbuilding subgames and it feels a bit less chaotic than I would like. This is an attempt to iterate on the same idea but with a bit less predictability.

A leapfrog table involves more entries than the die used to roll it (for instance, 30 entries on a d6 table) where order matters. Use it as so,

1. When an entry is rolled, strike it off.
2. If landing on a stricken entry, roll again, advancing from the stricken entry (multiple times if necessary)

To add "declining marginal returns," you can regard upper levels of the die you're rolling as null results, e.g. roll 1d8, on 1-6 advance that many entries, on 7-8 nothing happens - such that if the first six entries are already filled up you only have a 57% chance of actually adding something, or whatever.

Tech tree adapted from the most recent edition of a popular 4X (1d10, null result on 9-10)

1. pottery
2. animal husbandry
3. mining
4. sailing
5. astrology
6. irrigation
7. writing
8. archery
9. masonry
10. bronzeworking
11. wheel
12. celestial navigation
13. currency
14. horseback riding
15. ironworking
16. shipbuilding
17. mathematics
18. construction
19. engineering
20. military tactics
21. buttress
22. apprenticeship
23. stirrups
24. machinery
25. alchemy
26. military engineering
27. castles
28. steel
    
29. banking
    
30. cartography
31. mass production
32. printing
33. square rigging
34. astronomy
35. metal casting
36. seige tactics
37. gunpowder
38. industrialization
39. scientific theory
40. ballistics
41. military science
42. steam power
43. sanitation
44. economics
45. rifling
46. flight
47. replaceable parts
48. bessemmer steel
    
49. refining
50. electricity
51. radio
52. chemistry
53. combustion
54. advanced flight
55. rocketry
56. advanced ballistics
57. combined arms
58. plastics
59. computers
60. nuclear fission
61. synthetic materials
62. telecommunications
63. satellites
64. guidance systems
65. lasers
66. composites
67. stealth technology
68. robotics
69. nuclear fusion
70. nanotechnology

goop -> ultrahuman evolution table (1d8)

1. aging
2. sex
3. mouth/anus
4. mobility
5. eyes
6. pain
7. ability to breathe air
8. brain
9. sleep
10. survival instinct
11. live birth
12. hair
13. walking upright
14. grasping
15. vocalization
16. memory
17. empathy
18. display of emotions
19. reciprocity
20. dreams
21. sclera
22. breastfeeding
23. menstruation
24. opposable thumbs
25. immortal souls
26. morality
    
27. maths
28. metaphor
29. music
30. language
31. telekinesis
32. astral projection
33. telepathy
34. aura reading
35. psychic vampirism
36. personal survival through reincarnation
37. levitation
38. Speech of the Gods
39. body-hopping
40. conscious control over all physical and mental processes

goop -> anything evolution table (1d20, null result on 16-20)

This can become the ultrahuman evolution table

1. aging
2. sex
3. mouth/anus
4. mobility
5. eyes
6. pain
7. ability to breathe air
8. brain
9. sleep
10. survival instinct
11. exoskeleton
    
12. flight
13. bioluminescence
14. pheremones
15. venom
16. ability to survive in vacuum
17. burrowing
18. exotic energy source
19. can see ghosts
20. darkvision
    
21. live birth
22. hair
23. walking upright
24. grasping
25. vocalization
26. memory
27. empathy
28. display of emotions
29. reciprocity
30. dreams
31. web-spinning
32. fire-breathing
33. shapeshifting
34. parasitic larvae
35. petrification
36. magnetic sense
37. phase shifting
38. antimagic
39. explosive
40. hallucinogenic
    
41. sclera
42. breastfeeding
43. menstruation
44. opposable thumbs
45. immortal souls
46. morality
    
47. maths
48. metaphor
49. music
50. language
51. telekinesis
52. astral projection
53. telepathy
54. aura reading
55. psychic vampirism
56. personal survival through reincarnation
57. levitation
58. Speech of the Gods
59. body-hopping
60. conscious control over all physical and mental processes

eliminative progress tables

 A d6 table has six entries, right? Not here!

The following sort of table is meant to represent when you have a sequence of events or developments where some things are biased to happen later and indeed can't happen at the start, but where there's still considerable randomness about the exact order, and an expected "early" thing might never kick in. 

To use this table, simply eliminate any results that arise for future rolls, decrementing every future result. Here's a toy example: a goop evolving into something like a person over millions of years:

d4 goop evolution table

1. mouth and anus
2. locomotion
3. brain
4. eyes
5. opposable thumbs
6. rational soul

So l roll 1d4 on the table and get a 1 - my goop is now a heterotroph with ingress and egress for nutrients. The table now looks like this:

1. locomotion
2. brain
3. eyes
4. opposable thumbs
5. rational soul

I roll 1d4 again and get a 2 - my sessile coral thing now has a brain, but it can't see or move.

1. locomotion
2. eyes
3. opposable thumbs
4. rational soul

1d4 on this and I get 4 - they've evolved a rational soul! So now you have a coral that's a full person. Maybe it just contemplates, since it can't really do or observe anything? Maybe these are the brains in vats I've been hearing so much about? Maybe their strange dreams call out to people from the sea, singing of a strange kinship... 

(Note this table could have given us sequences that make even less sense, like getting a rational soul before getting a brain - I would rather roll with and explain such oddities than try to fit everything into a more elaborate sequence.)

Potential uses of this could include:

• evolution, as in the above, towards people crabs
• the villain's plans progressing
• class abilities, especially in your bespoke GLOGhack
• a civilization progressing up a "tech tree"
• rewards from a patron for progressively crazier tasks

and so on. I've been thinking about telescopic isotime (which I've just learned is used in Lizardman Diaries' Empyrean Dynasty long before it occurred to me) and am thinking of some millions-year-long minigames involving evolution towards humanish people and millenia-long tech tree development - I'll post rules for those soonish.

the measure of all things

Why measure things in temporal units? 

1. It makes things concrete, dare I say materialist. 
2. It makes things comparable - at least, if a lot of things are measurable in time.
3. It builds in clocks, which many blog posts have written about as helpful to sandbox play and the avoidance of quantum ogres

What can one measure in time?

1. Damage - how long you can survive without receiving medical attention
2. Distance - how long to travel between points on a pointcrawl
3. Exhaustion - how long it’s been since you got a good night’s rest; how long you can function until you pass out
4. Mana - how long you need to meditate in a place of power to charge this, or how long the ritual needs to be, or how long a cooldown period you get
5. Morale - how long a unit  will endure dangerous battle; how long a force will endure crappy conditions marching/camping under hunger/plague/harsh discipline
6. Obscurity - how many days of research in the library, or buying drinks at bars, are required to uncover this fact
7. Proficiency - years of training in a skill
8. Projects - how many person-hours are required to create this
9. Rarity - a once in a minute/day/year/century event
10. Relationships - how long someone will care about you before needing the relationship renewed (by, depending on the type of relationship, patronage, or a date night, or whatever)
11. Resistance - how long you can get beaten up, or hold your breath, or endure ______ before folding
12. Standard of Living - how many people need to be working full-time to support both you and yourself (okay not technically a unit of time but integrates well with them
13. Stealth - how long you can do this without someone noticing
14. Wealth - how many hours of labor are embodied in this

How can one measure things in time?

1. Openly, so that players can tactically work with it, or secretly, so that they have to guess.
2. Smoothly, such that you know exactly how long something can take and can put it on Fantasy Calendar or whatever, or stochastically, rolling to see how much things advance or whether the event happens.
3. (If something doesn’t happen according to visible clocks in reality, being open and smooth is going to feel gamey!)
4. Using aforesaid Fantasy Calendar, or a physical timer like on your phone or a little hourglass (useful especially if you use some kind of microisotime where the time represented by a combat round is around the time IRL resolve it

What am I missing from any of the above? And what shouldn’t be measured in time?

fictionplay

Here's a bit of theory, or manifesto, or something. It's short and probably thought of by others, because I'm not all that smart, but I think it articulates the kind of roleplay I find most interesting. 

What I am most interested in lies at the intersection of:

1. fiction that is not stories, in the narrow sense of "story." Stories have a narrative structure, especially one based around a satisfying set of choices that change an individual, with the beginning pregnant with the end; fiction in the sense that I care about is just a set of claims that are consistent with each other but not reality, and which are asserted for interestingness rather than deceit. A description of a cool sword is fiction but not a story. A big setting supplement is also setting but not a story. A campaign that kind of meanders and does a bunch of interesting things may or may not be a story, idk, but it is certainly a fiction.
2. play that is not games, in the narrow sense of "games." Play in the general sense is ____________ ??????? but "properly" gamelike to the extent that goals are clear and actions are clearly delimited.

Thus, the answer to me re: "are RPGs games" or "are RPGs stories" is that they're neither, but adjacent to both.

OSR-Style Roleplay - what it really means

Is the OSR based on a false origin myth? Should it die? Is it an ineradicable discourse? Has it died already again and again? There are many stories you can craft. 

But unlike you heretics, I don't believe in crafting stories - I believe in procedures. As always, once you roll the dice, you should stick with result forevermore. Once you click on the below button, that's what the OSR is.

alone together: solo tools for trad PBP

Recently, a Knight at the Opera discussed how media stand in the shadow of each other; for instance, how early film served as a simple recording of play-like performances despite the possibilities being so different. I don’t know that there’s any RPG form living more thoroughly in the shadow of its parent than PBP versions of tabletop gaming, with more tragic results: it’s a direct transplant of the GM-player conversation loop that is so often strangled rather quickly when the medium simply doesn’t support it. Traditional RPGs, with their task resolution and strict GM/player division of labor, tend to fare worse than storygames, with their conflict resolution, weak or no role specialization, and oftentimes just explicitly passed around narrative control. OSR-style play falls squarely on the former side of this divide.

But OSR-style play has long emphasized a few ideas, like GM neutrality its enforcement through randomized tables, that mesh well with another style, one that’s been finding its legs recently: solo gaming. OSR procedures and solo oracles fit so well together because they’re a solution to the same goals: providing surprising challenges and the illusion of an independent world. 

But solo gaming is also solving another problem: doing without the conversational loop. (Indeed for solo play the former problems arise from the latter.) Perhaps they’ve progressed faster than PBP on this front because while each exchange from player to GM and back in PBP is achingly expensive, in solo it’s impossible.

The thing, though, is that nothing about oracle use and other solo tools makes having a GM impossible - it only makes impossible the GM who wants to tell a particular story. And a GM can do things an oracle can’t - like playing with secret but consistent information, and so on.

Here’s the general proposal, then: for a PBP game to describable either as 1) an OSR game where players know all or most all of the objective GM procedures and can execute the role of neutral referees themselves, 2) several solo games which take place in the same continuity.

This style can also play nice with:

1. Pendragon-style personality mechanics for narrating other PCs 
2. Using multiple systems (say Gary likes combat puzzles and I don’t, so he uses Pathfinder 2e to govern events in his posts and I use B/X or whatever) - since all or most all mechanical loops can be closed within any post, only diegetic continuity matters
3. Since I keep looking for ways to slot it into everything, using 1:1 time as a regulator of “how much” narration any post should be doing
4. GMs uploading tables to Perchance, dungeons to twine…

My more specific proposal: if you’d like to do this over the summer - I thinking a sandbox game set in Dolmenwood but can be persuaded into plenty - let me know!

It Takes a Village (ability score generation method)

 Rook asks for people's favorite ways of generating ability scores. Here's mine:

1. 3d6, down the line.
2. Give this person a name, something that keeps them busy (rolling on an appropriate background table works!), something they want, and (if this isn't the very first person we know about in this world) a relationship to one other person. Make sure it's all on an index card or a spreadsheet row, but nothing more than that.
3. Repeat (going around the table as you do so) until everybody's bored of it. 
4. All of these are now part of your stable of characters. Anybody can choose any and give them a single class level to start.

If you like, you can set things up for generational play by requiring half the rolls to be for minors - roll 2d6 for each stat and when time in the campaign has advanced enough, give them their additional d6 in each stat and make some suppositions about who they've become by that point. 

random factional alignment generator

Why still more posts on alignment? Maybe because as such an inherently slippery concept, there's so many ways to resolve it. Here I want to lean into the idea of alignments as really just being army factions to play Chainmail in. Those of you who grew up as the same time as me will likely recognize exactly where my conception of where Generic Fantasy Army Faction Components comes from.