Spell-ing it out?

TLDR: the simplest expression of a spell may be the most fun in play and engender the most creativity.

For your consideration, five iterations of one of the most basic of all D&D spells, by edition (skipping over a few):

Light: A spell to cast light in a circle 3” [30'] in diameter, not equal to full daylight. It lasts for a number of turns equal to 6 + the number of levels of the user; thus, a 7th-level Magic-User would cast the spell for 13 turns. 

[Oe Men & Magic, WotC collector's edition "reprint"]

This is our baseline. As far as I can tell it is faithful to the '76 Whitebox edition. I am trying to find an earlier scan.

Light*     Range 120' / Duration 12 turns
This spell casts light in a circle, 30' in diameter. It is bright enough to read by, but not equal to full daylight. It may be cast on an object. The light may be cast at a creature's eyes. The creature may make a saving throw, but if it fails, the victim will be blinded for 12 turns. In the D&D BASIC rules, a blinded creature may not attack.
* Reversible
[Moldvay/Cook Basic]

The spell gains a fixed duration, range, and some adjudication text because somebody decided to cast it "on" a creature's eyes and some GM allowed it. Note that the monster gets a saving throw. Also, it's now reversible. 

Light (Alteration) Reversible 
Level: 1   /   Components: V,S
Range: 12"   /   Casting Time: 4 segments
Duration: 6 turns + 1 turn/level   /   Saving Throw: None
Area of Effect: 2" radius globe
Explanation/Description: This spell causes excitation of molecules so as to make them brightly luminous. The light thus caused is equal to torch light in brightness, but its sphere is limited to 4” in diameter. It lasts for the duration indicated (7 turns at 1st experience level, 8at 2nd, 9at 3rd. etc.) or until the caster utters a word to extinguish the light. The light spell is reversible, causing darkness in the same area and under the same conditions, except the blackness persists for only one-half the duration that light would last. If this spell is cast upon a creature, the applicable magic resistance and saving throw dice rolls must be made. Success indicates that the spell affects the area immediately behind the creature, rather than the creature itself. In all other cases, the spell takes effect where the caster directs as long as he or she has a line of sight or unobstructed path for the spell; light can spring from air, rock, metal, wood, or almost any similar substance.
[AD&D PHB]

The spell now has a school and components, the duration is a level-dependent length, and the area is increased to a 40' diameter (assuming a 1":10' grid square). The spell gets a physics justification, and the brightness is characterized more specifically as torch-like. Details on the reversible version are given (and vary in duration). Magic resistance is mentioned, and there is some text about what happens if the target resists or saves vs. the spell.

Light     Evocation [Light]
Level: Brd 0, Clr 0, Drd 0, Sor/Wiz 0
Components: V, M/DF
Casting time: 1 standard action
Range: Touch
Target: Object touched
Duration: 10 min./level (D)
Saving Throw: None
Spell Resistance: No
This spell causes an object to glow like a torch, shedding bright light in a 20-foot radius (and dim light for an additional 20 feet) from the point you touch. The effect is immobile, but it can be cast on a movable object. Light taken into an area of magical darkness does not function.
A light spell (one with the light descriptor) counters and dispels a darkness spell (one with the darkness descriptor) of an equal or lower level.
Arcane Material Component: A firefly or a piece of phosphorescent moss.
[D&D 3.5, Online SRD]

The spell school is changed, and it gets a clerical domain. Components are expanded and specified. Range is reduce to touch, duration is still level-specific but simplified, and the spell is no longer reversible but instead "counters" spells of its opposite. Note that it's a lot harder to tag an enemy's eyes with Light now! 

Light     Evocation cantrip
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: Touch
Components: V, M (a firefly or phosphorescent moss)
Duration: 1 hour
You touch one object that is no larger than 10 feet in any dimension. Until the spell ends, the object sheds bright light in a 20-foot radius and dim light for an additional 20 feet. The light can be colored as you like. Completely covering the object with something opaque blocks the light. The spell ends if you cast it again or dismiss it as an action.
If you target an object held or worn by a hostile creature, that creature must succeed on a Dexterity saving throw to avoid the spell.
[5e PHB]

Light is leveled-down to an at-will cantrip (probably happened in 4e, actually), duration is fixed, and a Dex save is included for unwilling targets. So it's even harder to tag an enemy; you must first touch them and then hope they fail their Dex test? Or, perhaps there is no longer a touch attack roll, you just do it and then they try to dodge it. Yeah, probably that; I'm not a 5e expert.

So, I ask you, did the spell get "better" along the way?

I believe this progression is an illustration of the attempt to systematize all the common aspects of the game – to replace GM rulings with set rules. There is good and bad in that.

By spelling things out, the player experience is possibly more consistent from session to session and table to table. Also, the player has the fairly complete knowledge of how the spell works, possibly making work lighter for the GM (unless the player mis-remembers, and the GM has to correct the effects).

However, spelling it out also constrains the use of the spell. The more words devoted to the exact behavior, targeting, etc. of the spell, the narrower its usage becomes. I think it's safe to say that the latter spell descriptions rule out certain things. The phrase "one object that is no larger than 10 feet in any dimension" suggests that the spell has to be cast on an object – not living tissue like an enemy's eyes (reinforced by "if you target an object held or worn by a hostile creature") and it can't just emanate from you. This, very clear picture of how Light works – down to letting the caster choose the color – shuts out other choices that might be made for flavor or utility. What if I wanted to use a jar of fireflies as a component? Or cast the light on my palm so I could open and close my fist to send morse-code like signals? Maybe I wanted a halo around my head so I could look angelic.  

For fun, here are two more descriptions of light, one from a streamlined take on the old school rules, The Black Hack, and one from a Oe retroclone, Delving Deeper. To my way of thinking, the brevity of these entries is fantastic! 

Light: Creates dim light from a Nearby spot or object that lasts for Ud8 Minutes.
[The Black Hack 2e, "Ud" references the usage die mechanic.]

Light (reversible, duration: 12 turns, range: 120ft) Causes an object to shine as brightly as a torch, illuminating a 15ft radius. The reverse, darkness, creates a sphere of impenetrable darkness with a 15ft radius. [Delving Deeper v3, Vol. 1]



* Froth of the Thought Eater Podcast has suggested the spell summary in D&D 3.5 to be an excellent resource. There we have this gem: "Light: Object shines like a torch."

Sword & Backpack on dice

TLDR: Dice are cool. 

... each player should possess a personal 20-sided die. The die is used to resolve combat, make skill rolls, and so on. Sharing a die is fine, but it’s weak magic. In Sword & Backpack, dice aren’t just tools, they’re a direct line to fate, a link to the great mystery. As such, they should be respected. Your personal die should be carried in one’s pocket at all times. It’s a totem. Respect it as such.

You can find a primer on, and links to, Sword & Backpack here. S&B is a tongue-in-cheek presentation of the simplest RPG rules imaginable. Basically roll a d20 and see how high or low the result is. Sounds simplistic, sure, but what more do you really need? Also, the formatting of the rules is kind of cool; the small pages are meant to be printed, cut out, and pasted into a pocket-sized notebook.

Analyzing Choose Your Own Adventure plot branching

TLDR: avoid linearity in your adventures, yes, but also learn how to make recursiveness not tedious.

I have a mild addiction to the old Choose Your Own Adventure books. They are an early example of computer-based Interactive Fiction (IF) and share a lineage with the text-based adventure games of old: Colossal Cave and Zork, for instance. As such, they are a type of role-playing game that evolved along a different path from tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, it works like this. You begin a story and, after a few pages of text, are given a choice like "If you decide you can't delay in finding your lost dog and go down the stairs into darkness turn to page 114. If you decide to go back for a light source and supplies first, hoping that Spot can take care of himself for a while, turn to page 32." As you read you are offered more choices and you follow a branching story path until you reach a passage that culminates, for good or ill, in "The End."

[If you find the CYOA books fascinating, there is an interesting (and freely-available) game called Cheat Your Own Adventure that turns the concept of branching paths into a kind of social, story-telling game.]

When reading a CYOA book, I map it to keep track of alternate choices that I want to follow up on later. I keep reading through to various ends until I know I have visited every passage in the book. Here are three books by Edward Packard that I have read in the last year or two, and what I learned from mapping them.

CYOA 12: UFO 54-40 (1982)
You are abducted by aliens while traveling on the Concorde. Will you get along with the aliens or will you be brain-wiped? Will you find human allies to help you escape? Will you reach the paradise planet, Ultima?

I mapped this one some time ago and used a method that later evolved into something more data-oriented and less visual, as you can see. If I were to re-map it like the others, it would look more like CYOA #18 than #45, which is to say less recursive.

Whether intentional or through a printing error, there is a thread of the story you can't reach without cheating in this one.

CYOA 18: Underground Kingdom (1983)
You enter the hollow earth through a fissure that seems to be rapidly closing. At the core you discover a black sun, mysterious golden birds of high intelligence, and warring tribes of furry people.

Green = redirect to target (boxed), Red = ending, Gray = no choice

CYOA 45: You Are A Shark (1985)
You enter a temple where you find yourself trapped by a chimeric idol. A seated monk leads you through meditations in which you experience many lives as different animals. The not-subtle subtext is that humans are jerks.

This is the most "recursive" CYOA I have read to date, with many ways to loop back through the story. I was surprise that, for me, the recursiveness did not make the story better. For one thing, there are fewer endings because different lines end up merging into the same track.  I suppose the upside of is that you can experience most of the book in a single read with the right choices – looping back naturally and choosing a different path each time. In some ways, I felt like I was robbed of the many-stories-in-one-book nature of earlier CYOAs.

Green = redirect to target (boxed), Red = ending, Gray = no choice

Same data, but visualized in tree form

How This Relates to Tabletop Role-Playing Games

It seems that over time Packard worked fewer endings into the books. UFO 54-40 has 30 endings. Underground Kingdom has 21. You are a Shark has only 14! This may have been a reaction to readers frustrated by very short story lines – in Underground Kingdom you can die in four pages, having only made two choices. And some of the endings are abrupt and disappointing. Very few take up more than half a page. The trade-off is that more looping can feel repetitive.

This brings to mind some essays I read a while back on Jaquaying the Dungeon. The reference is to Jenell Jaquays, who wrote The Caverns of Thracia (1979) and other classic RPG modules as Paul Jaquays. 

Turning Jennell's last name into a verb, the author of the articles, Justin Alexander, contends that dungeons should be looping, not linear. That's a gross over-simplification of what is spelled out over five essays, but it relates to the CYOA structures above. If we can think of non-looping, branching paths as linear – and I think we can – "Jaquaying" would mean to mix it up a bit by having multiple ways to progress through the story that aren't mutually exclusive. In You Are A Shark, you can take a "left-fork" that later returns you to the same fork, allowing you to go right (or left again). When it comes to dungeons, you can add the idea of multiple entrances (beginnings) as well as exits (endings).

I generally agree that Jaqueying a dungeon is a good thing, but – and I think you knew there was a "but" coming – re-treading the same old paths can be tedious. So how do we design dungeons that are Jaquayed without being boring?

Recursive, not Repetitive

First of all, we don't have to work too awfully hard at this. There is an inherent interest in "the road not taken." Players will naturally want to return to areas where they skipped over a door or a turn, just to see what they missed. And humans have a kind of completist itch in any case; they want to know they have set foot in every available square foot of dungeon.

So really the tedium of going back through the same areas is about signal-to-noise ratio. Think about your drive to work, there's nothing qualitatively positive about the repetitive part of it. You've seen those roads a million times. So how do you keep the drive fresh? Well, nature helps. An unusually lovely sunset, the change in seasons and conditions, the random appearance of interesting animals. All of those things can make "the same old drive" eventful. And there are things you do yourself to break up the drive: like playing different music or an audiobook, making up games that involve license plates or road signs, using the time to call an old friend or parent...

These same kinds of tricks work in the dungeon. The GM can change the conditions or introduce new creatures into already travelled areas. Instead of a pretty sunset or a flight of geese, the dungeon may have become smokey with accumulated torch use and stings your eyes, or the sounds of the party has drawn a patrol of bugbears into the area, or killing the displacer beasts on the way in now means the kobolds can lay claim an area they long avoided. Maybe that lever you flipped down has mysteriously been flipped back up while you were away, or a previously locked door is standing wide open.

The GM can also throw up detours. Perhaps there is a new cave-in or hastily thrown up barricade. Maybe a shifting hallway trap or an illusion makes the characters believe they are in the same hallway when they really aren't. 

To complete the analogy, the party can play "road games" to pass the time, perhaps with some encouragement from the GM. Not fighting their way through the halls and rooms this time might give the party more time to explore on the way back/out. Maybe there were runes they didn't notice before which help fill in some of the dungeon's history, or they could use the time to search for secret doors (again). I generally use the "you get one attempt" rule unless the fiction changes. So here it is; the fiction changed – the characters have been through the hall already once and this time they are seeing it from a different direction. The GM might even let them find the secret stuff automatically this time, or at least throw out really pointed hints and reduce all the difficulties by a step or two.

Stop and Smell the Slimes!

This advice might take a little effort to employ, but it's worthwhile. I'm as guilty as anyone about short-handing things that are repetitive in role-playing. After a while it's natural to not describe the same halls or the same attacks and just say things like "you go north for 40 feet" or "I attack the kobold." But it's a quick death for a game or campaign to indulge in this form of abbreviation. After all, you are playing the game to experience the excitement and the wonder of being a different person in a different world. Don't rush through it! Take a moment to stop and smell the roses: admire the dwarven stonecraft or collect a sample or two of various useful slimes and molds.

Unlike a Choose Your Own Adventure, you can change the "text" of the game as you go. Like a Choose Your Own Adventure, the fun is in the journey, not the end.

A creature design primer for Troika!

TLDR: what it says on the tin, really. A quick breakdown of Troika! monster stats, guides for creating original monsters, and a linked spreadsheet containing all the core book creatures.

Art by Shoji Ohtomo

Designing from Scratch

Let's keep this simple. When creating a new monster, just find a comparative creature and use/alter those numbers or start from scratch using the typical stat ranges as follows:

SKILL
The Skill stat for creatures ranges from 3-16, but about two-thirds have a Skill of 7, 8, or 9. Just remember you are working with a curve. There's a big difference between those three numbers! The "drop off" on either end of that middle range is severe.

• Low Skill 3-6: Gremlins, Pisceans, Goblins, Living Dead 
• Moderate Skill 7-9: Knights of the Road, Orcs, Harpys, Lizard-Folk, Man-Beasts, Thinking Engine, Ogre
• High Skill 10-16: Tower Wizard, Manticore, Dragon

STAMINA

Creature Stamina ranges from 3-46, with a fairly even/wide distribution. Remember that creatures that use spells don't spend Stamina on them, so you don't need to adjust for that. Stamina is just a measure of toughness. Base your score on how long you want them to stay active in a fight.

• Weak 3-6: Gremlins, Pisceans, Sympathy Serpent
• Average 7-14: Feathered Folk, Knights of the Road, Lizard-Folk, Orcs, Man-Beasts, Living Dead, Trolls, Harpys, Tower Wizards, Parchment Witches, Thinking Engines
• Tough 14*-21: Cyclops, Salamanders, Ogres, Manticores, Dolms, Alzabos
• Titanic 22+: Dragon, Ekodat, Loathsome Wurm

* 14 is a kind of slip-point between really tough humanoids and loutish or "puny" giants. If you prefer, you could use 1d6+1, 2d6+3, 3d6+5, or 4d6+7 as rough "hit dice" guides for weak, average, tough, titanic creatures.

INITIATIVE

Initiative ranges from 1-8, but only 4 creatures out of 36 exceed an Initiative of 3. Creatures with multiple attacks, area attacks, or follow up attacks need an extra point or two to get those in. 

• Slow 1: Goblins, Living Dead, Trolls
• Average 2: Pisceans, Feathered Folk, Knights of the Road, Orcs, Lizard-Folk, Man-Beasts, Tigers, Parchment Witches, Thinking Engines
• Fast 3: Gremlins, Harpys, Tower Wizards, Cyclops, Salamanders, Ogres*
• Supernatural 4-8: Alzabo, Manticore, Loathsome Wurm, Dragon

ARMOUR

Armour ranges from 0-4.

• None 0: fifteen creatures from Living Dead to Tower Wizards
• Light 1: nine creatures from Goblins to Thinking Engines and Ogres
• Heavy/Tough 2: six creatures from Trolls to Cyclops
• X-Heavy/X-Tough 3: five creatures including Salamanders and Manticores
• "Impervious" 4: the dragon

DAMAGE

Damage should be based on the weapon used, a weapon comparable to the creature's natural weapon (e.g. dagger-claws), and/or creature's size and ferocity. Seriously, I can't make this easier than just thinking about the creature's "weapons" and looking at the damage tables for a comparable. 

MEIN

Pick any six labels. They don't need to represent any kind of sequence and there are 158 unique ones among 36 monsters, so I think it's safe to say you can be creative. Common ones are Aggressive, Confused, Curious, Fearful, Hungry, Playful, Spiteful, Tired, and Watchful. Some of my personal favorites are: Absent-Minded, Beatific, Blooming, Doubting, Hagridden, Inveigling (and Fake Inveigling), Mewling, Plagued by Thought, Rancorous, Rowdy, Smug, and Unstable. 

SPECIALS

Specials aren't always directly combat-oriented. While the Manticore and the Dragon have special combat attacks, lots of other creatures have specials like the Cyclops' foresight, the Parchment Witches spell variety, or the Pisceans' penchant for eating the party's supplies. 

The Data

In case you are wondering where these numbers came from, I put the Troika! creatures into a spreadsheet (also in available in comma-delimited form). Enjoy.

Converting from Advanced Fighting Fantasy

Troika! is based on Fighting Fantasy. The monster manuals for the RPG based on FF (AFF) is called Out of the Pit and Beyond the Pit. The presentation of each is slightly different: 

Troika! Goblin

Skill: 5
Stamina: 6
Initiative: 1
Armour: 1
Damage as Weapon 

Mein
1 Curious
2 Dismissive
3 Preoccupied
4 Gossipy
5 Overly Friendly
6 Paranoid

Advanced Fighting Fantasy Goblin

Skill: 5
Stamina: 5
Habitat: Hills, Plains, Wilderness, Caves, Dungeons, Marshes
Number Encountered: 1-6
Type: Humanoid
Reaction: Hostile
Intelligence: Average 

The obvious differences are that Troika! includes Initiative, assigns a number to Armour, and teases out the reactions with a Mien table. AFF, on the other hand, supplies a Habitat, Number Encountered, and Intelligence rating.

To convert an AFF monster to Troika! you will minimally need to assign an Initiative number, Armour rating, and Damage Track (or "as Weapon"). You can obviously work with the ranges above. The rest is icing. And you shouldn't need to adjust the scores where the two systems' stat categories align.

Solo gaming apologetics

TLDR: I try to shatter some assumptions about solo RPG play and discuss reasons for trying it.

Prejudices and misunderstandings abound when it comes to solo gaming, and it would try my patience to address all of them here. Snap judgments like "I guess it's okay to just try out the rules" or "Sure, but it's not like really role-playing" are, as of this moment, gently but firmly set aside. I want to begin from a place of no assumptions.

It seems strange to me and totally incongruous with the notion of using one's imagination NOT to enjoy playing alone. – Stephen Gilbert

Why are the majority of wargames played by more than one person in the first place? – Stuart Asquith

These quotes are from blog posts on the hobby of solo wargaming, but I think they are legitimate and disarming questions from which to approach solo RPG play. They invert the assumptions that solo play is something you only do when you can't find other players or that it is inherently weaker, qualitatively, due to the lack of other players.

When playing RPGs what do others bring to the table? More, and more diverse imagination, sure. Also a kind of surprise factor – ideas that originate from outside of our own experiences. Other players help us increase bandwidth so that there can be more things going on and more characters acting simultaneously, with a low cognitive load on each individual player. Other players allow us to immerse in a single role and to not try to imagine what other characters, villains, or monsters are doing, or how the world itself reacts to our probings. Other players make RPG play a social event.

That seems like a lot!

But it would be wrong to think that you can't achieve some of the same diversity and surprise with other tools – dice and tables, primarily. Before you dismiss this idea, think of gamers you have played with before. Can you not imagine what they would do, in character, given certain situations? I won't say that replacing other players is easy, but a sufficiently complex "model" in our heads or in some table-driven programmatic form can give us very similar results. After all, Game Masters do this all the time – jumping from one NPC to another with sometimes radically different backgrounds and agendas.

Additionally, playing alone removes most time constraints, making bandwidth less of an issue. And a degree of social interaction, of a different kind, can be had by sharing your play narratives with others.

It's a good thing when your characters start talking back. :)

To deal with a lack of players.
Some gamers suffer from a lack of other willing players in their area. Of course, the online world has made this less of a problem. With a decent Internet connection and a little exploration to find the right groups on social media platforms, you can find other gamers willing to play with you. (If you aren't a dick, that is.) However, getting an online game started usually requires you to be reasonably flexible in arranging times and chosen systems. Your own "why" could be that you have very little predictable times in which to game or simply that you want to play a specific system or setting that doesn't capture the interest of others.

To learn or practice.
Solo play is an ideal way to learn rules, test modules, practice voices, etc. There are tools out there for working either end of the scenario – tools that simulate parties of adventurers so that you can practice running a game or scenario, as well as tools that emulate the game master so that you can try those same systems or modules out in character.

To entertain.
We can't overlook the argument that it's just plain fun. Maybe you already have a gaming group, but you want to play more than you do currently. Maybe you are looking for something to do when you suffer from insomnia or when you are stuck in a hotel while traveling for work, or as a quiet-time respite from all the computer, tablet, and phone screens you stare at the rest of the day. Don't be embarrassed to embrace solo play. Why is telling yourself stories somehow pathetic but passively absorbing stories through the television an acceptable pastime? No one laughs at writers or artists who imagine cool things when alone!


These points are by no means exhaustive. Feel free to add your own solo play "why" or "why not" in the comments below.