A Little Salt

In an RPG sourcebook, the information given is generally about System or Setting. 

System is the hard rules about how to resolve questions in the game; what dice we roll to determine success or failure.

Setting is the information about what the game world, and adventures in it are supposed to be like.

Theoretically, we should be able to separate the System from the Setting. We should be able to take the system rules and apply them to a variety of settings. 

What I find with D&D however, is that the System-as-provided dictates huge amounts of the Setting. They are practically intertwined.  It imposes huge assumptions about the Game World and what goes on it.

 

As soon as players plug into the Race/Class matrix to build a character, we have Assumed that all these various types of people exist and have some function in the world. The DM then gets to arrange this motley crew into some sort of "party." The simple Adventuring Party is a D&D trope unto itself.

Then there is the Magic  as listed in the book. As soon as we have a list of Spells, and magic-users calculate what to burn their spell slots on, we have a world where magic isn’t really all that Magical, but more like ammunition to be managed.

How about that spell that returns people from the dead? That makes for a world which is fundamentally different from any human reality.

How about other spells which summon energies and entities from other Planes of Existence? D&D simply assumes a Cosmological Circus. I also find that under these circumstances, playing a magic-user requires a significant dollop of genre-savviness in order to feel effective.

And if a Gnome is a 3-foot-tall magical person as described in the PHB, then what do we call the creatures that are 3-inches-high with red conical hats and keep mice as pets?

Then you have the Levelling System. It is nice for a character to grow and gain power. D&D has a conceit of character level, and facing PCs against roughly equivalent enemies. This creates the assumption that PCs will begin their careers by slugging rats, then eventually become powerful enough to tell God how they really feel. This creates a serous expectation of scope for Players and DMs.

At the end of the day, we get a Bizarro World where, perversely, a Dungeon is a place people Want to go.

 

All this about the Assumed Setting of D&D is sticking in my craw lately. Partially because I get to teach it to new players, and I find it is a whole damned thing. And partially because I have game ideas which are decidedly Fantasy, but would not fit into D&D as D&D.

D&D could be a game about Anything. The source books have everything from dinosaurs to Hellenic deities to mind-devouring space aliens.

However, the tendency in play has been to make it a game about Everything.  The Forgotten Realms setting (which includes locations like Baldur’s Gate) is probably the definitive, official D&D setting. It is definitive because it makes room for All the Usual Stuff, and whatever else has been published in official books.  

(Parenthetical statement about content bloat, Hasbro, cranking out books and crap, commercialism) 

It’s a great body of work and imagination. But all the elves and warlocks and displacer-beasts tend to choke out the notions and visions (delicate and fragile ones) which will be unique to each DM and group.

If a DM wanted to cut their game loose from any of these assumptions, they would have to brutally pare out huge sections of the rules; The D&D parts that Players probably expect to be in a game of D&D because that’s what D&D is like. That's what I'm toying with.

I am thinking about trying other game systems, or taking a knife to the Rules of D&D. But that’s a separate post. I’d like to maybe run Mage: The Ascension, just to show my players that D&D isn’t the only option for tapping that TTRPG magic.

 

For now, all of this is just to explain to my players that D&D is its own beast.  Much of the experience is guided by its Assumed setting, and maybe not so much by our own imaginations and fancies. (Especially in these current adventures which are specifically meant to teach the Assumed setting) Please take it with a grain of salt.

Chasing the Dragon/ How I built these adventures

 After a hiatus of 5 years, I'm back to running Satan's Game.

My little girl is bigger. Work is quite tolerable. I am lucky in love. And so I have a little more RAM to spare the imagination.

We bought ourselves Baldur's Gate III for our nearly coincident birthdays. So much of the history of vidya games is The Attempt to Automate Dungeons & Dragons.   BGIII is exactly that. You can make the little people move around the terrain. You can make them kiss. You can't look Up though, which is a miserable shame in a game about exploration.

As cool as BGIII is, it soon got me jonesing to tabletop as god intended. Now I am lingering in early Act II, (btw the game is divided into Acts, following the general trend in Content-Era D&D which emphasizes "story" and "narrative" while offering formulaic solutions to achieve this, like I am about to offer below)  Neglecting this Very Important Videogame because I am suddenly more interested in game and Dungeonmaster-craft.

It is notedly difficult to assemble a tabletop group in your 30-40s. We have busy lives. We go to bed early. Having addressed these hurdles, I have gathered a group of Players, all of whom are(were) brand new to the TTRPG experience. Seizing their availability, I set forth to quickly build and Adventure; something which I have not done in years, and never really had nailed down in the first place.   

This is how I mentally structured the adventure. Insert disclaimers here.

Inspiration     Purpose     Scope/Structure     Mechanics     Specifics 

Inspiration: The initial Idea that was so good, you simply have to run a game about it. It will dovetail or dictate the Purpose, Structure, or Mechanics of the creation. The inspirations will rarely be a Specific. Specific encounters may be more ore less inspired. But one juicy encounter, taken by itself will rarely provide the imaginative structure on which to build the rest.

My Inspiration was that I simply wanted to run an enjoyable game, and that my players would all be very New. For all I know, this is the only taste of TTRPG these folks will ever have. And I want to leave a good impression. For this, I want to furnish a "typical" D&D experience. 

Purpose: This is where I define What this game is for. Why would anybody want to play it. Are we doing a serious, long drawn high-stakes campaign to get that LotR high? Are we having one shot to play with ideas which would break, or not fit into a more conventional game?  In my case, I am curating an experience for New players to show them the game. I don't have a message or a grand vision this time.   I want to use a spread of Monsters, NPCs, Treasures, Tricks and Traps that characterize both the Mechanics and the Milieu of Satan's Game.   

Scope and Structure: With my goals in mind, I can pick a format which will serve the goals. Hex crawl, sandbox, dungeon crawl, one-shot, unfolding drama, 5 room dungeon, theater of the mind. These are some game-planning structures that are commonly talked about. Frankly, I want to keep it short. I'm not counting on scheduling regular games. And I really don't want to overcommit either. So the plan is to make a short one-shot adventure. 

This is also about the same as defining what the adventure is About. What is the main thing the players will be dealing with? A dungeon? a landscape? a person? a case of right and wrong? This will set the bounds of the adventure. Beyond those bounds is a different adventure. The first adventure I presented is about a monster. The players are challenged to survive it and learn about it. I set this in a wilderness area, with only a handful of scenes. The points of interests are in a loose geographical arrangement, but not mapped. The player characters should follow from one to the other on their quest for security and certainty. Right? There is not a "story" written out. But I know the motivations of the monster and how it will operate and what it will do if the PC's don't interfere. That informs me to What Should Happen Next

Mechanics: I didn't tinker with this for the adventure. New players have enough to learn. But changing or adding mechanics can help convey the ideas or mood. The opponents or environment may have a challenging feature which adds a challenge to exploration or combat. One might invent new powers for the players to covet.  A curse which grows over time might be used to ratchet tension. These are examples of mechanical tweaks.

Specifics: These are the encounters and points of interest which make the actual body of the game. Structure considerations tell us how to distribute them. For this adventure, I made sure that there was something for most every sort of character To Do. This is to teach a variety of mechanics. Encounters are also meant to convey information about the monster and increase tension in the situation. I will also scan through spells, tricks, monsters and so on to sift out appropriate ideas, then apply as prudent. 

 I found a monster in the AD&D MM. The Eblis, a sub-entry under Birds. This is a spooky intelligent stork with illusion powers. I like everything about that except it being a literal stork. Storks bring babies, not horror. By the time I was done reskinning it and modifying it to 5E, I had a new creature which no one but myself had any reference to. It might have been in better taste to stick to typical D&D monsters in the book, for the sake of teaching the milieu. But I was fascinated with the Eblis and Mystery Monster adventures are pretty simple to plan.  

What happened? As a result of all this, the party succeeded their way off course almost immediately. They got some blood on their hands and got while it was good. They left with many questions. 

We have another adventure going on now. This one is also meant to convey the gist of D&D to new players. This one is about a dungeon rather than a monster. More of a dungeon for dungeons' sake.