Firefly: The Knitted Jumper Caper

I have a quiet challenge that I've set myself: to find the thinnest possible premise from which I can spin a workable game adventure. The adventure based on the exhibition of Egyptian burial art was easy. The adventure based on the 'ghost' underground station they found in London is likewise easy. The adventure based on the Women's Institute and their charitable endeavours? That's a little harder.

So, anyway, I had this idea. And I thought it was a good idea, one that would give plenty of adventure for a three-hour game session, where the villain was suitably psychotic, and it was all good fun. My one concern was that the players might decide I'd just gone too far this time.

What I didn't expect was for one of the players to say, "oh, they're probably smallpox blankets" within ten seconds of the Crew getting the cargo they were to transport, followed by another noting that harmless old Ethel was clearly an evil assassin. Pretty much the only thing they didn't immediately have was why.

Still, it was a fun session - the big advantage of Firefly is that the characters do a good job bouncing off one another, which means that with a good group you can get a fun session almost regardless. And so we had balls of purple wool being handled like soft, squishy grenades, we had the evil alliance between Kaylee and Ethel (which River detected based on their mutual cheerfulness), we had an asset named "The Crate Escape"...

It was a good session to end the year on. And now the Lost Episodes take a break until January...

On Hidden Rules

Over on ENWorld, I managed to get myself embroiled in a debate about the value of 'hidden' rules - those rules in the game that aren't immediately obvious but which only become apparent with system mastery.

It's fair to say I'm not a fan. Frankly, I'm of the opinion that if something is important enough to be a rule it should be spelled out in big, clear letters; and if it's not important enough to do that, it's not important enough to be a rule.

Now, it's worth noting that a rule may be 'hidden' for several reasons:

A rule may be hidden because the game is badly organised. This is quite common in early editions of the game, where things were gradually added as the game was crafted, largely on the basis that they were 'cool'. I'm inclined to think that if there are rules hidden due to bad organisation of the rulebooks, that's a design flaw that should be corrected up at the next reasonable opportunity.

A rule may be hidden because the rules-text is badly phrased and inpenetrable. The classic example of this is the rules for initiative in 1st Edition, where it's entirely possible to read the text carefully, and several times, and still not understand what it's getting at. (See also the 5e rules for creating monsters.) Again, I'm inclined to think that any such instances are a design flaw, and should be corrected at the next reasonable opportunity.

A rule may turn out to be hidden because there are in fact two contradictory rules and it's not clear which takes precedence. Or a rule may turn out to be hidden because there are multiple rules in play and the interactions (or order in which they should be applied) is not clear. And, sure enough, I'm inclined to think this is a design flaw. The authors should consider the situation, work out what they intended, and clear it up at the next reasonable opportunity.

But all of those are basically just mistakes that can, and should, be fixed when possible. What really annoys me are those cases where the designers have deliberately hidden rules away, as Easter Eggs to reward those players who develop "system mastery".

3e was probably the worst edition for this. A good example was that they made the longsword the best melee weapon (in 3.0e - it changed in 3.5e), because it did the most damage for a one-handed weapon (allowing a shield), and had a 19-20/x2 critical which meant that you tended to get less 'wasted' damage if you rolled a crit against a low-hp opponent.

There are two things wrong with this thinking, though. The first, and lesser, problem is that the designers didn't actually have as much control as they thought they did - the fact that the longsword was better than the battleaxe was a trivial nonsense next to the difference between 3e casters and non-casters - who cares about marginally more damage when the Wizard can move mountains with a word? And for all that the designers have very cleverly built in this 'best' melee weapon, they seem to have utterly missed that cheap magic item creation has the consequence of removing the constraints of Vancian casting - the only thing keeping those casters in check.

But the bigger problem is that the designers didn't seem to consider that adding hidden rules, and rewarding system mastery, in this manner makes the game harder for the DM to run. And the DM isn't a competitor in the game, nor a competitor with WotC (in any sense) - one of the purposes of the DMG should be to make the game as easy as possible for the DM to run. If there are any hidden rules there for the players to find, those same rules should be spelled out very clearly in the DMG, complete with their explanations.

Another example of a hidden rule in 3e perhaps explains this better: there's a convention in the spell design that a spell either requires a touch attack roll or a saving throw (almost never both). Spells that require a touch attack will almost always hit, since touch ACs are generally poor, and so they do "1dX plus level" damage. Conversely, spells that require a save a much less likely to hit, and so they do "XdY" damage - they're vastly more damaging. But this convention is never actually spelled out, even in the DMG where it talks about creating new spells.

(And, consequently, when later designers started adding new spells, they seem not to have known about that convention, and therefore tend not to apply it - with the consequence that many newer spells are simply better than the PHB ones.)

Or, again, there's a convention that spells that do ability score damage (such as ray of exhaustion) can't reduce a target's ability scores to 0, since that would lead either to death or complete incapacitation on the part of the target. But, again, this isn't spelled out, and so there's a spell in the "Spell Compendium" that does massive Dex damage with no cap, and therefore allows mid-level Wizards to trivially one-shot dragons.

Oops.

(There's also the Wealth by Level table, which for years led to DMs being accused of not giving out enough treasure, indeed to the extent that Pathfinder now encodes that DMs should give out a 'right' amount of treasure. Only it turns out that WbL wasn't any sort of target amount, but rather just the likely outcome of using the provided treasure tables. And, indeed, DMs certainly shouldn't have let new high-level PCs start with the value given on the table, but more likely around 60% of that value. Though in that case I'm not certain whether that was a deliberately hidden rule or something that was only realised later.)

Now, it is worth noting that, of course, there will always be some hidden rules. The complex nature of the overall ruleset, coupled with the fact that the designers are human and therefore imperfect, guarantees that this will be the case. So I'm not foolish enough to request they be removed entirely. However, while I'm not going to call for perfection, I think it is reasonable to ask for better - and to keep asking for improvements as time goes on. After all, wouldn't we all like a game that is exactly the same... but better?

Ease of Use in 5e

The more I've run 5e, the more frustrating I've found the experience. Don't get me wrong - I really like the game, the rules, and the vast bulk of the experience. But the more I've played, the more I've found that the game itself gets in my way. For example:

The Character Sheet. I've complained about this before, and it's still true - the official character sheet for 5e sucks. I still haven't found a really good one, largely because I haven't looked very hard, but the one that we have is certainly not it.

The index. The index of the PHB is bad - it's full of entries reading "see something else" where, frankly, it would just be easier to give the page number. Perhaps the worst example is "Dash".

(Of course, in the 21st century what we should really have is an easily-accessed online database of all the rules, all painstakingly hyperlinked and searchable. Physical books, and even PDFs, are actually entirely the wrong format for this game.)

The monster creation rules. For the new Eberron campaign, I had a pretty clear idea of the monsters I wanted to introduce. Unfortunately, while all of these exist in 3e, none of them yet exist in 5e, which meant I needed to do a conversion. So, I sat down with the 5e DMG... and spent an hour scratching my head. It turns out that the monster creation rules are actually pretty damn good, but they're almost completely backwards, which is pretty damning.

The binding. I paid $50 for my DMG, and by the time I had finished my read-through, and before I gave it any in-game use at all, there were already pages coming loose. Which is absolutely inexcusable in and of itself, but seriously impacts my ability to use the book (since I'm constantly worried it's about to come apart).

I still like 5e. I still think they've created a damn good game. But at this point I kinda wish they'd take the books back to the design stage and produce a revised edition, and in particular a revised edition with no rules changes whatsoever but carefully rewritten to maximise ease of use.

Well, That Didn't Go So Well...

Last night was the second chapter of my "Eberron: Dust to Dust" campaign, and unfortunately was the second game in the last few months that just didn't seem to work (the first being the Firefly episode "Strawberries"). And, once again, the problems were entirely on the GM side of the screen. (Frustratingly, the problem was also not a lack of preparation - I actually had both enough material prepared and also the relevant material prepared. It just didn't sing.)

The fundamental and biggest problem in the evening was that this session was very definitely a railroad. The players basically had no meaningful choices to make. Unfortunately, I suspect that may have been inherent to the adventure I'm running - I needed to introduce the Draconic Prophecy, the Spell-weaver, and take the PCs to the haunted Lightning Rail station, and in the time allocated that basically meant hitting each of these in turn. Which means that the important lesson there is simple - next time, run a different adventure!

The second problem, though, is an ongoing issue I've found - I don't do well at handling "exploration" scenes. I'm mostly okay with combat (though I'm increasingly coming to think low-level 5e sucks in that regard), and I'm going with interaction, but that exploration pillar is tripping me up. I'm definitely going to have to work on that quite urgently, as exploration plays a significant part in both the third chapter and also in the "Christmas Game" this year! But, for now, suffice to say that some scenes were utterly devoid of any tension, and any notions of resource management fell by the wayside pretty damn quickly.

Regarding low-level 5e combat: I've now run four sessions of 5e, all at low levels, and have had several combats in those sessions. And I'm just not terribly happy. Basically, 5e seems to have taken a significant retrograde step from 4e, and even from 3e and previous.

The issue is partly one of simplification. In theory, this is a good thing, since it frees the DM up from having so many minor issues to worry about, allowing him to worry about the "fun stuff". Which looks like it could well be great at slightly higher levels. But at low level neither the PCs nor the monsters really have many fun powers to play around with. And so a goblin is much like a chitine, is much like a skeleton, is much like a... while the PCs' tactical choices boil down to deciding which bad guy to attack. Even the 3e consideration of how best to achieve flanking is gone.

Fortunately, I think this should fix itself fairly rapidly, as the PCs quickly progress to higher levels and everything gets more interesting. At least, I hope that's the case. Otherwise, it does look like this may be my last-ever D&D campaign, which would be a real shame.

The End

I learned this morning that Margaret Weis Productions have effectively stopped production on any new "Firefly RPG" products. It's not clear whether this is a permanent change or a temporary hiatus, but it does mean that there's unlikely to be anything new for the game for at least a year.

Which is a real shame, as I very much enjoyed those books.

That said, I'm not sure there's really all that much that could be added: more adventures, of course, but beyond that?

Though, actually, there are at least two products I would have liked to see: a big, extensive 'atlas' of the The 'Verse, going into a lot more detail about the various worlds (although that's tricky to do, since ideally it should include material both from Firefly and Serenity, while the license only allows MWP to do the former), and a book on "Patrons, Fixers, and Pimps" (my title) about people who might want jobs done, people who are able to get jobs done, and the people who bring the two together. At present, the setting has Badger and Mingo and Fanty, but is otherwise somewhat lacking, so an expansion in this area would be welcome.

But the truth is I should be okay: by my count I have nine pre-gen "Firefly" episodes still unused, plus four (I think) "Serenity" episodes that I can convert. So that's enough material for more than a year of gaming even without adding any of my own episodes. And that's plenty.

But, still, it would have been nice to have a bit more to play with...

Dragonboobs

When WotC introduced Dragonborn to D&D in 4e (well, sort of - like so much else, it's complicated), they unleashed one of the fiercest but also the silliest arguments in D&D history. Because the illustrations of female Dragonborn were differentiated from the males by giving them boobs - and because they were clearly reptilian creatures, that was clearly absurd.

The reason it's an absurd argument is that these are fantastic creatures with a fantastic biology. Real-world reptiles are the way they are because they happened to evolve that way, but it's not hard to imagine that they could evolve along a different path in a different environment. And that's before we even get into the possibility of a creator deity declaring "let it be so."

Now, having said that, I do feel WotC missed an opportunity to do something different with the Dragonborn. Largely because I'm of the school of thought that non-human species should really be non-human, and that the more inhuman a species is, the more it should diverge from humanity. (And so, since elves and orcs can inter-breed with humans, that necessitates at least a physical compatibility, but there's no reason gnomes should, never mind Dragonborn, Shardminds, or Thri-kreen.)

So I would certainly have taken the Dragonborn in a different direction: rather than identify a female dragonborn by giving her boobs (and, in fairness, making her smaller than the males), I would instead have given the males a crest, much like we see in the animal world.

And, in a similar vein, I would vary the depictions for other species more significantly, also. Warforged and Shardminds would be entirely sexless, and not described as having "male or female personalities" (whatever that means). Elves, I think, would be matriarchal, with the females being larger and heavier than the males (this is already true of Drow, of course).

But there's no reason even to stop there. One could introduce a species where all PC members must be male or must be female (like the Khepri from "Perdido Street Station", where the males are all mindless drones, and so any PC would have to be female). Or, indeed, a species where sex remains undifferentiated until they enter a mating phase of their lifecycle, at which point part of the population each become temporarily male or female (and not necessarily the same each time). Or what have you.

Basically, as soon as you're talking about a non-human species, and especially once you're talking about fantasy biology, all bets are off.

Ultimately, my "non-humans should be non-human" position has a number of corollaries, some of which might be useful.

Firstly, because D&D is played by humans and therefore since even non-human D&D characters are played by human players, those D&D species should serve to highlight something about the human condition. Although there is a wide variety of human societies, by virtue of our biology we all have certain things in common - we all age and die relatively quickly; we're all driven to seek food, shelter, and sex; it's women who bear children; etc. But if we posit a non-human species with a different biology we can consider the "what if" for the case where one of these basics ceases to apply. What if elves are effectively immortal and so don't think about aging? What if plantmen have no need to seek food? What if shardminds have no interest in reproduction?

Secondly, I take the view that a choice of PC's race should be a matter of an instant - either the player comes to the process with a clear idea that "I want to play a {whatever}", or they should play a human. I particularly dislike the approach where the player chooses his class and then hunts about for the race that has the optimum ability score modifiers to suit that class.

(Crucially, though, I should note that I'm largely talking from a theoretical "white tower" point of view. In reality, players will choose their race by whatever means they wish, and I'd much rather they end up with a character they're happy with than some notion of 'pure' gaming.)

Thirdly, I'm inclined to think that the non-human species should be differentiated from humans in a handful of clear, and fairly significant, ways. An elf shouldn't just be a "human with funny ears", but neither is it a good idea to load them with a hundred tiny adjustments - better to give them four or five very clear differences.

And then, as a corrolary to that, pretty much all elven NPCs should therefore differ from human NPCs in those same ways, to build consistency in the world. An elven PC of course wouldn't be bound by those same things (since PCs are inevitably exceptional), but an elven PC probably should differ from the "human version" of the same character in a couple of ways, and those ways probably should bear some relation to the established facts - even if that relationship is to entirely subvert one of them.

(It probably goes without saying that I reject any claim that D&D is racist. It is, of course, entirely possible to play D&D in a racist manner by drawing lazy equivalences between certain species and real-world groups, but I don't accept that that is automatically the case, or even the case as-written. For the simple reason that I reject those equivalencies, and instead view the non-human species as being, well, non-human.)

Firefly: Bucking the Tiger

This month's "Lost Episode" was the final pre-gen adventure from the "Echoes of War" series - oddly, this one didn't make it into the compiled volume of adventures and so is only available as a PDF, which proved a major pain when I elected to print the damn thing prior to use. Oh well.

Anyway, the game had four players: Emma (Book), Josh (Jayne), Phil (Mal), and a newcomer to this game, Daniel (Inara). Which was certainly a decent set of characters, although at one point Phil did need to slip into Simon's skin for one of the scenes.

This is a fairly complex and meaty adventure, and so I was always a little concerned about our ability to fit it in to the allocated time. As it happened, we ran over, but only slightly - everything was wrapped up by about 10:45 instead of the projected 10:30. But I did have to cut out quite a lot of the subplots in order to make it work.

When reading through this adventure initially, I concluded that it was probably the best of the "Echoes of War" series, and I'm inclined to stick with this assessment. In particular, I like the way that it has a choice of subplots that can be resolved, meaning that the adventure will play out significantly differently for different groups.

That said, I'm not terribly happy with the way the adventure tried to resolve the mystery - in hindsight, I still think they'd be better going with the "Three Clue Rule" and leaving it as a player challenge, rather than using a special Complication to determine when a given NPC reveals their secrets. But it wasn't too bad, and did at least resolve quickly.

All in all, I was happy with this adventure, and happy also to come to the end of the "Echoes of War" series. Next month's adventure is "The Knitted Jumper Caper" which should be a nice slice-of-life episode to end the year - this will serve as something of an "end of season" show, albeit one of those end of season shows where the major plotlines have been resolved and so it's more denouement than climax. Which is fine.

And then next year we'll launch into the "Ghosts of the Black" adventures, interspersed with some homebrew and some of the other pre-gen episodes (for Firefly or, indeed, for Serenity). But that's all for the future...