TobCon 3 Report

I had the privilege of going to the third TobCon in London at the end of August. Spread out over Saturday and Sunday, I got to play three games and run one.

My own game, Rough Night for a Red Wedding was initially meant as an homage to Rough Night at the Three Feathers, and I’ll have a bit more to say about how that went in a separate post. The three games I played were all packed with great ideas, even though the respective systems didn’t always support the game style as well as they could have.

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Passive Perception

I should probably rename this blog, ‘The Annual Empire’…

That being said, here’s a little idea I had while rereading the Zweihänder rulebook recently.

One of the rules issues that’s bothered me for years is how to run what Zweihänder calls “Secret Tests”. The classic example of this is the test to spot an ambush: it’s the kind of test the player needs to roll, but the very act of rolling tips the player off to what the PC is trying to achieve. Spotting whether an NPC is telling the truth is another example.

Zweihänder has a nice little solution, by having the player roll, but the GM doesn’t reveal the difficulty modifier: the player rolls, the GM describes the result, and in edge cases, at least, the player won’t know how far to trust the GM.

There are, inevitably, weaknesses to this method. It penalises near-successes, for example. But generally, I think it’s a pretty cool way to maintain suspense.

But another way to resolve these issues in a d100 system would be to make more use of the respective digits. I’m a fan of d100 precisely because it can do cool stuff with the various numbers it produces in a single roll (e.g. the d100, the result reversed, the two face digits – other possibilities exist, like the 2d10 sum; the d100 is super-flexible).

So maybe the GM sets a difficulty number from 1-10 to spot an ambush, avoid a guard, detect a lie, or the like, with higher being more difficult. In the case of a roll against an opponent, the base difficulty might be the tens digit of that opponent’s respective skill. So a guard with an awareness of 42 would set a base difficulty of 4, perhaps modified for weather, light, etc.

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Making the Speak Language Skills Interestingly Useful

A few weeks ago I posted on making the Read/Write skill interestingly useful, but that just raises the question of language skills in general. Tim Eccles’s article on this topic in Warpstone #19 is excellent on the historical and linguistic implications of what we knew about (then-)canon, but this post, like the last one, is going to concentrate more on the in-game practicalities of the skills. Because, like with Read/Write, the exclusivity of the language skills may work in favour of flavour, so to speak, but against the kind of communication a game needs to flow:

This is an example of language problems used wonderfully, but unfortunately few of us are Simon Pegg or Edgar Wright!

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The Midderlands: A Weird and Perilous Setting, Kickstarting Now!

We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming, for a bit of promotion…

That’s too strong a word, since I’m not involved with this KS other than as a backer, but I think it must be of interest to anyone here reading about WFRP or Zweihänder. It’s a Kickstart for a, “green-hued, dark-fantasy, old-school mini-setting and bestiary set in a twisted middle-England.

Here’s the video (warning: dubstep, but please don’t hold that against the project):

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Making the Read/Write Skill Interestingly Useful

I’ve always had a bit of an issue with WFRP’s handling of the Read/Write skill, at least in its first and second editions. One of the strengths of the game has always been how it’s rooted its fantastical (and sometimes fantastically silly) elements in a world that felt real. Much of the heavy lifting with the latter was done by the careers system, but it was also observable in the rarity of the Read/Write skill. (Of the six pregens in The Enemy Within, only two were literate, and the Elf wasn’t one of them.) Meanwhile WFRP3 and Zweihänder both fold literacy into a more general education skill, in both cases treated as ‘advanced’. This was a world, the system tells us, dominated by illiteracy; those who could read or write were a privileged few.

But the wisdom of this approach is contradicted by the last 40 years of game design. Generally speaking, GMs now know that it is a bad idea not to give out any information because a lack of leads stalls the game. An entire rules system, Gumshoe, has been designed to address this issue. If the characters can’t read, then that immediately eliminates a major source of clues and leads to keep the action going. The problem cropped up as early as 1e’s intro adventure, The Oldenhaller Contract, itself: the scenario relies on the PCs being able to read the advertisement nailed to the Deutz Elm in Episode 12. So in this post I’m going to look at a few ways a WFRP GM can help keep the game going while still being true to the (pseudo-)historical verisimilitude of the setting.

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