Social Skills and NPC Stats

On Monday, I introduced my approach to social skills in roleplaying games. Now, I'm pivoting to a related topic, that of non-player character stats, in particular ability scores and skills.

Some gamers don't like to bother with stats for npcs, for a number of reasons: too much work for too little return is a pretty common one - 'why should I spend all that time on a npc who may last only five minutes in the game?!' - though *waves hands furiously* comes up with some frequency as well - 'I just make something up in response to what the players do.'

I can definitely relate to the first: the event which lead to my personal 'old school renaissance' began with trying to prepare a supplement of generic non-player characters for d20 Modern - after looking at page after page of two-line characters stat blocs in a copy of 1001 Characters for Traveller, compared to what I was attempting to churn out for d20M, the less complex rules of earlier roleplaying games looked mighty good to me. In my experience, games which make non-player character stats simple to prep and manage in actual play are more likely to encourage often harried referees to actually use them rather than handwaving them.

I'm not fond of handwaving the rules of the game as a general rule. It's one thing to make a ruling based on a situation at hand, to apply or not apply a particular rule based on its applicability in the moment, or to improvise a target number when one isn't readily available; it's another thing altogether to consistently ignore the rules for an approximation of how an encounter with a non-player character 'should go.' As referee, I like to play the game, too, and if I'm just making stuff up that 'sounds right,' then I'm no longer actually participating in the same game as the players. The rules provide a more-or-less objective foundation to the game-world, and by holding myself to that foundation, it makes it easier for me to assume the role of neutral arbiter when the dice hit the tabletop.

Moreover, most players become invested in their characters' abilities as expressed through the rules: trading attribute points, choosing skills, selecting equipment, and so on. Note that this is not the same thing as optimising a character; all of these choices can be made for reasons, such as fulfilling a particular character concept, that have nothing to do with how effective a particular character is with respect to task or conflict resolution in the game. In my opinion, this investment carries with it the reasonable expectation of that objective game-world against which those characters may be tested.

So, my personal preference is to have appropriate stats for non-player characters, and to this end I select games which skew toward the less complex end of the spectrum when it comes to character generation and creation. Note that a game doesn't have to have identical rules for generating or creating player and non-player characters - consider the difference between, say, a 1e D&D player character and a 0-level non-player character - only that they should be comparable in some way through the rules of the game. To make them easy to use in game, I like to create a stable of generic non-player character stat blocs in advance of play - generic barkeep, generic guard, generic bravo, generic gambler, and so on - often using a stripped down subset of the rules for player character creation, with unique characters generated in more-or-less the same way as player characters.

That means that, in the campaigns I run, each non-player character has a set of attributes and skills that relate to the rules for social interactions; as a function of that objective setting, I'm not inclined to simply make up a target number on the fly if there's some other recourse open to me. Now, there are a number of ways in which the rules for social skills can be used to manage social interactions, and in my experience, at least two of them are pretty problematic. Social interaction rules may be simple or complex. Perhaps the simplest is the reaction or loyalty roll, modified by an attribute score or a skill; the Charisma modifier in 1e AD&D or the Liaison skill in Traveller each come to mind as quintessential examples of this. Years of playing with reaction rolls convinces me that, if you use no other social interaction rules in a roleplaying game, then use these, along with morale checks for opponents - it's pretty near bomb-proof as far as rules go.

Another approach is to roll-against-attribute: frex, a roll under the character's Charm attribute score indicates success. This is one of those rules which can be somewhat problematic, however; in essence, the character's attribute score becomes the objective measure of difficulty in performing a task in the game-world. A rope is as difficult to run across as the character's Acrobatics score makes it; a maid in a countess' entourage is as difficult to seduce as one's Seduction score. Static target numbers, such as the DC's for the d20 Diplomacy score, are similarly flawed, a problem exacerbated in those games by feat and class ability bloat resulting in extremely high skill values.

One way to account for this is using objective measures of difficulty to apply as modifiers to an attribute or skill roll. When I ran Traveller, I used the BITS task system for skill check modifiers; I particularly like the correlation between the descriptor and the value of the modifier, as it helps to establish a common, replicable frame of reference for both the referee and the players.

My preferred approach is to manage social interactions through opposed rolls, stat versus stat, such as Charm versus Wit to bluff a guard. For me, it is perhaps the most intuitive method of handling social interactions through dice rolls, as it pits the relative strengths of the characters against one another.

In the rules and published adventures for Flashing Blades, the examples of skill use provide for both direct rolls against an attribute or skill value as well as opposed rolls. I decided to preserve this approach in my own campaign, but I also wanted to avoid the pitfalls of the simple roll-versus-attribute. Toward this end, I developed an additional non-player character stat - Tractability - which serves a similar function to the BITS task system for Traveller. How Tractability works is the subject of my next post.

Lumpers and Splitters

There are two kinds of people in the world . . . [insert joke here].

Simulating real-world activities in a game often requires some measure of abstraction - a die roll to see if you can stab your foe with a sword, or to climb a trellis to a balcony. Just how abstract is necessary and desirable is a source of near constant debate among gamers. One element of creating an abstraction of a real-world process or action is deciding how complex the abstraction needs to be, balancing the want of detail for the need of playability. Each abstraction, then, involves trade-offs, and many of these trade-offs come from lumping or splitting like things into a single unifying rule or many separate rules.

On the one hand, you have a game designer like Gary Gygax, who in OD&D wrote that all weapons did 1d6 damage, lumping together everything from a crossbow to a dagger to a sword to a polearm. On the other hand, you have a game designer like . . . Gary Gygax, who in 1e AD&D famously included twenty different polearms in the core rules of the game, each with its own rules for determining how effective it is against different types of armor, how fast it is to use in combat, and the different ranges of damage done.

Another old school example of splitting and lumping is the difference between firearms in Top Secret and Boot Hill. The core rules for Top Secret include thirty-one distinct firearms, from the Colt M1911 and Browning Hi-Power to the AKM and M-16; the Top Secret Companion added another thirty, while articles in Dragon lavished attention on Uzi variants and the weapons of Heckler & Koch. Each gun has its own projectile weapon value based on a variety of characteristics. Contrast TS's approach with that of Boot Hill, which has thirteen basic firearm types - single-action revolver, double-action revolver, fast-draw revolver, rifle, carbine, &c. In BH, a SAR6 - a six-shot single-action revolver - can represent everything from a Colt Peacemaker to a Smith & Wesson Schofield to a Remington Model 1875.

There's utility in both approaches, of course, but as much as I enjoy comparing the effectiveness of various polearms versus plate armor on the weapon versus armor type table or deciding which is more my agent's style, the Walther PPK or the Beretta Bantam, I find myself leaning more toward lumping when it comes to weaponry in roleplaying games. Once I was comfortable with describing a CBR - cap-and-ball revolver - as 'a greasy Colt Single Action Army' or a R15 as 'a gleaming brass-plated Henry rifle' when I was running Boot Hill, I grew to appreciate the versatility and relative simplicity of the approach. For me, when it comes to the rules of the game, ease of play trumps evocative flavor - the latter I will add to the mix myself.

Like Boot Hill and firearms, Flashing Blades takes a spare approach to swords. There are six basic types of swords in FB: longswords, rapiers, foils, sabers, cutlasses, and two-handed swords. "Longsword" and "foil" can be a bit confusing, as both are anachronisms as used in the rules - longswords, which are closer to two-handed swords in FB, for the most part fell out of use in the 16th century, while foils are the 18th century descendants of the smallsword.

Adding flavor to the swords of Flashing Blades begins with identifying some of the different swords that each of the five represent.

FB Weapon	Real-world Examples
Longsword	Basket-hilted broadsword, side-sword, pallasch, schiavona, Walloon sword, mortuary sword
Rapier	Rapier, Pappelheimer rapier, cup-hilt rapier
Foil	Smallsword
Saber	Sabre, szlaba, kilij, Schnäpf
Cutlass	Cutlass, hanger
Two-handed Sword	Doppelhänder, estoc, claymore

'Basket-hilted broadsword' is the correct name for what FB labels a "longsword." The side-sword is an Italian blade, later called spada da lato, developed from the Spanish espada ropera in the late 16th century but still popular among soldiers. The pallasch is the Hungarian broadsword, popular in the Empire, while the schiavona is its Italian counterpart, taking its name from the Dalmatian guards - Schiavoni - who served the doges of Venice. The Walloon sword is a Dutch weapon while the mortuary sword is the English Civil War-ear name for the broadsword - the style of sword used to execute Charles I, many royalists would have an image of the late king on the pommel or hilt.

The Pappelheimer rapier has a distinctive guard from the more-or-less standard swept-hilt rapier, developed in Germany; the cup-hilt rapier is popular among the Spanish.

The smallsword is a mid- to late-seventeenth century development - in my own campaign, set in the 1620s, this would be more properly considered simply a small rapier - but for simplicity's sake, I go ahead and call it a smallsword anyway, replacing Mark Pettigrew's anachronism with my own.

The szlaba, kilij, and Schnäpf are Polish, Turkish, and Swiss sabers, respectively.

The hanger is a hunting sword, with a heavy, slightly curved blade, used for performing the coup de grâce on a wounded animal.

The Swiss and German Doppelhänder, later known as the Zweihänder, descended from the medieval longsword. The French estoc, is a proper longsword, and may be used one- or two-handed. The claymore is the Scottish two-handed sword, which is not to be confused with the basket-hilted broadsword also called a claymore.

I actually had a gamer tell me once that his group was too busy playing for fluff. Fortunately, I've never experienced anyone like that across the table from me - most players seem to prefer, 'the Spaniard with the cup-hilt rapier of shining Toledo steel' to 'the guy with the sword,' so I make the effort to build out from the rules to a more evocative description. That said, I don't really need the rulebook to do it for me - 'no flowers, by request.'

The Nevers Thrust

"You know my first attack. My second makes you invincible. Attack me. Parry in septime, riposte, envelop in quatre, beat forearm! Take blade as you change arm - disarm. To the forehead!"

"You can't pierce the forehead."

"You can. Right here."

Many cape-and-sword roleplaying games offer players the opportunity to utilize special abilities or combat maneuvers as their characters gain experience. In 7th Sea, for example, Swordsmen characters study different schools of fencing which give access to Skills and Knacks as well as Techniques which are specific to Mastery of a particular school. Honor + Intrigue characters learn Dueling Styles, each of which includes a Final Secret. Combat skills in Swashbuckler - the roleplaying game by Jim Dietz, not the Yaquinto Publishing board game - build on one another, with Slash progressing to Backhand Slash to Two-Handed Slash and Jab to Thrust to Lunge, for example.

The exact benefit of specials and maneuvers in these games varies; for example, Mastery of the Lucani style in 7th Sea allows a character to make a combination attack using both a broadsword and a fist, while the Final Secret of H+I's Spanish Style is allows a free Parry on the expenditure of a Fortune Point. Learning different schools and styles allows access to different abilities with experience, which can then be used in combination during a fight.

Swashbuckler takes a slightly different tack. The rules posit two "very generalized" fighting styles, the jack of all trades and the specialist. The former is built by taking a wide variety of combat skills while the latter is focused on full progression through a few skills instead.

Inspired more by pure fencing simulation rules like Rapier and Dagger, Flashing Blades takes a somewhat different approach. FB includes various martial skills, including five dueling styles; the dueling styles confer skill in the weapons associated with that style and may offer a bonus to a particular type of martial attack or defense; for example, Italian Style dueling allows a character to use the longsword, rapier, and foil and confers a + 1 bonus to hit on a thrust or lunge and a + 1 parry bonus using an off-hand weapons like a dagger, main-gauche, baton, or buckler. FB also contains a variety of special attacks, such as entangling an opponent in a cloak, disarming, striking to subdue, or making an attack or parry while drawing a sword, as well as a variety of "dirty tricks," including tripping a lunging swordsman, throwing sand in his eyes, or kicking him in the junk! With the exception of Entangle, these special attacks or dirty tricks aren't tied to a particular style, however - they are open to any character to attempt.

This is one of the reasons that I opted for Flashing Blades when I decided to run a cape-and-sword campaign. I don't like roleplaying games which require an inordinate investment of character resources to perform fundamental tasks - the aforementioned Jab to Thrust to Lunge skill progression in Swashbuckler is a glaring example of this - and I strongly prefer rules that are intuitive, where the abstractions are couched in common sense language - 7th Sea's Raises make sense in the context of the rules but are too abstract, pulling me out of the action. Flashing Blades offers me both of these.

What it doesn't offer me is the Nevers thrust.

La botte de Nevers comes from Paul Féval's Le Bossu (The Hunchback), perhaps the second-most popular cape-and-sword novel in France after the Musketeers saga. The description of the Nevers thrust above comes from Phillipe de Broca's brilliant 1997 adaptation of the famous story, taught by Vincent Perez's duc de Nevers to Daniel Auteil's Lagardère. Lagardère pursues Nevers for the purpose of learning the attack which bears the duke's family name, and once in possession of it the swordsman declares he is now, "Immortal!"

I can actually get pretty close to replicating the Nevers thrust using the combat rules as written for Flashing Blades. The attack consists of a parry of a thrust, a strike to subdue on the sword arm as a counter, a disarm, and a thrust to the head. But that's only pretty close - per the rules as written, a disarm is a counter, not an attack, and can only be made following a successful parry, so the opponent must thrust not once but twice in succession.

The higher hurdle is the thrust to the head. Hit location in FB is chosen at the time of the attack, and resolved by 1D20 rolled twice on the hit location table - the result closest to the target is the result. As a result, it's possible to aim for the head and hit the left leg instead, though a more likely result is a wound on the right arm or chest if the head is missed.

In order to make the Nevers thrust work as described by monsieur le duc, then, I could allow a disarm as an attack rather than a counter and eliminate the roll for hit location, automatically allowing the thrust to find the head. That's not at all unreasonable, if the steps are executed successfully in sequence: parry a thrust, counter, disarm, thrust.

And voilà! My campaign has the Nevers thrust.

This also opens up an interesting house rule possibility for the players, to develop their own special maneuvers for their characters. As a ground rule, let's say this requires that the character is a Master or Master Superior to develop a special maneuver. The special maneuver is a sequence requiring a minimum of two combat rounds composed of some combination of fencing and brawling attacks, footwork, parries, special attacks, or dirty tricks, which must be performed in order successfully. If the special maneuver is performed successfully, then the character gets an additional die to roll for hit location per round required to complete the sequence; if any action in the sequence is not performed successfully - an attack is parried, for example - then they are simply resolved normally per the rules as written. A special maneuver is 'paid for' with an earned Expertise point, and at least two checkmarks for the Expertise point must come from actual duels, not sparring in the salle d'armes.

Let's see how this might look in practice. Vulmea's Surgical Strike consists of parrying an opponent's slash and countering with a vicious kick in the first round, followed by a handful of sand thrown in the eyes and a slash to the head in the second. (Of course it's not gentlemanly. Pirate, remember?) If the sequence of parry, brawling attack, dirty trick, and fencing attack is executed successfully, I get to roll four dice instead of two for hit location, improving my odds of splattering brains on the deck.

I like this. It engages the rules as written, preserving both the crunch and the flavor that led me to choose Flashing Blades in the first place, and it puts the players in charge of developing special maneuvers as simple or as complex as they want them to be like Swashbuckler, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach like 7th Sea's schools or H+I's styles.

But what about Bonetti's Defense? Can the same thing be done for defensive maneuvers as well? Sure - use a combination of parries, blocks, and footwork, and gain extra dice to roll for parries.

Can a special maneuver be taught? Sure, why not - what's a Master without students, after all? Let's say that a student must have an Expertise of at least 18 - Expert - in order to perform the maneuver and earns one less die than the Master who created the maneuver in the first place, so if anyone else successfully performs my Surgical Strike, they roll three dice for hit location, not four. This provides an additional incentive to develop one's own maneuvers.

I think Lagardère would be pleased.

O Death, Where Is Thy Sting?

A design article by Mike Mearls on save-or-die rules in D&D stirred up discussion around the blogs and forums a few weeks back.

Save-or-die is one of those subjects which brings out ardent partisans for and against its inclusion in roleplaying games. Some gamers like the frisson of imminent danger that save-or-die brings to actual play. Others object to save-or-die for a variety of reasons, from attachment to their characters to the continuity of the adventure to the chore of making new characters in complex games to being sidelined during the game to the idea that death should only occur when it's suitably dramatic or when the player decides it's okay.

Another of the objections I read pretty routinely is that it encourages disposable characters. Why become invested in a character, goes the argument, if she can die on an unlucky roll?

Why, indeed?

For me, the answer is uncertainty. Maybe my character is Rob Roy, or maybe he's Alasdair MacGregor - I don't know which he may turn out to be at the outset, but either one is fun to play and harbors the same potential for success, whether or not that potential is realized in the campaign.

I was reminded of this the other day when reading Amanda's post at Drama, Dice, and Damsons on the end of her run as Maria in Twelfth Night. Amanda has this to say about the close of a show.

I won't miss it, but I will enjoy the memory.

The business of not missing a part or a play is important. I spent far too many years being devastated by the ends of shows and finally schooled myself to let go. This, I may add, was a huge improvement on the month- long grieving period I used to find myself indulging in. Now I can put it down at once, smile or wince at the memories and move on.

Amanda's perspective on a role and a show closely mirrors my own with respect to roleplaying games. I played a fighting man in an OD&D one-shot last March, and I was bummed when he got punked by a giant spider on a failed save against poison about an hour into the game. I liked Sir Guilbert de Roncevalles, le Dragon d'Aragonne; sure, he was a preening, arrogant git, but at the same time he was noble and courageous, and ultimately a bit foolhardy. For his short time in the gaming 'verse, he was fun to play, and I was sorry to lose him.

None of that prevented me from immediately taking over his squire, Jacques, as my new first-level character and playing on from there.

Being disappointed is fine; letting disappointment become a show-stopper, on the other hand, well, that can be a real problem.

I play my characters to the hilt, with the full expectation that any one of them can rise to greatness. And sometimes they achieve that greatness, and sometimes they get shot by a sneaky fusilier with a pistol, and it's all good. I smile, or wince, and reach for a blank character sheet.

Take It On the Run

Nate at d20 Pirates has a great post detailing some hazards during chases, inspired in part, he explains, by the classic random city encounter tables in the 1e AD&D DMG. I fully intend to use these next time a chase situation develops in my campaign

If you're running a pirates campaign, or thinking about running one, or just like reading about pirates and roleplaying games, d20 Pirates has all kinds of fun stuff.

The Sword Master

Captains Navarre and and Marquet battling with Zweihänders in the cathedral of Aquila. Rob Roy with his claymore facing Archie Cunningham with his smallsword in a castle armory. D'Artagnan and Rochefort dueling by lantern-light in a wood near Calais. Arthur shattering Excalibur on Lancelot's armor.

You may not know his name, but if you're reading this, you almost surely know his work.

And you may even know his face, too.

The seemingly-drunk assassin who challenges Porthos, the one who fights with two swords, in Richard Lester's The Three Musketeers? That's William Hobbs, one of the greatest fight choreographers in the world.

Mr Hobbs was an actor and fight choreographer - he would coin the term 'fight director' when co-founding the Society of British Fight Directors in 1969 - at the Old Vic as part of Laurence Oilivier's National Theatre, but it's his work arranging duels with lances, pistols, maces, and all manner of swords in dozens of movies and scores of stage productions that makes him a stage fighting icon.

The fight choreography of movies contributes to the combat systems one finds in roleplaying games - for example, how many feats and class abilities are based on the wire-fu of Yuen Woo Ping? - as game designers try to capture the on-screen action and replicate it through rules and probabilities. One of the appeals for me of Flashing Blades is that combat takes on the manic, brawling feel of the Richard Lester Musketeers movies by which Mark Pettigrew was clearly influenced. With rules for throwing sand in an opponent's eyes, punching him in the face - and kicking him in the junk - Flashing Blades recreates Mr Hobb's choreography both in my mind's eye and in the choices I make as a player and referee. I think that's an important feature of great cape-and-sword roleplaying games.

Here's a too-brief sample of Mr Hobb's choreography.