James at Grognardia just posted on cleric weapon selection. That got me to thinking about such fault lines in gamer preferences, and the evolution of my views thereof. Incidentally, one of the solutions discussed in the article cited is class-based (rather than weapon-based) damage, which I have a half-written post about (and seems to have been already extensively considered); as often, I am late to the party. 🙂

Here are all the fault lines that I could think of. What am I missing? Where do your preferences lie?

Race-as-Class

This is the probably the fault line that I have the strongest opinion on. I am in favor. An elf class is very different from a fighter class, but an elf fighter is very similar to a human fighter. Most of the specialness of demihumans bleeds away quickly, and race choice just ends up being another lever to use in maximizing your move silently check (or whatever). Also, not having race separately means one fewer choice at chargen time.

Cleric Weapon Selection

This was the issue that prompted this post, but I have no dog in this fight. I’m fine with the classic mace-wielding D&D cleric, and, as James M. notes, coming up with justifications for this restriction can be fun. There is a compromise solution where clerics are limited to weapons that are appropriate for their particular god or religion (did this start in AD&D, or 2E, or somewhere else?). I’m not a big fan of this approach, though I often played with it, because everyone wants to play a cleric of the thunder god (or whatever god allows the best weapon selection). If edged weapons are allowed, the cleric also works well as a holy knight class, obviating the need for a paladin to fill that archetypal niche. I’m much more interested in the cleric being seen as a demon-hunter rather than a parish priest that for some reason ventures into dungeons in search of treasure. I do like the idea of no weapon or armor restrictions at all, and if I opened up cleric weapon selection, I would probably go this route. I also like FrDave’s solution (in a comment on that Grognardia post) to break weapons into categories and allow fighters access to all of them, but clerics only access to one (chosen at character creation time).

Demihuman Level Limits

I’ve never played a game where these were actually a limiting factor. I am in favor though. I prefer a more human-centric campaign. My experience in 2E and later editions is that adventuring parties end up being mostly made up of elves, with humans being a clear minority. This breaks the sense of the fantastic that I think should be associated with demihumans (though maybe that is an argument for them not to be playable PC races to begin with). I also like the idea of characters retiring and the setting persisting. A level limit serves as a nice reason to move on to another character.

Alignment

In the past, I was very anti-alignment. It seemed to be a vast oversimplification, and I was a moral-relativist teenager when I started playing. Were not most people, even the villains, good from their own perspective? This is, of course, a popular trend in modern art and philosophy. Antiheroes are still tremendously popular (for example: Batman, Elric, Dexter). Alignment also seemed to get in the way of characterization, which at that time seemed like the holy grail of role-playing. I would probably still have trouble playing with a by-the-book alignment matrix, though re-conceptualizing alignment as arcane and non-arcane is interesting (as in LotFP, where working magic is inherently “chaotic”). This (Blood of Prokopius: Conan and Alignment) is the best post I have read in a while about alignment.

Save-or-Die Traps

Yes, please.

Ability Score Generation

3d6 in order. I still have a fondness for 4d6, drop the lowest die, arrange to taste. This is the way I played through most of the 90s, and it injects some randomness while allowing you to play a reasonably competent character of any class. Any method that takes longer is flawed because I value streamlined character creation. Point buy systems (especially non-linear ones) require too much time and calculation, and encourage numerical min-maxing.

Level Drain Attacks

I’m still on the fence here. They have never come up in games I have played in, either as referee or player. I’m not sure how I would react in practice, so I would like to try it out at some point. Logically, if one is okay with save-or-die traps, I think one should also be okay with level drain attacks. They are one of the few things that truly induce visceral fear in players, and that is nothing to sneeze at.

This is my gloss on the main classes. It is meant for a B/X or Labyrinth Lord type of game. Not all of these classes will probably make it into the player’s document. I don’t want the number of choices to be overwhelming. There will likely be no weapon or armor restrictions (with the exception of elves, who can’t use iron). I’m taking my cue here from LotFP. Still to do: thief and necromancer descriptions.

Clerics draw power from higher beings. Some clerics will attempt to subvert this power to their own ends, but wise clerics serve their patron well, for woe it is to attract the attention of an angry deity. Clerics are armored crusaders, most often itinerant demon slayers, and are particularly skilled at banishing arcane horrors such as undead. Not all clerics have the best interests of humanity in mind though. In far off places, there are clerics that serve semi-divine witch kings, or even darker things better left unmentioned.

Elves are descendents of beings from another realm that were trapped in this world ages ago. “Elf” is a human word; they know themselves as the lothirim, which means lost, forgotten, and forsaken. Once elves could speak all the languages of nature, but time, and separation from their homeland, have diminished them. They are now a pale reflection of their former glory. Elves still speak some words in the language of creation, and this is the source of their magic. They also fight fearsomely, though they can’t touch weapons (or anything else) made of iron.

Fighters, perhaps more than any other class, have many backgrounds. To name just a few: barbarian, knight, mercenary, weapon artist, and magician’s guardian. But all fighters share a reliance on their own military skill and training. They are the only class that gets significantly better at fighting with weapons. They are the only class that can do well what they do best (fight!) while in full armor. They are the best at making their hits count, and powerful magical weapons only attain their full potential when in the hands of a fighter.

Magic-users work their will on the world by manipulating dark, arcane forces. Of all the adventuring classes, magic-users are the most feared. Many people blame them (perhaps rightly) for these evil and parlous times. Magic-users come in two varieties, magicians and sorcerers. Magicians are students of the dark arcane arts. Sorcerers have magic inside, whether from demonic blood, changeling heritage, or some other wicked secret. Wise sorcerers seek ways to control their power. Otherwise, it ends up controlling them.

Monks are masters of self-discipline. Through long and arduous training in ancient martial and mental arts, they have developed their inherent physical and mental potential far beyond most humans. Their art allows them to evade attacks, strike with lethal force when unarmed, redirect the strength of their enemies, leap fantastically high, and fall with the grace of a cat. Monks are almost preternaturally quick, and their cultivated reflexes allow them to avoid many dangers that would fell other adventurers. A monks is usually the disciple of a master, though some teach themselves from archaic manuals that they have discovered or been bequeathed.

The sword & planet genre is relatively new for me. I have not read the Barsoom novels. I did not know about Expedition to the Barrier Peaks before I discovered the OSR a few months ago. My fantasy has long been spiced with steampunk elements, reminiscent of the style of Final Fantasy IV & Final Fantasy VI, but I have usually pictured those as products of the current society (like magitech in Final Fantasy VI) rather than remnants of ancient advanced civilizations. I watched and enjoyed the original Stargate when it came out, but I don’t think it had much influence on my gaming. Despite that lack of experience, the science-fantasy elements of Dwimmermount’s Red Elves of Areon, modules like The Tower of the Stargazer, and the setting of Carcosa, have made me think again about introducing ancient laser rifles and robots to my fantasy games.

How would that interact with the rest of the setting though? I like my fantasy setting to feel almost radically unknown (though not necessarily surreal or gratuitously strange, though there is a place for that). Someone living in ancient Babylon, for example, would really have no idea how the universe worked, in terms of metaphysics, cosmology, and possibilities. Does the ocean flow over the edge of the world? Maybe! Using tropes from the sword & planet genre seems to automatically import all kinds of assumptions, such as, off the top of my head: spherical planets, gravity, and outer space being a void. I see this as potentially working at cross-purposes with the sense of the fantastic, even if players are not put off by the genre-bending. One way to handle this would be to just not worry at all about consistency at the beginning, and come up with interesting explanations after the fact, in the same way that one might handle a seemingly contradictory or confusing result when using a set of random tables. There is something pleasingly classical about this approach. Somehow later rationalization does not seem satisfactory in this case though.

I have been mulling over a possible solution to this dilemma: the nature of reality varies based on verticality. As characters venture deeper underground, the world becomes less mundane, and as they ascend into the heavens it becomes more systematic. In its deepest reaches, the underworld bleeds into the afterlife, the shared reality of dreams, and other weirder places. Even geometry and gravity may cease to behave as expected.

This doesn’t need to be overly schematized or communicated to players, it just serves as a set of conceptual guidelines for the referee. And it reflects many interesting dichotomies, in game tradition, mythology, and philosophy.

In the earliest versions of D&D, dungeon level was explicitly associated with threat level. It got more dangerous as you went down. This just made sense based on the needs of the game, but has since become enshrined in just about everything that has been influenced by D&D. In Greek mythology, Olympus is up, Hades is down. In Aristotelian cosmology, heavenly bodies are made of perfect substances, whereas all matter on the earth is corruptible, and this was carried over to the medieval worldview (through Ptolemy) and the thoroughly Christianized. There are many inspirational pages up on the web about medieval cosmology.

From a comment over at Initiative One (edited slightly to make the link clickable):

I do find I hate halflings the last few years. I think Jackson killed them for me in the LOTR movies. Anyway, I’ve debated between either this look to depict Halflings that developed from a mammal not related to apes-or halflings as a catchall term/race/class for all anthropomorphic animals about three feet e.g. Reepicheep, Puss-in-Boots from Shrek etc.

I don’t think I could pull this off myself, due to my referee style, but I think it’s an interesting idea. Maybe I could do it in a really creepy Germanic fairy tale setting. (Myself, I don’t mind Jackson’s hobbits at all; I just don’t like hobbits in my D&D very much.)

Undead come in two varieties: sentient and mindless. This reflects the philosophical doctrine of mind/body dualism, and suggests that many undead may be incomplete beings. A ghost, for example, is a spirit or mind without a body. A zombie is brute flesh with animating will but no mind or soul.

What happens to the spirit when the body is called back to service in the case of the mindless undead? Does the campaign world have an afterlife or an underworld where the spirit resides? Is the spirit gladdened by the body’s return to service? What if every time a skeleton or zombie is animated, the ghost is also pulled back to the mortal realm, with no chance for eternal rest until the zombie is destroyed? Ghosts could be great allies to player characters.

Perhaps necromancy requires that the ghost be imprisoned, preventing it from reuniting with the body, resulting in necromancers collecting such trapped spirits (which would also be of interest to demons or other entities that might value such things). This would result in necromancers making many ghostly enemies, and might contribute to their terror of death and their own search for immortality and lichdom. Failing that, they would seek to escape the grasp of the underworld by true extinction of the soul. A sort of necromantic nirvana.

These trapped spirits could also be bound to objects. Maybe some or all magic items are the byproduct of such necromancy. FrDave had a post about a magic sword that was infused with the spirit of an elf-maid, and in D&D magic swords are traditionally sentient; this is another way to explain where magic swords get their sentience.

The most terrible form of zombie creation: tearing the soul out of a still living person, leaving only an undying and mindless slave.

One relic of the older editions are level titles. They started out as wargaming shorthand (as in, a hero is worth 4 fighting men). As video games have show, even otherwise meaningless achievements are psychologically very powerful. Rather than just hand out titles mechanically with level progression, why not make characters earn them literally?

Sample titles: champion, conjurer, veteran, journeyman, robber, baptist, demoncaller, etc. In addition, any organization within the campaign world can have a series of ranks or titles. Such a collection of titles is also a list of adventure seeds that suggests profitable courses of action to the players without compelling them to do anything.

There is no reason why a title could not also be accompanied by an XP award, optionally. It is often suggested that it would make more sense, for example, for a magic-user to gain experience from casting spells. Rewarding experience for titles gained seems like a reasonable way to go about giving experience for activities without overly changing the underlying incentive structure. And it reflects the fact that the first time you do something is special. You can get experience for killing more than one dragon, but you can only ever get the dragonslayer title once.

Don’t forget how Bilbo described himself to Smaug: clue-finder, web-cutter, stinging Fly, ringwinner, luckwearer, barrel-rider.

Maybe I’m being unnecessarily naturalistic, but doesn’t it also make more sense to refer to Felonius as a seer after he has successfully scried something?

In Turkey, there are ancient underground cities, the largest of which discovered to date is 18 stories deep, extends 280 feet beneath the surface, and could have held 30,000 people. BLDGBLOG writes:

Manhattan will be gone, Los Angeles gone, Cape Canaveral flooded and covered with seaweed, London dissolving into post-Britannic muck, the Great Wall of China merely an undetectable line of minerals blowing across an abandoned landscape – but there, beneath the porous surface of Turkey, carved directly into tuff, there will still be underground cities.

There is an MIT Press book about this: Caves of God: The Monastic Environment of Byzantine Cappadocia, by Spiro Kostof (sample chapter PDF available with some gorgeous black and white illustrations that could make wonderful player handouts). Definitely something to check out from the library. I hope it has maps.