I just finished reading The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman this afternoon and was pleasantly reminded by how, in another world, it couldve been snuggly ensconced in the middle of Appendix N. In it, you have a little girl with device that tells the truth by use of nested metaphors, talking polar bears that wore massive suits of armor, a Texan (as in the country) aeronaut that makes his living gunslinging in a hot air balloon, angels, witches who can make themselves invisible, tiny poison-spurred people that ride giant dragonflies, a trepanned british explorer-cum-shaman who can control the weather, a knife that can cut into parallels worlds, and most importantly, people's conciousness' being visible and in the form of wild animals. Even by ignoring the (ir)religious bits of the books (and toward the end it gets a bit hard to do), the whole series is a wealth of weirdness that i can only describe as C.S.Lewis-ian.
Lewisian isnt the greatest word for it, of course, but it covers a broad base that a lot of settings pull from; its the genre of the fairy tale, where the dangers are familiar to the listenener, but made slightly magical to keep them new. Honestly, folkloric may be the better descriptor of it, though it doesnt fully describe the much more serialized nature of something like The Golden Compass and stories like it, where each scene/chapter is more akin to those bedtime stories your grandparent may have told you, where each night some new monster or ally would be introduced instead of having previous characters and their abilities being used in new and interesting ways (another connection could be made to Beorn in the Hobbit and many of the small 'sideplots' of many myths and sagas from around the world). Novelty is king here, especially of the kind where few of the elements interrelate in any major way.
Take, for example, the panserbjorne: polar bears with opposable thumbs who wear armor and live on Svalbard. They cant be fooled by humans, always keep their word, and are known to be the worlds best metalsmiths. When taken in its fullness, it sounds like something straight out of the Mahabharata or the Saga of Beowulf; in that same vein, it come straight out of the mouth of anyone telling a campfire tale and adding bits of flavour to an invention as they go. In a word, 'folkloric settings', like His Dark Materials, are the ones that have the most in common with creative (in the strictest definition of the word) GMing.
Friday, February 9, 2018
Core D&D: Part 7
I still havent quite figured out how leveling will work, but a bunch of minor ideas have floated around that could at least help in that regard, and from a surprising corner: money.
A bunch of ink has been spilled on coin standards, price lists, etc already, but i do think the idea of simplifying how money is handled is a worthy goal. That said, theres a lot of room to expand the concept, especially into spaces that D&D usually handles with oddly set up, specific, and independent sub-systems.
Now, im no economist (not by a longshot haha), but ive always seen money as transferable value, with its strength being that multiple people with their myriad desires being able to use it to purchase/sell a number of products as long as each side sees the currency as legit and they bot agree on its value (im sure theres a bunch of little things wrong with that statement, but work with me a bit). In rpgs, money is usually the only way in which value is transferable, making money one of the things that most people desire/look for, sometimes to the detriments of common sense or expediency.
Likewise, oftentimes things like information, art, alliances, or training is forgotten in the shuffle of things because its a lot harder to put realistic value to them, let alone them then needing to be noted down somewhere (which tends to leave them forgotten altogether).
My solution, though im sure it isnt too novel of an idea, is to replace money/gold with value points (VP). VP would handle anything and everything that PCs would run into while still allowing them to increase their grubby little murderhobo hoards to their hearts content. Originally, the idea was a a tiered system that placed everything into on of about 6 'value levels', but it felt arbitrary and made grafting the system onto most versions of D&D a hassle; this one just replaces whatever word people have for money with VP and calls it a day.
A PCs VP is found by adding together the values of any and all equipment that they have on them, useful information they have (and depending on how far you want to go with this, where that info is useful), the amount (and cost) of training they have, and the amount and type of currency they have on them (if your campaign has multiple currencies for multiple locations; you can skip this if theres a universal standard). At first glance, this seems like a LOT of bookkeeping, and it is, but it can also be seen as the major engine around which the game runs.
On thinking on it for a second, VP is the perfect way to handle advancement, since the way you can gain it isnt directly material; a monk meditating on a mountaintop may be gaining the same amount of 'value' as a pirate captain trawling the high seas. Further thought would need to go into to figure out all the corner cases, but im thinking this is the solution to at least some of the earlier problem.
A bunch of ink has been spilled on coin standards, price lists, etc already, but i do think the idea of simplifying how money is handled is a worthy goal. That said, theres a lot of room to expand the concept, especially into spaces that D&D usually handles with oddly set up, specific, and independent sub-systems.
Now, im no economist (not by a longshot haha), but ive always seen money as transferable value, with its strength being that multiple people with their myriad desires being able to use it to purchase/sell a number of products as long as each side sees the currency as legit and they bot agree on its value (im sure theres a bunch of little things wrong with that statement, but work with me a bit). In rpgs, money is usually the only way in which value is transferable, making money one of the things that most people desire/look for, sometimes to the detriments of common sense or expediency.
Likewise, oftentimes things like information, art, alliances, or training is forgotten in the shuffle of things because its a lot harder to put realistic value to them, let alone them then needing to be noted down somewhere (which tends to leave them forgotten altogether).
My solution, though im sure it isnt too novel of an idea, is to replace money/gold with value points (VP). VP would handle anything and everything that PCs would run into while still allowing them to increase their grubby little murderhobo hoards to their hearts content. Originally, the idea was a a tiered system that placed everything into on of about 6 'value levels', but it felt arbitrary and made grafting the system onto most versions of D&D a hassle; this one just replaces whatever word people have for money with VP and calls it a day.
A PCs VP is found by adding together the values of any and all equipment that they have on them, useful information they have (and depending on how far you want to go with this, where that info is useful), the amount (and cost) of training they have, and the amount and type of currency they have on them (if your campaign has multiple currencies for multiple locations; you can skip this if theres a universal standard). At first glance, this seems like a LOT of bookkeeping, and it is, but it can also be seen as the major engine around which the game runs.
On thinking on it for a second, VP is the perfect way to handle advancement, since the way you can gain it isnt directly material; a monk meditating on a mountaintop may be gaining the same amount of 'value' as a pirate captain trawling the high seas. Further thought would need to go into to figure out all the corner cases, but im thinking this is the solution to at least some of the earlier problem.
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