Episode 166: Jim Pinto Talks About D&D as "Work," Player Agency vs. Consumer Agency, and the DM/Player Compact

Episode 166: Jim Pinto Talks Player Agency  and the DM/Player Compact

Our guest for episode 166 is the prolific game designer Jim Pinto who has some interesting thoughts about current trends in role playing games and how they present challenges to all game masters, novice and experienced alike.

Jim Pinto has worked on products like Legend of the 5 Rings, The World's Largest Dungeon, and Shadow of the Demon Lord. His most recent work at Post World Games, including the Protocol and Praxis series of games, have challenged traditional role playing game dynamics and have become influential to designers like Greg Gorden.

While there are a lot of books discussing how to be a good game master and how to run the best role playing sessions, not a lot has been written about what responsibilities the players have to the game master. In the most recent episode of Geekerati Radio (Episode 166), I chat with game designer Jim Pinto of Post World Games about how each edition of D&D has made game mastering more like work and less like play and about what the proper role of the game master is.

As always, I don't want to reveal too much about the discussion here. I want you to listen to the episode after all, but I have provided a list of some of the products and concepts we talk about in the episode below.

Concepts

• Jim's concept of reliant focused play.
• Game master's fiat.
• Player Agency vs. Consumer Agency.
  What is the proper role of the game master?

Products and Outside Articles

• Glen Blacow's "Aspects of Adventure Gaming" which was published in Different Worlds #10 (which you can still purchase from the publisher here).
• Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering
• A Theory of Fun
• Call of Cthulhu 7^th Edition
• The Goblin Crown by Robert Hewitt Wolfe which I reviewed here.
•  Critical Role

Episode 161: Geekerati Returns with a New Format and an Interview with Dom Zook of Saving Throw Show

The Geekerati Podcast was founded in 2007 and streamed 160 episodes before going on hiatus in 2014. It was meant to be a brief hiatus as the Geekerati panelists coordinated their busy schedules, but it ended up lasting almost five years. With this episode Geekerati returns with new Bi-Weekly prerecorded episodes with new guests and new segments. We are proud to relaunch with an interview with our friend Dom Zook. Dom is the Executive Producer of Saving Throw Show a Role Playing Game Live Play streaming channel on Twitch. If you're a fan of Critical Role, or any other live play show, you should give Saving Throw Show a look.They are currently running a number of gaames online, but their Savage Worlds show launches its new season during the channel's Fundraising Marathon on June 21st!
 

This episode also sees the introduction of our first new segment, Something Old/Something New. This segment will be a regular review segment and will be joined by other segments including our Dungeon Master advice segment Dungeons & Dilemmas in the near future. Our current segment reviews the old Conan Roleplaying Game by TSR and Attack of the Necron, the first entry in Warped Galaxies the new YA Warhammer Adventures book series from Games Workshop. 

 If the discussion in Something Old/Something new piqued your interest in the system used by the TSR Conan Roleplaying Game, you will want to take a look at its Open Content successor ZeFRS and download the pdf rulebook.


This episode featured the following sound effects from Plate Mail Games: 1950s Space, Inside the Internet, and Space Battle. 

Is it Explosively Good? A Review of Brian McClellan's POWDER MAGE Role Playing Game.

Readers of my posts here at Advanced Dungeons and Parenting know that I am a big fan of the Savage Worlds role playing game. It's an easy to learn and simple to play game that is remarkably flexible. This flexibility allows the Savage Worlds rules set to be used as the basis of games set in a wide range of genres. The system can handle everything from gritty low magic fantasy to cosmic powered super heroes without missing a beat. The characters from each campaign may not fit well in the other campaign due to scaling issues, but the mechanics work seemlessly in each setting.

I am also a fan of Brian McClellan's Powder Mage trilogy and was hooked from the first few pages of The Promise of Blood (link goes to the Mysterious Galaxy bookstore, one of the best independent book stores out there). McClellan manages in the trilogy, and later books in the setting, to achieve something rare in fantasy fiction. He is able to tell stories of "regular folk" in addition to the epic heroes at the center of the tale. From a role playing game point of view The Powder Mage trilogy alternates point of view characters between characters at vastly different power levels, but the lower powered characters are as important to the resolution of the conflict as the most powerful characters. It is one of the most impressive things about this inventive series, and it is something that makes it perfect for the Savage Worlds system.

The Powder Mage's Challenge to Game Design

Before I get too deep into a review of Brian McClellan's role playing game adaptation, I'd like to take a moment to discuss the particular challenge anyone adapting The Powder Mage trilogy into a game faces due to the varying power levels in the tales. As I mentioned above, McClellan has characters in his book that operate on at least three levels of power. I would classify these tiers in the following way.

1) "Normal" Skilled Characters.
2) Experienced Characters with Minor Boon/Ability.
3) Characters with Extraordinary Powers.
4) Characters with Extraordinary Powers at Super Heroic Levels.
5) Gods.

With the exception of the God tier, more on that later, there are characters of deep narrative importance at every tier. In other words, there are characters I would classify as Player Character worthy at each of these tiers and McClellan does a great job of balancing them narratively. Interestingly, this dilemma is one of the things that makes Savage Worlds the perfect system for the game.

At the first tier of power are characters like SouSmith and Ricard Tumblar. SouSmith is a boxer who gets hired as a bodyguard for someone at tier 2 and Tumblar is one of the most politically powerful characters in the world. These would be standard characters in a picaresque low-magic fantasy campaign. Adamat and Sergeant (later higher rank) Olem are paragons of the tier two characters. Experience wise, and skill wise, these characters are similar to tier 1, but they have something that sets them apart called a knack. For Adamat it's a perfect memory and for Olem it's the fact that he doesn't need to sleep. These characters can also use their "third eye" to see magic. Most of the "knacked" of the books are at tier 2, but there are some who are higher.

Tier's 1 and 2 are the low fantasy tiers and tier 3 is where you really begin to see people separate in power. All "privileged" mages and many Powder Mages fall into this group. There are some Powder Mages at tier 2 and some at tier 4 to 5, but most are in the mid-tier 3 range. These are characters who have the same number of skills as other characters, but who also possess magic abilities that allow them to destroy buildings with the wave of a hand. I initially wondered whether Savage Worlds' basic magic system could emulate "privileged" mages, but after comparing the dice of damage from a cannon blast (3d6+1 HW on pg 65 of the Deluxe Explorer's Edition) with that of Burst (2d10 HW) and Blast (2d6 or 3d6 HW), those concerns went away. The Burst spell has destructive power slightly less than a modern 20mm cannon and Blast has slightly less power than a medieval cannon. While neither is going to tear apart a modern Abrams tank, they both will make quick work of a Jeep or medieval building. There are a number of characters at this level of power in the book.

Tier 4 characters are like tier 3 characters on steroids. Where a standard "privileged" mage can make short work of the facade of a house, a "predeii" can lay waste to the entire building and bullets bounce of their skin without the aid of a magic shield. Similarly, the Powder Mage Taniel can withstand the assaults of a predeii and amplify his strength and agility to levels beyond that of mere mortals.

The Gods themselves come in at tier 5. I won't go into detail about the Gods of The Powder Mage trilogy, but I will say that they are a key focus of the conflicts in the books and that they are not so far removed from tier 4 as to make them uninteresting. Whether some other characters fall in at tier 5 I'll leave for you to discover.

The Powder Mage Roleplaying Game as Sourcebook

One of the things that becomes immediately clear as one reads Brian McClellan's Powder Mage Roleplaying Game is that the author himself has written much of the content. As a sourcebook discussing the history of the world and giving you a rich sense of place in order to set your games, this book is invaluable. Based on this content alone, I would recommend this book as a purchase for gamers and non-gamers who are fans of the series. McClellan's presentation of the setting is as readable as the fiction and the team has selected some excellent artists to capture The Powder Mage setting. If you want to know the state of the world after The Powder Mage trilogy, then this is the place for you.

But How is It as a Game

If there is any place where Powder Mage fails, it is as a role playing game book. While the lore is all there to inspire play, there aren't enough mechanics to make this book as useful as it could be. Alan Bahr, who is a very good designer and who is on an absolute tear when it comes to putting out good books lately, dropped the ball a little bit here. While he does provide some of the new rules one expects in a Savage Worlds rpg setting, new Background Edges for example, there are some weaknesses in these examples and some major holes in the book.

After a very strong beginning, a discussion of the goals of good gaming and how to use the X-card in your games, the character creation session begins to peter out in the background edges section as it tries to adapt the Powder Mage archetype to the Savage Worlds rules. In doing so it attempted to create a new subsystem rather than fit the archetype within the existing subsystems Savage Worlds had to offer. In this particular case, the character reads more like the Gunslinger from Pathfinder/Critical Role and less like a Powder Mage. Bahr and McClellan might have been better served to use the Super Powers Companion or see how the standard magic system fit with the archetype. Given the power tiers above, I think that most Powder Mages are easily represented by the standard magic system and that outliers like Taniel are better represented using the Super Powers Companion. The same would be said of predeii and the Gods.

That is a mere disagreement of design, and is a minor one at that. Bahr and McClellan's point system for Powder Mages does work, and well, even if it's not how I would do it. If that was the largest failing of the book, I wouldn't have mentioned it in the first place. Since it is actually the smallest flaw, I did choose to point it out.

If that's the smallest flaw, then what is the biggest one? The biggest flaw is that as useful as the book is for players and book fans, having rules for character creation and a detailed gazetteer, it isn't as useful as it needs to be for game masters. One of the things that Savage Worlds game masters have been spoiled by is how the game's Fast, Furious, and Fun mantra has influenced how useful the books are to GMs with only small windows of prep time. Pick up any official Savage Worlds world book and you'll find quick and dirty adventure generators, a short adventure made of linked events, and enough NPCs to make a short campaign. This is what Brian McClellan's Powder Mage Roleplaying Game lacks entirely.

While the game does include a couple of very fun, and easy to start a campaign, short adventures, it completely lacks a bestiary or the quick and dirty adventure generators one would find in The Goon, Necessary Evil, 50 Fathoms, etc. Worst of all, the book entirely lacks statistics for "Wardens" of either the standard or "black powder" variety. Given how ubiquitous Wardens are as opponents in the books, and the fact that there is a Warden on the cover of the role playing game, this is a pretty large drop of the ball. I had high hopes for this game, and backed it at the $65 level, but it did not live up to those expectations.

Final Assessment

Does this mean that it's not worth a purchase? Not at all. For the setting material alone, this book is well worth the price of at least the pdf. What this book needs is a couple of pdf supplements written just for GMs. They don't have to be long and could be limited to a bestiary and adventure generator, but they would really fill out the holes in the initial release. It's 85% of were it needs to be as a game and 110% of where it needs to be as a sourcebook.

Firearms in D&D Mystara: Tinker, Tailor, Dwarf, and Spy's Darokinian Musketeers

As I posted last week, my current D&D campaign "Tinker, Tailor, Dwarf, and Spy" takes place in the "Known World" setting that was originally published in the Cook Expert Set of Dungeons & Dragons. The players are currently adventuring in northern Karameikos, but I have plans to have the players wander into Darokin and Glantri. For those who aren't familiar with the Known World, it is a hodge-podge setting that includes an anachronistic combination of cultures ranging from the Roman Empire to Renaissance tech societies. Karameikos, where the players' characters are based, is a high-medieval culture and thus is an ideal starting society for the "default fantasy" campaign.

As I mentioned above, even though the characters are based out of a default fantasy kingdom, they will be wandering into Darokin and Glantri which are countries inspired by renaissance level cultures. Darokin is based on renaissance Florence and Genoa with a strict plutocratic government. Glantri is based on renaissance Glantri with the country being a "mageocracy" rather than plutocracy. Because the players will likely be traveling into these two nations, I had to ask myself whether or not I wanted to include firearms in my D&D campaign. After some back and forth, I decided that I would indeed be introducing characters who use Muskets, Pistols, and Arquebuses, but limiting them to Darokinian society.

In preparation for this move, I purchased the Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting by Green Ronin in the hopes that it included the rules for the Gunslinger archetype for the Fighter Class. It turns out that it wasn't necessary to purchase the full campaign guide, as Matthew Mercer has been kind enough to provide the Gunslinger rules as a Pay What You Want file. After reading the archetype, I found that it didn't fit exactly what I wanted to have in my games. The Tal'Dorei Gunslinger is closely based on the Pathfinder Gunslinger character class from the Pathfinder Ultimate Combat Guide and as cool as that class it, it comes with all of the "fiddliness" of the Pathfinder system. Matthew Mercer's Gunslinger kept that fiddliness and I wanted a class that fit with the simplicity of 5th edition.

In the end, I read through the existing archetypes and feats in 5th edition and realized that I didn't need to come up with an entirely new archetype or create new feats. All I needed to do was reskin some existing rules to fit the theme.

The first reskin I will be using in my game is the creation of a Blackpowder Marksman feat. The feat will be identical to the Crossbow Expert feat on page 165 of the 5th Edition Player's Handbook. That feat is pretty powerful and makes crossbow using Fighters extremely powerful options in 5e. A key element is the first benefit which lets those who possess the feat to "ignore the loading quality of crossbows with which you are proficient." In other words, it allows crossbow using Fighters to attack more than once when using an Attack action. I thought that it was fair to have a feat that applies all of these benefits to a person who uses black powder weapons.

While I don't want to spend any real time getting into the weeds of the Arquebus > Crossbow > Longbow > Shortbow argument, I will share the reasons for why I am happy with this quick fix. First, as argued effectively by Richard Berg in his wargame Arquebus, while the longbow's effectiveness had been reduced by the innovation of plate armor, "crossbows took more time to wind and fire than an arquebus, which had similar penetrative abilities but a far lower rate of fire." Looking at the stats for the crossbow and comparing them to the longbow, we see that these attributes are taken into account in 5e.  The heavy crossbow does 1d10 damage and requires reloading while the longbow does 1d8 and doesn't. The Crossbow Expert feat allows a Fighter to use a crossbow with the same rate of fire as a longbow, something ahistorical but perfect for fantasy. In D&D a combat round is only 6 seconds long and a high level Fighter can shoot his longbow 8 times in a combat round (and thus a crossbow 8 times). That's not at all realistic, but it allows the damage curve to keep up with mages and hand to hand combatants. This is high fantasy after all and limiting arquebus/musket use to 4 shots per minute might be accurate, but it wouldn't be fun. So long as you keep the damage for the black powder weapons within reason (which the DMG does), game balance is retained.

Once I made this slight concession to fun over fact, I began looking to the character class archetypes to see how they fit the model of Musketeer. What I found was that two of the archetypes in the Player's Handbook reskinned nicely to be gun toting characters. I was especially impressed with how the Battle Master archetype fit for Musketeers. Since only a few of the maneuvers for the Battle Master specified "melee weapon," it meant that these abilities could be used with missile weapons with only minimum change. I quickly wrote up a page using The Homebrewery that included the Musketeer archetype based on the Battle Master. I haven't stated up the Eldritch Knight version, but if one limits the spell list properly it's easy to see spell as "magic ammunition."

Lastly, I created a background that would allow even non-Fighters to be proficient in "simple" black powder weapons and classified the arquebus as a simple weapon with the pistol and musket counting as martial weapons in Darokinian Society.