[MM] Memento Mori - Character Generator

This is for generating system agnostic characters who've had terrible lives in a terrible world before struggling their way to a life of adventure.

After generating, look back over the events and try to develop a coherent backstory.

You'll have to excuse the formatting. Apparently blogger is rubbish.

STARK - Just Role-Playing. v1

 This is some ultra minimalist tabletop roleplaying "rules" I wrote. Rules is in quotation marks because they're anti-rules. A way of playing any game by stripping it to the bone. This post will be updated over time as I make changes. Rules after the jump. They assume basic familiarity with tabletop role-playing games.

Just Role-play.

Jargon Design

Upfront I'll say I don't want to yuck anyone's yum. If the thing I'm about to rant about is what you enjoy the most from D&D, that's totally cool. I'm genuinely glad it clicked for you and got you in to the game.

So what is cranky old grandpa going to yell at clouds about this time?

I'll call it "Keyword Design", or "Proper Noun Design", or "Jargon Design". Whatever.

Everything you do in the game is A Thing™ that implies a discreet use or mechanic.

Why do I dislike this? Simply put: it sucks me out of the game. Makes me feel like I'm playing a capital G Game no different to Monopoly, or Overwatch.

I [use my Action] to [Perform] [Mighty Nipple Tweak].

None of that is natural description. It' You might as well be playing Magic the Gathering. 

I [tap 3 forests] to [summon] [Taintslap Grundleboar].

If you were introduced to D&D from 3rd to 5th Edition, you could be forgiven for assuming this is what the game is. May I direct you to the first paragraph of this post. 

And I'm not claiming D&D never had game jargon. Nor do I think - for the thousand millionth time - that rules and mechanics are bad and D&D should be entirely improvised.

My definition of "role-play" is pretty broad. It covers everything from decision making to interacting with the imaginary world, to in-character conversation. Basically all the stuff that isn't about rolling dice and adding numbers and rules interactions. Some people hear role-play and assume it's just the character acting part.

"I search the bookcase for any secrets by lifting and pulling on books, flipping through them, running my fingers under the shelves and generally poking and prodding" 

is as much role-play as

"verily good inkeepsm'n! A rounde of ales for the goode folke! [leans in] and a rumour or two about yon abandon-ed castle..."

"does my Passive Perception™ find any secrets?" and "Can I roll Diplomacy™ to get info from the barkeep?" are more game-play than role-play to me.

Accusations that I hate rules are totally false. I spend an embarrassing amount of time homebrewing rules and concocting mechanics. It's literally one of my favourite pastimes. Amongst my gaming groups I'm notorious for hacking, homebrewing and trying out new systems almost constantly.

But for some reason, when I hear players talking about character builds, and engaging with the game primarily through mechanical jargon, my eyes roll in to the back of my head and I go in to a coma. To me that's the most boring aspect of D&D when you're actually playing at the table. And even a boring way to think and converse about playing. One more time: please re-read the first paragraph of this post.

When I'm playing D&D, I want to imagine I'm in this world and interact with it as if it was a real place. The dice come out to simulate and resolve situations that arise from role-play. Role-play first, with the Game as a supporting element.

Jargon design does it the other way around. Game first with Role-Play as support. Like the role-play is there as a contrivance for pitting character builds against mechanically appropriate challenges.

For example, the special Features™ of Backgrounds™ in 5E. Essentially they're just roleplaying advice. Ideas for how the DM™ and Player™ can leverage the Player Character's™ past life for role-play opportunities or in-game benefits. But the way they're written, it's as if it is a mechanic. Just another spell or skill for you to pick off the menu in an applicable situation.

It's a really good idea in theory. A Feature™ could get the imagination flowing, and the DM/Player could start thinking of other ways their past life as a baker could enrich the game. But in practice, due to the framing of it as just another tool in the PC's belt, people apply game logic to it. You don't start thinking about other ways to use your Bakers Guild membership because the WotC™ Approved Official Game Interaction™ is done for you. It says you use your membership to do this specific thing. You didn't have to activate that imagination muscle yourself.

Instead of codifying that interaction, you could just ask yourself "what would a baker do?". Your brain has all it needs to handle the in-game situation already. The information is filed away, ready for instant recall. You know stuff. You have common sense and the ability for deductive reasoning. As does your DM. You have a conversation and say "wouldn't it be cool if there was a secret Baker's handshake that gets me in to the hidden Breadmaker's guild?"

And everyone agrees that is is cool so you decide that it happens. Without dice. Or a rule to say you're allowed or supposed to do that. And you feel clever. And that's fun. You had fun. All on your own! Well done.

The Feature™ idea would be better served as an advice block. A reminder to always be thinking about how to use your Background™, Bonds™, etc in-game for fun and profit. Along with a brief example of one such way.

Acolyte [Bunch of Proficiencies™ and equipment and all that bollocks] How to use this in play? Acolytes could call on their church in times of need (lodging, healing, political favours, and so on). Locals may treat the Acolyte differently based on their relationship with that religion and the other clergy members. The church might also compel the Acolyte to assist with important matters. Climbing the ladder within the organisation might also come with various privileges, but also responsibilities the Acolyte must juggle.

The idea of having your description be resolved with a bespoke mechanic is attractive. But I feel the way it's done takes the "your description" part away. YOU aren't role-playing anymore. WotC's writers are doing it for you.

Sometimes less is more. The more you codify and gamify every aspect of the RPG, the less agency or creativity the players employ. A good role-playing ruleset is there when it's needed, prompts and encourages creativity, then takes a backseat so that it doesn't get in the way. 

Sure, it is satisfying to solve the math problems by applying the right mechanics and tipping the odds in your favour with the most possible bonuses. Some people get a lot of mileage out of that. Make brain feel big. Watch dice go brrrrrrr. I get it.

But, in my experience, the most rewarding and memorable moments are the role-playing ones. Where players talked their way through something without throwing dice or cracking open the rulebook. Those are the ones people reminisce about for years to come. You can end up robbing yourself of those moments the more you mechanise them.

In summary; Rules are good when they assist the playing of the game. They shouldn't be the focus of the game*. 

*In my opinion. For the last fucking time, go read the very first paragraph of this post.

The Rant to End All Rants

Me vs The World
I feel like I'm the crazed madman in a movie, yelling and screaming about a truth obvious to him, that nobody else sees. I have no way of telling if my thoughts and opinions on TTRPG's are logical and valid, because nobody seems to agree with them. My low self esteem tells me that I should accept I'm wrong and stupid and smell and nobody likes me. 

BUT, it's not just me that nobody agrees with. Nobody seems to agree with each other. And even when they do, they argue about what they agree on. So maybe it's not just me that is stinky.

God, I hope it's not just me that's stinky.

The following is going to be a long and rambling breakdown of how I see stuff.

Ludo-Narrative Dissonance

The way I see it, is everyone is (unknowingly) a hypocrite, or trying to square peg a round hole. From every school of thought, I see people saying they want X thing from TTRPG's, but play using Y rules that do the opposite, or at least make it harder than it needs to be.

D&D 4th Edition and the WotC editions in general are a great example of this. They took criticisms of 3.5E's bloat and tried to streamline it. Except in the end, it somehow turned out even more byzantine than all previous editions.

There is Another Way

That kind of spawned the Oldschool Renaissance (OSR). A lot of dissatisfied people started looking back at previous editions to see what might be useful, and they (re)discovered a lot of the simple elegance of that stuff from the 70's and early 80's. For sure, it has it's archaic quirks, but those could be ironed out after several decades of select game design improvements were applied. Like restoring antique furniture.

Others settled on Pathfinder, but I don't know anything about that culture so I've nothing to say about it.

The Dam Breaks

4E tripped something in my brain. I was miserable running it and miserable playing it, but for the longest time I didn't realise it. I would spend days and days designing campaigns and encounters and set pieces according to the perfectly cromulent guidelines from the DM's guide and numerous blogs on the subject. And I kinda enjoyed that. It was a very nice mental exercise. 

But then you get to the table with it, and nothing works as well as you thought it would. Nothing lands with the players. Nothing engages them. But I've always been the go-to DM of the group. People like my campaigns and are excited to play in them. Or so they tell me. So what went wrong? Did I lose my touch? 

Sorta. I stopped doing what I normally did. What was comfortable for me and running my game. Instead I was running 4th Edition. As prescribed in the official material, and advised by several well written blogs. It was very compelling in theory, but didn't work out in practice.

A bit about my gaming history.

I was introduced to D&D in the early 90's at about 8 or 9 years old by a friend's older brother. He sat us down and ran an introductory adventure from the Basic edition of D&D (he had a mix of early 80's Moldvay and Mentzer books). He ran one session, then handed over his box of D&D books to us and set us on our way.

We didn't really understand the rules that much, but we muddled through it, making things up where we needed to, and had a blast playing. The rules didn't get in the way, and we probably weren't even following them properly. We just did what worked for us.

When I started highschool, 2E was the game de rigueur. So we ran that in much the same way, but with more comprehension of the rules. 3rd edition was released during my senior years and everyone jumped over to that. It was just fine in the early days before all the splat books came out. 

In between all those major editions of D&D, I also experimented with all sorts of other games. Cyberpunk 2020 (ha!). GURPS. Vampire. I got deep in to mechanics. I loved reading those rulebooks and absorbing the mechanics. But when it came time to actually play with them, everyone kind of switched off. Looking back, I can see it was because the mechanics got in the way of the adventure. D&D managed to toe the line pretty well between mechanics and role-play all the way through until the latter days of 3.5E, which is why it was always the constant with me and my groups. We'd go off and explore other games for a bit, but always come back to D&D.

But what captured my 8 year old mind just as much as D&D was the Fighting Fantasy choose-your-own-adventure novels. Which at some point released their own game system called Advanced Fighting Fantasy. I played that in tandem with D&D through primary school and came back to it after graduating highschool.

What was great about AFF was that it was a very light system. It had 3 stats, used two 6-sided dice for everything, and the books were paperback novel format so they could be easily toted around. We could play it on the go. Exploring the woods, we'd have nothing but pocket notepads, pencils and a couple of dice. The rules were simple enough that we had them memorised and could do everything off-the-cuff. You could play this game anywhere at any time so long as you could find a reasonably flat surface to roll a die on.

What fascinates me about it, is the idea that you could have simple mechanics as robust as D&D, but a fraction of the mental overhead. You can hold it in your brain and never really need to reference a book. The flow of play never gets held up trying to find or resolve one rule or another.

Like Sands Through the Hourglass

All these TTRPG's talk a big game about how they allow you to use your imagination, and how the role-play is the thing. And how they're easy to use and resolve. But how often have you - even in the highly lauded 5th Edition D&D - had to stop to look something up? Or wait 15 minutes for your turn in combat? Or flip through multiple stapled pages of character sheet to find something? Or make a series of rolls, one after another to resolve a single task? Could you estimate how much time is spent on doing that? Or what percentage of your sessions are devoted to that kind of thing, vs engaging activities that move the game forward? I think if it's taking more than a few seconds to roll and adjudicate something, you might be having your time needlessly wasted.

No Efficient Gaming Under Late Stage Capitalism

Keep in mind that writers tend to get paid by the word. And businesses need to be putting out regular new products in order to stay in business. It behoves them to design a system that can be constantly expanded upon with new material. Which inevitably leads to greater complexity. Which slows the game itself down.

Like how your phone or PC gets slower over time as all the software and patches and advancements tax hardware that was built to become obsolete within 5 years, forcing you to upgrade regularly, sustaining the business indefinitely. 

The average lifespan of an edition of D&D is about 7-8 years. 5E is doing quite well in that regard. I wonder how long until it buckles under the weight of all those expansions and a new edition becomes necessary. It'd actually be cool to see it stick around for 15 or even 20 years though. Will the business model hold out? Will people's imaginations hold out? They've done it with Magic the Gathering.

Tap That Market

Ah. Magic the Gathering. Simple to learn. Hard to master.

Simple to learn. You can memorise the basic rules of play. And all the special mechanics are explained on the cards themselves. Funny how something so simple, but robust enough to be expanded on infinitely can stand the test of time. Nearly 30 years MtG has lasted. It's seen the rise and fall of several editions of D&D, and remained relatively unchanged itself in all that time. No major rules overhauls. Cards from 1993 are broadly compatible with cards from 2020. It might not be balanced particularly well, but the mechanics will interact with each other pretty smoothly. Try pitting an AD&D party against a 4th edition Beholder. You wouldn't be able to run the encounter, the mechanics are so different.

Mental Breakdown

So, coming back to the pivotal moment where I realised I was playing the wrong game. 4th Edition. It killed off my longest running gaming group. We'd been playing together for the better part of a decade. But something was off with 4E. I was the mainstay DM of the group, while the others would run something between campaigns or if I had burned out and wanted a break. But within the first year or two of 4E's run, nearly every one of us had tried to run a campaign with it, and each one had fizzled out. We didn't see it at the time, but looking back, I can see that the rules and the gameplay were exhausting to deal with.

But at the same time, we enjoyed it. It doesn't matter what rules you use, as long as you're having fun. But it was kind of like one of Sauron's rings of power slowly turning us all in to gollums. 

Anyway. After one particularly sucky and short-lived campaign we all sort of burned out on D&D and just stopped. But for me, I started thinking about what went wrong and I realised that for a very long time, I've not actually enjoyed D&D. At least not as much as I could have. And I started thinking about why that was. What parts of it specificially were giving me headaches. I sort of came to the following conclusions:

• Too many rules slow down the game, which more often than not makes everyone bored. Rules should be simple and flexible and quick to resolve.
• Making characters was more fun than playing them.
• My groups most memorable characters were made in simpler systems with fast and basic generation, started as mostly blank slates and grew their personalities through play.
• Designing campaigns was more fun than playing them.
• My best campaigns were largely improvised in play.
• Structured design takes inordinately long to prepare and is only rewarding to me while I'm designing it. It never once paid off at the table.

Memories

I started going back through my memory to the good times, to try and identify the best games, what rules were used and the various other circumstances that contributed to it. I most fondly remembered B/X D&D, AFF and a homebrew that were based on AFF. At the same time, I came across the OSR and rediscovered oldschool D&D and the philosophy of that playstyle that had been lost over time. That was kind of a second epiphany.

Oldschool rules tended to facilitate the gameplay they intended. If you play them the way the rules imply you should, then everything runs smoothly.

Modern ones are struggling with that. They say it's all about storytelling and role-play, but the rules are intended for tactical strategy and action combat. If you try to role-play, you find yourself having to jump mechanical hurdles to do it.

So for a while, I was deep in to the OSR scene. I loved the DIY attitude, I loved the type of game those rules supported. But the people did sort of have an air that I can't describe and won't even attempt to because it'll mischaracterise them. In any case, I never fully felt comfortable in that scene, so when google+ shut down and several scandals turned the OSR in to a complete mess I quietly exited.

Once again, I started thinking too much about this stuff. The oldschool philosophy is pretty good, but as I was reading through the dozenth twist on B/X or some clone of it, I picked up on the fact that people are still having to tinker with the rules to get them to work for them. And I too have always done the same. There's still a few things getting in the way.

Space Kings

Then I came across Space Kings.

Made by a guy whose group played D&D at a bar. The drunker they got, the harder it was to play. Too much math and tracking and dice flying everywhere.

So he made a game that used a deck of cards to resolve everything. Very little character tracking.

Super fast and elegant to resolve. Easy to learn and memorise. It was like AFF all over again.

It really distilled TTRPG's back to the core mode of playing: The player says what they want to do. The DM tells you the result, and if you need to flip (roll) anything. The DM improvised and narrated results based on how good your draw was. Not much more to it than that. But it was robust enough to sustain lengthy campaigns while drunk.

Brilliant. It might even be perfect.

Veteran Players

I've noticed that the more familiar players get with the rules, the more they tend to think in rules. New players don't know the mechanics yet, but they're told it's a game of imagination and to just describe what they would want to do as if they were there. Then the GM tells you the result and if any dice need to be rolled. Every RPG rulebook ever tells you that's how the game works.

It's a good way to learn the rules. But over time, as those rules are learned naturally through play, the player builds up a sort of mental index of approved game interaction options. The brain naturally likes to make things easy, so instead of describing in real-world terms what they wish to do, they'll pull up a game rule and say "I want to do that".

Newbie: "I swing my sword at the orc, trying to chop off his arm"

vs

Veteran: "I use Dismemberment, which gives me a +5 to targeted attacks"

Some games encourage this more than others. For instance, modern D&D has pages and pages of feats, skills and combat mechanics that cover almost every situation. So naturally, the players will learn this language and push the button or pull the lever that does the thing.

Some players are more or less susceptible to this as well. Typically, those who don't like reading or learning rules will stay in that improv mode longer, because they don't bother mentally cataloguing mechanical interactions.

Some players are so deeply invested in mechanics, that they think that IS the game, and if you're not interacting using that language, then you're not playing it properly. Or if the rules don't do it that way, then the game itself is not doing it right. Role-play is not what a role-playing game is to them. Character building and combat strategy is what role-playing is.

To a lot of people, that's what they signed up for, or are comfortable with. But it is at odds with the creative role-play side of TTRPG's. As much as I appear to complain about 4E, I recognise it's perfectly good as a straight up tabletop wargame. It might be remembered more fondly if WotC marketed it as such, shed the pretence of role-play and made it a D&D branded competitor to Warhammer.

Forever Young

So what do you do about this seemingly inevitable path away from roleplay the more you master the rules?

Build the rules in such a way that creative thinking and role-play are a necessary component. I'd say what you leave out of the rules is just as important as what you put in. If the rules don't let you fall back on codified interactions, then you're forced to stay in that new-player-imaginative frame of mind in order to play at all.

This is what a lot of rules-lite and minimalist systems try to do. They give you one or two universal mechanics that can be applied to any situation with a little imagination. So, the less robust they appear on paper, the more robust they are in practice.

A side effect of leaving things up to the imagination is that it actually exercises the imagination, which makes the imagination easier to use, which creates a cycle that ever improves your game. From speed of play, to engagement, to excitement.

And once again, if you don't like leaving things up to people's subjective opinion; I think you might be playing the wrong kind of game. Or playing with the wrong group. If you can't trust everyone to be reasonable and mature and cooperative; the game rules aren't the problem here.

Make Believe

I'm not advocating for purely narrative systems with no rules. And people who imply my train of thought will inevitably lead to that are either falling prey to the slippery slope fallacy, or arguing in bad faith.

It's still a Role-Playing Game. Game is still a word there. People showing up to an RPG still want to roll some dice, just as much as they want to wax Shakespearean with an NPC for half an hour. 

I'm saying the ideal should be a balanced ratio of Role-playing to Game. And a seamless transition between the two modes. Or no transition at all. Rather than Role-play mode and Game mode, a single mode that is both at once. Neither end of the scale should get in the way of the other, but rather support, facilitate and enhance the other.

I am aware that there are a number of systems that attempt exactly that. I've read a lot of them and for one reason or another they tend to rub me the wrong way. If I could point at a good version of it, I'd say Space Kings. If I could point at an example I dislike, it'd probably be something like FATE, Powered by the Apocalypse, or similar "storygames" along those lines. But nailing down the why of that is something I'm having trouble with.

That's it.

I've run out of things to say in this post. I don't expect anyone to read it or agree with me on anything. I just had to get the poison out.

It probably won't be the last rant, but I do want to start posting more actual gameable content at some point. Maybe. If my attention span holds out.

[D&D] Death & Attachment

 D&D is a villain holding a gun to a puppy's head.

You are being set up to get upset.

D&D is kind of in a tug of war with itself. On the one hand, it tries to be a story emulator. On the other, it tries to be a game. The more you want it to be a story, the more the game part interferes. The more you want it to be a game, the less control you have over the story.

I ran a questionnaire. It was a small and therefore biased amount of responses. But, from those responses I gleaned that story & role-playing were by far the most important aspects of the game. But when it came to chances of character death, people still wanted it to be a real threat. The game part (stakes) still matters.

In fiction, characters are never at any real threat of dying. Characters die if it's dramatically appropriate. The stakes aren't real though. The writer is in complete control of that. As an audience, we buy in to the illusion of threat in order to enjoy the story.

In a game, you can lose, whether by difference in skill or by chance. The stakes are real. We play the game because we want to test our skill or luck, and for that game to be satisfying there has to be a real risk of losing.

To reiterate simply: A traditional story must be rigged to be satisfying. A game cannot. That's the tug of war.

What's the gun to the puppy's head?

D&D these days gets touted as a story emulator, by the product itself, the marketing and the popularity of live gameplay productions (made by professional entertainers and storytellers). They really push the idea that you're going to lovingly craft a character for yourself and you'll get to go on heroic adventures, making a story together with your friends. You're going to get immersed in the fiction. You're going to get attached to that puppy.

But then there are game rules and dice. The gun. That puppy gon' die.

(unless you're clever and lucky and win the game)

Now, this has rarely been a problem for me. I've been lucky enough to play with groups where PC death was no big deal. Expectations were managed.

But going off this survey, conversations and countless online threads, it seems a lot of people are getting sold on the wrong fantasy. I don't mean elves. I mean the fantasy that you can recreate and star in your own novel or movie.

Not to say that you can't. But if you want that, you'll need to tweak how the game works. Take threat of death off the table. Make it a dramatic choice. If someone goes to 0hp they're knocked out but not going to die. It's up to the player and DM to decide if death is appropriate and fun in that situation. I've seen games successfully run like this, and it can be pretty fun.

But if you want to run D&D as written, it's important that expectations of PC survival and story are managed upfront. You gotta let people know that it isn't a traditional story with a 3 act structure and character arcs. It isn't Lord of the Rings. It isn't even Critical Role. It's a fantasy world simulation. The stories don't have structure. The stories emerge naturally from the butterfly effect of action and reaction. Your PC might die for any number of reasons. You can't rely on plot immunity. Free will and the dice make that impossible.

I think the marketing department are aiming for wide market appeal. That's why they push it as a story emulator. They seem to think people can more easily understand and engage with the concept of telling a capital S Story, over running an imaginary simulation.

Top 10 Best selling videogames of the 2010's according to Wikipedia; Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto V, Player Unknown's Battlegrounds, Mario Kart 8, Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, Diablo 3, Terraria, Call of Duty Modern Warfare, Red Dead Redemption 2, Call of Duty Black Ops.

Grand Theft Auto 5, Red Dead 2 and Skyrim are the only games on there I'd consider are notable for their story. But the gameplay itself is largely open world simulation. People are not spending hundreds of hours playing through the story sections. They're fiddling about in the world making their own stories.

Minecraft up the top. No story to speak of. Wildly popular and influential.

Zero linear story games in the top 10 (nobody is buying CoD for the story). The first one that pops up is The Last of Us at 18th.

The producers of D&D don't give people enough credit. We'll like and play D&D as an open world sandbox. And we'll get less upset about our characters dying if you advertise it as such.

I'd say if people still don't like losing their progress from PC death, then maybe some kind of legacy system could be useful. Like, you can cultivate your next character in some way while playing your current one so that you have something to look forward to in the event your current one dies. That's a post idea right there.

And to beat my broken drum again, I'll say; pare down the mechanics. No wonder people get so attached. Sunken cost fallacy. You have to put so much time in to making and maintaining a character. It's an ordeal. You'd be less bothered about PC death if it only took 10 minutes to make one. 

[D&D] Skills

I always go back and forth on skill lists. They are an undeniably useful game tool. But I also find they can be a crutch for many players.

In all things in life, we want to travel the path of least resistance. So a list of common game interactions with an associated rating is nice. I can, at a glance, see my character is very good at picking locks. There are a lot of locks to pick in RPGs.

But then the law of the hammer sets in. The cognitive bias where if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. If all you have is this list of a dozen skills, then you try and solve every obstacle in the game with a skill and a dice roll.

If you didn't have the list at all, you'd just use your imagination. You'd talk in natural, descriptive language about what your character wants to do. But to those brought up on skill lists, the idea of throwing out the skill list is insanity.

You must have a way to measure the skill of your character. My character is good at picking locks, not because they are a Rogue, but because being a Rogue gives you +5 to lockpicking.

You must have choice and agency as a player and as a character. My character is good at picking locks because I decided to take the lockpicking proficiency. If I don't get that choice, I will not be playing the character I wish to play. I had no hand in crafting them.

These arguments are fallacies, imo. The presumption is that the game was built around the use of these skills. It would be like telling someone to play Super Mario Bros. with a Rock Band guitar. An unnecessary and awkward interface for the game.

I strongly disagree. The core mechanic (roll 1d20 vs a DC. Roll high to succeed) is the only tool necessary to resolve these situations. The skill system is an extra layer of granularity to tip the scales more in your favour, but they aren't necessary to play or even enjoy the game.

I won't deny there is pleasure to be had in character building and modifier hunting. It's a satisfying mental exercise to play with the lego blocks of character customisation to build your avatar brick-by-brick. It's also satisfying to get big bonus number make dice go brrrrrrrr. But I see those as a kind of mental junk food. Yes, it gives you pleasure, but the quality of that pleasure is thin and fleeting.

I was in my late teens and early 20's when 3rd and 4th editions were big, and I got really invested in them. I was on the Character Optimisation forums and poring over hundreds of pages of splat books to hand craft all sorts of mechanically interesting builds. I loved it. Then I'd get to the table with these characters and immediately get bored with them, whether the build was successful or not. I realised years later that I got more out of the mental exercise of building a character than I did playing it. And years after that, I learned about how dopamine responses and anticipation are linked to form habits. Healthy and unhealthy ones. 

Game designers use this in a benevolent way. It's a simple method to enhance fun. You get all these big numbers that go up on your character sheet. Modifiers, experience, levels, big pools of hit points and spells that do 4d6+18 damage. Loads and loads of special abilities that tell you all the cool stuff your character can do. The excitement builds, you throw the dice, count all the big numbers and explode in orgasmic delight. That's the sugar rush part of the game. The noise and flashing lights of the poker machine.

The rest of the game is where I believe the better quality - nourishing - fun is to be had. The role-playing. The problem solving. Immersing yourself in a story and an imagined universe. Shooting the shit with your friends, having a laugh. Those are the endorphin and serotonin companions to dice rolling dopamine. That's the exhilaration of a good workout, or the thrill of pulling off a bluff in poker.

I'm not saying the mechanical stuff is bad for you. I'm saying we're addicted to it. We place a higher importance on it, because our brains are wired to do that. It's an easy feelgood response. A better effort-to-payoff ratio than the other stuff, so it gets higher priority. But it's a small and temporary payoff compared to the other stuff. 

I made a little questionnaire not long ago and solicited responses from my circles. Questions about what aspects of tabletop RPGs you enjoy the most. An overwhelming number of the responses (24 respondents total. A small and admittedly biased data set) said that story and role-playing were the absolute most important aspects of the game, far above anything else. Game mechanics, strategy and other mechanics-heavy aspects were only moderately important in comparison.

This is interesting to me, because it's the opposite of what I hear when I talk to people. Whenever I advocate for reducing mechanical complexity in favour of greater creative freedom, I meet heavy resistance. It seems to be that in the moment - a conversation - people react strongly when the easy dopamine reward option is threatened. But when asked to sit down and think about it - a questionnaire - people recognise that the real value of the game lies in the social and imaginative aspects.

We know we're addicted to snack food (mechanics), but the addiction makes us resist giving it up.

Any game designer will tell you that the more complex you make the mechanics, the slower the game gets. Can you remember any epic 3 hour long combat encounters that were exciting and tense the entire time, with a rewarding payoff at the end? I'd wager not. It's more likely that those combats were a slog. A death march and the only relief anyone felt at the end was because it was over. Was the time and mental energy you expended to build your character an advantageous trade-off in that situation? A couple of good dice rolls, maybe. But the net takeaway is that you were bored most of the time and exhausted by the end. That's what you'll remember for years to come. The time and energy that was robbed from you.

Snack foods (mechanics) are fine, in moderation.

One way to break unhealthy habits is to substitute healthy habits in their place. We cut down on sugar and eat more nuts instead. We shed unnecessary mechanical complexity, and replace it with more role-play and mental exercise.

Ditch the skill list. Instead of picking the happy meal menu item, we engage our imagination and describe what we're doing. And instead of referencing a rulebook to tell us what the outcome of a situation is, the DM makes it up on the spot (using common sense, of course). You know. Role-playing.

You don't need a character sheet to tell you that your level 5 Rogue is extremely skilled at picking locks. That's just common sense. Everyone at the table can agree your level 5 Rogue should be good at that. Instead of adding a bunch of bonuses together (and making everyone else wait), the DM can just lower the DC to whatever everyone agrees sounds reasonable. Your level is a pretty good number to use. Lower the DC by that amount. Or if you're playing 5th Edition the Proficiency Bonus is the only modifier you need. And you don't need to choose and track what you're proficient at. It's inferred by your class, background and the fiction itself.

Did you really lose any agency when building that character? You got to decide they were good at picking locks just the same as if the rulebook said you could. That's more agency, not less. You still get the satisfaction of rolling high on a d20. You've lost nothing, saved time (and energy), exercised your brain, and been more engaged in the (highly important) fiction than you otherwise would have been. That's a pretty good deal.

But but but if it isn't in the rules I have to ask for permission from the DM! They shouldn't have such arbitrary power over my fun!

If your DM is as unreasonable and unfair as you seem to think they are, then I don't know what to tell you. Your DM sucks. They need to adjust their attitude, or step aside and let a more mature person run the game.

[FIC] #3 - Sex Massacre of the Lizard God

Working her way up the sheer cliffs, she cursed the jagged rock face.
"Shitty shit fuck, you fucking piece of sheer rock," She paused a moment to brush aside the tawny locks that clung across her brow, stuck fast with sweat. "Fucking ass shit hair, I'll piss on your dog!" Her muscles screamed and blood pumped like lava. "And fuck you too, blood!" She didn't mean it. Blood was her bff. Despite her protestations, she ascended the forbidding crags with unnatural agility and ease. The bloodthirsty creatures on her trail were the real cause of her vitriol.

Several Lizardmen, hot in pursuit were a short distance below and gaining. They hissed and growled as they ascended after their prey.
"Sshitty sshit fuck, thesse fucking warmbloodss alwayss make thingss hard!" said one in Lizardtongue.
"And look! Sshe sstopped to fix her hair! Ssuch vain creaturess!" spat another.
"Hey, now. Nothing wrong with a girl wanting to look fabulouss before sshe diess." Said a third Lizardman, wearing a gaudy feathered headdress and sequinned loincloth. The others laughed.
"Oh Tony, you're alwayss sso…delightful," remarked the lead Lizardm'n as a rock sailed past his head and splattered the face of another just below him. The rest hugged the cliff as the body fell; catching one more reptilian on the way and sending him Wilhelm-screaming into the jungle below.

The brown-haired barbarian laughed and made a rude gesture at her pursuers.
"Suck a ghoul's leprous ding-dong!" She mocked before making a final push to crest the top of the cliff.
The angered Lizardmen hunters scrambled up after her. The first one to scale the cliff was rewarded with his own rock to the face and a free trip through the tree canopy. The rest grouped together and swarmed up and over. A rustle in the bushes indicated the direction their prey had run. Readying spears, they followed.

They came to a small clearing. Facing them was the ferocious female, clothed in hide and furs, brandishing a thick tree branch. Her legs were braced, lips curled, eyes smouldering like a cornered she-wolf. Behind her the plateau ended abruptly in another deadly drop. Evidently there was no means of escape, so she had turned to meet her end with fangs bared and claws extended.
"Pinkssskin," croaked the leading Lizard in a broken river folk dialect. "Tell me your name, sso that our priesst can properly ssend your ssoul to Yakthaka on the altar of ssacrifice."
"Heh," snorted the wild-eyed northern warrior "You can tell Yakthaka yourself when I - Faolain of Clachad - send you to him."
"Oh daaaaaaaaaaamn!" called Tony from the back of the group, "Stone. Cold."
"Hey!" snarled the Lizardman, "Whosse sside are you on, Tony?"
"Herss now, if you're too much of a fuckboy to top that harssh diss," sassed Tony. The Lizardman sighed and turned back to Faolain.
"Uhhh…" He stammered, trying to think of a suitable comeback. "Not if I kill you firsst?"
Tony imitated a fog horn while the rest of the hunters shook their heads in disappointment.
"Fine," Said the Lizardman, defeated. "Fuck it. Jusst get her!" He shouted and they immediately leapt upon their prey.

---

Faolain awoke with a pounding headache made worse by the rhythmic beating of drums in the distance. She hung from a log - carried between two Lizardman hunters - bound at the wrists and ankles. Looking around, she saw primitive huts on either side. Ahead, a large stone ziggurat loomed, the peak of which stood just above the line of the tall jungle trees.

Lizardchildren scampered about, laughing, hurling insults and stones at the wildwoman. Faolain spat and cursed at them like a rabid hound in response. They started crying and one even peed himself. The lizard men put Faolain down a moment. One set her upright as the other gave her a brutal slug to the jaw. She spat out a glob of blood, grinned fiendishly and laughed at her captors. They tried not to cry but one peed himself. The lizard children stopped crying and began laughing and taunting peepants lizard guard; calling him "peepants Jeff". They weren't very inventive. The other lizard man shooed the children off and consoled his friend. Touching piano began to play.
"Don't worry Jeff. I involuntarily sshit mysself when I orgassm." Said the lizard man, rubbing peepants Jeff's shoulders.
"Uhh…" replied Jeff, clearly weirded out.
"And ssometimes, when I'm taking a sshit, I get a boner." continued the oversharing lizardman.
"Okay, I think I'm fine now, Kyle." said Jeff, trying to end the awkward bonding session.
"And you know you gotta jerk that boner out. Can't go walking around with a hardon," continued Kyle unabated.
"Yep. Tearss gone. Massculinity resstored. Let'ss get going…" urged Jeff, standing up and dusting himself off.
"And ssince, you know…completing makes me poop," added Jeff in a weirdly hushed tone as if he hadn't been talking about shitting and jerking off this entire time. "and poopin' givess me a boner…" murmured Kyle, connecting the dots.
"Sstop. Sstop Kyle. Sstop now pleasse." said the completely ignored Jeff.
"I jusst gotta keep jerkin' and poopin' until I passs out from dehydration in a pool of sshitty jizz," The two stared at each other in silence a few moments. "Bodiess are weird, huh? Good talk, peepantss. Let'ss go."

They came to a plaza before the ziggurat. Faolain was cut loose and thrust into a wicker cage of jungle vines and branches. She scrambled to her feet and launched herself outwards. The two lizard man guards were prepared and wrestled her back in, closing the cage fast. Clutching at the bars, Faolain rattled the cage and raged at her predicament, the lizardmen, Kormm, the earthen ground, the wind, happy couples, a bird, an irritating itch that was just out of reach, the establishment, civilisation in general, lack of a sword, puppies, and so on until she was spent.

Panting and leaning against the cage, Faolain surveyed the surroundings. The reptile tribe were gathering and dancing at the foot of the moss and vine covered ziggurat. Sweaty scaled bodies thrusted erotically under the lusty light of the sexy setting sun. The drums beat a hot latin rhythm that made hips move with minds of their own in a pantomime of safe-for-work sexy sex thrusts. Shit was so hot Faolain had to fan herself like she was in a 90's Diet Coke commercial.

A voice called down from a platform halfway up the ziggurat. A lizardman priest in fine robes stood behind an altar. In one hand he wielded a wicked curved dagger and in the other, a skull sized glittering blue and amber jewel. He chanted, swayed and moaned in exultation over a human figure tied down to the altar.

Wearing naught but golden armlets, matching anklet and a white semi-transparent silken loincloth, the boy struggled against his bindings. The token gesture of clothing showed a great view of supple young side-sack as he writhed about on the altar - glistening alabaster skin turning a sultry shade of pink from the exertion. Faolain couldn't help but pop a ladyboner at the helpless cliche reversal of sexual objectification. Her barbarian blood surged and spurred her to action. She watched her guards like a hawk, ready to take advantage of any opening to escape.

"And so we shall ssacrifice this pink-sskinned devil to Yakthaka," yelled the lizardman priest down from his platform. "And Yakthaka will drink of itss dissgussting inferior warm blood." He continued in a racially insensitive manner.
"And thiss sshall ssate him and he will not eat uss and will guide our hunterss and give uss good weather and fertile women and help uss conquer other tribess and not eat uss and provide affordable health care and lower taxess and upgrade infrasstructure and hopefully not eat uss. So it wass for our ancestorss and sso it sshall alwayss be until we fuck up and he eatss uss. It iss a good ssystem of government and hass worked sso far."
The crowd yelled "Pleasse don't eat uss!" in unison and resumed their sexy dancing.

As the sun began to set, the drumming and dancing became more intense. Loincloths were flying and lizard people just started totally fuckin' in the streets.
"Hey boyyyyyss!" Cooed Tony the Lizardman at the guards. "Why don't you join in?"
The guards looked at each other.
"You go ahead Jeff," said Kyle. "I jusst like to watch and jerk it."
"You're one crazy ssex pervert, Kyle." Replied the other as he doffed his loincloth and waded into the scaly street orgy.

Now was her chance. As Kyle fiddled his lizardjunk, Faolain struck her arms through the bars and pulled him in. She wrapped her steely forearm around his neck and began to choke the sex fiend.
"Jusst…a…little…more," he gasped through a crushed windpipe. "I'm about to complete…" he said, as he completed. And as he completed, a foul stench of poo-poo struck Faolain's nostrils.
"Oh, fucking gross!" said Faolain in disgust. She reached down to the lizard man's waist and pulled a bone dirk free from its scabbard, then proceeded to furiously stab the wretched shitting pervert.
"Ow! Sstop! Casshewss!" Kyle wheezed as he tried to say his safe word, but it was too late.
Everyone else was too busy gettin' busy to notice what was happening in the twilight gloom. Later, some lizardfolk would happen across his corpse - dick in hand, lying in a puddle of blood, jizz and shit - and point and laugh. Kyle Shitgasm would become a schoolyard taunt for generations to come.

---

"Quiet, femboy!" Hissed the lizardpriest. "Ssoon the ssun will sset and the Dragon'ss eye will ssup of your warm blood."
"Aieeee!" wailed the virginal young man as he wriggled and a busomy testicle popped free of his loincloth.
"Won't somebody save me?" Cried the helpless lad.
At that moment, Faolain heaved herself up onto the ziggurat's platform, dagger in teeth, blood dripping from red stained hands.
"I'm here to take your cool gem, sweet robes and hot fuckboy." She growled at the lizardpriest.
"Augh! How did you esscape?" Shrieked the reptilem'n in response. "No matter. The ssun has sset and I'll ssacrifice you both to Yakthaka!"
The priest plunged his dagger downward towards the hysterical damselboy, but Faolain struck with the speed of a viper. She sent her bone dagger through the priests hand.
"Ahhh, geez!" Cried the priest, sucking in air. "Ahhh. Fuuuuck."
Without thinking, he dropped his blade and the glittering gem to clutch at his punctured claw.
The Dragon's Eye dropped to the ground and rolled off the edge of the platform. The three watched in stunned silence as it bounced down each of the ziggurat's massive stepped blocks, cracking with each impact.
"Ssssssssshit..." Stated the lizardpriest. He hiked up his robes and fled the scene. "Good luck, asssholes!" He added, "See you in lizard hell!" as his voice trailed off.

Presently there came a rumbling. Followed by a bestial roar. Faolain was working on the boy's bindings as Yakthaka began to emerge from his prison amgonst the mating lizard people. After a few frantic moments, Faolain released the young man and pulled him down behind the altar, causing his willy to slide out the side of his loinwear.
"Wait here," she said. "I'm gonna watch these losers eat shit" and crawled towards the edge of the platform.

In the plaza below, a great black mist had formed around the Dragon's Eye. Most of the lizardman villagers had stopped their hot bone sesh to stare dumbstruck at the mist. The rest were still so into it they didn't even notice.
Faolain squinted; Shapes were beginning to coalesce in the mist. Horrible forms from the world's lost primordial aeons, too fantastic for this lazy author to describe. Dim memories of blasphemous horrors from beyond the pits of hell taunted at the back of Faolain's primate subconscious.
"Fuckin. Cool." whispered Faolain to herself as the damsel threw himself upon her in hysterical fright.
"Ohhhhh, this is awful!" He cried, "How will we escape this dreadful creature of gnashing teeth and hook'd claws? My heart surely cannot take much more of this!" He squirmed and rubbed his supple young body against Faolain's leg as he waxed melodramatic.
"Quiet, boy-wench!" Faolain hissed, "Your insipid puling is like to reveal us."
The boy shrank back and pouted as a testicle popped loose again.

Meanwhile, the gathering of lizard people had turned into a bloodbath. Yakthaka moved amongst the expanding mist with the speed of a panther, ripping and rending lizard flesh indiscriminately. Faolain saw a couple still in a sex fugue explode into a confetti of gore and giblets. She couldn't help but pop a barbarian boner. The massacre below was igniting her wildling bloodlust.
"Fuck it. I gotta fight this thing. Wait here while I kick it's 700 teeth in." Said Faolain.
The damselm'n fainted for no reason.

With bone dirk in one hand and sacrificial dagger in the other, the she-asskicker bounded down the ziggurat's steps and waded into the thick black fog. Faolain couldn't see a ding dang thang. Guided by her barbarian instinct and the screams of the dying, she punched, stabbed, choke-slammed and bicycle kicked her way to Yakthaka.
"I'm going to kill you now" Stated Faolain in the frank manner of her people. "It's nothing personal," she added. "It's just badass."
"Oh daaaaaaaaaaamn!" called Tony from the clutches of the ravening hellspawn, his lower body missing and gushing blood, "I told y'all sshe was sstone cold!", he said before being lowered into one of the godling's gaping maws. As the mouth chewed and crunched bone, Yakthaka spoke out of some other orifice. The words came in an infernal tongue that would rend the mind of any normal person to hear, but Faolain was of the hardy cragsmen of Clachad, whose brains were chiseled from stone and therefore impervious to most forms of magic, hypnotism, daemonic manipulations and eldritch mind fucking.
"I don't know what the tits you just said" yelled Faolain. "I don't speak ugly motherfucker!"
"Ssweet disss!" gargled the hype-lizard from within some noisome gullet.

Without any attempt at overcoming the language barrier, Faolain and Yakthaka proceeded to fight. The lizard god enveloped Faolain completely, clawing punching and biting from all directions.
"Ha ha ha!" laughed the barbarienne gleefully as she dodged swiping claws, "You just give me more angles to kill you from!"
Faolain was a whirlwind of fuck-you-up; Stabbing, ripping, tearing, biting, eye-gouging, dick kicking, German suplexing, reverse German suplexing, Boston reacharounding and ear flicking.
The battle raged on for seventeen hours, with ten minute breaks every two hours for occupational health and safety reasons. Finally, the victor stood over a bloodied, mangled mess that used to be Yakthaka and teabagged it for several minutes, which was customary for her clan.

Afterward, she went over to the sexy damsel - who had woken up and fainted several more times during the battle - took him in her slashed and bleeding arms and lustily kissed his pouty crimson lips.
"By Kormm!" She exclaimed with a hearty laugh "I'm covered in blood but my foes are brought low. I have a boy with lips like wine and an ass like woah. All I need now is a tankard of ale and a horse to carry me home!"
And then Faolain sexually assaulted the young man.

THE END