A critical hit with the ugly stick

In Magic World, a BRP game, characters have an Appearance (APP) characteristic. As with any characteristic, if, by magic, ageing, disease, or wounds, the characteristic is reduced to zero, death follows shortly. But just how does a character 'ugly away'?

This is a pressing question. In the our new campaign, a Magic World game set in Allansia, the players have rolled a particularly ugly bunch of PCs. Forget the good, the bad, and the ugly, we have the ugly, the ugly, and the ugly. As these players are particularly reckless, I can envisage (en-visage, geddit?!) an early-campaign Major Wound stripping them of 1d3 points of APP, leaving them hovering at the door of death by disfigurement. But what does this mean? 

Well, it means that the player characters perhaps ought to head to the Salamonis School of Decorum and Ettiquette for some APP training. And it means I should have used Elric! characteristic generation, which I remember as being 2d6+6 right down the line. But in terms of being reduced to zero APP, I see two options. 

Option one is to interpret a Major Wound that reduces APP to zero as a catastrophic fatal wound (sword through face kind of thing) regardless of remaining HP. "Yes, I know your character still has just under half his HP remaining, but that sword stroke chopped his face clean off. Sorry." 

Option two is the Call of Cthulhu solution. Having APP reduced to zero causes permanent destruction of the character's personality, and control of the character passes into the hands of the Referee. The character is 'dead' as a player character. Incidentally, it is not the ugliness itself that causes this, but the damage to the character's sense of self.

Are there any other ways of explaining character 'death' through APP loss? Have you ever had a character 'die' through ugliness in your game?

Experience, Charisma, and Glory

Some regard Charisma as a 'dump stat'. It is a bit difficult to have a 'dump stat' when you are playing 3d6 in order, but you know what I mean; STR 18 gives you a +3 bonus in melee combat, DEX 18 gives you a +3 bonus to AC, CON 18 gives you an extra 3 HP per level. Even modifiers provided by high INT and WIS can provide mechanical in benefits; extra spells, higher chances of knowing a language, bonuses to Saving Throws or adventuring skills, depending on your particular flavour of The Game. But CHA? CHA? CHA 18 should give you a bonus to NPC reaction rolls and an increased maximum number of henchmen. But these are small beer; how many modestly endowed PCs are maxing out on their henchmen allocation? And how many Old School GMs set aside roleplaying to randomly determine NPC reactions? Or remember to?

Now me, well, I am comfortable enough with a Fellowship test, or the like, as in WFRP, to use some kind of CHA test to determine the success of a PC's attempt to inveigle their way into the Black Brotherhood, or persuade the Archgourmand of the Ogres that adventurers are poor, stringy, gristly meat. But even in those cases, it is the actions of the players, not the dice rolled for their PCs, that carry the most weight in determining the success or failure of their actions. The +3 to hit provided by STR 18 counts whether or not the player of the PC can actually lift a sword; the player simply says, 'I hit with my axe' and the GM says 'roll'. The effect of the +3 to NPC reaction rolls provided by CHA 18 is dependent on the ability of the players to put words in their PC's mouth.

Cha-, Cha-, Charisma eighteen, Russia's greatest love machine

Regardless, CHA can be made mechanically meaningful in an Old School game by making it every adventurer's Prime Requisite. And then some. A +1 bonus (CHA 13-15) = 10% extra XP, a +2 bonus (CHA 16-17) = 20% extra XP, and, naturally enough, a +3 bonus (CHA 18) = 30% extra XP. That is a lot of extra XP, but then someone with CHA 18 is a person that is more likely than most to turn the bare facts of their deeds into legend.

But then, for me, XP are not literally a measure of 'experience' - after all, what do PCs get XP for? Finding treasure, mostly. Sometimes killing stuff. And, if you are that way inclined, completing quest-like objectives. And accumulating this XP does what? Makes PCs better at fighting, others better at magic, and some better at sneaking about. The same experiences improve characters in different ways. Why? Because D&D is not a BRP game. D&D is a more abstract (and less 'realistic'). In my games, XP (and Levels) are measures of a PCs fame, glory, and legendary status - I've argued before, D&D [only?] makes sense when adventurers are 'rock stars' - though this 'legendary status' is only in part a social construction (boosted by carousing and conspicuous consumption too; you can buy 'charisma'), but is built into the physics of the game universe itself.

The idea of using the CHA modifier* to boost XP rewards comes from a number of sources: Mongoose RuneQuest II uses CHA to determine the number of improvement rolls that a PC gains per session/adventure, on the [dubious] basis that charisma helps PCs find tutors/training partners better than gold, or intelligence. Pendragon has a Glory statistic that is a combination of a Player Knight's repute and something more 'real'. Old School games have, since they were New School, awarded XP for carousing and the like (Chris Kutalik, of Hill Cantons, not only does this but increases PC Charisma scores as they level, looking at the relationship between CHA and level from the other end of the telescope [take one // take two // Hill Cantons Compendium]). But the tipping point came when I was reading some Pelinore stuff, and came across the Free/wo/men NPC class. "The level of a Freeman or Freewoman is not determined by experience points but by a combination of their wealth, age and influence". At first I though that NPC classes such as this are a great way of avoiding the situation in which every NPC of interest has an adventuring class and a few levels, or else is a fragile 0 level non-entity. But then I thought that the idea of levels relating to 'wealth, age and influence' might help us to think about what XP and levels are meant to/ought to represent. 

*I am all about the modifiers these days. I'd rather have a PC roll 1d6/2d6/xdy (whatever) and add their modifier to beat a target number, than roll 1d20/3d6/xd6 (whatever) to roll under the relevant statistic. Using d6 rolls to resolve adventuring tasks obviously owes a lot to the streamlined D&D rules found in Lamentations of the Flame Princess. 2d6, though, gives a probability curve, and Stars Without Number (via Traveller) provides an example of how to use this in an Old School context. Dyson Logos has a nifty conversion of B/X Thief skills to d6 and 2d6.  

On Ability Scores (2)

More stuff that everyone and their dog has written about before:

In the last post I said that most NPCs in D&D should not have ability scores. By this, I don't mean that we shouldn't bother writing them down, I mean that they should not have them at all. Ability scores in D&D are not the same as characteristics in RuneQuest (RQ). In RQ, every living thing is statted out just like a PC because in RQ characteristics are a measure of something ‘real’. A Dragon’s STR can be compared directly to that of a PC. In D&D monsters do not have ability scores. If a monster needs only a bare stat line, so does an NPC, though they might have rich, complex histories and personalities.

In most versions of D&D, education does not raise INT, weight training does not raise STR, an improved diet does not raise CON. One of the weaknesses of thinking about D&D ability scores as a measure of something ‘real’ in the game world is that if, for example, we rationalising low CON as being the result of a PC’s obesity, a PCs CON score should be pretty mutable, changing with diet and exercise. If we treat D&D ability scores as representations of a Platonic ideal of the PC, the CON score will remain the same for the entire life of the PC. We might change the PC’s ability score modifiers though...

On Abillity Scores (1)

On the forums at Dragonsfoot I argued that a D&D character with an ability score of 3 was simply at the low end of ‘normal’. The corollary of this is that scores of 18 do not represent superhuman capabilities. Others took a much more stretched view of the 3d6 ability score curve, arguing, for example, that INT 3 represented an intellectual disability and INT 18 genius.

Scores of 3 and 18 turn up on 1 in every 216 rolls of 3d6. If everyone rolls 3d6 in order, that’s at least one genius in every village (and one villager that is superhumanly wise, superhumanly dextrous, etc.). So INT 18 is not the equivalent to Einstein, but to the guy with the [capacity to get a] first class degree in Physics.

But perhaps everyone in the village is not rolling 3d6 in order, and so 18s are not as common as 1 in 216 in the general population. In fact, I agree. We roll 3d6 to determine the ability scores of adventurers. In fact, I do not think most NPCs in D&D [should] have ability scores. If 3d6 is the way that we generate the ability scores of adventurers, an ability score of 3 is the ability score of a viable adventurer. An adventurer with a negative modifier when resolving actions related to that ability, but an adventurer all the same. But whatever a score of 3 represents, it does not represent a disability – ability score generation is not a roll on a critical hit chart; not even Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is that cruel and grim.     

Clever Player, Stupid Character?

Or the other way around.

Role-players are usually comfortable with the idea that the characters can be physically dissimilar to players. We do not blink when the character being played by a weakling bends iron bars or lifts boulders, or when the character played by a clutz nimbly disassembles a deadly trap, or when the player who is never completely well rolls up a character with a constitution of 18. The dissimilarity of the characters and the players is enforced by the way in which physical characteristics are bound into the mechanics of the game.

Characteristics such as wisdom, intelligence, and charisma – personality and cognitive characteristics – seem to present many role-players with a problem. They are often not tied so strongly into the mechanics of the game. They might determine how many spells you can learn or cast, or offer slight modifiers to reaction rolls, but their effects are not felt in the mundane mechanics of the average role-play session. Complicating this is the feeling that the activities that might be covered by these characteristics ought to be the proper domain of role-playing, not dice rolling. When a player says that his character will attempt to throw a goblin over a wall, a GM will ask the player to roll some dice. The GM will not ask for a demonstration. When a player says that his character will negotiate with a goblin, a GM will often ask the player to role-play this negotiation.


While Steve couldn't string two words together, never mind an argument, his character (Wis 17, Int 17, Chr 17) could speak like Cicero.

I want to protect characteristics such as wisdom, intelligence, and charisma from being ‘stat dumps’ by giving them more mechanical prominence in a game. But I want to do this without cutting the role-play aspect of role-playing games. That said, a clever player, playing a D&D character with intelligence of 7, who solves puzzles, engages in complex negotiations, and the like, is no more playing a role-playing game than one who devolves everything to a characteristic test. A combination of characteristic tests and skill tests, modified GM judgement of intrinsic difficulty and role-playing decisions is the best way forward, I feel. A player might make an impassioned speech when negotiating with the King of the Assassins, but if the character who is to be making the speech has a low charisma score that might not be quite what comes out of the characters mouth. We would not consider for a moment that there should be one to one translation from player action/stated intention to character action when dealing with questions of physical action. This is not just to hobble the characters of the clever, charismatic players, but to boost the characters of players who are not so quick witted or charismatic. Just as a weakling can play a Herculean hero, so can the shy player who stumbles over his words play the greatest demagogue in the Known World.