Blog Graveyard vol X: Appendix M

I was inspired by this post to write my own entry to the Blog Graveyard.

The subject of today's eulogy is Appendix M, whose last sighting was the 28th of January, 2020. Appendix M was started by bygrinstow as a way to get back into drawing by publicizing their practice. Art being a worthwhile endeavour on its own, this had the very respectable side effect of providing us all with a ton of creative creatures to steal for our own purposes. Thanks from the future, bygrinstow.

Bygrinstow, by the way, also brought us the brilliant Monster Extractor series, which has inspired me before.

What does Appendix M offer us? Monsters! More than you can swing your sword at! You could choose an article at random from this blog and be almost guaranteed to land on a post containing a monster you'll want to throw at your players. If you didn't, it's because you happened to land on one of the few posts that doesn't contain a monster.

Testing this theory myself, I got the Dirt Diver, the House Beetle, the Forgotten Soldier, and Nearly People. Surely one of those names makes you want to go check it out for yourself. In amongst these original creations are well-trodden monsters such as Kobolds, Mermaids, and rival adventuring parties, but these sit between the more unusual beasts like whatever a "SCARLSNIPE" is, and gelatinous shapes that aren't cubes.

The absolute highlight for me personally is DRYAD, TRUE, which helped me to ease my players (and myself, as a new Judge) from module content to homebrew sandbox-style content by being the subject of the hook at the end of Portal Under the Stars. According to Appendix M, the dryad is like the forest's immune system. She comes into existence to protect it from evil, and attacks intruders with the remembered mental anguish of victims of evil. The sister monster to this is the DRYAD, FALSE - something the locals might think is a dryad but truly is just a monster.

If it's not monsters you're looking for though, there is a handful of other content such as the MURDER HOBO class - a class that manages to capture the flavour of the murderhobo concept while actually being something I'd potentially allow at my table. It might even be fun to run a whole party of these guys as a chaotic one-shot or campaign.

Whether you're looking for stats for a monster so you don't have to do them yourself, an interesting twist on a known monster, or something entirely new and bizarre to throw at your players, it's worth casting Consult Spirit to commune with this dead blog and retrieve some of its wisdom.

12 months in

Wow. It's been a year.

Twelve months ago now I posted my first post to 19 Sided Die. It was a reddit post I put together more or less on a whim, and once I posted that it just kept flowing. I couldn't stop writing. After the first post I jotted down a list of all the ideas that came to me and I still have some of those original ideas left.

But it's slowed down in recent months. At least one person has asked me why - that person being Toast over at Scrolls from the Toaster, who recently celebrated his 100th post and shouted me out. The feeling is mutual, Toast. Our side-by-side growth has been very encouraging for me.

As for why: nothing is wrong, I've just been writing less. I reached a point where I had to tell myself that was okay, after I missed my first weekly post in over nine months. Since mere weeks after I started this blog, I've had a son to look after. That means he's almost 1 and my spare time has only been shrinking as he's increased in both mobility and appetite. Because of this, I've had to be choosy with my hobbies - especially those involving sitting in front of a screen.

I don't always get a couple of hours spare time in a week to write a post, and my backlog ran out a while ago. I still have plenty of material to work with though, so if anyone else is out there waiting for me to post each Wednesday, stick around.

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In December I started what I called the blog100 challenge. Out of the series of 100 questions by d4 caltrops I completed 9 before falling off the wagon. Along the way, at least 3 others started their own blog100's. I'll consider that a success - although I really should get back to it!

I'm still struggling to answer that tenth question. It's one of the few that doesn't feel relevant to me, but I'll find a way to do it. These posts may move from the Sunday slot to the Wednesday slot in order to keep a weekly pace if that works out better for me. We'll see.

I also recently came to learn that Throne of Salt did something similar in January, independent of the challenge, by answering all 100 questions across four posts. Very cool!

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Six months ago I talked about the goals I set when starting this blog and how it felt to stick to those goals. In as much time again, I had double the readers with far less effort. I'm not sure what the lesson is there, if there is one. I'm happy to be taking it more casually than I was, but at the same time I miss the schedule and the regular discourse. I'm glad people are still around, reading my stuff. In fact, within just the last few months I began to hear back from players who had actually used some of my classes - in particular the Ranger (whose skills have received some reworking) and the Dragon. On that note, the Dragon might be the most polished thing I've put out there, so it's nice to see it continuing to get some attention.

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What's next for 19 Sided Die? I dunno. There's a lot on the backburner. Tell me if any of this sounds neat.

• OD&D has been a fixation of mine for a while. I want to talk about a lot of OD&D related stuff.
• That list of ideas from the beginning still has a dozen topics remaining, and I've jotted down about three dozen since. Each of these is at least a post's worth of content, some of them have expanded beyond that.
• One of those topics, I could fill a book. This isn't a promise - if anything, it's the opposite. Scope creep may just kill this one.
• Another one of those topics feels like it should be in zine format. This one is more likely to see the light of day.
• Anybody interested in Obsidian related content? I've used it to prep and keep session notes since before beginning this blog, but I've really only just recently taken the deep dive into what it can truly do. For here I'll most likely keep it to the TTRPG space, but Obsidian for TTRPGs is a whole beast of its own.
• Send help, Obsidian is taking over my life.
• A ton of old posts that need to be revisited.
• Downloadable PDF versions of my content.

Variable Rate of Advancement

Something OD&D did that doesn't fly with most groups today was variable rates of advancement. It did this in two ways: not only did different classes use different advancement tables, but characters earned experience at varying rates depending mostly on their "Prime Requisite".

Don't even get me started on the limits for demihumans.

In modern games, it quickly becomes unbalanced if players aren't all on the same level. Furthermore, balance is held on a pedestal. To be fair, in some cases that lack of balance is a legitimate problem. I've played in a campaign where one player character constantly far outshone the rest and it kind of sucked for everyone else. I think it's very much worth noting though: that party was all of the same level and it still happened.

Despite the title, the table continues with other bonuses not related to advancement.

The Prime Requisite system appears to me to be oft misunderstood. Modern players see this as restricting certain classes to only the players who rolled high enough ability scores. When combined with the way scores were rolled randomly and no choice was given to adjust them, it feels like someone is locked out of playing, for instance, a Fighting-Man if their Strength roll wasn't very high. This couldn't be further from the truth. It's perfectly viable in OD&D to play away from a character's natural aptitudes and simply be one level behind the party most of the time.

Dial it back there Gary, you're not helping my point.

A point is made here that a player does not need to choose the "optimal" choice if it does not suit the character they want to play. This is a tricky thing. People are natural optimizers, so it feels bad to throw away a potential 10% experience bonus permanently. And the 20% penalty? Well that just feels awful in comparison. There's one more thing to take into account here though.

Because of experience gains varying depending on the character's level, a party operating together will cluster toward a similar level. Higher-level characters will slow down in advancement while the lower end of the party shoots upward rapidly to meet them. What mathematically looks like (and more importantly, intuitively feels like) a permanent penalty is, in reality, a stipulation that your character will sit slightly behind their expected level for a short time before catching up with the party. That actually isn't so bad (though it still feels bad).

We can do something interesting with this concept. Let's look at pros and cons of this system and create a new mechanic, trying to squeeze out the pros while mitigating the cons.

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The upside of this system is that is encourages players to work with what they've got. Those of us who enjoy DCC's funnel system will agree that this is the best way to play. You don't choose what position you are born into, and the fun is making something great out of it.

This goes hand in hand with reduced player agency, as it punishes players for choosing to play against those randomly decided characteristics. Major player decisions, such as a character's entire class, can feel forced.

How am I going to mitigate this? Aside from just making the bonuses smaller and more granular, I'm going to make them a player option. Here's how the concept works: The player rolls their random features. Ability scores are an easy example; let's use the traditional 3d6 down the line. The player then decides whether they want to stick with those characteristics. They may swap ability scores around, but for each one that remains unchanged they get an additive +2% bonus to all XP gains.

You can take it a further than this. Other randomly chosen attributes (such as occupation or birth augur in DCC) can be kept random for an additive +2%, with the option to choose one instead for no bonus. Race and class can be determined randomly, for a much more significant +5% bonus each - all players should roll randomly and then decide whether they want to take that race/class with the bonus, or choose any other. Some players will be lucky and get what they wanted and the bonus. That's fine.

If you are doing this in DCC however, you might need to start using more granular numbers for XP - otherwise those 1-4 points per encounter are going to start requiring decimals.

Odd Goblin, a GLoG hack, does this but with one-time flat experience gains. That's where I got the idea - sort of combining that with OD&D's Prime Requisite bonuses. It is my hope that implementing a system like this will provide both the reward for rolling with what you get given, but also allow for full player agency as there are no explicit penalties for playing against your rolls and only minor bonuses for taking the random option.

I realize this is essentially the opposite of my previously posted progression mechanic, but as always I like a lot of game mechanics and different things have their place at different tables.

Hiding your Plans

This post is an analysis of a player behaviour I've noticed: scheming behind the referee's back. I don't mean this to sound like a pejorative, but I do believe it's a net negative for the table even though I understand why it happens and have even participated.

There is a tendency for players to cook up clever plans that the referee has not foreseen and spring them at the last moment. Sometimes this is purely narrative. Sometimes this involves exploiting chains of game mechanics and in these cases the players will execute their actions one by one in the required order, letting the referee resolve them piece by piece. It's almost as if the intent is to trap the referee in the logical conclusion of their own rulings up until that point.

This is potentially problematic for two reasons. The lesser problem is that the referee isn't prepared. This is already part of being a referee anyway. The referee should expect to have to handle this from time to time, though it's slightly unfair and potentially embarrassing to put your referee on the spot on purpose.

The greater problem is that you don't afford the referee the opportunity to help you do what you are trying to do. That is the referee's job. You're not there to thwart each other. You are collaborators. If you came up with a good plan, a good referee will want your plan to succeed (or at least sensibly play out). Instead, when the referee does not know your plan, it may fall flat when something does not work as the player intended. I have had this happen in my own game, after a player refused to answer, "What are you trying to do, exactly?"

It's possible that this is a symptom of adversarial thinking, but there's another cause. This cause is a problem that I'm not sure how to solve. It persists through any amount of player-referee collaboration.

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There is a common trope that is so crucial to storytelling* of all kinds that calling it a "common trope" is frankly insulting. I'm talking about The Reveal. These are often the pivotal moments in a story, the most memorable scenes and the most impactful beats.

In a TTRPG, the players are the story. The referee is too, and the degree to which each is true depends on the campaign. But no matter the table, thanks to the structure of play (the basic procedure), only the referee ever gets to do The Reveal. The master plan, the twist, and the flashback origin story - these are all forms of The Reveal that players attempt to execute while explicitly avoiding stating their intent to the referee, and they are all things that can fall flat on their face without the referee's support. They want the referee to enjoy The Reveal as much as the players do when one is sprung on them. Unfortunately, it's often a lot of work to make these work, and that work is best worked out together.

I wonder if it subconsciously creeps in that in movies, if the audience knows the plan they know it will fail - that's where the drama comes from. Conversely, if the audience does not know the plan, everything goes according to plan - that's The Reveal. The opposite is true in TTRPGs however, where the player requires the referee to make it work. There are any number of things that the player doesn't know, but the referee could weave into the narrative if they were just given some warning. Rules may need to be bent or particular judgements made. In extreme cases, established lore and prepared events may need to be thrown out to avoid messing with the player's master plans.

In those cases, the referee is stuck with a choice: change what is established or tell the player they failed. That sucks. Better to collaborate rather than try and pull a fast one. The referee is there to make the game work for you, after all. The players actually enforce an adversarial relationship here by expecting the referee to attempt to thwart them, and preemptively thwarting them in return.

*I don't think it's correct to call TTRPGs "storytelling". However, storytelling is the piece of TTRPGs within which this problem resides.

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I don't know how to solve the problem of players not getting to do The Reveal. In a sense, everything that the players do is The Reveal to the referee. I get that feeling constantly when I run games. It's all about seeing what my players are going to do and incorporating their ideas and I am always surprised. Changing the way players think doesn't seem like a viable solution though - I can only change the way I run the game. It's something I'll be ruminating on.