Revisiting Balance in Game Design (in which I ramble a bit ... you have been warned)

Balance, that old chestnut. People with opinions talking gaming seem to think it ain't necessary, because "player agency" solves all that, or that encounter balance is a myth, something that cannot be achieved so it needn't be tried ... I get it. If all you do is DMing games, you'd have to realize at some point that a Gamemaster is one key element to achieving balance in a game. And yes, it is a multi-faceted problem. Just doesn't mean it can't be solved. Lets talk about it once more ...

This is following up a discussion I had with my good friend Eric (of Methods & Madmen fame) on X, where I'm also at now (find me! follow me! hehe). It was his idea to change medium and write posts about it, too. Read his take here. I have also talked plenty about this with my good friend Mark, and he pointed me towards this nice little nugget of his about balance in a game he wrote. You can read that here.

Over the years I've taken several stabs at the project, and as I got more and more serious about designing my own games, my perspective somewhat shifted. One of my early takes on this (2014!) can be read here. Spoiler: I'm a bit further down the road right now, so I might not even fully agree with what I wrote back then, but clever young me already took that into account and left open what he couldn't know. Ha!

[source]

Anyway. This one will be a bit all over the place. You'll find this examined through all kinds of lenses, as the discussion was all over the place as well.

Preamble

Balance is everything, and everything is balance. Anything that goes against that simple truth will produce some disharmony, if you are lucky, disaster, if you are not so lucky. So purely on the face of it, it is ridiculous to assume that games don't need to be balanced one way or another.

Assuming so, then, needs to come from some skewed understanding what is happening in game design, or what it means to play a game. Something different to what the original games offered. A paradigm shift of sorts.

I think I have a grasp on what is happening and why. It took a while and some discussion, but in the end it was right there in front of me. As usual it is there to be seen, but you have to look. Now I have to find a way to actually explain this in a way that gives others the chance to gain that same understanding.

I'll say it up front: this is no joke. We have been way too lax with how we talk and write games, what game design really means. And in the end (not "the end" end, but where we are at nonetheless), it fucked up what little gaming culture we had. what we are seeing now is the corpse of our hobby looted.

You think this is hyperbole? Keep reading ...

[source]

Where we come from, where we are ...

I'll keep this one short. It will just be a reminder what was offered in the beginning and how that changed. It will be important to understand where I come from when I talk "balance".

Out of several different attempts to make role-playing games happen, D&D was the one that stuck, that actually produced a hype that not only carried itself quite well, but also inspired a wave of innovations in this new hobby that still needs proper reviewing.

What was the essence of that game? What was able to catch the inspiration of so many gamers all over the world? We know today that it wasn't just the rules, it also was the "zeitgeist" back in the early seventies. What the sixties sowed had been in full swing in the 70s, and it showed. The books people read, the movies that went along with it ... very fertile ground for something like role-playing games.

People had been ready to experience the stories themselves they had seen or heard and read about. I think it is hard to grasp what it actually meant to grow up in that time. For one, computer games hadn't been a thing. Board games hadn't been that big yet, either. If you really were into "gaming" and lived in the USA, it would have been in one of the war gaming clubs. A very fringe group of individuals, and ground zero for role-playing games.

Nerds! [source]

 So the hobby takes off and innovates up to the 90s like crazy. Hundreds and thousands of games come into existence. the hobby is broad enough at that point so that there is a general agreement on what it means to play the game, but yet no proper research. No one is looking, everyone is doing. Basically. Some forums here and there discussed aspects of the big picture, but it was all very much wild west.

The only way to find out if a game designer back then understood what they were doing, usually was publishing it and seeing if it worked or not (simplified, of course).

The end of TSR in a way marks the end of that momentum as well, even for the competition. Hasbro buying WotC (because of M:tG) then killed it for good and fully made it a corporate endeavor.

Then the revisioning started for good, and the strongest for that first game: D&D. 3e did what 3e did, but people wanted to keep playing that original game, so all the retro clones and blogs happened ... and ended up being successful.

4e failed, 5e tried to play catch up with a crowd that would rather play the old games. That worked a bit, but all the while another movement gained momentum out of the retroclone scene many associate with the moniker "OSR": minimalist games really started taking off.

Basically, we ended up with three distinct kinds of games. The "old" games that started it, including those designed in that tradition. The minimalist games, that basically take the core assumption of the old games, add a concept to that and assume that those playing know what they have to do. And finally, the corporate vision of role-playing games, that would rather have the game being a theme park, of sorts, where you pay and pay and pay to participate.

That's the way I cut it, and those three distinctions are crucial for the argument I make.

The Basic Tenets of  RPG Game Design

Role-playing games are, despite their war gaming roots, first and foremost about NEGOTIATION. You talk about what's happening until a disagreement makes it necessary to consult the tools the game offers until the problem is resolved.

Ongoing negotiations ... [source]

Those tools exist along a hierarchy, with the basically talking being the lowest, and the most complex tools being the highest spot in that hierarchy of negotiations. I go into detail about this in the GM section of be67 when talking encounters (following the paradigm established by the D&D RC). It goes like this:

Other than seeing Encounters as elements that form a cohesive narrative, they also need to be seen as interactive elements. As such, they will have several degrees of possible interaction. They are, ordered hierarchically (from easiest to most difficult):

•         Superficial – Can be negotiated without the use of dice.

• Passive – Can be overcome with a Save.
  

• Resource based – Can be overcome, but it costs.
  

• Active, Attribute based – Can be overcome with active use of Attributes.
  

• Active, Skill based – Needs specific Skills to be overcome.
  

• Combat – High resolution challenge triggering some or all the resources.
  

All elements can be combined, of course, and it should be possible to cleverly negotiate encounters towards a lower hierarchy solution in almost all cases. Instead of fighting, Characters could use Skills, instead of Skills, they could argue the use of Attributes or spend some resources they got available. Arguing Saves would be possible, if it is imaginable that a challenge could be overcome instinctively, and arguing down to “superficial” would render the challenge harmless because Players could talk their way around it. The Gamemaster needs to entertain the argument first, however, and has the last word in all things.

This holds true through all sorts of designs (hence "basic tenets"). You can add to this, or leave stuff out, but along these lines game design happens as soon as talking won't bring the narrative forward.

In a sense, and this is important to understand, the design starts where the negotiation ends. Or rather: the rules of a game EXPAND on language towards the narrative the game intents.

This is, then, where you decide how a game should play. The vision. But what makes a game?

Definition Time & Some Analogy

At this point we can start talking balance, then. We'll start with the analogy and go from there:

The relation between gaming system and GM is the same as between a car and a professional driver. Ideally, both compliment each other to completion, which means, if both work as they should, you get the best possible result. It also means that one balances the other. A good driver will easily tell what problems a car has and what changes need to be made, a good car is designed to accommodate a driver as good as possible.

So for one, a gamemaster needs to know systems like a professional driver needs to know cars. That may come with individual tastes and biases (and will produce new problems I'll address further down), but the more you know, the more you'll appreciate how a game is done before positioning yourself towards it (incidentally how you recognize a good reviewer as well).

By that same token, games need to be designed properly to elevate the performance of a good GM. If all a GM is doing is reduced to compensating for a lacking system, you might still have a game, just not as good as it could have been.

Proper design, therefore, needs to establish standards that new games can build on, just like cars developed standards and still evolve to this day.

In game design, that standard should be (as far as I'm concerned) that someone buying a game can expect to gain the same experience from it as the designer was able to conjure when testing it if playing it by the book. This is no small feat to begin with, to be fair, because it means that the designer must have done extensive testing to present the game in a way that takes all possible uses into account (as far as that's possible).

The only way to assure that is to have the engine of a game BALANCED to the extent that it actually takes some punishment before producing false results.

See it like this: a guy has a vision for a game. It is supposed to do xyz when playing it. That means, it needs to produce results to that effect on all levels of resolution. It is the "first principle" of the game. The base line. Now, when testing reveals a problem where, say, leveling breaks or classes aren't progressing properly or combat produces undesirable effects, or a plethora of other problems that could occur when designing a game, a designer would look at the problem and adjust the system towards the established first principle.

Doing so throughout will produce a BALANCED SYSTEM within the parameters established in the beginning. Which means, as a matter of fact, that there is a metric by which encounters are balanced within the system. It is the equivalent to having a sports car do the things a sports car does.

He's saying something about speed ... [source]

So what does "balance" mean, then? Well, chess, for instance, is balanced. Other than who starts, everyone has the same rules and moves. You play two games and switch who starts between the two of you, and it is the same for both.

The balance is in the symmetry of the game, as well as in how the single elements within the game move and interact. Making that happen is the act of designing a game. "Fairness" is not in the opponent you get, but in the fact that all have the same chance to reach the goals the game sets. finding an individual way to make that work is up to the player.

There you go, game design 101. You decide what your game wants to do, then you engineer it towards that goal anyway you can, balancing all elements towards the vision you have for the game. If you manage to make all that manifest, you have a balanced game on hand.

Balance is unnecessary?

Why aren't there proper distinctions and definitions? Or how come that balance is deemed unnecessary in role-playing games? The answer to both would be that gaming is part of our culture to an extent that general assumptions of what that entails interferes with a need to have a distinction to begin with.

We are expected to know games. At least the general principle of what "gaming" is. We are also expected to accept that while there are general distinctions between categories of games, our only purpose is to know what we like so that we can go and consume that. In other words, you don't need to know how a car is built to drive one. Or even enjoy driving one.

So on the customer side, we only learn to look for the signs of what we think we like, not how that is achieved or, necessarily, how something actually aligns with what we could, would or even need to enjoy. There is a huge wiggle room where selling and buying the illusion of what we want is absolutely fair game. That would be consuming for the IDEA of doing something, with no intention of actually doing so.

I have bought enough games to know exactly what that means. And I have bought games because I liked their presentation, not really thinking about actually ever playing them. Or pdfs, because of an appealing idea and some nice cover art. Guilty as charged, on all those points. Which is why there is a market for it, which also is why that market is over-saturated but, for lack of a better word, flat.

That said, make no mistake, producing artifacts that superficially manage to summon the air of being a role-playing game is not the same as actually writing a role-playing game. There might be overlap, for sure, but to satisfy the market of the former is far easier than doing so for the latter.

That same wiggle room also produces another problem: it results in a faulty understanding of what playing a role-playing game actually entails. It skews our meta-knowledge of this niche of gaming towards an idea of entertainment more akin to going to a theme park.

At this point we are back at the distinction made in the beginning, those three different approaches we call "role-playing games" without distinction. Following the original paradigm will lead to a different understanding of what the game needs than following that of a minimalist game. And corporate has its very own idea what it wants of a gamer (basically WotC wants for the game what Adobe does for its apps). 

With all three having very different approaches and need for their designs (again, with overlap), there will be confusion about what a game needs if the distinctions aren't clear.

Coming from a faulty premise like that will make it impossible to evaluate the requirements of a good game from a customer perspective, even if you end up playing a lot of games that spawned in that dreaded wiggle room. The idea of "balance" would not even occur to you, as it is not needed for the kind of games that don't need it. You agree at the table what you want to experience, and then you experience that. The rules are more about engaging socially and how to behave. More LARP or improv theater than D&D.

Still my favorite LARP pic ... [source]

 What's more, the "balance" those minimalist or corporate games need is not necessarily anchored in the system, but outsourced to the participants (although with a different focus for each). That hierarchy I've talked about above doesn't track with those games.

Minimalist games, arguably, reduce the game to mostly the negotiation part. That has to mean that those mean rely on a proper "social contract" between the participants to make it work. That can be through having an experienced GM bringing their "meta understanding" of what constitutes a game to the table, compensating for the lack. It can be some form of ideology, that will force the experience through the same lens for everyone.

The corporate approach would be to gear the experience towards being a theme park. In that, you'll have always fun and never struggle and own nothing of the game and be happy (to know is to know). The first thing to castrate for that is the GM as well as the authority of the game itself.

Also seems to work well with ideology, as politics try to determine who is allowed to play and who isn't. Social engineering replacing the system, fucking up that nice hierarchy I shared above simply by giving a "get out of jail card" for all levels of resolution.

But all of it is, in its own way, a form of balance. Otherwise you couldn't play.

But people play games how they want to play them!

The one thing a game designer should ignore is how people are NOT playing their game as published but go their own way with it. If a game is designed as described above and playing it really does what the designer intended, then those playing it differently do so at their own peril. If the game is not at fault (and it might be, but if ...), then the gamer is. Limits of control and all that.

I mean, there is value in learning that a huge variety of people ignore a rule or use it differently. Something like that should be considered for revision, naturally. But if someone, say, uses a horror game to play a superhero campaign, the designer is not at fault.

But that's not even what I'm hinting at.

There is a whole movement in the ttrpg community to see systems as a mere trappings for their individual expression of the story they had in mind. Systems doing their jobs will then be seen as intrusive, disruptive even. And since that's a market, it's easy enough to find content creators (not game designers, mind you) accommodating that need.

That is all fair game, of course, but all the same something different to playing a proper role-playing game. Not even denigrating here. If you find enjoyment in playing something akin to what heavily scripted you tube theater groups call "playing a role-playing game", feel free to do so. It's just very different to what role-playing games had been originally and should be regarded as such.

Same goes for lite rules/minimalist games. Of course there is a beauty to keeping it nice and succinct, and of course is there the possibility that they will offer a proper gaming experience. Just not without an experienced gamemaster, who'd have to invest a whole lot of work to make a game with few rules worth playing for a campaign, if it's possible at all. Or without external forces (as in "not part of the rules") that engineer cohesion into a group.

It's all just different. You wouldn't take a Trabi to a Formula One race, is all I'm saying.

Unless it's pimped? [source]

In all cases, first principles apply: if you write a game with improvised theater in mind, maybe even for Twitch streaming or what have you, it will bring different necessities than writing a proper role-playing game that group of friends can play for decades without getting bored of it, or even writing something that's just supposed to last for a couple of sessions.

That all of this has its place does not mean that one form of design replaces the other. It is, rather, to be treated differently. That's not always easy, it seems.

Why bother, then?

To keep with the analogy, if you shift gears in a car to the next tier, you expect that car to behave like a car that has been shifted one up (ideally, going faster then before). How you react to the car performing is directly related to the feedback it gives. The same goes for players in a game. They'll try and test, maybe even read the rules, to get an idea how a game behaves and act accordingly. System mastery is, to use another buzzword, giving them "agency" over their characters.

If a system, now, produces unreliable results, their performance will be geared towards balancing and compensating the problems the system is producing themselves. Same goes for the GM, of course. They might even work together to address the shortcomings and find compromises to solve them.

It is, naturally, something the designer should have done to begin with to present a "complete" game. And if all of that produces more hustle than playing the game is worth, people will move on and play something else.

So this is why designers should bother with offering games that work properly, which means, they are balanced in a way that reliable results allow for all involved to have an enjoyable experience when engaging with the game. And those things will get apparent over time, of course, so even if a game is successful for, say, the sheer marketing power of its publisher, it will fall short sooner or later when people find out what a game is lacking.

D&D 3e, for instance, broke when characters reached mid to high level. The work load for the GM just got too big too handle, plus, the system did not take into account how powerful characters impact a setting and so on and so forth (I hear 5e has some of the same problems, actually). 

50 years into the hobby, examples are legion. But so are examples of good design. It just seems that people have a hard time accepting standards and building on them. Ignoring them, however, doesn't mean you'll get away with something subpar, because gamers will notice sooner or later. They always do.

Another important point why game designers should bother is that leaving the task to make a game work to a gamemaster is unfair to begin with and also introduces so many additional variants to playing the game that the outcome of playing the game is random at best, futile for all involved in its worse manifestations. Because you can't know who is running the game, how experienced, which tastes and biases. It is why the first principles discussed above are so crucial. It is why balance is crucial.

[source]

 Which is, ultimately, why people find ways to argue that it wasn't needed to begin with. Or that it's okay as long as all follow the same ideology. Or that it can be known what a rpg is and therefor will sort itself out at the table. It is why those three distinct groups exist and fight for dominance.

My bias is towards writing games as complete as possible, following the design principles outlined above. I think it has value to do so and that it is important to see other games for what they are: different.  

To close with the analogy: give a good car to a mediocre driver, and you'll get a good performance out of it. Give that same driver a bad car and you open the result up to such a huge variance of failure, that everything between "passable" and "disaster" could be the outcome. A good car avoids that, as does a good game. Both car and game will follow or even develop standards and need to be engineered towards producing reliable output throughout.

And that's why you bother.

Conclusion

This will be a long one no reads or bothers thinking about. Yet, I stand by the above. We need proper definitions for what's happening around us, if only to recognize what has been done, what can be done and even how to do something else. It is also to save what is left of gaming culture, I assume.

All of this is already happening, but of course some people have a vested interest in keeping it foggy, unexplained and vague. Because then you can claim "this is how it's supposed to be played" or that something that isn't, is a natural evolution of a design (as, say, AD&D 2e to D&D 3e ... rather a neutering than an evolution, I'd say). People earn money or just street cred by keeping things just as they are.

Not an evolution ... [source]

That is a problem.

Not that I have anything against them doing so, but y being honest about what a game can do, maybe even MUST do to fulfill certain criteria, it might end up appealing to far less people. What happens to D&D now regarding rewrites and 6e is a very good example for what I'm talking about here.

What's worse, the fact that the gaming community is split across political and ideological lines is very much due to the fact that lots of rules don't care to create an experience SO COMPLETE that those things don't matter. Or the other way around, if all you argue is rules for that years long campaign you are in, then the game did you a service. Once a game leave too much room for interpretation, those spaces are filled with all kinds of nasty surprises instead, like what the publisher wants you to do, think or buy. Or that political/religious/ideological bullshit someone wants to push down your throat.

So we need definitions, we need to be clear about what game does what service for what audience. And we need to understand that balance is a very real aspect of games, but the kind of balance you chose has a HUGE impact on your gaming experience. And some of that has NOTHING to do with the original idea of what role-playing games are.

If you are like me, you'd want that hustle on the system side of the game, not anywhere else.

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Almost all my shit on drivethrugh is on the cheap right now, this being the time of the year for it, so check it out. If you want to do me a huge service, think about getting Monkey Business, as that only needs two more sales to make copper!

Cheers and all the best for the next year!

Paradigms of the D&D Rules Cyclopedia (or: Staring into the Abyss)

It's February 2023 already and I'm (seriously!) way behind with everything I planned to have happen LAST year. That said, I'm getting there. No day goes by with not at least some progress. Could be more, maybe it SHOULD be more, but I'm content with how it is. I'm getting there. Point in case: I'm tackling the final hurdles in finishing writing on be67, that Weird Sixties RPG I'm aiming to publish as soon as possible (if I'm lucky, May 2023 ... I always seem to publish big projects around that time, wonder why that is). Those last hurdles, however, are those really tough bits where so much of the rules converges that lots of interacting ideas need visualization. Welcome to another episode of the ...

Parody of original cover, fair use for sure ...

[Short side note: it seems that it is safe right now to at least talk about our house rules of old D&D iterations, therefore I'll keep telling you that be67 will be a collection of my D&D RC house rules mutated into a complete game ... I'll still take care that it is very much it's own thing, which means pushing a couple of concepts I used a bit further than I originally intended. Not a big thing, and still very much compatible with everything D&D or OSR out there, but this post will look at the core of some of the concepts in the D&D RC and how they relate to my version of those concepts. As I keep saying: be67 will not be D&D, it'll be a retroclone mutant of the D&D RC.]

The Game, as we see it

OD&D was famously vague with its rules. So vague, in fact, that it was almost impossible to play RAW (Ruled As Written) if you didn't have the war gaming background Gygax and Arneson had. To be precise, if you weren't part of those war gaming circles Gygax and Arneson frequented, OD&D would most likely be a mystery to you. Something inspiring, for sure, but IF you were able to make sense of it somehow without that context, it'd most likely be with a very different understanding compared to what the original authors intended.

Tunnels & Trolls (1975) is the perfect example of how that could still manifest a beautiful and complete game.

As far as TSR was concerned, they had two venues to explore: one was revisioning the OD&D toward a version that was more clear in its rules (that'd end up being AD&D), the other was making the entry into this hobby easier (which was attempted with Basic D&D). It ended up creating two very distinct versions of what D&D can be, both based on that vague first iteration, both, in a way, distinct variations of the same themes, ideas and concepts.

Now, we are talking the D&D RC here, which is the end point of that second strain, and, if not vague, it ended up being just as convoluted and incomplete as that first game, just on a bigger scale. We always knew this, I think, but the beauty of role-playing games is that it is possible to "wing it" on almost every level of resolution. Nowadays, a  skilled Gamemaster can GM a game with a very minimalist approach, no problem. They can also gain an (as in "one", not "the") understanding of a poorly explained game and make it work at the table.

As far as D&D is concerned, it means: the collective and documented experience of playing D&D in general makes for a great blueprint how to "summon" that kind of gaming experience. It is a paradigm:

paradigm (noun)

A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual discipline. [source]

So mostly, playing the "idea" of the game will be close enough to the actual rules to make that approach work. But what's more: with a strong paradigm like we have with D&D and a little experience in playing it, it is easy enough to bridge what the rules might be lacking and still make it work. You get an idea where you have to end up, roughly.

In a way, the paradigm of D&D can take a lot of abuse before the game breaks (one could make the case that WotC did find that breaking point with 4E). It can also help masking some pretty major shortcomings in the rules ... which is something a dedicated collective hivemind processed and filtered most prominently in what the OSR was up until, say, 5 years ago.

What's more, while there never will be an official revision of the D&D RC, there for sure are retroclones rewriting and revisioning that game (Dark dungeon comes to mind, with its retroclone mutant Darkest Dungeon as an iteration moving away from D&D ... the latest version, combining both, can be found here). There are also tons of micro solutions to problems the rules pose and you can find them hidden all over the internet.

Some of it is about bridging gaps in the rules (perceived or not), some of it is about finding a true understanding of what all the numbers mean and how they relate ...

You want an easy example? Guns are a very specific and ignored problem in the D&D rules. At least I haven't seen any satisfying solutions to the problems guns bring to how the game is designed (the original solution, imo, was to circumvent the problem entirely by introducing wands and staffs ... but that's pretty unsatisfying to begin with).

Other good examples would be giant creatures and structural damage ... it is all there, in parts and pieces or as island solutions for specific monsters (I argued in the past that dragons give indications how we are supposed to create our own monsters ... see the argument made here).

[source]

And sure enough, all of this can be improvised in a narrative. No one would object to the idea that a dragon may just be able to do a lot of damage to structures, if it's able to bring the mass or firepower to do it ... That said, it'd still be nice to have a ratio behind it all. Not necessarily to apply it on every fictional building in a campaign, but because experience taught us that the game WILL break down for mid- and high-level games if those things need to be "winged", because characters could be that dragon (or its equivalent) and without rules to accompany that, it'll just get boring fast.

You see, all of those are problems hidden deeply at the core of the game, and if you were to write a game based on those rules, you are either forced to ignore them as well (the c/p approach of many a lazy game designer ...) or come up with a satisfying solution that suits the game. I keep saying: the D&D RC has an EPIC scope, but doesn't do it justice all the time. That can be a problem if you try to reproduce its results.

Here's another very specific problem: HD

The reason for this post is: I have no solution for this specific problem. Yet. All the pieces are there (as you will see), but I can't see a good way to condense all of this into core principles that work as a jumping off point for GMs new to the game (other than just doing the work and offering dozens of pre-made monster portfolios ... which would be a cop-out, obviously).

The problem is, many assumptions about how powerful monsters are rely on "legacy code". Some of it definitely derived from games like Chainmail, some expanded on through experience (you know it works because you threw it at a group and it worked), and build on that comes the whole rest you'll find in the D&D RC. There is no "behind the scenes" how the sausage is made, it's just a lot of sausages, ready for consumption.

Well, to be fair, it's not entirely true that there are no metrics at all to work with. There is an attempt to "balance" encounters in the RC, and it goes a little bit like this: it basically makes HD comparable with Level, which is a whole thing in itself, and not necessarily a tool of precision, considering that "special abilities" may be imbalanced to begin with. But anyway. So you take a group's total level and compare that to the "back engineered" HD of a monster (or NPC) to see how they relate. With that, you have a metric to asses how hard a confrontation MIGHT be (Tucker's Kobolds would be a great argument against that, but whatever).

Now, if the adjusted HD are, say, between 30 and 50%, it'd be a "good fight". As in, it'll tap into the resources a bit, it'll hurt a bit, but it'll most likely be a voctory, which is satisfying, and that is, of course, "good". 50 to 70% is, by that metric, "challenging", 110% (barely above what the characters bring to the table!) is categorized as "extremely dangerous".

D&D RC, p. 101

also D&D RC, p. 101

As I said above, it's not nothing. But the whole "adjustment" process is pretty much broken, and I have to find a way to make it all make sense in a way that would allow a GM to build a monster that'd be intentionally balanced from scratch and without much hustle. From what I can see (and, again, considering the scope), not even the math works out (as far as I'm aware).

Check it out. You take the base HD a Monster has. If there is anything added or substracted, it is basically rounded up or down. Then (also D&D RC, p. 101):

"[...] add half of the original Hit Dice figure for each power bonus. Power bonuses include:

• Each asterisk next to a monster's hit dice.
• Special NPC abilities.

For NPC parties, award a power bonus for each of the following conditions: 1) Everyone in the party has +2 weapons or better; and 2) There are spellcasters in the party. (Take the highest level of spells that may be cast, divide by two, then divide that result by the number of characters in the party, rounding up; the result is the power bonus added to the Individual Adjusted Hit Dice figure of every character in the party.)"

It's just ... okay? It'll give you a form of measure, I'm just not sure if I would trust it. As a matter of fact, I'd test that before believing it. Or rather, I'd have to see if it matches how I play it. Again, just from a game-within-the-game point of view, the Gamemaster is just as much a black box as the special abilities can be. I can bluff the players into making mistakes, just as a smart goblin would ... I will not lie or cheat, but I will have monsters and NPCs that'll give it a shot.

And there's the next problem: smarter monsters (than the base line), no change in xp range. Okay. At least there is some rules for it (D&D RC, p. 214). That whole chapter on changing monsters is inspiring, but not a lot of crunch, actually. Good ideas, almost no rules.

Size can be factored in, but it is a strange one, because changing the size of an EXISTING monster will alter its xp range and base HD exceptionally. Huge medusa, in an example, has HD 8+24, plus better AC, better to-hit, better saves, more damage! That'd be brutal ... and in no relation to other big monsters in the book? A big goblin like that would fuck up a normal orc, no problem (a 7 ft goblin would outmatch an orc with more hp, slightly better saves, more damage ... it's not much on that scale, but a lot when going bigger than that, as the Medusa shows easily). 

That's not even all of it. Look at the Gargantuan entry for monsters (D&D RC, p. 177), compare them ith their counterparts and THAN do the math to see if it fits. It doesn't. The gargoyle is not that much larger (still L), but features 32 (!) instead of 4 HD and deals about 4 times the damage. That's a legacy monster, for sure. They just didn't bother to align it all.

There's more. As those stars factor in as "special abilities", it is interesting to check what the thinking was there, so off we go to the section in the book about xp (D&D RC, p. 128) ... only to find out that each * basically denotes some ability that can be used in combat. Nothing else ... unless it can cast, which automatically counts as "weaponized", no matter the kind of magic (also interesting, also unbalanced).

I don't really get the distinction anyway, as EVERYTHING can be weaponized. Their argument is "if it can fly, no *, if it can swoop in to attack, it gets the *". Not even defenses factor in (they say there could be exceptions, but they don't say what they are). And another "soft rule" added to that, is called "Modifying XP" (same page) and basically advises "if it's tougher than you thought, give more xp, if the characters walk through it, give less.", which sucks, as far as advice goes (nothing to work with, just taking space, also diminishing clever play).

See the problem with that? I do.

It is all connected to HD, but inconsequentially so. It's not connecting all the dots. If you have (optional) rules for balancing, apply them to everything, connect them with how xp are calculated and monsters are created. Make it click, revise all the monster entries. Do the work. As it is, the problem is addressed in three different chapters, offering 2.5 different solutions, with all the island solutions you can come up with in the monster section. There is a vague idea what that could mean, but not developed enough to produce monsters with other than "making them up", and riddled with inconsistencies.

And that's assuming they touched the proper dials here. HD is a good measure for attack matrices, but it doesn't translate well into the size adjustments: they have to use tricks here, but they are basically inflate the HD+x and then add a indirect to-hit modifier. At best, it's not a very elegant solution.

Want more? What about things like Morale? It is so crucial to be able to overcome monsters by scaring them away instead of having the whole fight, with all the risks and resources that takes. Doesn't that factor into how dangerous an encounter is? 10 HD, but runs away as soon as it sees blood? That shouldn't be a problem for a group of level 1 characters. 

Or how about checking if the random encounter section creates results in line with the balancing idea? Don't bother, it doesn't (although it's the same fucking chapter!). It teaches a different lesson, however: there is no balancing encounters in the wild. There be dragons out there, and they don't care what level you have. And not all encounter end up in fights, AND the characters should not only encounter tougher foes, but should also learn the signs of such an encounter and how to evade them. It is all part of the game. Just different parts, offering different design philosophies EVERY TIME.

It's all kaputt ...

Let's say, a group's antagonist is a highly intelligent and very rich 2HD monster. Has the funds to give the group hell, and the smarts to be subtle about it. Could terrorize them for a whole campaign, no sweat. A real Moriarty (who might have higher HD, but needn't really in this context). If they caught him, the wizard of a high level group could take him out, bare-knuckle style.

If that would be the climax of a campaign ... xp would not rely on the enemy's HD, it'd be the creature's wealth AND all the challenges it threw at the group over the course of the campaign. Yes, all the monster xp gained, rewarded AGAIN (as per D&D RC, p. 127) plus the wealth.

And that's just that: with a shotgun approach like that, the moving pieces collected in between almost don't matter, what's important is how it is scaled towards the end of an adventure or a campaign so it doesn't overshoot all connected systems (like levelling and and so on). And even for that it has at least secondary safety measures. So D&D RC characters cannot gain more than one level for "an adventure" ...

Another side note: again, very weak with the terminology here ... What's an adventure? How about campaigns? What's if a normal session generates more than enough? What time of playing are we talking here? Say, a 12 hour session dungeon crawling (I do know people like that ... I sure was one of them when I was younger), all open-worldy, no story ... is that one adventure? Again and again just soft rules, ignoring the deeper, underlying structures.

And how unfair is that, if it occurred that you lose xp because of advancement? How easy is that to handle on higher levels? Say a group of high level characters drop a surprise round on a party of big bad dragons and take them out ... big haul, lots of xp, done in a days work. Why not? If you played long enough, you are bound to have some tricks and shortcuts collected for opportunities like that! Instead, nothing. The GM overshot and had to regulate ... fuck that.

What's more, say you just need a couple of hundred xp for next level, but you gain big time (like with finishing an adventure). Bad luck, chummy. You get one point short to gain the next level, everything beyond gets scrapped.

And there is yet another aspect: all the tools talked about here are about fighting monsters, but there is a shift in how xp are gained somewhere in mid-level range, where just killing and looting won't cut it anymore. The shift is away from combat and more towards actual role-playing.

There aren't enough dragons in the multiverse to advance even one high level wizard. Once your fighter needs 120.000 xp to gain another level, they'd rather have some drama where they can shine (good role-playing will gain a character 1/20 of what they need for next level, or in this case 6000 xp) than going for goblin genocide in the homeworld. Exceptional actions will net you another 1/20. If you aim for both, you'll advance every nine sessions, at least.

So. Many. Construction. Sites. So frustrating.

The D&D RC, if it where a bong ... [source]

Solutions: let's stare into that abyss a bit!

I could go on, but I won't. If you've read all the above, you get the idea. But how can I fix that for be67? What does it take to make it all work in unison? Cutting the "fat" here seems to be such a waste, although all of them are island solutions, there are some nice ideas throughout (obviously, duh). And my guess would be that it'd seem too one dimensional as soon as it all lines up into a pattern that actually leads to something like a coherent system.

The only thing I know is: I need that, for sure, since everything else is lined up already and this is the final piece. I cannot write my way out of that. So I won't. Lets take a look at the elements we have:

• HD to have an idea how good a monster or NPC fights and how long it'll last (with the added benefit that the amount of HP also indicates level of maturity).
• Damage output per successful attack (again, there is no rhyme or reason how that measures, but it really matters).
• Saves are really important, since they are a great passive defense mechanism (no idea how to factor that in).
• AC is there in the top five, but it just "is" in the rules (nothing to see here).
• Morale, as described above, lots of moving pieces (no clue how they should connect).
• Special abilities, which can be anything, but at least it is highly applicable AND we have an idea how they track.
• Encounter challenge rating, not a good, but the best indicator we have how some of it at least connects.
  

What else? Treasure? Not necessary (although it factors in with xp). Number appearing? Well, that's a strange one, as it randomizes the balance rating. Maybe good to have a measure like that, but I think it might be a relic from dungeon generating tools that didn't make the cut for the D&D RC. So that's about it.

We can calculate which HD range relates to Total Party Levels in general, and (maybe) what outcome to expect depending on the Challenge Ratings. If you are aware of the sneak peak I shared of the book in my last post (NEG (blank), find it here), you can get an idea how there are additional measures that should make it easier to calculate and manifest a threat.

For one, a GM can track how dangerous the surroundings are, which maps nicely with the idea of a Challenge Rating. For the six Danger Scales presented in the NEG I'll go 20%, 40%, 60%, 80%, 100%, 120%. If you have the Total Party Level (TPL) as well as the Danger Scale (DS) and an Encounter occurs, there's already a lot to deduce from the available numbers. It just isn't that much of a help if you end up with one big number and a myriad of options how to resolve it.

I'm telling you, this will hurt a little ...

Say we have a group of 6 level 5 characters cruising in a DS IV kind of situation, that'd allow for encountering a (80% of 30) 24 HD entity. And the problem is: that could be ANYTHING. Even just reduced to the encounter table, there's so much to go with. I'm tempted to make it sort of a point buy system where the 24 (in this case) are a pool to buy all kinds of features, with some easy defaults to fall back on, if time's pressing.

It could be, however, information overload: would it be a good option to use a swarm, or one big fella? Maybe buy some damage options and better AC? So default is AC 9, reducing that would mean different costs for different numbers of enemies ... so that needs to be categorized. Single (one entity), skirmish (a division of the HD Potential) and mob (1 HD entities, all of them) encounters, maybe? At least that's what I did in ORWELL ...

Maybe it should scale a bit differently? Like, a single encounter should have the lowest AC default, skirmish encounters default a bit higher, swarm lands at 9. Easy. Default damage should be just as easily mapped with group size ... But having the option to buy shit with HD as the currency would mean it'll be reduced. You'd have to do THAT before deciding for group size, right? Right?!

[source]

Okay, so potential first, then group size, then the defaults (AC, Damage, Saves should be in there and Morale?), then using the Potential for specials. And that's it. Make it relate to the basic encounter key, give it something special, maybe dial a bit with the stats ... é voilà, basic encounter?

No no no ... Something's missing. Can't have the same defaults independent of the actual HD. Higher HD should have better defaults, right? So that needs to be done. Saves scaling HD like Level, maybe? Higher damages, maybe related to DS? DS could factor in all the time, actually. Still, that's a lot of information to decide on during a game ... And how would prepared monsters fit into this?

[source]

So we need to shift that paradigm?

Fifth attempt at this (I think). Anyway, had to put it to rest again for a couple of days to mull it over AGAIN. Here's the thing: they never cared to put it all together. In other words, the system I'm looking for, does not exist. The D&D RC is a tool box, consequently it doesn't amount to much until you do something with it. That can (and often will) mean we have to fill those gaps ourselves with the tools we like or our own solutions.

Which is good, as I can use something I came up with instead. It'll change the tone of the game a bit (compared to the D&D RC, that is), but only for the GM (which is another interesting observation, I think ... the game doesn't change much on the player side at all). So how could I go about this, then?

be67 already offers several frames I can work with. Encounters are themes and tropes a GM wants to see in an adventure, all of them geared and scaled towards an escalation (including clues a group might collect and stationary encounters they might explore). Characters are free to explore as they see fit and encounters are abstract enough to manifest independently of that.

Here, have an example! What we are playing now is a Narnia grindhouse feature where the group ended up looking for some lost kids in a Nazi occupied Narnia variant ... No talking lions yet, but we've only started. Anyway, the group enters through a portal and gets several directions to explore (hints to several stationary encounters). The first Encounter I roll is connected to the main plot: Nazis. As for what their motivation is, the Motivation Generator comes up with "A force of greed that is insane and aims for power". That's what I'm working with.

It is a Main Plot Encounter, so the characters should get a chance to learn something about what's going on here. I'm going through the stationary encounters, and there is a frozen lake with a mystery that the group will see soon in the distance. "insane greedy grab for power" sounds to me like they are taking something powerful they shouldn't, maybe in a place they shouldn't (very movie-villain like, I might add). I decide it'll manifest as a mining operation on the frozen lake. Those Nazis are cutting huge pieces of ice out of the lake and something is trapped in those pieces they carry away!

It was clear that they'd end up seeing the lake soon, because of their decisions. Encountering the mining operation fit that perfectly, imo, so I went with it. That same result on a different stage might have had very different results with the same encounter and motivation rolls, but should have covered the same themes just as well: greedy Nazis doing insane shit for power ...

Another narrative encounter might have been more benign or challenging or threatening, so what would have happened then on their way to the lake would have manifested very differently. That way you gain huge variety in encounters, but themed and with some escalation systems to forward the plot as the characters figure out what's happening (one way or another).

Anyway, so plot and stationary encounters come with a "Danger Scale" (as mentioned above) that alters how powerful those encounters are and changes as the characters interact with them (clearing a dungeon, for instance, would reset that stationary encounter to a DS II (default) or a DS I even). As far as "balance" is concerned, the Total Party Level (TPL) gives indicators what's how tough on a group.

I'd take that, but modify it to adding all of that up (Levels and HD from supporting NSC) and then taking a tenth of that as base line. If that produces fractions (.1 to .9, obviously possible), round down but keep that fraction in mind.

Danger in be67 is scaled from 20% of that TPL (very easy) to 120% (very hard), just like they indicate in the RC, but in steps of 20 % to align it with the DS. That tenth of a TPL is calculated easily enough, to see what HD Potential (HDP) that amounts to in a specific DS, just multiply that number with 2 ( for the 20% or DS I), 4 (40%, DS II), 6 (60%, DS III) and so on. Easy enough and actually quite fast, I'd say.

Now a GM has to decide what's needed in that specific situation. If it's less than what's actually available, it can well be improvised as long as the numbers aren't adding up to something more or way less powerful than indicated by the HDP of that encounter. Other than that, there will be rules to use the HDP to its full, well, potential.

The next thing that needs deciding is the size of the encounter. Is it a single beast/NPC/entity? A "skirmish" (which, for be67, means a group with the upper limit of character group plus DS)? Or a "mob" (which would describe a number of entities above the number of characters in a group + DS)? As a situation is already on hand, that should be easily to decide on the fly.

Mob rules in effect! [source]

While the TPL and the DS with the narrative and motivation generator results give you a target area (HDP) and a rough idea what could happen (group size, some elements of the encounter as well as a "stage"). Once the smallest HD unit of that encounter entity is defined, you also gain a couple of insights in as far as HD already determines how capable a monster/NPC/etc. is to hit something. We also already have guidelines for what HD can mean generally, as it nicely tracks with character levels.

Something like that will give a GM a base line to work with, as far as AC, Damage, Saves and Morale are concerned. What it needs, then, is comprehensive tables to make that information easily accessible. Done. A GM that knows if it'll be a single, a skirmish or a mob encounter and what HD a single of those entities will have, will just as fast have the basic default values needed to make it a fight.

As a cherry on top, that fracture from the TPL tenth calculated in the beginning, that can easily translate into that HD bonus we all know and love from D&D monster entries (+1, +2, and so on).

If you are GMing on the fly, this "fast lane" approach will help you immensely, but there is more ...

Introducing Builds & high complexity Encounters

Following the above, you'll see that the numbers a GM is working with at any given moment are moving targets, in flux until needed in a specific situation as all parameters may change quickly during play (DS changes, characters gain allies or explore alone, and so on).

The easiest way to alter those spontanious numbers quickly, is to provide a GM with what I call "Builds" or "Monster Builds" in be67. It is basically a collection of alterations that add variety in the base numbers (higher or lower AC or Saves and all that) as well as special abilities, combat tactics, treasure and even weaknesses.

That, then, is just thrown on the numbers a GM has come up with. Instant goblin soup. Or that werewolf you just needed. Or aliens, because why the fuck not. Builds is what GMs prepare for their adventures (think: grindhouse features), but are just as easily provided in the equivalent of monster manuals (and be67 itself will feature its good share of examples as well ...).

HDP will be a general guide what's possible or recommended here, but that's just to not overpower an encounter by accident and should formulate nothing more than an upper limit. Anything below that threshold should be fair game.

To get REALLY deep n dirty into the rules, be67 will also provide tools for GMs to create detailed builds themselves. It'll provide a GM the dials needed to have a somewhat balanced build to throw at all suitable TPL. It introduces weaknesses (blind, small, stoned, incestous, animal or plant, stuff that'd impede an encounter somewhat) and gives a coherent list of special abilities and combat tactics for inspiration, as well as guidelines to implement attributes, skills and other character traits for monsters and NPCs.

And that's it?

That's it. GMs get three grades of resolution to manifest ALL encounters the game provides as well as all the tools needed to DIY all aspects of it. With this, if it isn't written already, I feel confident enough to say that its now conceptualized to a point where it just needs to be written.

Is this still B/X D&D? I'd say be67 will produce similar results to a degree that it all stays highly compatible while doing something else entirely (like, being weird in the Sixties and introducing lots of GORE!). If you where playing it towards a more balanced version of the game. As far as the D&D paradigm I described above goes, I'd say that if you were to design a game like that from scratch nowadays, you don't (well, I don't) have the luxury of it not making sense. In my opinion.

The only aspects new rpgs need that MAY gain a distinct advantage against their (overwhelming) competition, would be compatibility and/or coherent designs. Coherent enough, at least, so that an aspiring GM could transcend the rules to a degree that allows for a complete DIY approach. If you can throw it at everything and do everything with it, chances are that people that bought it to at least read it, will get something worthwhile out of it.

Hence the headache of making this work as good as possible.

That said, I hope I could also show that the D&D RC is more than that one approach I chose to build my designs on. There is way more, and that's a good thing. In a way, having it being so "patchwork" and incomplete is part of the appeal of the D&D Rules Cyclopedia. It draws you in easily enough (playing early levels works like a charm, with enough material all around to make it even easier), and when you get to a point where you find some inconsistencies, it invites you to look deeper and engage with it even more that way.

I wonder if that imcompleteness is one of the secrets of its success, actually starting with OD&D, which (as I alluded to in the beginning) was just as incomplete (and inspiring), but for other reasons. Is it, even, the source of that paradigm I was talking about above? Something worth pondering on, I presume, but maybe impossible to replicate in a modern rpg?

As for be67, I'm happy how it shapes up. If nothing else, it is what my house rules look like as a full game, and it is what I use when I want to play a game like that, so it'll be handy to have around. But it is also a (hopefully) comprehensive deconstruction of early D&D (as you see above), so it may have value as that as well. Compatibility is the third important aspect, I think.

Structuring monster and NPC generation like seen above, it not only makes all monster manuals out there fair game, it is also quite the fit for the great systemless monster generators that managed to get my attention (my good friend Eric Diaz' great Teratogenicon and James Raggi's fabled Random Esoteric Creature Generator come to mind ... I'm sure that's just the tip of the iceberg), if more inspiration or just more meat on them bones is needed.

Anyway, this ended up being a long one again. I appreciate everyone reading this one to the end. Thank you for tagging along as I tried to sort this out for me, and I hope you took something away from joining me in this deep, deep dive into the machinations of the D&D RC! Maybe it'll also help gaining a bit of interest for be67. Either way, know you are appreciated.

Latest version of the cover ...

Revisions Part 1: The D&D RC was never complete or finished

WotC tries to be a moving target in a bullet storm right now. Whoever thought it was a great idea to ACT as if a document that needs recourse to legal advice can be open to public review just by calling it a "playtest" to associate it with some sort of development process in gaming, must think gamers are GULLIBLE enough to actually think they are involved that way and not just shut up. And if you did their survey and believe it'll have any value to WotC, then I have a bridge to sell you might be interested in. In other words: revision your work away from that bullshit. I'll do just that! 

Edit 28JAN23: I stand corrected, and I'm proud of all the fans standing up protecting D&D. Good show! The dragon is sleeping again ... I'll just say that we have no way of knowing if they actually looked at the surveys. It's actually still a bit ridiculous to assume they did, as what they are saying now is EXACTLY mirroring the original first response: the OGL 1.0a cannot go without lots of hurt for WotC. That has been clear from day 1. To claim now it's the survey from last week, well, it's disingenuous. Either way, it is the result that counts! Big Corp still sucks :)

I never used the OGL

I always found it suspect that something that isn't protected by law (like rules) needed a license to begin with. A lot of this is lawyer speak (think: smoke and mirrors) to widen the grey area for the corporation to act in, and that was pretty obvious from the beginning. If you make it your own, it is, by the same logic, your own and someone else may rewrite it and use it just the same. Them's the rules ...

Now, the main problem with Big Corp thinking in this very special situation is: they want to deviate from what they claim "stewardship" for (a term that only came up just now, and it is ludicrous to believe something like that might be compatible with a hyper-capitalist, neo liberal locust-think), well, they want to deviate just enough to act as if they are selling something new while keeping the old barred from any further use. The illusion of infinite growth colliding with the open source mindset ingrained deep into the original game and its first couple of iterations.

 

WotC be like ... [source]

We have seen over the years how they tried to mutilate the original game to get some resemblance of the D&D theme park they are trying to have you pay for ... forever and ever. This latest stunt is a reminder not only of the incompetent greed involved in this whole affair, but also of what your worth as a customer is with these guys. Shut up, do as your told and pay for it, too, while you are at it. It is not about "stewardship", it is about interacting commodities (and yes, we are also commodities in this regard ... for them, anyway).

So I avoided the waters those sharks frequented, and that included avoiding their OGL. What I did, however, was licensing Monkey Business with Labyrinth Lord, and they are licensed via OGL1.0a (as far as I know). So that's still protected under some legacy rulings. Or whatever ... Still, MB needs a revision anyways, and with be67 as far done as it is now, that revision will be a conversion to my own game.

About the RC being unfinished ...

We always said that the D&D Rules Cyclopedia is the most complete D&D book out there. That is still true, it is just a very low standard to have, because that book was only as complete as they could make it. It's open for debate if an "official" revision of what was offered back in the 90s would even be possible, so it is what it is, and it will most likely stay that way.

When I started compiling be67, the first thing I thought I would do was setting it up as a module to alter Labyrinth Lord, which is, of course, a CLONE of the Basic Expert rules and therefor in the same family of rules as the D&D RC. It didn't take long to realize that making be67 its own game was not only just a couple of steps more to take, but it might become necessary as well, because it was so very much its own thing (hence, a MUTANT rather than a CLONE).

Unconditional love? [source]

So I went for writing a complete game, which made it necessary to take a very hard look at the source material, if only to see what a "complete" version might entail. The first insight gained from that was a reminder of the damn scope of the RC. It is huge. Decades worth of playing it just once in its entirety.

The second insight was how much of a patchwork job it actually is: Weapon Mastery and Skill System are incomplete, lack proper editing and are definitely at best minimaly tested additions. It is full of little oddities that show what a hard job it must have been to compile all of that into one book. In the 90s, no less. Bits and pieces don't fit or are incomplete. Encounter matrix doesn't completely match the monster entries and while there is a lot of advice how to do a lot of what the book offers yourself, it left some huge parts unexplained (how to prepare proper dungeons, for instance).

What's more: once you take a REALLY close look, you'll find that it ALL connects just very loosely, as far as the numbers are concerned. Some of it is just copy/pasted and then expanded on without revision (or just checking if the math is right). How the original design connected is a black box, most of the time. The whole "race as class" discussion is a great indicator for that. Looking at the design it becomes obvious that there is a underlying logic to the classes offered in the book, with some of them offering some ideas where to go with that (druid and monk come to mind).

If you understand how that works, you can build every class you'd like, race is just a feature of that process. One more aspect to add. There is a chance for this to be so open, it'd allow complete customization of all aspects of the rules. It just was never done.

And fair enough, you don't have to look under the hood to play the game. But you have to when you are writing your own. Turns out, reconstructing that "black box" that is the original design will have you end up with something else entirely. And the deeper into the design the changes are, the bigger are the implications for how the game manifests on the surface. Especially if you gear it towards another setting, as be67 tries to do (Weird Sixties Grindhouse ftw, people!).

 

If I try to explain how monsters relate to challenge rating so a GM can potentially diy the shit out of it, I have to write that myself. If I want the GM to be able to build their own classes, I'll have to come up with something myself, because it doesn't exist in the original book. If I want to connect the numbers the game produces with how to structure adventures, or campaigns even, I have to do that from scratch, as the original book doesn't offer that ... And so on and so forth.

In that sense, the D&D RC is a very unfinished and incomplete book. Luckily so, because if they aren't able to connect all those dots, and a designer is to find their own solutions, there's no way they can claim it to be theirs, just for the tranparence of it all.

As a matter of fact, I'm not sure they are even able to entangle what has been the originl design and what has evolved because of fan or hobbyist initiative. The D&D RC, following that logic, was a very specific interpretation of one specific strain of the D&D family of games, already incorporating not original design, but concepts, insights and ideas established elsewhere (not only from the fan base, but also through many, many other successful rpgs out there).

An incomplete patch work that cannot be true to the original design due to being exposed to external and uncontrollable influences and bases its design on some unknown and obscure metric, barely makes a good argument for being protected by any means. In my opinion.

DIY, all the way ...

As things stand right now, it doesn't seem safe to associate with the D&D brand even superficially. Therefore, all publications I can manage to put out here in the next 5 months will deny all connection to the source other than it being inspiration. I'll be open about how it all connects, so it will be my very own take on some of the same principles established so many years ago. A retroclone mutant, if you will.

There is freedom in going it all the way all alone (and I might not be alone, actually). We'll see if I can claim be67 to be part of the OSR family or not. It's all still easily enough hacked and connected, but that's just something tainted now. What you guys do at your table is yours to decide, naturally, I just can't believe that it'll be open discourse from now on. At least it's not safe to assume so right now.

We'll see.

Right now, WotC tries to play it for time while funneling critique into non-existance, but the damage is done and gears started moving all over the place. Interesting times.

In closing I want to share a double page from be67 that took me a long time to complete, for the reasons I stated above. It might need more context, but I think the basic premise is easily enough grasped: it is a dynamic random encounter table that should help propelling the narrative in a way forward that supports the Grindhouse Feature the GM has prepared. Here we go:

Isn't she a beauty? Anyway. What I'm trying to say and show here is that be67 will not only be its own thing, it'll also be "complete" in a sense that there'll be no part of the rules that's not so throroughly and openly connected, that you'd have to guess why it is the way it is in its context. The above in part of a little machine that'll allow a GM to always keep the game within the parameters it establishes. with very little bookkeeping, I might add.

And that's that. If you've published something that may be construed to be close to what the Wizards do at that Coast, my advice would be to revise the hell out of it and build as much distance to those greedy fuckers as possible. I'll definitely do that.

And if you are in it for what I'm trying to do here, I hope you'll enjoy be67 as its own thing, just as much as you'd have while I could have associated it with the origins of the hobby. The hint needs to be enough.

Take care, friends and neighbors. Thanks for reading!

Tell them to show and not tell ... (a look inside the be67 GM chapter)

One of the most difficults tasks when writing a set of rules is to not necessarily to make those rules understood but more so to write the book in a way that allows the reader to produce as close as possible to the same experience as you make happen when you play the game you are writing. You need to get them into the same headspace, if you will, to share the same vision you have. One of the first rules in that regard (I think for writing in general, actually) is to assume they know nothing you know.

We need to be told that we should show and not tell ...

Readers might even know more or just "differently", but if they don't go along with what you are proposing (for whatever reason), they won't get it. And the worst case scenario for that would be that they'll have a bad experience when playing your game. So I'm extra meticulous about making myself as clear as possible.

Part of that exercise is to put the reader in a position to compare their own frame of reference to mine and find the overlap. To be totally fair, the ideal mix for a text like this is in huge part "telling" and in some parts "showing" (examples and all that), but to some degree it needs to be an exchange of references in order to build common ground.

Therefore, today I'll show you how I tell them what can be seen as inspiration to show the players the Weird Sixties instead of telling them ... This is part of the beginning of the Chapter about GMing be67:

SOURCES & INSPIRATIONS

The first part of this chapter seems a bit excessive at first glance, but we strongly believe that (1) many of the inspirations collected here are already known but so popular that it’s easy to lose out of sight how deeply rooted they are in the Sixties, that (2) it needs at least all of that to show how versatile popular culture had been almost 60 years ago and (3) that it is necessary to visualize that psychosphere where grindhouse publications would borrow their ideas from.

There’s furthermore a long upheld tradition in role-playing games to have something akin to what was called “Appendix: N” in AD&D 1e. It’s not as much “required reading” as it is a guide towards what informed the designers to do what they did. Some of the same is true here, of course, so the following is neither complete nor canon, but recommendations what could give a Gamemaster in be67 an edge or two.

What’s more, many of the titles collected below would find sequels and reboots and additions for decades to come, some inspired or initiated whole new genres or cultural shifts. What happened in the Sixties build the foundations for the main cultural identity of the 20^th and early 21^st centuries. That’s a lot.

What are the Sixties?

What follows is a somewhat romanticized and decidedly US-centric description of the Sixties. Other cultures definitely contributed to our idea of the Sixties in this context (Japan and the UK, mainly), and we will give some examples of that, but for length alone we have to cut corners here and give some pointers instead.

In short, the Sixties could be characterized (for the purpose of this game) as “psychedelic optimism”. It was happy and colorful and feminine, with a good dose of “weird” intruding popular culture in form of the freedom movement and some strong and distinct subcultures all across cultural niches in the US to boot. There was movement and palpable friction between poor and wealthy as well as traditional and more non-conventional values.

There also was Vietnam, but it wasn’t (yet) the war that would traumatize the US for decades to come. Careful observers would see first signs of that early on and the soldiers that came back had went through hell, obviously, but without an audience. And yes, people demonstrated against the war, but it was an ongoing process with the hallmarks of disaster only.

A huge part of the positive spin (or feel) the Sixties had was due to the introduction of several psychoactive drugs to the populace. The first drugs that come to mind in that regard are, of course, marijuana and LSD (or Acid) popular with artists and the counterculture (as well as some scientists). However, an impact just as big had the invention of Valium and derivatives in 1963. Popular- and counterculture had all been on very mellow drugs, and that, arguably, took the edge of the Sixties while making them more fun all around (again, for the purpose of this book … things, naturally, had been a little bit more complex than that).

There was some technological optimism as well, with lots of innovation and people with enough money to buy it. The Sixties saw an economic surge in the US, mostly due to government finishing what Kennedy had started. And while that would fall flat in the 70s, it certainly helped spending in the Sixties. In general we can assume that the average citizen in the 1960s had access to most of the accommodations we have today, minus computers and cell phones. Things like ATMs or hand-held calculators had been invented, but weren’t in heavy circulation at 1967. Maybe something you’d see an article in the newspapers about. Computers did exist, but only to the degree that people in general had been aware of them and it gave authors some strange ideas about the future. When in doubt, accept that a more “primitive” version of the tool in question might have been available.

Those are the basic tones of the game.

But what did that look like?

TV in the Sixties definitely had some highly recognizable staples. Here’s a great sample how weird it could actually get in mainstream TV:

• The Addams Family
• The Avengers
• Batman
• The Beverly Hillbillies
• Bewitched
• Get Smart
• Gilligan’s Island
• Hogan’s Heroes
• I Dream Of Jeannie
• The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
• The Munsters
• My Favorite Martian
• Rawhide
• Star Trek
• The Twilight Zone

Before we go into the grindhouse experience, we also should take a look into mainstream cinema. It featured some genuine classics. Let’s see what had hit cinemas that decade until 1967 alone:

• A Fistful of Dollars
• A Shot in the Dark
• The Birds
• Blow-Up
• Bonnie and Clyde
• Carnival of Souls
• Cool Hand Luke
• Dr. Strangelove
• For A Few Dollars More
• The Godson
• The Good, The Bad & The Ugly
• The Great Escape
• House of Usher
• The Innocents
• James Bond (Dr. No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball, You Only Live Twice & Casino Royale)
• Lawrence of Arabia
• Lolita
• Mary Poppins
• The Pink Panther
• Planet of the Apes
• Psycho
• The Time Machine
• The Wild Bunch

That’s only a small selection of popular movies with comedic, violent, horror or surreal elements and only in the first seven years of the Sixties (and mostly US). Great movies have been done before and after that and all over the world. For instance, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Night of the Living Dead and Easy Rider didn’t make the list because they had been released in 1968 and 1969 (but had been in production in 1967).

Movies, documentaries and TV shows from later decades but playing in the Sixties also offer great sources of inspiration. Here are some definite highlights (as far as the game is concerned):

• American Graffiti (1973)
• Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)
• Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999)
• Catch Me If You Can (2002)
• The Doors (1991)
• Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)
• Green Book (2018)
• Inherent Vice (2014 for the movie, the book was 2009)
  
• JFK (1991)
• Mad Men (series, 2007-2015)
• Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
• The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
• Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)
• Perfect World (1993)
• The Rum Diary (2011)
• Taking Woodstock (2009)
• When You’re Strange (documentary, 2009)
• Woodstock (documentary, 1970)

This is, again, just the tip of the iceberg and very mainstream, but for that reason easily accessible just the same.

The seedy underbelly of 60s cinema?

The one thing lacking in the Sixties was proper special effects. They did good with what they had. In some cases, anyway. But most of the time the results will fall under “acquired taste” today. Every one of the Science Fiction and Horror movies of the Sixties will make fantastic pitches for be67 adventures, however, so we encourage looking all of them up for inspiration (or even viewing, for that matter). That said, we will name a couple of favorites just to show a glimpse what’s there to discover and explore:

• Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy
• Billie the Kid v. Dracula
• Black Sabbath
• Blood Feast
• Brides of Dracula
• Dr. Who & the Daleks
• Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
• The Gorgon
• Hillbillies in a Haunted House
• Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter
• The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)
• Matango (a.k.a. Attack of the Mushroom People)
• Mothra vs. Godzilla
• Onibaba

That’s just a small selection, already bordering hard into grindhouse-territory,

Also authors and books and music, oh my!

Many, many authors of weird tales still highly popular today had already successfully published books in the 1960s. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, for instance, got published as a paperback only early in the Sixties and then became hugely popular in colleges (the famous “Gandalf for President” pins started then and there). It resonated very well with the Zeitgeist of the 60s. And of course the old and fantastic classics had also been around back then: H. G. Wells, H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe, Bram Stoker …

Mix in Eastern influences feeding new impulses into the Western collective unconscious and some drugs and you end up with the Beatnik movement and all the blues and rock and folk music opening up to new psychedelic realms, all of that eventually amalgamating into the Summer of Love in 1967 and Woodstock 1969.

We can’t possibly map all of this here, but we will name a couple of our personal favorites to give an impression what we might refer to when GMing be67 (in the tradition of the famous Appendix N):

• Isaac Asimov
• Peter S. Beagle
• William S. Borroughs
• Charles Bukowski
• Anthony Burgess
• Raymond Chandler
• Arthur C. Clarke
• Philip K. Dick
• E. R. Eddison
• Philip José Farmer
• Dashiell Hammett
• Robert A. Heinlein
• Frank Herbert
• Ursula K. LeGuin
• Mervyn Peake
• Thomas Pynchon
• Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
• Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• Roger Zelazny

All of the above contributed a lot to what was imaginable back then, which naturally also ended up one way or another on grindhouse movie theater screens (while being watered down immensely and somewhat more sleazy) .

As for music: using the soundtracks of all the collected entertainment above should give a GM more than enough material about what the Sixties sounded like. All the bands and artists performing at Woodstock are a good start, the Beatles should be in that mix, some country, some folk, but also classic music like Mozart or Bach and the like (see Apocalypse Now, 2001 or Clockwork Orange for ideas).

That said, even contemporary music can help a Gamemaster getting some inspiration … More on that in the next part.

Summoning the Weird Sixties!

We have used throughout this book quotes from movies that wouldn’t be considered original grindhouse features by any sane movie aficionado. Mostly, anyways. The material we quoted for inspiration is also pretty much mainstream popular throughout, although many of them wouldn’t exist without exploitation cinema. Why is that? The idea behind this was to give some pointers where one actually would find inspiration for grindhouse features and how common those tropes are now because of it. This is how it works:

Exploitation movies take what is popular and use it shamelessly, often towards the sensational and uncouth. It’s where the name came from, as a matter of fact. Aspiring GM of be67 should take this to heart and have some fun with doing the same.

Basically, every popular story idea, doesn’t matter what medium, can be made into a grindhouse feature just by mixing it relentlessly with other ideas and making it somewhat less reputable in the process but glorious because of it.

The gold standard that produces would nowadays be something akin to a Tarantino movie. A daunting proposition, one might say. As would be to assume that all D&D games are on par with Tolkien’s work. In both cases, however, players can have just as much fun as they’d have watching a Tarantino movie or reading Tolkien. The reason for this is that the rules will already get you half way there! So far we have provided:

• Characters you would find in those movies,
• with backstories that already sound like bad movie plots, and
• an award system that motivates players to go all-in on the premises of their Characters (if they like xp), but furthermore
• with a combat system as gory as it gets and
• lots of other rules like Funk Rerolls and the Bubblegum Barometer to give the game that specific feel!

This chapter will add some more tools and insights to help Gamemasters of be67 with their games with The Rule of Cool, some basic structuring for adventures, what High Level Play will look like, how to work Skills as a GM, Environmental Effects, how to keep players happy with Special Loot, how to convert other gaming material, how to make Character Classes from scratch and how to handle Monsters. All of that and some more general advice should offer a Gamemaster more than enough material to prepare and run games set in the Weird Sixties for years. Future publications will add Adventure Modules, new Classes, different Settings and even more Tools to that.

-----------------------------------

And that's the introduction for gamemasters to the game, giving you an impression what this book will read like and what scope it'll offer on it's, roughly, 140 pages A5. We here at Disoriented Ranger Publishing take our funny games serious like that ...

I'd be happy to hear thoughts on the above, of course. What baffled me most when I researched this was how much of the Sixties is still mulled over to this day, one way or another. So, was this helpful at all? Did it convey a frame to work with?

Anyway, back to work. I still have high hopes that be67 will see the light of day this year, at least in pdf form. There's other things in the works, and I'm currently a bit scattered. But it'll sort itself out, I'm sure of it. Until then, have some artwork for the book (still in the process of collecting those and experimenting with this on Midjourney ...):

Funky Vampire Queen?

 

Ghosttrain, New York, 1967 ...

Summer of Love ... but it's Zombies!

Still undecided about those colors ...