Fantasy Heartbreaker, by Russell Bailey

Splinter Cell: Conviction

So, my housemate, Orrin, played through the demo of Rich Dansky‘s Tom Clancy‘s Splinter Cell: Conviction. For the moment, her observations hold more water than mine, but just watching her, I could see the writing on the wall. For her, it was all stuff like “INFILTRATE THE MANSION,” but for me, it was “POST MORE ON ENVIRONMENTAL NARRATIVE.”

Because this is something that’s worth talking about. You’ve got all this crap that’s going on inside the head of the character, and all this crap going on inside the UI (or on the character sheet) of the player. Generally, though, the environment doesn’t reflect any of this. If you’re lucky, you get some post-processing shaders to put everything in stoner blur (or the GM narration equivalent) when you’re dazed.

If you’re really lucky, you get one of those entire maps where you’re crazy, like in BioShock 2 or Velvet Assassin.¹

Heads, HUDs, and types of action

Video games have been trying to push character and game state information into the 3d environment for a while. Dead Space and Ghostbusters both replace classic interface elements with animations on your character.[3. Arguably, World of Warcraft does this with its various floating punctuation marks. I think that's an in-between case, myself. I'd love to see an MMO push character-mind stuff into the environment, though.] The reduced screen clutter is supposed to immerse you more in our friend the environment.

Does it? I think it worked a little in Dead Space, but thought it was almost irrelevant in Ghostbusters. Seeing the character state on the character looked great, but it didn’t make me feel like there was any kind of focus on him or his world. It wasn’t his story, it belonged to the actual Ghostbusters, and that was okay. The game also did a good job of conjuring the environments from the first film, but didn’t share that film’s gift for evoking 1980s New York.²

And the environment in Dead Space was an impressively rendered rehash of other games, kinda like every half-decent remake of Aliens. Focusing on it more didn’t really do anything for me.

Splinter Cell, though, is taking one of my own personal demons (quest text) and marrying it to one of my personal fascinations (the dungeon, or, if you must, the level). Your environment doesn’t just tell you what you have to do… the tooltips for climbing and sneaking and peaking and all are projected into the environment, too.

In other words, the game takes a somewhat new approach to two things:

• Required action (Infiltrate the Mansion)
• Potential action (Jump on this crate)

You find yourself looking into the environment for your goals and opportunities. Will Hindmarch says:

Conviction is all about putting you into the head of Sam Fisher, more so than his body. The game projects his thoughts onto the walls and surfaces of the game world, turning literal space into a figurative, psychological terrain at the same time.

That’s particularly interesting to me, because I think that the dungeon (electronic or imagined) is a landscape of psychological terrain.

The Dungeon as Psychological Projection

Conan beneath the Scarlet Citadel

Sometimes, that terrain is the designer’s headspace.³

Sometimes, it’s the hero’s. If you look at Quarmall, ⁴ or the Scarlet Citadel,⁵ you see environments that reveal the essential qualities of the characters therein.

The Scarlet Citadel reveals almost only what Conan brings in: old grudges, bold action, murderous ferocity, and a canny mind ready to exploit any weakness. And, yes, he fights a giant snake. Says it all, really.

Quarmall is more your “ecosystem” dungeon, with its giant slaves bred to pump the ventillation system, its halves controlled by warring princes, and ruling over all, its withered wizard-king. Here the Gray Mouser encounters charlatan wizards, and Fafhrd muscle-brained fools — both things they’ve been accused of being themselves.

Each also finds opportunities to showcase his most conspicuous qualities. The Mouser abducts a girl and attempts a spell, Fafhrd finds his romantic inclinations overwhelming his better judgment.⁶ And, of course, traversing the dungeons levels leads the two to reunite and perpetrate one of their own greatest scams.

So, if the dungeon is, in part, a projection of the hero who enters it⁷, is that something to consciously model in roleplaying games? It’s not hard to envision a mechanism for doing so, something like 3:16‘s flashbacks, only projecting into the environment, rather than exclusively the hero’s own past.

If I’m a little suspicious of the idea in a roleplaying game, I’m even more suspicious when it comes to MMOs. Do designers even have the right to tell a player what’s going on in their character’s heads? I’ve been told that an exclamation point is already a bridge too far. Should the character even be acknowledged as someone psychologically separate from the player, or is that just a legacy inherited from other sorts of games?

And if we’re facing the death of the character⁸, then is it acceptable to make psychological assumptions at all?

______

The early editions of Tunnels & Trolls are a good example of two class design schema:

• Classes to fill holes
• Classes on a spectrum

The two base classes are warrior and wizard. The warrior is a straightforward arms and armor type, noted in the game’s fifth-and-a-half edition as being based on Conan. Wizards have a mix of dungeon utility spells and combat spells.

T&T‘s mechanics are somewhat more regular than D&D‘s. “Take that you fiend!,” the equivalent of “Magic Missile,” simply allows the character to wield his intelligence as a weapon.

The spectrum element comes in when rogues are added to the basic mix. Like D&D‘s thieves, they appear to have been modeled on the Gray Mouser, but they are essentially fighters with who dabble in magic. They represent an in-between space between the warrior and wizard class, illustrating the spectrum principle.

Initially, rogues were required to choose to become either warriors or wizards as they leveled up… a choice the Mouser himself made at a young age. In practice, apparently, players tried to avoid making this choice, and thus T&T introduced a mirror-class: the warrior-wizard.

The warrior-wizard is interesting not only in that it completes the spectrum of character classes, but in that it requires the rolling of unusually high attributes at character creation. The combination of fighting, spellcasting, and attribute requirements is suggestive of D&D‘s paladin (though I doubt there’s a direct line of inspiration). As of T&T 5.5e, then, the classes form a sort of circle.

Unlike most fantasy games which followed, Tunnels & Trolls embraced Dungeons & Dragons‘ milieu of dungeon delving wholeheartedly, but casually rejected many of D&D‘s other additions to the fantasy genre, such as the thief-specialist and the fighting cleric. In other words, it absorbed D&D‘s gameplay innovations while ignoring its class design.

It’s particularly tantalizing to imagine a version of D&D with the more elegant class structure of T&T. Indeed, while the thief has only occasionally been imagined as a subclass of the fighter, reimagining the cleric as a variant wizard has a long heritage. The “White Mage” is a fixture of franchise like Final Fantasy, and is echoed in TSR’s mid-90s Lankhmar boxed set.

It’s almost criminal to go this far down into an article about Tunnels & Trolls without mentioning that the game’s far more lighthearted than D&D grew up to be. The spell names are, largely, cheap jokes. The tone of Liz Danforth’s 5.5e is tongue-in-cheek, and rather charming.

I was raised on two kinds of fantasy gaming. The first were the Sierra and Lucasarts adventure games, which were full of puns and jokes. Although the humor was  of a slightly different breed, they fit well with my readings of Fritz Leiber and Jack Vance, as well as Robert Aspirin, J. R. R. Tolkien¹, and, dare I say it, Piers Anthony.

The second were the Dungeons & Dragons variants and The Lord of the Rings, plus the Elric books. Though all three have more humor than they’re generally given credit for, they are by comparison dreadfully serious. I think Aaron Allston makes it through the Rules Cyclopedia without so much as an ironic aside. The third edition of Dungeons & Dragons admonishes (though not absolutely) against the use of cheap gags in your characters or campaign.

At this stage of my life, I appreciate the humorous side of fantasy gaming more. I’m compelled by Conan’s rarely-detailed “gigantic mirths,” and the heroic laughter of Fafhrd and the Mouser in “Adept’s Gambit.”² I’m attracted by the absurdity of creations like the rust monster and the beholder. That makes a review of Tunnels & Trolls rather a welcome evening chore.

Gary Gygax

So I talked about my disconnect with the cleric and fantasy religion in general yesterday. Apparently, Gygax had a few words on the issue:¹

This capable and knowledgeable individual² suggests that data on the deities is insufficient for usefulness in an AD&D™ campaign. That religion, being so much a part of our real history, must likewise play a part in your campaign.

J. R. R. Tolkien did not agree, for he wrote many pages without mention of religion. Most of the heroic fantasy and swords & sorcery books written do not feature any particular religious zeal on the part of their protagonists. Consider Conan, Fafhrd and Grey Mouser, Harold Shea, and the list goes on and on.

I do not agree that it needs be a significant part of the campaign. As AD&D™ games depend on participant input for their character, the detailing of deities and those who serve them is strictly a part of the role playing aspect of the game.

Must all evil characters sound sinister? Does an elf have to be flighty? Need a ranger be lugubrious? Actually, the game system tells you what is necessary for a campaign, but how the campaign is role-played is strictly up to the DM and players.

I’ll admit I don’t know what Gygax means in the last paragraph.³ Gods aren’t necessary. Cool. Got that, agree. Fiction need not match one reader’s view of history. Check. Play it your own damn way. Correctamundo.

But, ah, are elves flighty in conventional views of history? Did evil-aligned personages⁴ actually speak in a sinister fashion? I’m really not sure what the Father of Roleplaying⁵ means here, even though I suspect I agree.

I should probably mention that my current campaigns tend to have gods, but I don’t really mention them all that often. I more or less assume that you must believe in something, and that sometimes that something’s real. That sometimes she talks to angels, when she has her little fits, even.

I don’t, though, typically involve gods overmuch. They get little shrines and prayers and sometimes saints⁶. But my desire to rewrite Dune has dwindled over the years,⁷ and I’ve simultaneously become very frustrated with playing or playing with Religious Character Who is Crazy Because Religion is Crazy.⁸

One of the fastest ways, in fact, to turn me off your game⁹ is to start telling me how important religion is to your setting. I don’t object to it, but if you’re at the place in the creative process where that’s what you’re most passionate about, well, then, I’m in a different place.

And do keep in mind, as I say this, that I’m someone who writes about vampires from a very Catholic perspective for money and enjoys the hell out of it. It’s just that, again, I view religion these days as something of a given.

A game designer

Oh, and if your main original idea is that Christianity Was Wrong, well, then, you can show yourself the door. I’ve got my own opinions on Christianity by the loads, a fair few of them unfriendly, but I nonetheless don’t need another game designer going “ha ha, I wrote the end of the world just slightly different from Revelation, buy this big WoDalike to find out about it.”

The device I'm employing here is actually a "straw man," but I like this picture better.

Oh, and by the way, sorry, if the Celts were a world superpower I think I’d be awfully tired of them, too, so don’t think “ha ha Christopher Lee was right” is going to sell me on your latest “dark fantasy epic” either.¹⁰ And by the way, we all know that fairy tales are dark, that Santa is creepy, and that Lilith was Adam’s first wife.¹¹

God save us.

_____

“Vatican II led to many changes in the Catholic Church, notable ones being the use of mother-tongues – instead of Latin – for parts of the mass, the empowerment of the laity, and allowing priests to use bladed weapons in combat.”

– Critical Miss #8

I suppose I’d know who the cleric was, if I’d started with her. I understand girls you can’t save, no matter what god they work for.

You couldn't save her. Just like all the others, a million little boys who couldn't. Forgive yourself.

As it happens, though, I didn’t. I started here.

Ultima 3: Exodus Character Creation

Actually, let’s zoom in a bit…

Ultima 3: Exodus Cleric

There. See. Now, what I knew in… 1988… sounds right… was that a cleric was another word for priest, and a priest was someone who worked for God.

Just one problem. Fantasy didn’t have God. Oh, sure, there was a cross on Link’s shield, but there’d been one on He-Man’s armor, too, hadn’t there? Just a device, a heraldic symbol.

Now, in 1989, someone conveniently introduced me to the pagan gods¹, and they found their way right into my world of magic and elves². My carefully envisioned narrative-driven side-scroller had elves and Greek gods.

But those gods didn’t have priests, did they? I mean, you read the Bible, there are priests all over the place, and usually mucking things up. Got Jesus hanged, I’d been told, and that’s why we couldn’t let the Church have undue influence on the state.³ But the Greek myths, nooo… people prayed, maybe there were some burnt offerings, but pagan gods didn’t need priests. They did things themselves.⁴

Yet, Ultima had priests. Briefly. I was very glad when the next Ultima came around and got that fixed. Shrines, virtues, no gods. Very sensible, and I could continue being a bold maverick having Zeus meet the elves. I’d played Hero’s Quest by now, too, and read Lloyd Alexander, and while there were certainly hints of greater supernatural forces⁵, there was hardly a celestial hierarchy.

Even King Arthur, well, God occasionally popped up in his life, but no priests. I’m not sure what they were all doing at the time, but he had a proper wizard to cast his spells for him, just like Pharoah had had.⁶ Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser had gods, and Lankhmar had a whole street devoted to them, but both the priests and the gods were more than a little silly.

The holes filled, gradually — I was a weird kid, but hardly a dumb one, but my fantasy worlds never really had need of magic priests, even as they developed pantheons of their own. Even reading Moorcock and Lewis, the gods all took care of their own business.

The idea that a whole class of adventurer might need to be priestly never really occurred to me until I got my hands on the Rules Cyclopedia. Even since then, I’ve never been sure why clerics weren’t just a sort of mage, and seeing fantasy through the eyes of D&D hasn’t really helped that at all. In gaming, I came to understand, clerics were somewhere between fighters and wizards… but so were elves, and for that matter, there were paladins. And some paladins had gods, too.⁷

But in the better sort of fantasy video games, there never were priests. The Ultimas were neatly atheistic, and when they got around to coping with gods, in Pagan, it was in a very Star Trek way. Gods, fantasy said to me, better off without ‘em, and their priests are all liars and idiots and just occasionally Theleb Kaarna.

Badasses, like this guy.

Yet, for some reason, there was always someone who wanted to play one in my games. Sometimes, they weren’t very serious — I’d heard of Bob, the God of Donkeys out there in another campaign. But all too often, they were devout worshipers of gods who never seemed good for anything except a daily spell allotment. Sometimes they were badasses.

And he hung out with this hottie. Just saying.

And there seemed to be roleplaying games that shared my indifference. Tunnels & Trolls had no clerics, and Stormbringer certainly didn’t go out of its way to suggest the idea.⁸

The first time I ever encountered a proper cleric adventurer was in college, as it turned out. Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish officer who got lost in Florida, made his way to Mexico casting out demons and disease in the name of God, gaining and losing fellow soldiers and native adventurers along the way. And around that point, through that lens, the cleric started making sense to me.

The cleric? He’s Moses. He’s Samuel⁹. He’s Martin de Porres. She’s Joan of Arc.

And don’t worry. Someday Aleena will come back.¹⁰

_____

“Hello, my name is Jimmy Pop and I’m a dumb white guy,
I’m not old or new but middle school, fifth grade like junior high.”

– The Bloodhound Gang, “Fire Water Burn”

Jeff and I

1984. My uncle leaves a party. I ask my Mom where he went.

“To play Dungeons & Dragons,” she says. I ask her what that is.

“A game like Conan,” she tells me, barely, I think, understanding herself. “Your uncle’s the Dungeon Master. He decides what monsters the heroes fight.”

1985. On a trip to Barbarian Books and Comics, my father buys me a set of polyhedral dice, cast in translucent red plastic. To me, they look like magic gems.

1989. My friend Jeff and I are rapt in front of the secondhand EGA monitor. We are being asked to make the most important choice of our lives.

Jeff's upstairs room, 1989

We pick thief, and give him a little bit of magic. Just like that guy in the books I found in the back of Barbarian.

1994. Wheaton Plaza, the food court, half mall and half strip. We’re deep in the midst of planning our great fantasy novel, about a city at the center of time. We start to talk about how to make a roleplaying game out of Dune, and Jeff passes something amazing across the table to me.

D&D Rules Cyclopedia

I’ve seen it before, of course. Ads in the back of comic books. Maybe when I helped my uncle move, and he gave me his Uncanny X-Men comics. I open it, and there’s a girl, there, dark hair and a bandanna. The heading says “thief.”

Rules Cyclopedia Thief

1994. Barbarian Books has moved into an abandoned Photon Battlefield.¹ The D&D books are in the back, now. But there’s something else. Different. Softcover, green marble, with a single red rose.

My Future

I open it, and fumble around. There are a lot of dark-haired girls. And then I’m reading, flipping, and there’s a kind of vampire for every book I’ve read. For Interview with Vampire. For The Dracula Tape. For Doctor Strange.

I spend the entire night trying to recreate the art in my precious hardcover sketchbook.

And when I sleep, I see the city. No longer Lankhmar of the shattered temples nor Imryrr in its opium dreams. I see wet asphalt and grainy reflections and the stain of blood.

Jeff doesn’t even recall that book the next day.

2000. Elkton Hall, the University of Maryland. In the underground garden of a mafia boss, Marek the thief-mage triggers a trapped door. The ornate pipework fountain behind him bellows steam and rises, revealing itself to be the apparatus on the back of a gigantic robot.

“You bastard,” Marek says, or maybe Jeff does. He and Mike put down tiny d6s to show where they’re standing on the map. I put down the red d20 my father gave me so many years ago.

“That’s where he is,” I smile.

2005. My apartment, after she left. After I made her leave. It’s dark, and we can hear the Georgia Avenue traffic. Jeff and Angela and I are crouched around a red-foil book, exploring rain-slick streets not so different from the one outside. Tori Amos is on the stereo.

My Present

“Who was she?” Angela says, as Frankie the waitress, hungry young vampire and terrifying lost girl.

Her only friend, London, smokes his cigarette. Jeff shows us he’s doing that by sucking on the end of a Pepperidge Farm Pirouette.

“She played bass,” London says. Frankie’s eyes don’t leave London’s. Angela’s don’t leave Jeff’s. He coughs. “She had dark hair.”

2007. DC, anywhere. Pick a spot and I’m there, saying goodbye to someone, something. Those books, green marble and red foil and always with the roses, they’re leading me away. I kiss Jeff. I kiss Angela. I stare at Hope a long moment and I don’t kiss her. I pack two dark-haired cats in the back of a rented SUV and I drive away from everything I knew and towards everything I’ve been imagining.

Leaving DC

2008. I don’t measure time in years anymore. I measured it in word counts, and now books.

My uncle and my father

My uncle’s just died. I’m stuck in an Atlanta suburb but I spend a lot of time on the phone. My Mom reminisces about how he and my Dad used to play in the woods, calling each other Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

2010. Books have given way to stories, features, something called “sprints.” Every day I walk through a dusty warehouse past the original proof for that old green book cover.

I go home, I mess with the necessities of life, and then with my partners. And we sit down side by side to work.

I’m writing my own little book about fantasy roleplaying, and the concept art’s coming in. Fighter, magic-user, combat scene… I leaf through it.

There’s a woman with a bandanna over one eye, dark hair flowing behind her shoulders. She’s got a reckless grin on her face and a knife with three eyeballs skewered on it.

I crop, it, clean it, and I do the only next thing. I send it to Jeff.

I often refer to Dungeons & Dragons as a game of dangerous archaeology. In their classic tomb-robbing mode, the party enters an underworld with its own history, meaning, and ecology.* The process of exploring a dungeon is much like the process of excavating a tomb… except eighty times faster and with more blood and looting. You’re like Heinrich Schliemann dosed to his eyeballs on haste.

The dungeon is the first and most important venue for environmental storytelling. (Yes, I said the “s” word, but stay with me a minute.) The classic dungeon isn’t full of helpful NPCs… for every Scarlet Citadel with a friendly-but-evil wizard in a holding cell, there’s a Moria or Howling Tower. The central question of those latter dungeons is this: what happened here?

Which brings me to a presentation from GDC: “What Happened Here?,” an examination of environmental storytelling by Harvey Smith and Matthias Worch. Smith and Worch are, of course, addressing video games, but their analysis has a lot to offer classic dungeoneering.

Construction

Let’s start with some very basics:

We’re saying that the game environment, which has been derived from a fictional premise, can communicate

the history of what has happened in a place

• who inhabits it
• their living conditions
• what might happen next
• the functional purpose of the place
• and the mood.

In other words, say you’re exploring a mouldering tomb that’s now the home of a band of human bandits. Entering a room, you find a makeshift deck of cards, dirty bedrolls, and the smoldering remains of a fire.

Immediately, you can infer that this is a living space, that the inhabitants spend a lot of time idle, and that they might be back at any moment. The GM has scattered the elements, but you, as a player, have constructed the story behind the space.

As Smith and Worch say:

Environmental Storytelling is the act of “staging player-space with environmental properties that can be interpreted as a meaningful whole, furthering the narrative of the game.”

…

“Environmental storytelling relies on the player to associate disparate elements and interpret as a meaningful whole.”

The narrative layer they’re talking about isn’t flowcharted or railroaded, it’s a layer of story that the players assemble non-linearly using their PCs senses. Rather than a passive storytelling experience (like two bandits sitting there talking about how bored they are), we’ve created an active and interactive exploration.

[I]nterpretation is more compelling than exposition.

…

“Active” also means that the story isn’t shoved down the player‟s throat –quite the opposite, discovery is self-paced. The player is *pulling* the narrative.

This leads to a familiar world, which is self reinforced, more complete, and more immersive.

Now, what you’ve seen might create a feeling of subtle menace: the bandits could be back at any moment. Or it might create a feeling of sympathy for men living in filthy quarters and passing time without even a proper deck of cards. Or disgust at the moral decrepitude of gambling thieves. In other words:

Every player is going to bring his own views, experience and frame of reference to the scene, and come to different conclusions.So environmental storytelling “Invites interpretation of situations and meaning according to players’ views and experience.”

Telegraphing

Environmental cues can also be a powerful tool for informed decision making by players — a cornerstone of the old school and the classic dungeon experience.

This dead NPC sizzling in a fence points out real environmental dangers to the player. Just like the trail of red blood leading into a dark room helps the player prepare for what’s ahead.

Environmental storytelling “can help the player navigate an area by telegraphing.”

“Meaningful narrative is inferred by players if you give them cues but leave them the space to imagine.”

– Steve Powers, Disney

At Grognardia, James often speaks of the pleasant lacunae in rules and settings that give referees room to imagine the hell out of their game. I posit that those lacunae are equally vital for players, and should be present in the content the referee creates.

Something should be wrong

Smith and Worch:

When dressing up the scene, think about how these elements connect. This is how we take the act of simple environmental jumbling to the next level:

• Placing a cup of coffee in an odd place.
• Offsetting a chair in front of that table a little bit.
• Maybe it was hastily pushed over. Think about what happened there. A single prop can transform the scene.

Imagine another element in our cramped tomb chamber: a dark brown stain across one of the bedrolls. Blood, or shit? Is the owner ill? Wounded? More questions, more room for interpretation and imagination.

The Environmental Layer

All of this exists in a layer of “story” that’s not the railroaded narrative or epic history gamers have come to associate with the term. Environmental story isn’t just the communication of information, it’s another way in which the imaginations of the players and the GM interact.

The process is, fundamentally, archaeological: the players unearth the world piece by piece and invest it with meaning from their own speculations and experiences.

What are your experiences with weaving story into environments? How do your environments reflect the stories your players have created in them?

____

* See James Maliszewski’s excellent essay on Gygaxian Naturalism at Grognardia.

Courtesy The Scrolls of Lankhmar, here are some lovely pictures of Fafhrd and the Mouser by David “Mouse Guard” Petersen:

(In which, as a remedy for an unquiet mind, I begin designing a thief class for my Swords & Wizardry/Labyrinth Lord/Rules Cyclopedia game.)

The thief is my favorite fantasy character class. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are my favorite fantasy heroes. My definitive edition of Dungeons & Dragons is the Rules Cyclopedia, which prominently features the class, along with a really nice illustration. (Wearing all her clothes, too!)

I loved the thief in Hero’s Quest and Quest for Glory. I love Thief: The Dark Project and Assassin’s Creed, and I’ve been making sneaky bastards in The Elder Scrolls games the whole way through. I adore sneaking around ruins by night in real life.*

This is all by way of saying that I don’t care if the thief wasn’t in D&D until Greyhawk, there’s going to be one in my old-school D&D game. You know why the thief wasn’t there in 1974? Too busy looting shit, probably. Or selling ill-gotten booty to some slim, dark girl who wanted coffee afterwards. Or the thief was there the whole time, but so fucking stealthy even his saving throw matrix was invisible.

Mm. Unfortunately, that leaves me with a problem. I love the D&D thief, but I don’t actually like the D&D thief. The class’s skills are all calibrated to fail wildly if you roll them at low levels.**

This is fine if you’re running a long term game, where the thief will gradually grow into his role. (Particularly with some clever interpretations.) It will not do for the next D&D game I’m scheduled to run.

That game’s only going to be a couple of sessions long, and while I’m looking forward to low-level characters that can die easily in drunken*** accidents, they also need to be able to accomplish things right off the bat.

So let’s write a new thief, shall we?

Inspirations

First, we need inspirations, and that means first, the Gray Mouser.

(I’m skipping Quest for Glory, for the sake of brevity.)

The Gray Mouser

When asked to assemble a crew of junior heroes to save Rime Isle (Swords and Ice Magic), Fafhrd assembles a crew of “berserks” and the Mouser a crew of “fighter-thieves.” Fritz Leiber probably wasn’t talking in D&D terms, but he was certainly aware of the vocabulary.****

Our thief class, then, represents a “fighter-thief.” This is a guy who’s sneaky when he needs to be, and brash when there’s a hottie involved. The thief becomes a subclass or cousin class of the fighter, brother to the berserk.

Both Fafhrd and the Mouser were accomplished second-story men. In “Ill-Met in Lankhmar,” they do this badass Assassin’s Creed shit while trying to escape Thieves’ House with their precious hit points. In “Claws from the Night,” they again go climbing the roofs and shattered towers of Lankhmar.

So. Climbing, with a dash of parkour. Probably slightly more Daniel Craig than Altair, but that’s the general idea. Cool.

The Mouser’s a skilled swordsman, so this isn’t going to be the kind of thief who shies from a fight. He’s a swashbuckler, through and through.

The Mouser loves to collect magical paraphernalia, but this seems to be mostly a pose. (“Adept’s Gambit.”) He has some training in white magic, which he never uses. He performs some impressive black magic, but only once. (“The Unholy Grail.”) He casts a spell from a scroll Sheelba gives him, and the outcome is either that he’s a badass wizard and doesn’t know it, or that Sheelba’s safety instructions were accurate. (“The Lords of Quarmall.”)

As much as I adore this aspect of the Mouser, and as much as it’s an aspect of Greyhawk‘s thief, I think I’ll leave it aside.

Bilbo Baggins

The bravest little hobbit of them all posed as an “expert treasure hunter.” Bilbo’s main thing was being clever, and to a lesser extent, quick. His most thiefly actions were his various deceptions, against his party members and his enemies alike.

These, unfortunately, don’t translate well to a mechanic in a game without social mechanics. I might allow a Charisma check, but that’s for an individual character, not a class.

Bilbo did, however, have a knack for finding treasure. Sting, the arkenstone, the One Ring… pretty good, all told. So that’s what my thief inherits from him: a better chance of finding treasure.

Altair and Ezio

The aforementioned parkour and pickpocketing… plus, sneak attacks. My favorite thing in Assassin’s Creed is the stealth kill. This is an argument for keeping backstab. As if I needed one.

Mechanics

Alright. So we want our thief to sneak, climb, roof-run, find treasure, and sneak attack. All of these are abilities that we can implement without stealing the thunder from other classes, or from clever player description.

The cardinal rule of these abilities is that a thief can do them under conditions where no one else can. So, every character can climb some things, but the thief can climb sheer surfaces. Anybody can surprise an enemy, but the thief can surprise more often, and exploit the opening better. Anybody can find treasure, but the thief finds caches where no one else would think to look.

Climbing and Running

The thief can cross broken terrain, rooftops, or any kind of other obstacle course at full speed. With a saving throw, the thief can also pass an enemy or group of enemies who would otherwise block the character’s path.

(Inspiration in part from the obnoxiously capable Rules Cyclopedia mystic.)

Surprise Attack

Most characters surprise on a roll of 1 or 2 on a d6 (LL p. 50, RC p.92). If this fails, the thief may make a saving throw to surprise anyway. Further, any hit a thief scores in a surprise round is a critical.

(I thought about giving thieves the Advanced Edition Companion Assassinate ability, but it seems a little much.)

Find Treasure

The thief has very good instincts about where people and creatures keep their valuables. I’m keeping it simple, for now, and following Labyrinth Lord‘s version of the elf secret door mechanic:

On a roll of 1-2 on 1d6, the thief can find a hidden cache of treasure.

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* This is a horrible idea, I know.

** It’s my argument that the Greyhawk thief’s skills, as well as many other percentages in OD&D, aren’t meant to be rolled, but I have to do more research to back that up.

*** Likely both players and characters. Company retreat.

**** Leiber and gaming! A perfect subject for a future post.

At Grognardia, James reposted TSR’s Code of Ethics from the nineties.

These attitudes at TSR are pretty much how White Wolf managed to be way cooler to teen gamers in the nineties. Some of them, like an inherent distrust of authority, are still central to what I write every day at work.

They’re also, of course, wildly divergent from much of the literature D&D was based on. That code was published in 1995… think about having it looming over your head when trying to assemble 1996′s Fafhrd and Mouser boxed set.

Premise: a character class provides players with an interface to the game world and a place for their characters within it. (See yesterday’s post on classes.)

There are a couple of major schema for constructing character classes. Most games use more than one.

Class by Combat Role

You separate characters by how they fight. This is the simplest distinction between Dungeons & Dragons‘ fighting men and magic users, and it goes back to Chainmail. The fighter/wizard divide (or lack thereof) is arguably the definitive problem in character class design.

Basically, in Chainmail, there were guys who fought other guys with swords and polearms. Then Gygax added wizards, who functioned as artillery. So, going into Dave Arneson’s original game, you had these two basic types of units.

In 1974 D&D, they were represented by two overlapping but distinct systems: combat and magic.

In tabletop games, D&D 4e is probably the most rigorous example of this approach. Not only is every class and monster defined by a combat role, but those roles are transparently explained to the players right there in the rulebook.

Virtually every Everquest-descended MMO is built like this. (The extent to which Everquest itself follows this model is a longer discussion.) The most transparent about it is probably City of Heroes, which marries Everquest combat roles to character concepts while staying fairly abstract about both.

This is a somewhat circular methodology, though. Since D&D, it’s become imperative to have certain classes if you’re going to do a class-based fantasy game. And if you’re going to have combat, there’s a strong push to give each class a unique place in combat.

(That last bit’s especially true of MMOs, where problem solving comes down to money or combat, no matter what style the game adopts otherwise. )

Classes by Concept

You have a fictional persona in mind, so you make a class for it. By volume, this is probably the biggest driver in class design.

D&D’s original classes (fighting man, magic user, cleric) were driven by combat role and need. The first supplementary class,* the thief, appears to be driven more by concept.

The thief appears to be loosely modeled on characters like Fafhrd, the Mouser, and maybe Bilbo Baggins. (Gygax didn’t like Tolkien all that much, but that didn’t stop him from using Middle Earth stuff where he liked it or thought it would be commercial.)

He has the skills one would guess a thief might need, as well as one which seems rather particularly borrowed from the Mouser: the ability to use magic scrolls.** In the process, he introduces a third system to D&D. Mechanics supporting fiction, we are go.

Classes to Fill Holes

Your system’s missing something, so you make a class to fix it. D&D’s cleric is the classic example of a class created to fill a hole in a game or campaign. Dave Arneson had one player playing a vampire. As Mike Mornard recounts:

Well, after a time, nobody could touch Sir Fang. Yes, that was his name.

To fix the threatened end of the game they came up with a character that was, at first, a ‘vampire hunter’. Peter Cushing in the same films.

As the rough specs were drawn up, comments about the need for healing and for curing disease came up.

This is pretty much always a supplement for another design scheme, and many games that start strictly adhering to another approach evolve in this direction over time.

Classes as a Template Layer

Your system operates on a point-buy or other system, but classes ease new users into creating a character.

D&D 3.5 almost works this way. One of my favorite video games of all time, Hero’s Quest/Quest for Glory I, works this way. Ultima Online‘s current character generation process works this way.

Vampire: The Masquerade‘s clans were intended to operate this way, but quickly became vital fictional concepts in and of themselves. By the end of the Revised Masquerade line, fictional concept drove class design completely. How that played into the approach taken to Vampire: The Requiem, and how the vision changed over the course of that line, is the subject for another article.

Classes on a Spectrum

You have certain “pure” mechanical concepts (melee, magic, stealth) with classes that represent them (fighter, mage, thief) and then a series of classes which exist between those.

This is the fighter-cleric-mage spectrum of the original D&D. The Mass Effect series is also built this way, and quite elegantly. Tunnels & Trolls primarily follows this method, though it’s also evolved quite a bit over the years.

Classes by Convergence

Your game has no formal classes, but character optimization favors a small number of builds. You probably lie awake at night worrying about tank mages. Later designs building on the same system end up centering around these builds more than the original open, underlying system (usually based on skills).

Ultima Online is the poster child for this. UO wasn’t designed for classes, but they perpetually emerged from each revision of the skill system.

GURPS is often played this way, though I’d be a little afraid to say so on a message board.

Exalted looks like it’s a class-by-concept scheme, with all of the D&D standards scaled up, but many people play it as a convergence scheme, and that’s the current approach to its mechanical design.

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* Class was a slippery concept in 1975, something I’ll treat in the future. But by the definitions later games would extrapolate from D&D, Greyhawk D&D has four classes.

** This seems to me to be directly from “The Lords of Quarmall“.