Showing posts with label dodex. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dodex. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Align yr linguistics

One of the daffier ideas from 1st edition AD&D that people sometimes bring up is the concept of alignment languages. The rules stated that people of the same alignment actually had a special common language that they automatically knew, and only people of their alignment could speak. Apparently Gary Gygax originally intended it to be something like a ceremonial language used by religions, like Latin for Catholicism or Hebrew for Judaism, but as written it came across as a full language that anyone of a given alignment knew and somehow no one else could learn. The general consensus was this was Very Silly and they promptly disappeared in 2nd Edition, I'm pretty sure never to be seen again. In fact as each new edition of D&D comes out they seem to push alignment further and further into the background. You get the sense that a lot of people find it a bit embarrassing, when they don't ignore it entirely.

While alignment languages are odd, when you imagine people being able to speak something purely due to their moral outlook, I think there's an argument to them making sense in the classic D&D universe. After all, it's a world where alignments are a Real Thing. It's not just a person's moral code. It's an actual fundamental building block of the cosmos, that you can verify with magic. If certain magic items only work for people of specific alignments, why not languages?

A lot of fantasy settings have a Dark Speech, Demonic, Abyssal etc that evil creatures all use. The language itself isn't evil though (though invariably described as 'guttural', 'harsh' etc), it's just like a lingua franca for meanies. Lingua wanka?

I want to have alignments in my Dodex game, though a more simplified version to D&D. I'm going for Order, Chaos, Light and Dark. There's no Neutral, that's simply an absence of alignment. Most animals don't have an alignment, and not all people do either. It's assumed that player characters all do because they're Important People who have the potential for dire fates and grand destinies (even if half the time they end up dead in a pit trap). People are kind of aware of alignments in-game, they're seen as innate principles of life. Positive and negative forces, structure and entropy, like yin and yang. Depending on someone's belief system they may consider them to be literal pillars of existence, like gravity or magnetism, other people might see them more as metaphorical symbols for how things are.

Anyway I want to have alignment languages in Dodex! The common trade language in the game is called Tongue, which is accompanied by a physical sign language called Shape. There's also a secret(ish) one called Cant that's used by dodgy types, like a parallel trade language for the shadow economy. But then there's the alignment languages too. They're a type of magical communication, in a way, a bit like the one wizards use to scribble in their spellbooks. Something about the way they're constructed just feels wrong to people whose essence doesn't vibrate at that particular pitch. People of different alignments can still learn the language, but they struggle with it. Given time and effort they can translate things, but they'll never be truly fluent. As a result most people don't bother trying. In fact most people don't learn them anyway, it's not any easier to learn than any other language even if it is your alignment.

Aria is the language of Light. It is a tonal language where sentences rise and fall melodically, building to crescendos of meaning. It is not subtle... you can't whisper in Aria. It's also difficult to be sarcastic or insincere. You can be angry, or melancholy, or deceitful even, but the language forces you to do it in a declarative and heartfelt way. In its written form Aria looks like branches of swooping musical notation radiating out from a central point.

Ergo is the language of Order. Speakers sound like they're reading out a long set of equations, because essentially they are. Written down it looks like one of those giant chalkboards of sums you see in a film about mathematicians. Ergo is great at clarity, it's good for logistics. It is not good at nuance.

Gibberish is the language of Chaos. To non-speakers it sounds like a totally random series of made-up words and noises. They'll throw in a few barks and whistles too. No two speakers of Gibberish sound the same, but somehow they can always understand each other. There is no written form of the language.

Malison is the language of Dark. People expecting a grating, ugly form of speech are surprised at how pretty it can be. Its sing-song quality lends it to poetry and performance. But the flowery language hides its thorns. Malison has endless clauses and tenses, it twists on the tongue. It's impossible to pay a compliment without sounding snide, to speak of ideals without subverting them. It forces you to hold things back even when you try to tell the truth. The written form of Malison is like a palimpsest, patterns of sharp runic figures layered on top of each other.

Monday, June 03, 2019

Does success suck

So some of my initial thoughts about my game is that OF COURSE characters have the classic six attributes. These will potentially range in score from 6 to 20, depending on your character's race and what you roll during character creation.

The basic mechanic will be: have a Success Score that you are trying to get equal to or below on 2d12. Generally that Success Score is going to be a relevant ability score. Getting a double 1 is always a success, getting a double 12 is always a failure.

I'm going with the name 'Success Score' right now but I don't know if I like it. I don't want to use something like 'target' though because that feels counterintuitive to how the rolls work. I'd expect the higher a target number is, the harder something is to do. Whereas here the higher the number, the better your chances are of succeeding.

Something else I'm pondering is the idea of partial successes. I really like that element of Dungeon World, that the players often get to kind of get what they want but have to accept some sort of compromise or caveat. Obviously some systems revel in the characters being crap at stuff, but I think in general players like to be competent (just like the characters usually are in adventure fiction). But always succeeding is boring too. That's why I like having the additional layer of a partial success too. The obvious one being that in a fight, a success means you hit them and a fail means they hit you - but a partial success probably means you hit each other.

How to work that into my above plan for rolling under a Success Score though? I was wondering if it'd work to have a rule that if your total on 2d12 is above the Success Score (so normally a fail) but the individual numbers on both dice are below the Success Score, then it's a partial success.

I kind of like it, but then you have the problem that if the Success Score is 12 or higher then you're never going to fail (apart from the 1-in-144 times you manage a double 12). You'll always at least partially succeed, if not fully succeed. There's a good chance that most characters are going to have at least some attributes at 12 or higher (especially in attributes relevant to their class), so this could mean that a lot of characters rarely if ever totally fail at their core activities.

This could be mitigated somewhat by having some sort of difficulty "handicap" added to dice rolls, depending on the situation. That's how armour in combat could work for example. But is that then overcomplicating things. I like the simplicity of having people roll equal-to-or-under their attribute scores for most actions, but if I'm going to stick with that then I may have to give up on the idea of partial successes.

Wednesday, May 22, 2019

I've started noodling around with a ruleset for a fantasy RPG. Yes just what the world needs, another set of FRPG rules! This one is largely inspired by PbtA games, mostly Dungeon World and more specifically Freebooters on the Frontier. Obviously there's the ur-inspiration of D&D, and I think a bit of Fighting Fantasy too. It's going to use just 12-sided dice :O

- What? Why just 12-sided dice?
Why not?

- That's not a very good answer.
Well the idea of a game using a single type of dice appeals to me. And the d12 doesn't seem to get much love. Dodecahedron is a cool word.

- What will this do that's any different to the things you're ripping off? Why not just play a tweaked version of one of them?
I mean it basically will be a tweaked version of them. Bits of them tweaked together into one hideous chimera.

- Hideous?
But beautiful in the eye of its creator! Or maybe not, maybe I'll finish the job and then Frankenstein-style take one look at it and run off in horror.

- You're not really selling this.
This isn't a sales pitch! I'm not planning to flog it to anyone.

- So what's the point of this post.
Look, who are you? Why are you interrogating me? Who let you in here?

- YOU'LL FIND OUT SOON ENOUGH! MUHAHAHAHA.
*smoke bomb goes off*

Well that felt needlessly dramatic.