At the Happening, I was determined to play a little bit of Harnmaster and Dangerous Journeys, both of which I’ve been poking at for many years. David brought Boot Hill too, and as it happened, the three make a nice set for discussion. Also, we were intrigued enough to play a second session of Harnmaster, and I’m sure that if the others had been played earlier during the Happening, each would have been extended into more sessions too.
For those who don’t know these games, here is some important context for each.
- Boot Hill (1975, Brian Blume, Gary Gygax, Don Kaye) was one of TSR’s first games following Dungeons & Dragons and Empire of the Petal Throne, and qualifies as one of the first three or four published role-playing games. Its very first version is brief and zine-like, so the most playable (and obviously played) version is from 1979, which is what we used. This dovetails as well with the Advanced D&D: Dungeon Masters Guide published in the same year, which includes some Boot Hill/D&D adaptation/overlap rules.
- Harnmaster (1986, Robin Crossby) had been published earlier as a setting module, then developed into a distinctive game. It underwent world-building and a few rules changes throughout the 1990s, then split into creator/publisher factions to become two separate titles, blah blah, look up all that crap yourself if you’re interested. The point is that it has apparently been steadily played by people who like it a lot and who seem surprisingly wank-free; also, it lays a valid claim to being one of most daily-life, regular-guy, non-romantic fantasy games.
- Dangerous Journeys (1992, Gary Gygax) was Gygax’s first role-playing publication, via Game Designers’ Workshop, after he had been evicted from TSR, which seems to have also been an emancipation, although may not have felt like it. Unfortunately the game was lawfared out of existence by TSR, with the usual tactic of scaring distributors and publishers, screwing the author. I was always intrigued by its obviously heartfelt and distinct take on fantasy, especially since it focuses far more on the eastern Mediterranean rather than Breton/Saxon Europe. it also features an extremely slim, focused resolution system. As an important qualifier, I have the Mythus Prime version, which is much simpler than the core game and intended to be introductory, although I also wanted to use the great big Mythus Magick supplement, which is not hard to adapt to Prime. So it’s like the “simple rules version + complicated magic.”
Combat stuff
Briefly, each of these games will kill player-characters, although all of them are equally or perhaps slightly more likely to leave you alive, albeit probably scarred and regretting your life-choices.
The key, however, is timing relative to the quickly-changing events among multiple characters’ actions. Each is a bit inflexible regarding order … or so it seems, until it isn’t. For example, Harnmaster counts down actions by character within a round, but also grants sudden free actions in many outcomes, and this feature, meaning who gets one and what they do with it, generates the most significant outcomes of the encounter.
As far as I can tell, Boot Hill achieves a similar effect due to varying and somewhat unpredictable damage, so that after a single “take our turns” round, everyone’s options are now all variously limited or expanded based on whatever mayhem occurred, and to whom and to what. I’ve seen this in some later firearm-heavy games and always liked it, especially the notion that the bullets will hit something, person or not. It helps that guns are not magical and must be reloaded and otherwise managed, in whatever way the particular mechanics/actions may be constructed.
Our game concerned a showdown in a frozen snowy street, the front of a saloon, a few barrels, and at least one lucky shot and one lucky miss. I was relieved that the real killer among the NPCs, a Civil War veteran, met the wrong end of the dice, so he didn’t quite perforate my poor idealistic little priest, and caught a shotgun spray to his gun hand.
An object lesson to anyone considering dynamic combat rules: if you can anticipate the outcome just from looking at the probabilities, then the system is no good.
I think Dangerous Journeys is less nuanced in this regard, but that may be due to our limited use, and if so, it more than makes up for it via magical context, which I’ll discuss next.
To summarize, combat in each of these games looks like a lock-step grind but isn’t, due to considerably changed-up circumstances, action by action and round by round. This effect isn’t apparent upon reading them as instructions, which seem rather dry and automated, but it immediately jumps up in play given even the brief contact we had time for.
“Oh shit, that was close!” and then either, “But all of a sudden I have this little time-window I didn’t expect, so I will …” or “oh no, I am unexpectedly totally screwed, so I will make myself as small as possible.”
Magic stuff
Bluntly, in Boot Hill, there isn’t any, not even the gunplay as a stealth form. So, moving on.
Harnmaster magic is difficult and rare in setting terms, but rich and complex in play terms. Characters with high Aura get psionic abilities (which are not well-understood to be “real,” you’re just witchy or weird), various characters are logically eligible for scholarly magical training (of six types), and just about anyone can go into religious training which includes divine rituals (of ten major gods and any subgod or local entity you care to make up).
One of the characters was both psionic and religious, and through a series of rolls and player choices, turned out to be female, red-headed, and devoted to the religion mostly observed by elves, who are definitely eldritch in this game. Coupling that with the basically “Welsh mining” mountain town location, well, the unplanned combination was a bit spooky on its own.
Anyway, system wise, individual spells are skills, subject to success or failure by roll, and they induce fatigue, depending on how well or badly you roll. Notably, our big gun, the witchy acolyte knocked herself out with a psionics roll gone wrong.
Dangerous Journeys magic is based on somewhat more mythic or literary-historical model, that anyone might have charms or personal rituals which work, and serious scholars or divines may tap into much more powerful forces, with a correspondingly ritualized and often mysticized life-style. At first glance the system is an encyclopedist-obsessive’s life work, to the extent that (on reading) I have said, “oh, come on, do we really need all this completism, are you even thinking about practical play?” I was happy to find that in the scope of a given player-character, the necessary concepts and subroutines (down to which cheap gems are incredibly effective to have hanging about one’s person or room, or which nights you should get naked and take a bath with the right oils), are pretty easy to locate, and the system is quite simple.
I think that would be the case if one were using the daunting full Mythus rules, but maybe I found an accessible sweet spot with my choice to use the the narrow range of types in Mythus Prime + a bit more procedural range from Mythus Magick.
You can see my notes for casting in my play-scribbles below. Briefly, the system is d%, and it’s used for everything. For magic, it’s not so generous if you play like “I have a skill, point and shoot,” because it’s really about daily, monthly, and seasonal preparation and routine. Heka, the magical fuel, is reasonably generous for major practitioners, but it’s also super easy to expend, so all these rituals amplify your store as well as provide much better casting chances. As we felt our way through the first part of play, it quickly became apparent that all of the characters would treat a ship’s voyage as a venue for specific rituals, routinely, every day. It’ s an engaging form of character play which I now realize would fit very well into early RuneQuest, whose spells are unfortunately too fire-fight by comparison.
Where are we, what do I want, where are we going? Ah – then I will end each day with a half-hour scribbling on my astrological charts and sometimes bother my companions about when and where they were born. And that means to a great extent playing the end of each day, or if not directly, assuming that it was in some way “played” … and it seems weird, at the least, to other characters, but it does matter when something unfortunate arises during the next day. It therefore also matters greatly when and if that reflective time during the evening is disrupted.
Most important: situational stuff
For Boot Hill, David put some effort into the historical and poiltical circumstances of play.
I was familiar with the material mainly due to this graphic novel, which David also referenced.
For purposes of brief play, David set up a specific historical moment as our arena of activity, but the game presents much more nuanced and non-directed situation rules. Jesse presented this at the Patreon in the context of another topic:
All of us, I think, are determined sooner or later to play according to these quoted rules.
For Harnmaster, I built player-characters right up to the point where a player would make decisions, and we finished them at the table. Given the builds, I had already decided a bit about the location.
I had to be agile to complete my preparation more or less simultaneously with the characters being completed, which isn’t ideal for the game. However, we managed pretty well, based on criss-crossing among the following things
- my thoughts on the economics of the region based on the social classes and family background that had come up in character creation, so effectively a remote village with a substantial mining component
- Kristoffer’s character’s status as the only and favorite child of a powerful clan-chief
- the “what’s going on around here” roll which yielded bandit activity
- my desire to use a malevolent spirit, of the “ghost” category, which was most easily implemented by including a murder
You can see the evidence of me assembling what we had into a full situation via my scribbles, most of which was in place by the first few minutes of play.
What happened included the return of the clan chief’s brother (a serious asshole), his murder, some cool gems which independently landed in player-characters’ hands, and the brother returning as a possessing spirit. But I am not making it clear how much of this relied on one of my preparation rolls, deciding that a dead body was involved, and that it was one of the Lia-Kavair (think medieval ninja/thieves guild), thus using the procedural preparation rolls for such a thing.
I struggled more to set up for Dangerous Journeys, eventually realizing that motivations and in-fiction preparation played a very big role, so that a quick “let’s play” scenario robs from both content and procedure. Having read a lot of Gygax text in the past year or so, in combination with much struggling with it forty years ago, I am concluding that at his best, this guy actually believed in players – “This is magic? This is what I must consider as we play? Yes! I shall do that!” So it’s not really workable at all to think of “scenario” without players’ input, very similar to Boot Hill, framed in terms of what kinds of magic are operating based on the player-characters’ routines and priorities.
Perhaps sub-optimally for the game, I merely chose a location and some monsters (an ogre and a gaunt), which led me down an overly-complex road concerning Faerie vs. Classical magic.
I could summarize the play content as “we sailed here, we found the island all messed up, there was a big fat scary monster and maybe the nymph is in trouble …” but such an account misses how much the magic oriented everyone. The defiled shrine was traumatic, not because I was all spooky and shocky as an emotional engineer, but because David was by that point committed to his character’s notions of ritual purity.
Summary thoughts
For all three, there is so much to learn regarding contextual situations, in which prepared/available encounters are necessary and functional, but are not themselves the point, “to get to.” This is something I’d like to work on more myself, applicable to many other games as diverse as original Traveller and D&D 4E.
It really makes me reconsider the language for Bangs, as Sorcerer so greatly emphasizes, “get to the Bangs!” At the time, twenty-five years ago, I was striking against what I saw in play: ages of just fucking around and doing literally nothing no matter how many dice were rolled. But historically this language was perceived as creating a bunch of fixed events and landing everyone in them as if they were ducks in a shooting gallery, with further distortions of “hard framing” and “conflict.” It would have been better to focus on unstable and actionable content as something to play (including player-characters themselves), and to have stayed silent about the operations of such events to re-cast the situation into either more unstable or less unstable forms. [That is, if “how I said it” actually mattered at all, itself a dubious assumption.]
Here’s I didn’t talk about: resolution without rolling for unlisted things, and soft but real failure for rolled things unless it’s critical. It’s a good topic for another post.
Finally,the gritty daily experience which anchors all three of these games is exactly what I’m failing to do with Dark Sun, although we would like to, and it’s begging for it. I want to understand these systems’ lessons better.
10 responses to “Grit and focus”
I would like to pursue the discussion about situational play through the example of the harnmaster game.
Could we breakdown what the elements of situation play in contrast with what has been prepared prior to play, and also what was fixed, and what was open for change.
We had a village, situated in his direct cultural and ecological environment: the village map, the geological and economic environment (what stones are mined, etc.), and the direct social environment (a clanic structure).
1. What was prepared fixed before the finalization of the character creation. In other words, independently of the characters profiles.
2. What was decided/fixed after the finalization of the character creation: based on elements of the character profiles.
My memory is a bit fuzzy, so I may misremember. If I remember well, the decision of my jewel character coming from another place was based on both her distant relationship with the local clan head, the fact that there was only one clan head in this village, and the fact that my character, based on my decision, was a high skilled professional with potentially skilled training from somewhere else (the jewelcraft).
My own sense of engagement and inspiration came from the different framing of the scene. First scene set during the day, my character meets a shadowy but very wealthy stranger NPC who asks her to repair some of his jewelry. Second scene set in the evening, Kristoffer’s character is eating in a village feast with her father and the shadowy wealthy NPC, and we learn through Kristoffer’s character interactions that that NPC is her uncle, that he is dangerous and did bad things, and that he is not welcomed here by the clan head. Third scene, framed the following morning, David’s character find the NPC’s body while herding the goats.
The disconnection of the character’s knowledge and the player’s knowledge of what happens in each scene was key to inspire my own engagement and inform the way I would play. I was really curious about knowing what was happening and pushed this curiosity into my character’s action.
Obviously the backstory was part of a prepared relationship map, and it seems that the killing was also a prepared (fixed) event.
3. What was open to change and actually changed due to play
So yeah, maybe a better way to phrase this is just: what was fixed (either decided before the session, after the character finalization, or during the session) /what was “open to play” and what was actually played (opened to change and actually changed through play).
Another thought: the fatigue rules seemed to be unimportant in my eyes at reading, but proved to be very consequential. David’s roll to gather the herd didn’t led him to fumble it but to give him some fatigue penalties. His decision to carry the body toward the village not only hindered his ability to lose that penalty but added him more fatigue points. This all become relevant when a surprising attack occurred the following scene – all those fatigue rolls were penalties for the fight, so that roll for a day-to-day goat herding created a very relevant life-threatening chain of consequences.
Also, I would have loved to know better the religion rules before the game. The possibility of gathering bonus by doing religious activity, in a way that can help for a divine intervention, could have been very consequential in my choice if I wanted to do something desperate – which obviously happened. At the end of the second session, my only plan was to flee the village the fast as I could, due to that critical failure in oratory to convince the militias that the clan head was possessed. And surely that would have meant to find some asylum in the religious temple of a less local god.
(to Greg) Your comment is too dense to be a single discussion, so I’ll split your numbered categories into separate comment streams.
PREPARATION
Core point: content prepared prior to play vs. during play (or between the sessions) is completely irrelevant. It’s fascinating, obsessing, fraught, possibly agonizing, and pragmatically important, but it is not in fact going to help with the main topic. You’re best off staying agnostic regarding when a given “thing” was created, focusing instead on how it was played.
I’ll answer as best I and hope it doesn’t distract. I had rolled the basics for each character, as you know, without moving into the decision-making a player would do. The family/class background results led me to conceive of the mining/gem based village. It also provided a few NPCs including the clan head as the father for the spooky/psionic character, and that she was his “favorite.”
I used the campaigning section to see what had been happening during the season, which is where the history with the bandits came from, and which also gave me the time-units for events in play (hours).
I like monsters, so I chose one that seemed right for the location: the Hru, philosopher-rock things, whom we never saw directly in play, who have been considering what to do about human mining in the region for as long as humans have been doing it. (For people who don’t have the book, these creatures are thoughtful but amusingly slow in their decision-making, so I placed this quality front and center in my preparation.) With rocks and gems on my mind, I considered including a Dreamstone of Relgaria, but decided I was pulling in too many things.
The other prepared feature was the body: I really liked the “things carried” tables in the text and decided a corpse would be the best way to enjoy that right away in play. A bit carried away, I used the table for Lia-Kavair, also noting that it was full of gems which matched my notion about the village. I told myself that using this table made sense considering the bandits, but I probably would have done it anyway.
I decided that he was the clan head’s brother just before play began, not really based on anything the rest of you were saying, but merely “catching up” on necessary preparation and, as you say, applying relationship map concepts. I’d named the clan head Navo, thus chose this fellow’s name to be Bavo, and considered that he’d chosen a cooler name after leaving the village, Brovannon.
Since he was conceived as a corpse in the first place, his death was almost entirely baked into play. I am reluctant to discuss the “almost” further because it slides too easily into the kind of obsessive oh-no what-if thinking which I’m trying to teach you not to do. I will only say that being “fixed” but not 100.00%, was not in any way a source of stress or even interest for me.
I arrived at the spirit aspect, effectively another monster, between the sessions as I looked at what was going on, including my knowledge of who killed him, reviewed the text, and realized how it seemed written specifically to tell me that “this godless guy is now a very pissed-off spirit, haunting the town he hates via hostile possession.” Or to look at it another way, I was thinking in terms of playing him as a character, albeit slated for death, and the book held up a silver platter with the rules helping me to do that.
SCENES
Yes, this is the real topic: situational authorities. But do not consider the beginning of scenes too strongly in terms of fixed/unchangeable content. My job concerned where and when we “opened our eyes” at the first moments of play; yours concerned what you were doing, which then turned into far more direction, if that’s the right word, especially in the staging sense, than I provided.
I want to stress that point: that it’s not like you said, “I do this,” and then I take it and strategize it and massage it into some brilliant “what happens next” to present to you. Instead, you are providing me with instruction about where and when we now must play, during which I will use any knowledge and responsibilities which fall to me. Please note that when I said “what are you doing,” it did not concern a reaction to immediate confrontation thrown in your face, but was much more general – this means you were actually beginning the scene more than I was.
That’s why framing scenes is over-rated. People think too strongly of “scene” as it exists in other media, in totality of which occurs throughout its length, and in fact the term “framing” itself carries this implication, implying the end of the scene as well as its beginning. In stage, screen, and prose, to frame the scenes literally means to write the script.
Whereas we can only think in terms of how they start, and sometimes in terms of what must join them soon, which is still “at the start” in terms of what’s lurking just out of sight, but which is fact present. Furthermore, especially in a game of this type, the precise information of the moment, “what’s happening,” requires all of us to speak, not just a single director. Therefore, the starting point – although far from nothing – is much less preconceived or plot-directed than it seems due to our training from other media.
OPEN TO CHANGE AND ACTUALLY CHANGED
The list
• Obviously, the well-being of anyone at all, with a certain reference to the player-characters; necessarily made urgent given that a vengeful spirit was assaulting people and wanted that specific piece of jewelry back
• Less necessarily but certainly possible, whether anyone learned who killed Bavo and why
• Where any of the player characters chose to go in any long-term way, e.g., simply leaving the village
• The attitude and potential responses of the rock monsters, pending any involvement in play based on what characters did (Bavo already stirred them up, you see)
Any of these things, including whether and how they were implicated in play at all, was subject to activities (“character play,” me included) and the passage of time.
Harnmaster really helps given its concept of time-units per environ, which in our case concerned hours. I could think in terms of one to several hours at all times. This ties into the point I made about about scenes being extremely unplanned. I always said to myself “what about the next hour or so,” regarding anyone I was playing, and asked all of you the same question, and therefore, arrived easily at what to play next.
You are right to spot fatigue as primary in this context, and obviously the other problems like the many forms of injury apply as well. The religion and magic rules would also have factored in, as you pointed out, but which none of us knew well enough to employ. Please remember, of all of us present, you were probably the best versed in the text.
On reflection, I’m worried that you are misinterpreting the concept of “open to change and actually changed.” It doesn’t refer to things which are conceived and then reconceived, e.g., hypothetically, if Bavo had been prepared as a nice guy and then I decided halfway through play that he was a jerk instead. It refers to things which are diegetically capable of changing from their starting states in play, and since all of this is fiction, not physics, that quality is aesthetic and must be considered in that way, as procedure. Think in terms of one of the tables during the dinner: can it break? In this game, yes, it can; therefore, “open to change” includes the wholeness or destruction of that table. In a lot of ways, the system we choose to use is a primary means arriving at that aesthetic conclusion, and as I think about this, that’s the main way assess whether a system is any good.
Just two short notices for the moment :
a) I’m worried that you are misinterpreting the concept of “open to change and actually changed.”
Your description confirms me that I wasn’t misinterpreting, we’re exactly on the same page. I wasn’t asking if you changed your mind about something that was not already in play, but changes about things once they are put in play.
b) I realized this morning that all the process you describe is exactly what I did, without any difficulties at all, for our cyperbunk game, as described here : https://adeptplay.com/2024/03/25/friday-night-firefight/
For point (a), that’s excellent, I’m glad we’re making sense to one another.
The Cyberpunk post’s comments present a useful preview to this post and its discussion. Questions were raised there which are getting answered here, or rather, showing that they’ve been developed and answered.
A full sea journey in Dangerous Journeys seems like it would be quite fun. With each character doing their job (skills/spells/etc) + motivations and in-fiction prep.
Yes, it is hard to convey the possible range of play for magic in Dangerous Journeys. I had my hands all over the book because there weren’t obvious choices in any given situation, it is extremely contextual, and in combat there is a whole range of effects and even timing/coordination options. I was also getting sucked in by the possibilities — there’s a lot of metaphysical and social implications packed within there.
With regards to Boot Hill, it fulfilled a curiosity I had about playing it with some historical content instead of random gunfights on the provided maps. I really appreciated playing it with Ron and Ross. I also love that others are looking at the text and seeing the potential. Jesse points out some really great stuff that I would really like to see in play too.
A few things these play experiences and post made me think about:
– GMing Sorcerer really gave me feedback that I was fucking around too much. But it is still something I need to work on in general, because sometimes I feel eager to move to the next dice roll/conflict because I don’t feel at ease when characters are walking and talking and there is no obvious conflict or something to resolve.
– Playing Harnmaster and Dreams of Fire presented some good insight into some of the problems I had when I was GMing Circle of Hands. Charm Rolls are so consequential and Circle Knights are so bad ass that I had a tendency to treat the social classes and professions as color. I mean that I would start describing a bunch of shit that is clearly not actionable in my head and if someone wanted to play with it, I don’t think I really played back in most cases. But on the other hand, as a player, I enjoy playing within this type of context, and I don’t find it difficult.
I’ve been paying attention to people either demonstrating this in play or talking about it here at the site. Hans wrote about in some detail at some point, so we can try to track it down. It’s a good skills topic, especially since – as you point out – it seems to have something to do with the GM/player distinction in people’s heads, rather than being intrinsic to play.
“Hans wrote about in some detail at some point, so we can try to track it down.”
I feel that you’re right, but I haven’t been able to find it yet.
I loved my astrologer-merchant chick in Dangerous Journeys. Characters, especially when attached to the magic, come out feeling REALLY meaty, in terms of a felt fictional entity. We didn’t see ourselves through a big situation or anything, so I don’t have much to say about that, but I’m very glad I sat down at the table and learned a little about this game. It absolutely deserves some serious play, which I’d love to do.