Wednesday, September 4, 2019

Hail Jeff Rients, Howdy Timothy Brannan and Hello Nigeria!

Nearly eight years after last posting, I decided to crank this old Model T up again.  Because reasons.  What's fascinating to me is how many views I got: approximately 100 views in the last two days.  Now, I'm no technical wiz, but I would guess that some proportion of those come from spammers.  After all, I had two comments on my first DragonQuest post: one from Timothy "Witchlord" Brannan and one from some spammer who has been deleted.

But still.  Actually, one of the things that pushed me into brushing off the cobwebs here was checking out of the always worthwhile-reading Blood of Procopius and seeing my blog still listed on his site.  For some reason, having not been deleted from Fr Dave's blogroll after all this time struck a chord within me (Sir Arthur Sullivan's Lost Chord, to be precise).

However, I was not prepared to see how much of that traffic - spam or not - all came from Jeff's Gameblog.  I have no idea what that means, but - hail to thee, oh mighty, Jeff and his readers!  And while the vast majority of the traffic came from the U.S. of Something, I had three views from Nigeria.  I also have no idea what that means, but Hello, Nigeria!  Are you ready to rock!

Actually, if any of those folks - or the five Indonesians or the seven Ukrainians, etc. - would to pop in and say hello, I'd be glad to hear from you.  Or the 120 Americans, for that matter.

Hello, earth!
In this installment, we learn that you can make a percentile system really complicated if you keep adding special results and that DQ doesn't stand for "Dairy Queen".



[Introduction] Apparently, role-playing games have come of age in the last five years. I think that is supposed to be five years from the date of the first edition (1980). I’m not sure why 1975 is picked out since D&D was first published in 1974.  On the other hand, five years from the second edition would be 1977 which doesn't mean much to me other than the year that J. Eric Holmes' incorporation of the previous booklets first appeared? Hmn.

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[1] DQ actually sets out a “general course of events” for playing the game, which include Pre-Adventure, Adventure, and Post-Adventure activity. It’s all a bit mechanical-looking and obvious to me at this time, but it would have GOLD to me in 1982, specifying that there should be a reason why the characters are in this adventure [1.1.]; that contracts should be worked out with hirelings about profits [1.7]; that there should be an opportunity for players to appeal GM decisions and then it is over [1.13], and there should be a separate period for solo adventures [1.16]. This is all the kind of stuff that D&D at the time just assumed you could work out, which meant that the 2nd Gen gamers like myself had NO IDEA what to do.

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[2.1] I can only quote the heading of this section: “the rules are intended to guide, not restrict, the game master.” Damn, this would also have been nice to know at the time.

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[3] This game has 6 Abilities just like D&D! Oh no, wait: these are Characteristics. Totally different.

Okay, I kid. But they are intriguingly both like and unlike D&D’s more familiar 6, except with needless verbiage. Thus we have [3.1] Physical Strength, with an extra adjective for no reason since there isn’t any other kind of strength (cp. Gamma World). The same goes for [3.2] Manual Dexterity.

DQ does distinguish between Agility and Dexterity...I mean, Manual Dexterity. This is one of the most frequently brought up issues when people decide to bitch about D&D Abilities. The other difference is that DQ replaces Intelligence with Magical Aptitude; possibly because it has two words instead of one; possibly because DQ is more open to magic-using characters and has a skill system to cover languages.

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[3.9] DQ here includes an optional stat which is Physical Beauty; two words instead of one because no one wants you to mistakenly believe that Spiritual Beauty is an optional stat. I really hate this sort of stat, just like I hated when the Unearthed Arcana tried to add Comeliness into D&D. Attractiveness is such a subjective thing that trying to objectively rank it is silly and DQ sort of recognizes that but includes it anyway. Unfortunately, the game recognizes that subjective quality with some odd language: “Example: a female halfling would find a male halfling with a Physical Beauty of 23 sexually stimulating….” Whoah! I just thought he was handsome.

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[4.1] This innocuous paragraph contains two really important ideas. First, that anything not specifically covered in the rules can still be attempted by using a Characteristic roll. No big deal in 2019, but many of my generation never knew that D&D meant for you to do that sort of thing; we figured that of there wasn’t a rule, then you couldn’t do it. Yeah, if you had read the 1981 Expert rules then you would have seen the suggestion to do this, but that was easy to miss, only a suggestion, and not sufficiently Advanced D&D.

From a DQ-specific perspective, this little section also brings up Difficulty Factor, which turns out to be a really important part of the game that isn’t even mentioned in Chapter 3: Game Terms. Difficulty Factor is what you multiply a Characteristic by to generate a percentage chance for success, ranging from .5 (super-hard) to 5 (least hard). I wonder if the rules somewhere tell you how to come up with factor; like, is DF 3 for “average” tasks? I guess we’ll see.

Then, there is some war-gamey complexity because this clean design-stuff just feel doesn’t feel enough like Advanced Squad Leader. So now we get this odd rule that if you roll the exact number of your percentage chance, you don’t succeed unless someone helps you. But in order to help you, your pal has to a Characteristic of at least 15 “or equal to or greater than the aided character’s value”. I think that means that if the first guy has less than a 15, then the helper could have less than 15 too, but it sure is a confusing way to put it.

But wait! You want more complexity? Sure you do. So, if you roll over the TN + the score of the Characteristic that you are using, you may injure yourself. Does that mean that you have to recalculate this every time because the DF will keep changing? Yes; yes, it does.

Oh, AND you always have a chance of failure equal to 30% - characteristic value, regardless of Difficulty Factor (I think).

Oh, AND a roll of 100 is always a failure.

Let’s see: can we add any other complications into this? Actually, I’m too tired to tell. As with the roll for starting XP and monies, it’s too bad nobody just went with an idea like saying if you roll doubles and miss, that’s a fumble. Helluva lot easier.

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[4.2] This section also buries the lead, this time about magic. It gives rules for minor magic. Any caster of any magical tradition can attempt to use Magical Aptitude to cast a glamour (minor illusion), cantrip (minor transformation), or trance (minor charm). I’m really stunned by this idea because these sorts of magics cover 90% of the spellcraft you see in real history. That is, you could use just these things and make a perfectly adequate village witch or cunning man.

Furthermore, the text is very specific that is “best performed by a member of a Magical College”. Not “only performed”, but “best”. Which implies (without explaining) that anyone can try this! Presumably, one without training has to roll with a crappy DF, but that’s still quite a thing. It reminds me some of the near-contemporary Runequest and its attitude of “everybody can do a little magic” (1st edition RQ came out in 1978; 1st edition DQ came out in 1980). But RQ’s folk sorcery was called “Battle Magic” and was pretty focused on what the adventurous types would do: for example, make their blades magically sharp or increase their armor protection. This DQ stuff is less combat-friendly, but of far greater scope.


Next time, we see some really a brilliant idea to balance random character generation and learn how to waste that brilliance with several much less clever ways to undo the brilliant idea.

Tuesday, September 3, 2019

Thoughts on DragonQuest


I never played DragonQuest. I remember seeing the game at the toy store (Lord!). I remember a few articles in Dragon magazine. It looked…



Exotic. Intriguing. Beheady. Lots of adventurers seemed to have magic and there seemed to be a lot of different kinds of magic. That seemed awesome. But it also looked like one of those really complex adult wargames, the kind that intimidated Young Me. So, I looked and thought, but never went any further.

Recently, I stumbled across something calling itself the "Second Edition, Revised; version 2.06" from 2002. This incorporates the Arcane Wisdom supplement, which is a whole long story that you either don’t need me to tell you about or do, but I don’t feel like going into it right now (basically, there was magic stuff that got played around with between editions). Anyway, for no good reason, I decided to really look at this document. And I figured - hey! - why not post my thoughts to rpg.net because who the hell else would be interested?

I’m not going to explain the game here. I’m literally just posting my thoughts on things as I get to it. There are ways to learn more about the game if you are interested on the internet, if you are so inclined. I’m posting in the old war-game format which so epitomizes the game. If you have the rules, you know what I mean. If you have no idea what I mean, then please step into this time machine and discover how some people use to learn games using outlines and decimals.