Saintly Saturday: St. Andrew the Commander

Today is the feast of St. Andrew the Commander. He was a roman soldier during the reign of Maximian. About the year A.D. 289 he was sent by Antiochus, the Commander-in-Chief of the Roman forces, to fight off a large Persian army that had invaded the Syrian territories. Interestingly, St. Andrew had not yet been baptized a Christian, but still persuaded his men that the pagan gods were merely stone carved by human hands and were of no help in the upcoming battle. In contrast, all things were brought into being through Jesus Christ the omnipotent God of heaven and earth. Therefore, all his men, believing that Christ would give aid to all who believe in him, called upon the help of Christ. Though greatly outnumbered, St. Andrew’s men routed the Persians.

When it was discovered that this victory was done in the name of Jesus Christ, St. Andrew and his men were put on trial by Antiochus. When they confessed Christ they were tortured: St. Andrew was placed on a bed of hot iron and the hands of his men were nailed to block of wood. They were then chased through the streets by soldiers. In the end, these men, too, came to believe in Christ because they saw the strength of St. Andrew’s faith and listened to his teachings.

After seeing the folly of these tortures, Antiochus had them all beheaded: St. Andrew and 2,593 soldiers. At the spot of their martyrdom, one of the passes of Mt. Tauros in Cilicia, a spring come forth from the ground. It was soon discovered by the local Christians to have healing properties.

As a player, one of the things I enjoy most in an RPG is being surprised by my character. I allow the events of a campaign to shape them and inform their decisions as they advance in levels and/or power. For example, I was playing in a campaign that had a desecrated temple of St. Cuthbert sitting atop the Caverns of Thracia. I joined the campaign late and ended up playing an NPC turned PC.

Over the course of the campaign, the group managed to finally (and unknowingly) cleanse the temple of St. Cuthbert. Ironically, my character had failed a saving through and therefore was fleeing. Therefore, my character was the only PC to witness a divine light bathe the temple leaving behind a set of Bracers of Defense.

The fear left my character and he took up the bracers in awe. I decided that my character would see this event as a command to wear the bracers for the rest of his career and that he would become a devout follower of St. Cuthbert. Thus, by a random event, my fighter-type character ended up religiously wearing a magic item primarily designed for magic-users. This event reminds me very much of the story of St. Andrew and his soldiers. They allowed a single event to radically change their lives.

Fortunately, it was a 1e D&D campaign, therefore I had the freedom to choose this path for my character without crippling him.

In the wake of Paizo’s release of Starfinder, I am getting buried under a bunch of promotional material about various companies releasing support material for the game. I have to be honest, here: I have zero interest, despite the fact that my Gamer ADD is now focused on producing a 4-page ruleset for a sci-fi RPG. The reason I don’t have any interest is, again, related to the story of St. Andrew.

The 3.5 engine that drives Pathfinder and Starfinder gives off the aura of having a plethora of options for its players. Unfortunately, this is largely an illusion. The game assumes a certain amount of min/maxing and optimization by its players as their characters advance in levels. This cam be seen in the way monsters are handled at higher levels. Thus, the game itself punishes players who do not follow a pre-determined set of paths for advancement. Without optimization, a character can very quickly become unplayable and even a danger to the rest of the party. Thus, a character is expected to advance and develop in a particular fashion despite what happens in a campaign. Paizo even has The Pathfinder Strategy Guide, a book entirely dedicated to strategies of planning out how to optimally advance a character. Everything is planned out. There are not supposed to be any surprises.

I have experienced this on more than one occasion, where I chose to follow the logic of the events in a campaign rather than The Strategy Guide optimization. My characters would end up being less and less effective in play compared to those who had panned out their characters and the campaign became less and less interesting to me and I became more and more frustrated. While I understand and appreciate the min/max impulse in games, it best belongs in the realm of war-games, not RPGs.

I believe that if St. Andrew were a 3.5/Pathfinder character he and his men would never have chosen the path of Christ, because it wan’t optimal to their career choice; however, it makes sense in context of the events they actually experienced. Allowing PCs to freely make similar choices without systemically punishing them for doing so is not only more realistic, it’s also more fun: we get to be surprised by how the campaign world affects our characters as much as our characters affect the campaign world.

Meditating on 5e (Basic Rules)

PLEASE NOTE: As of now, all my musings on 5e are going to be about the Basic Rules (which I will refer to as 5eBR from now on). When one has a child in the hospital for the better part of a year, one’s gaming budget is Free. I have no ability anytime in the near future to actually purchase any of the core rulebooks. I may never do so.

I really want to like 5eBR. I really do. It is a really good hack of D&D and there are several interesting ideas that I will be hacking into my own hacked version of D&D. Unfortunately, I cannot bring myself to like 5eBR as is. It all comes down to a theatrical concept called suspension of disbelief.

When putting on a theatrical production, it is critical that the world presented have some kind of internal logic so that when presented with things such as the Battle of Agincourt from Shakespeare’s Henry V— something that could never happen within the confines of a theatre stage — the audience can easily immerse themselves in that world. They suspend their disbelief that the battle can’t occur on stage.

RPGs operate in a similar fashion. Everyone who plays D&D, for example, should know that the world presented defies all kinds of economic, physical and social logic. However, the rules do such a good job of representing a fantasy world in the abstract that we have successfully suspended our disbelief for decades.

Upon reflection, the moment I knew I didn’t like 3.5 was the moment my suspension of disbelief was shattered. Our party stumbled upon a machine that was built/controlled by the bad guys. It was a giant clock work of gears. We wanted to literally throw a wrench into the works; however, we did not have a rogue and the gear system was the equivalent of a DC25 trap. No matter what our party did, no matter how logical, no matter that it would work in the real world no one in our party could stop those gears from turning. I could no longer immerse myself in the world and I found, rather, that I was just seeing how illogical and silly it all was.

When the DM section of 5eBR was released, I decided to “play” the game the only way I could: stock a dungeon and see how it compared to the editions I like to play. I quickly realized that I couldn’t. There are no treasure tables. I then realized why WotC would be so lazy as to not include any: all XP comes from combat. Treasure is largely irrelevant.

This seriously challenges my ability to suspend disbelief: in order to become a better mage, cleric or thief you have to go kill stuff. The world presented isn’t a world where adventurers explore ruins from lost civilizations. Rather, it is a murder world where prowess in combat is everything. I suppose if you wanted to run a campaign inspired by Glen Cook’s The Black Company this would be okay, but this certainly isn’t the game I played as a kid.

What really threw my suspension of disbelief out the window was the combination of XP progression and the amount of XP given per kill. I have no real issue with fast XP progressions, especially in context of not having the kind of time necessary to take a character from 1st to 9th level (something I never did using older rule sets). Personally, this really never bothered me because my favorite “tier” of play is 1st-3rd; however, I could see how shortening the XP progression could be a very good thing.

Having said that, the world 5eBR presents completely breaks down when considering the amount of XP given per combat kill. A measly little goblin is worth 50 XP, a bandit 25 XP and a commoner 10 XP. At 300 XP to get to 2nd level, it would take 6 goblins, 12 bandits or 30 commoners to advance. This defies logic, because those kinds of numbers should be achievable through basic training — especially in a murder world where even scholarly mages need to kill things to be a better mage.

This is rendered even less logical when one realizes that Soldier is one of the backgrounds available to 1st level characters. A professional soldier in a world where combat is a constant should be plowing through the equivalent of 6 goblins almost every day during training, let alone if one actually participated in some kind of military campaign. Add to that the idea a 1st level character could be an officer and the 5eBR world just spirals off into the ridiculous.

I suppose that if the average age of a 5eBR 1st level character were, say, eight I might be able to accept all of the above, but I don’t really get off on imaging a character as an eight year old kid who is forced to murder things in order to get by.

For me, this all highlights the genius of Arneson’s 1 XP = 1 gp spent. Regardless of the world in which such a scheme exists, the main impetus for characters to advance from 1st to 2nd level is getting enough cash to invest in themselves — whether through better equipment, better henchman, tithing to a church, a down payment on a house, etc. Thus, each character can become a renaissance man (woman) in their own unique way and believably face down tougher and tougher monsters and win.

It also becomes believable that an army of commoners will still be commoners after a series of battles. When treasure spent is the main way one gets to 2nd level (because otherwise someone would have to kill 100+ goblins), war is no longer the main way a bunch of normal joes can become high-powered adventurers. Only folks willing to explore ruins, lost civilizations and dungeons to bring back treasure get to do that.

Languages of Averoigne

As I have admitted in the past, one of things that I have really come to appreciate from the 3.5 SRD is the way that it handles languages. It lists both a standard group of languages (Common, Ork, Elvish, etc.) and the alphabet that it uses. This way not only is there a common group upon which to understand how language is used across different campaigns, but how different languages are related (and thus reveal cultural realities about the world). This format, of course, is easily adaptable and customizable for different campaigns.

I mention this, because one of the fallow projects that I am most interested in finishing is my work with my own version of Averoigne. I have found that using the SRD understanding of language to be very useful both in terms of harking back to a Holmesian understanding of humanoids and for the purposes of building a rich cultural background. Here is a table with the SRD languages/alphabets in brackets followed by the languages they represent within my version of Averoigne:

[Celestial] Greek
[Common] Latin — Salic, Church Latin
[Draconic] Norn
[Dwarven] German — Dwarven, Gnomish, Goblin, Kobold
[Elvish] Celtic — Occitan, Elvish, Orc, Hobgoblin, Gnoll
[Infernal] Gothic

I made Celestial the equivalent of Greek, because that is the language of both the Gospel and the Christian Empire, which now only exists in its original form in the East. Rome has fallen and the Christian peoples of the West are now trying to pick up the pieces.

Common, therefore, is the various forms of Latin. Salic is a fantasy version of proto-French spoken by the Salians (which is the original tribal name for what would be become the Franks). They represent those outsiders in Averoigne whose answer to the fall of Rome is to create a new Holy Roman Empire based in Salia (which lies somewhere northwest of Averoigne). Church Latin is a more archaic version of the Common tongue.

Draconic is represented by Norn, another real world language found in Scotland; however, I am playing with double meaning of the word because it evokes the Norns of Norse Mythology. It thus has a pagan feel and represents a guiding force behind the pagan Rome of old (I am also thinking here of the woman riding a dragon in Revelation 17).

Dwarven is represented by German because (as fey touched demi-humans who have rejected the image and likeness within themselves) it is one of the main language groups spoken by pagans outside the Roman Empire. Gnomish, Goblin and Kobold are different dialects.

Elvish is represented by Celtic because it is the other major culture/language of pagans outside the Roman Empire. Occitan is another (dying) real world language, which can be found in Southern France in the very region Averoigne is a fantasy analog of. In the real world, it is a Romance Language (derived from Latin); however, I wanted it to represent more of a cultural clash between the Averni (the native people of Averoigne) and the Salians. They yearn for the old Romes (both Christian and pagan). It also nicely sets up a conflict within the Averni themselves over which pieces of Rome they are trying to pick up. Thus, Occitan, Orc, Hobgoblin and Gnoll are all dialects of Elvish.

Infernal is represented by Gothic, because Christian Rome was sacked by Visigoths and a fantasy version of the Visigoths can easily be seen as a stand-in for the infernal forces found in the Chaotic (Demonic) Wilderness.

Meditating on Electrum

Beedo of Dreams in the Lich House is musing out loud today about how the various versions of D&D interact with each other within the nebulous confines of old school play. He starts with the observation that ACKS borrows many concepts from 3e+ and/or has a 3e+ design feel to it. I myself have on more than one occasion admitted that the idea of 3e+ D&D is quite a gorgeous thing. Putting into practice is the problem.

Personally, I find it very interesting what has bled into my own gaming play from the 3e+ era. They often surprise me, because rather than being big design ideas they are minutia that actually makes interacting with my world a little easier for my players. Languages were one of the first that I noticed.

Another is the non-use of electrum. Despite the fact that it is a naturally occurring metal (with a mixture of silver, gold and a variety of other ores) that was used in coinage in several parts of the ancient world, it messes up the wonderfully easy to understand decimal system of 3e+ coinage. So, despite the fact it exists in both older versions of D&D and its clones, and despite the fact that Gygax had it exactly correct that electrum is half-way between silver and gold, my players have rejected it out of hand as part of their game play.

My problem is that I have always had a soft spot for the metal. It is possibly more historically accurate as a type of coin than either gold or platinum. It conducts electricity. Its name sounds really cool. Yet, my players are absolutely correct that it is just a pain to include it in the game as half a gold piece.

I mention all of this because I ran across this hymn today while chasing down something I was researching:

Beholding the orders of the Angels in manifold form, Ezekiel proclaimed them in his history long ago; among them stood the six-winged Seraphim, and the many-eyed Cherubim compassing round about; and with them he saw the Archangels shining like electrum and glorifying Christ unto all the ages. [my emphasis]

This got me thinking that I could re-introduce the metal into my game as a magical metal. Whereas adamantium and mithral are arcane metals, electrum could be a metal used to create/channel divine magic.

Unlike adamantium and mithral (which are ostensibly forged by a class that cannot use them in most applications), electrum could be fully taken advantage of by the spell casters who forge them — clerics.

Herein is another way that 3e+ design can sneak in to my game at a more fundamental level: rather than tying metamagic feats to players, I could tie them to various applications of electrum.