3d6 down the lifepath

the system presented here builds on this statline

rule

A background is something you could be raised to, while a career is a way to seek your fortune. Backgrounds have longer skill lists and careers have short ones. There is also a skill list for unfortunate wretches. All adventurers start with some basic adventuring skills (2 body, 2 verbal).

1. Roll two distinct d6 three times. 
2. One die increases your Condition and the other increases your Presence.
3. Take verbal skills based on the CO die and body skills based on the PR one.
   

   Roll	1	2,3	4,5	6
   Skills	4	3	2	1

4. Until you roll doubles, take skills from the first background you rolled. After that, take skills from either the career matching that roll or from the wretched list.

Your Training is equal to your total number of body skills (2 + those you chose) and your Learning is equal to your total number of verbal skills (2 + those you chose).

build

To support this character creation system, one obviously has to provide setting-appropriate backgrounds and careers. How exactly a roll of two dice indicates one or the other is not specified. Here are some possibilities, given that indicate the fact that only non-doubles can be keyed to backgrounds.:

• Difference: 5 backgrounds of descending probability or 6 careers of varying probabilities (0: 1/6, 1: 5/18, 2: 2/9, 3: 1/6, 4: 1/9, 5: 1/18).
• Sum: 9 backgrounds or 11 careers with a curve:
  2. 1/36 career
  3. 1/15 background, 1/18 career
  4. 1/15 background, 1/12 career
  5. 2/15 background, 1/9 career
  6. 2/15 background, 5/36 career
  7. 1/5 background, 1/6 career
  8. 2/15 background, 5/36 career
  9. 2/15 background, 1/9 career
  10. 1/15 background, 1/12 career
  11. 1/15 background, 1/12 career
  12. 1/36 career
• Combination: 15 equiprobable backgrounds, or 15 careers of 1/18 probability and 6 of 1/36.
• Ordered pair: 30 equiprobable backgrounds or 36 equiprobable careers.

Regardless of how one orders the transitions, be aware that there's a 125/216 ~ 57.87% chance that a character will come through with no career. Of those that have a career, all of them will have rolled doubles for their first career, so doubles should be assigned to the sorts of careers that are commonly "open to all comers."

why?

I wanted something that was somewhat close to both 3d6 down the line and a lifepath system. This deviates from 3d6 down the line by having much more centrally-normalized TR and LE in the 5-14 range, but CO and PR are pure 3d6. The main thing I don't like about it is that it is fixed length. Ideally, I'd want a lifepath system that's purely random except for your choice to stay on for another round or get off. Well, one must compromise I suppose.

a statline

rule

There are four stats. Condition is to Training what Presence is to Learning. You can have:

• no more things than your Condition
• no more bodily skills than your Training.
• no more bonds than your Presence 
• no more verbal skills than your Learning.

Skills have a ceiling of 1, 2, or 3, which is the maximum number of that skill one may have. All throws are d20 + Condition/Presence + Skills. A 20 or better passes, but if d20 + Skills is 15 or less there may be some complication.

When you run out of Nerve (Not-Getting-Hit-Points), physical damage reduces your Condition and forces a saving throw to keep going. Emotional damage past your Nerve reduces your Presence forces a throw not to break down.

why?

The Fantasy Trip is my favorite game I've never played. Maybe I still will someday. But it emerged from Melee and Wizard, two tactical skirmish games. Melee introduced the Strength/Dexterity split, which is handled quite differently than in the grand Arneson-Gygax tradition. Strength is how tough a character is (how many hits they can take and, in Wizard, how many spells they can cast), while Dexterity governs how likely they are to hit in combat or pull off other maneuvers. The Fantasy Trip used Intelligence (introduced in Wizard) to govern how many skills a character could have, Dexterity to govern how good they were at pulling them off, and Strength how long they can last.

Perhaps I'm a fool for monkeying with such a delicate balance, though Steve Jackson did in GURPS. He split the endurance element out of Strength to make it Health and making Strength responsible for the outcomes (damage, jumping distance, lifting amount) of physical feats. It strikes me to monkey with it in the opposite direction: keep the endurance element of Strength but throw the chance-of-success element of Dexterity in with it and separate physical success and skill (Condition and Training) from psychosocial success and skill (Presence and Learning).

Additionally, this has the feature where every stat corresponds directly to a limit on your character record sheet, which I think is delightfully straightforward.

The damage and saving throw mechanic is straight out of Into the Odd, you can substitute that out with little difficulty and keep the statline mostly the same. I also like the trauma depriving you of the benefits of your relationships angle, but that's going to need to be meshed into a game where those relationships are significant.

orc-goblins

Last September I re-read The Lord of the Rings, and then over the last few weeks I've been reading it aloud with my spouse (who has never read it before). I have a lot of thoughts about it, in particular how the LotR is very different as written than the received idea that people have about what LotR is like (some, but not all of which can be blamed on the film adaptation). But right now I have the most thoughts about orcs and goblins.

Now, much has already been written on Tolkien's orcs, particularly on the question of the racism in their portrayal. I highly recommend this article on the ambiguities in Tolkien's own presentation of them.

It is actually quite important in LotR that 'orc' and 'goblin' are two words for the same thing. Orc, as I'm sure you are aware dear reader, is a word whose modern usage begins with Tolkien and has only the loosest literary antecedent. And yet it is clearly the preferred word in LotR for goblin. I think that this reflects the dual literary heritage of orc-goblins in Tolkien: on the one hand (as in the hobbit) they reflect Germanic traditions of cruel, underworld 'fairy' (the name being a bit of a misnomer due to their typical unloveliness) creatures, while on the other they descend directly from the foreign masses of heathen/infidel/pagan enemies in premodern heroic narrative.

Elements of both of these can be discerned:

• Like ugly fairies, there is a definitional enmity between orc-goblins and dwarves, elves, ents and hobbits, the other fairy-story inhabitants of Middle-Earth. They also here draw their hatred for celestial lights and growing things, qualities that the 'paynim hordes' of romance do not share.
• Like heathen foes, orc-goblins are both cowardly and cruel, but muster for war in great numbers under captains who command their loyalty, fear or both. They desire conquest of the mortal world in a way that fairy-creatures typically do not.

There are also significant differences in their portrayal:

• Although most epics and romances paint the infidel with a broad brush, individual infidels can sometimes be distinguished either as honorable foes or even turncoats who abandon their foul religion. This is not true of orc-goblins. No orcs, nor indeed any of their captains (with the possible exception of Saruman, who began as a friend and is shown mercy as a foe) are portrayed with positive characteristics. In battle of the fields of the Pelenor, only the evil Men in Sauron's armies muster once the Rohirrim break the lines of the ocs. There are no orc-knights.
• Folkloric goblins are often solitary fairies, living in terrifying lightless places and seeking the ill of those who come there. Gollum, who is not in fact an orc-goblin, comes the closest to this portrayal; orc-goblins, too, dwell in darkness, but only in strength of numbers.
• The reverence of the elves for celestial lights and growing things and the hatred of orc-goblins for the same is the closest this enmity comes to the a 'religious' character that defines the heathen as an enemy. However, there is no sense that orc-goblins could (as Gimli does) come to be elf-friends if they learned to love stars and trees. When Treebeard gives a stretch of the long Entish name for orc-goblins, he mixes descriptions of their physical horribleness with those of their wanton disregard for trees; both, to him, seem to reflect natural characteristics.

I don't have big conclusions here, but I will add. Both source traditions of orcs bristle with racist (or to the extent that they precede the notion of race, anti-foreign) elements. Using orc-goblins as foes rather than historical races or nationalities does not really avoid their identification with those nationalities, especially given 1) the explicit alliance of Eastern and Southern Men with the orcs against the Men from the West and 2) the way the physical descriptions of the orc-goblins align with racist caricature and stereotype. To the latter point, one may not use folkloric goblins as a shield, for European folkloric ugliness aligns quite well with not only racist portrayals of foreigners but also portrayals of internal 'enemies' (Jews and Roma, to name prominent ones).

orthogonal checks

being a way to overload x-in-6 chances.

rule

At regular intervals (night or turn) roll a check with a canny die and an uncanny die (of different colors):

• Keyed but uncertain events (a guard hearing noises, a trap being sprung, a creature being in its lair) occur if their number appears on the uncanny die.
• Adventurers have a base 1-in-6 chance to succeed in something chancey (climbing, forcing doors, swimming, etc), to which bonuses can be added from their type or because of their stats. They succeed if the canny die shows that chance or lower.
• In the underworld, a random encounter occurs if the dice show doubles. In the over-world, this occurs if the doubles shown are less than or equal to the area's encounter rate. 

why?

Suppose there's an elf blissfully unaware that they share a room with a hidden trap and a secret passage. There's a:

• 2-in-6 chance they notice the passage
• 2-in-6 chance they spring the trap
• 1-in-6 chance that they encounter a wandering monster

 One could overload this chance on a single d6 in the following way:

1. Trap sprung
2. Trap sprung
3. Passage noticed
4. Passage noticed
5. Wandering monster
6. Nothing happens

There's nothing wrong with this. But it gets strange if the elf starts actively searching. Their chance to find the passage goes up to 4-in-6, and suddenly there's no more room on your d6.

You could at this point roll twice, once for the search and once for the trap/wandering monster. But that changes the behavior. Now it's possible to find the passage and have the trap sprung where previously those were separate outcomes.

Why should the trap and the wandering monster be linked, or the trap and the searching? Why not have three independent checks? That gives us eight possible outcomes rather than the four we had with single d6 overloading.

One reason not to is that rolling more dice potentially gives away the information that there's something to find. That's probably fine in some methods of play. But it also adds complexity to the checks that need to happen.

My preference is to always make the same roll for checks: 2d6 of different colors. Conveniently, the odds of rolling doubles are 1-in-6, the odds of wandering monsters in the dungeon. Although evidently odds were greater in cities and some wilderness environs in early editions, my inclination is that wilderness encounters should be less frequent on the whole than underworld ones. (Hence the encounter rate modification.)

A last consideration should be mentioned:

• If the canny die triggers on a low roll and the uncanny one on a high roll (or vise versa), then the two can occur together but not together with random encounters.
• If the canny and uncanny dice trigger both on low or both on high, then a random encounter will usually coincide with one if it also coincides with the other.

Of these, the first seems better to my mind. A random encounter can coincide with an unexpected twist or with a bit of progress, but not all three together, unless one is more likely than not.

thinking about checks vs throws

I'm thinking about ways in which I want checks to be distinct from throws. Both are meant to add uncertainty into the adventuring in ways the referee cannot prepare for.

• Checks happen and regular points in the procedure, and can introduce complications.
• Throws are one-off, prompted by the fiction, and yes-no. Do you hit? Do you save?

Checks correspond, more or less, to d6 rolls and throws, more or less to d20 rolls in od&d. In fact, a person could probably play a very satisfactory retroclone using only this method of play for checks and target 20 for throws and not need any additional rules references.

But if I could leave well enough alone like that, I probably would not be writing this blog in the first place. These are some specific posts that I'm thinking about in particular with regard to checks:

• On dungeon crawling structure. This is honestly the root of the idea that checks are procedural while throws are prompted by the fiction.
• On d6 uses in od&d and simplifications of them.
• The overloaded encounter die (or, in its advanced form, the hazard system) the things I love about this are its simplicity and the way it neatly maps onto the different time scales. The things I do not like about it are that it is resists the chances being altered by situation and that all the outcomes are mutually exclusive.
• On the wilderness encounter chance, which points out that the x-in-6 chance to become lost is rolled separately from the y-in-6 chance to have an encounter. Either, both, or neither can all occur.
• Encounter stew, which is delightful, but too focused on the specific question of dungeon encounters for me to immediately jump from there to a general procedure for a check.

I'm also thinking of the dice mechanic of Swords Without Master, where (for those unfamiliar) two visually distinct d6 are rolled, one for the Glum mood and one for the Jovial mood. If one is greater than the other, that mood prevails. If they are equal, the acting player will be stymied in whatever they're trying to do (the chance of doubles on two dice, of course, being 1-in-6).