Dilemmas and non-dilemmas

Dashiell Hammett, the father of 'hard-boiled' detective fiction

Yesterday I was 'de-friended', to use that horrible neologism, by someone on facebook (no-on I know in real life, so don't worry) como siempre for offering some constructive criticism and a different opinion. The guy was offering advice for writers. He said that they should give their protagonists a strong moral code and then put them present them with a moral dilemma. The problem was that the example he gave wasn't much of a dilemma. It could easily be resolved with a reasonable compromise or by thinking around the problem. 

Since the example involved a detective, I pointed out that the anti-heroes of the best 'hard-boiled' detective fiction of the 20s, 30s and 40s commonly faced far worse dilemmas. I don't want to spoil the plot of The Maltese Falcon for those of you who haven't read it or seen either of the films, but in the first couple of chapters Miles Archer, the partner of the protagonist Sam Spade, is murdered. It is then established that Spade has been having an affair with Archer's wife, which puts him under suspicion. It's strongly suggested that he's also having a fling with his secretary, who knows about his other affairs.

At the end of the story Spade is confronted with a dilemma, a real one. There is no workable compromise, no clever way round it. He is truly between the devil and the deep blue sea. He decides to play it by the book, and ends up being hated by everyone, including himself. This is not like one of Joseph Heller's Catch 22 dilemmas, which were meant to illustrate the absurdities of war, the military and life in general, but the kind of situation everyone faces at some point.

The Maltese Falcon was written by Dashiell Hammett, a man who was blacklisted by Hollywood for his political views: he was a communist and a leading civil rights campaigner. Hollywood is like that. Like the Greco-Roman god Cronos (Saturn), it devours its own children when they show precocious or exceptional talent or threaten a revolution. Anything new and exciting is quickly stamped out or appropriated and homogenised, then brought down to the lowest common denominator. 

It's impossible to divorce Hammett's politics from his literary works. He took up writing in the early 20s after quitting the Pinkerton detective agency in disgust at its involvement in union-busting activities. He understood humanity and saw clearly the web of collusion between businessmen, politicians, police and gangsters. He was a modernist and a realist. 

By writing honest stories where the ending was never happy, Hammett threatened to bring down the fantasy world of commercial entertainment, where square-jawed heroes face phony dilemmas in unreal, black-and-white morality situations in a mockery of real life.

The Maltese Falcon came out 85 years ago. It was a popular paperback novel - Hammett's first short stories were printed in pulp fiction magazines - not a great and worthy epic like Moby Dick. Two films were made of it within 12 years. The state of fiction writing and filmmaking is getting worse, not better. The rot needs to be stopped. If authors, publishers, producers and directors are unwilling to do so, at least role-players might try.

God Stats and Dump Stats

Hello again after a long break.

In role-playing games, a 'God Stat' is a stat which is more useful or desirable than any other. Typically this is a stat that has the greatest usefulness in combat, or which determines how many hit points you have or how many skill points you get to spend. The player character with the highest value in that stat will have a big advantage over the other players. In games where players can either juggle their stat rolls to suit the character they want to play, or just have points to buy stats with, most players (especially powergamers) will try to maximise that stat for their character.

An example is the Reflexes stat in Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0., on which all the combat skills (and many other cool skills) were based, which helped decide who act first in the combat round, and which added to the number of skill points you got to spend.

The Norse god Thor has a Strength of 100. Make that 1,000!

A 'Dump Stat' is the opposite of a God Stat. It's the stat which nobody cares about, often because it's never used for anything 'cool'. In many RPGs the 'Charisma' or 'Appearance' stat is the dump stat, because no-one really cares if anyone likes or fancies their character when they can kill everyone in the room in ten seconds.

Stig of the Dump has a Charisma of 3.

One reason for the (perceived) existence of God and Dump Stats is that the most widely-played RPGs are either in the Fantasy genre, where the game generally revolves around dungeon crawling and monster slaying, or are otherwise combat-heavy games. Cyberpunk genre games, for example, seem to end up being all about getting as many high-tech weapons as your character can carry and using them on someone at the earliest opportunity. 

In designing this RPG I decided to try to avoid creating God Stats and Dump Stats. I'll try and explain how I went about that.

In Lead & Chrome there are eight primary stats and four secondary stats derived from them. The main stats are:

Strength: how much physical force you can exert. Although there is only one skill that uses the Strength stat, it affects how much damage you can do in close combat and how much weight you can carry. Strength stat checks might be used to see if you can bend or break an object, or overpower an opponent.

Toughness: your physical endurance and how resistant you are to disease and poisons. It is also used to see if you can survive being mortally injured long enough for a doctor or first-aider to get to you. Other  than that there is only one skill which relies on Toughness.

Agility: your gross motor skills, and how fast you can run. Close combat skills are based on Agility.

Coordination: your fine motor skills. Ranged combat skills are based on Coordination.

Intelligence: how clever you are. Academic skills depend on Intelligence.

Know-How: how good you are with manual tasks and machines. Technical skills are related to Know-How. 

Charm: how well you understand and get on with people. Important skills to do with persuasion and telling if someone is lying use Charm.

Nerve: how much guts, grit or whatever you have. Several key skills are linked to Nerve, and you need plenty of this if you're going to face off with your enemies in a fight.

The derived stats are:

Size: how physically big you are. Size is calculated as the average of Strength and Toughness, with halves rounded up. It affects how badly you get wounded if you're hit in combat, and what size clothes (and body armour) you can wear.

Reflexes: how fast you can react. Reflexes is the average of Agility and Coordination, rounded up. Combat initiative depends on Reflexes.

Looks: how attractive you are. Looks is the average of Geniality and Agility rounded up (since a high Agility stat means that you're in good physical shape).

Sanity: this is the unusual one, calculated by adding your Geniality and Nerve. Every time you do something brutal or witness something horrendous or terrifying, you have to roll equal or less than your Sanity (subject to positive or negative modifiers) on a D20 or lose one point of the stat, and a point of either Geniality or Nerve to boot. In Black Chrome, the Cyberpunk setting for Lead & Chrome, having cybernetics implanted in your body also calls for a Sanity check.

Notice how the eight primary stats roughly make four pairs. A character with a high Strength but a low Toughness is like a boxer with a glass jaw. One with a high Coordination but a low Agility is like an obese watchmaker. One with a high Intelligence but a low Know-How might be a university professor who can't work out how to turn their computer on, and one with a high Nerve and low Geniality is probably a cold-blooded killer.

Stats in Lead & Chrome are generated by rolling 2D4+1 eight times, then assigning the results to the stats as you please. This gives a range of 3-9 with an average of 6. One stat of the player's choosing can then be raised by a further point, possibly raising it to 10, which is the absolute human maximum (and quite exceptional) in the game.

Alternatively, the Game Master can give the players a number of points to assign to their stats as they please, with the proviso that you can only have one stat with a value of 10 and no stat lower than 3. A total of 50 points gives an average character, but the GM might want to give players more (or even fewer) points. 

Now, say the GM is generous and gives you 55 points to play with, and you want to create the ultimate combat character. You want them to be a crack shot with a gun, an artiste with a knife and to have fists of fury. You're going to want a high Coordination and Agility to complement your Firearms, Melee and Martial Arts skills, and to give you a high Reflexes stat. But you also want a high Strength to do more damage in close combat, and a high Toughness to help keep you conscious in a tough fist-fight or alive after an armour-piercing bullet goes through your kevlar vest, while the resulting high Size reduces the effects of attacks that hit you.

At the same time, you want a high Intelligence so that you have a good chance of making Perception skill rolls to spot lowlifes reaching for their hidden guns, and a high Nerve stat so you don't reflexively duck for cover every time a bullet whizzes past your ear. A reasonably high Geniality score is also useful as it raises your Sanity, so you don't end up with your nerves shot to hell and jumping at shadows after a few close shaves.

Those 55 points could buy you seven stats at level 7 (just above average) and one at 6. But you don't want to be average, you want to be the best. So you put 10 points in Coordination and 9 points each in Strength, Toughness, Agility and Nerve. Hold on, now you've only got 9 points left for Intelligence, Know-How and Geniality, three each. Your whirling dervish of death is also a moron, a technophobe and a social outcast. You'd need another five or 10 points to build the character you really want, and unless the GM's a soft touch he's not going to give them to you.

So that's is how I tried to avoid God Stats or Dump Stats in Lead & Chrome. Do you think it works? Please leave a comment below this post.

Genre Studies

A bugbear yesterday

It's fashionable at the moment to talk about 'gender-swapping' characters in fiction, in order to get a magical 50/50 'gender balance' and eliminate sexist stereotypes. Aside from being a misuse of the word 'gender' (sex is the right word; gender in this sense refers to the roles and stereotypes society assigns to people on the basis of their biological sex -- in other words sexism), the concept falls down as soon as you run into a cast of characters whose sex has social significance. Thelma and Louise wouldn't mean very much if you changed it to Theodore and Lewis, would it now? And if the characters in a story lack real meaning, what's the point of them, or it?

So let us leave gender and move on to the real subject of this post: genre. Lead & Chrome is intended as a system for running games in three fictional genres: Western, Detective/Noir/Gangster, Cyberpunk. These are the subjects of the sourcebooks I'm writing at the moment. They are modern, realist, adult genres, with little or no room for romanticism, and the game is intended to reflect that.

You may ask: why these settings? Why not write a Fantasy or Space Opera game like everyone else is doing nowadays?

Class- and experience level-based fantasy role-playing games are a bit of a bugbear of mine. That is to say, they have 3+1 hit dice, Armour Class 5, they are of low-to-average Intelligence, are Chaotic Evil in alignment and 6D6 of them will appear at any given moment. Don't get me wrong, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson invented RPGs in 1974 with Dungeons & Dragons, and they deserve all the credit they get. But Fantasy has been done to death. D&D is the source of most of the clichés in the hobby and the subject of most of its parodies.

RuneQuest, which first came out in 1978, eschewed the class and level system, and Chaosium's other big games, Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer (both released in 1981) also broke the D&D mould: the latter was a conscious deconstruction of the fantasy genre, the former a disturbing cosmic horror game set in the 1920s, where players expected their characters to either be killed or go mad before the end of the campaign.

By contrast there hasn't been a proper Wild West game (as opposed to Weird West like Werewolf: The Wild West or Deadlands) since the third edition of Boot Hill in 1990, and no detective-themed games since Top Secret or Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes in the 80s. Of the two big Cyberpunk games, Shadowrun was a fantasy crossover which William Gibson hated, although R.Talsorian's 90s classic Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0 is still available.

The fact that Fantasy is experiencing a resurgence at the moment (along with the spate of superhero action films coming out of Hollywood) is no surprise. The entertainment industry worldwide has been busily infantilising culture for at least 35 years. Think how many times you read or hear the words 'terrorist' and 'terrorism' in books, films and TV nowadays. Whenever you do, there's a very good chance you're about to have your intelligence insulted.

Fantasy books and films and superhero comics don't have to be just for children, but the sad truth is that most of them are. Comic writer Alan Moore has said so. Both genres lend themselves to black-and-white, good-and-evil heroic storylines, but action films, dramas and thrillers are also being dumbed down. The hard-boiled anti-hero, born in the new wave of American detective fiction of the 1920s, 30s and 40s, has become just a cardboard cut-out, whose apparent vices and contradictions are just a thin veneer of grime over the shining armour beneath.

All this is the result of deliberate decisions by writers, editors, producers and directors, by the industry as a whole. These are commercial decisions, but they are also politicals decision that reflect the politics of our time. It's not a unique problem to the present either, as Mark Twain or Raymond Chandler could both attest. The battle between culture and philistinism has been raging for thousands of years. I may sound pessimistic, but in fact I look forward to the day when things get turned around again.

So I want to go back to the last time paperbacks and films were really about something, when writers wrote about real life from their own experiences. Hence the choice of these three genres.

Am I right, or am I talking bollocks? Please leave your comments below this post.

Combat: Penetration and Damage Class

Diagram of ballistic gelatin test result for .308 Winchester soft-point (SP, similar to a Dum-Dum bullet) hunting ammunition, by former US Army surgeon Dr Martin Fackler (from http://www.firearmstactical.com/wound.htm).

The two most important stats for a weapon in Lead & Chrome are Penetration (PEN) and Damage Class (DC). These are explained in the Combat chapter under Armour and Penetration and Wounds, but an explanation of how the values of these stats are arrived at may be of interest, if only from the point of view of game design.

Background

In 1991 R. Talsorian Games published a book titled Edge of the Sword Vol. 1: Compendium of Modern Firearms by Kevin Dockery. The book was a generic supplement for various role-playing games, including R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0., but it also contained the kernel of an original RPG, in the form of a combat system. 

Kevin Dockery's system used a several complex mathematical formulae to calculate the effectiveness of various firearms against armour and cover, along with the size of the wound cavity created in the victim's body: in other words penetration and damage. 

For many years before I began the Lead & Chrome project in earnest I had been tinkering around with ways to calculate RPG damage for any firearm, by taking weapons defined in the rules, comparing the in-game damage with raw data like calibre, bullet weight and muzzle velocity, along with statistics derived from those numbers like kinetic energy, momentum and sectional density (much much mass is behind each square millimetre of frontal cross section area). I have compiled have a huge spreadsheet file full of data for all sorts of calibres, with the numbers 'crunched' in various ways.

In late 2011, when I had already started on a set of alternative rules for existing RPGs that would become Lead & Chrome, I read Edge of the Sword in detail for the first time, finally paying attention to the formulae in the back of the book. Having played Megatraveller at school I was familiar with the idea of having separate stats for penetration and damage. It adds a layer of complexity, but it also solves the 'realism' problem of how to describe weapons which penetrate armour easily but cause only limited wounds (like the M16), versus those with low penetration but great wounding potential (like shotgun slugs or flintlock muskets).

I'd already found this interesting discussion of terminal ballistics and wound mechanisms (in terms of big game hunting), and I was working along the lines of using a calculation of wound cavity size as the basis for damage stats. 

So I took Kevin Dockery's formulae for penetration and damage and modified them in various ways, producing two new formulae for what I came to call Penetration and Damage Class. Developing that idea was one of the catalysts for the project of designing an original game.

Penetration (PEN)

PEN represents how well a weapon punches or cuts through body armour and cover materials. It is meant to correspond to real-world data on what class of armour will stop what calibre of bullet, artillery shell, anti-tank grenade etc. 

PEN corresponds to another game stat called Armour Value (AV). If the PEN of the weapon is less than the AV of the target's armour (or intervening cover) then the attack fails to penetrate. If PEN is greater than AV, the attack penetrates with its full DC. If PEN and AV are equal then the attack penetrates with a -4 modifier to the wound roll.

Low levels of AV correspond to the US National Institute of Justice (NIJ) rating for body armour. Type I armour (AV 2) will stop about 50 per cent of .22 LR and .380 ACP rounds. Type IIA (AV 3) will stop about half of .38 Special, .40 S&W and .45 ACP rounds. Type II (AV 4) will stop 9mm Parabellum and .357 Magnum rounds, Type IIIA (AV 5) will stop .44 Magnums, Type III (AV 7) will stop 7.62mm NATO rifle rounds and Type IV (AV9) will stop armour-piercing 7.62mm rounds, half the time.

PEN is calculated simply by multiplying the round's calibre by its muzzle velocity. The result is divided by a constant number X which gives a result of 2 for the .22 Long Rifle calibre, corresponding to the AV 2 value given to NIJ Type I body armour. 

This sounds like an unscientific 'rule of thumb', but it works very well for most handgun and rifle calibres. The results go askew for large-calibre, low-velocity, low-sectional density projectiles like musket balls or shotgun slugs, but merely dividing the PEN of those weapons by two (done by doubling the constant X) gets it back on track. 

Damage Class (DC)

DC expresses the wounding potential of a weapon. It is based on a calculation of how wide and deep a hole the bullet (or arrow or knife) will make in the victim's body.

The formula is quite complex: the round's mass times velocity squared, times the cross-sectional area of the bullet (proportional to calibre/2 squared), all divided by Calibre times Velocity. The result is reduced to its square root to 'flatten out' the results into a manageable range, and then divided by a constant that gives a result of 1 for the .22 Long Rifle cartridge. This can be summed up as:

(Square root of (M x V0 squared x A)/(C x V))/X

Where M = mass, V0 = muzzle velocity, A = cross-sectional area, C = calibre and X = the magic constant.

Sounds complicated? Well, the spreadsheet does all the calculations for me, and I put the resulting stats in the book (or on the web page) for players to use. 

The result of all this algebra is that a Luger pistol has a PEN of 4 and a DC of 2, while a Colt .45 Automatic has a PEN of 3 and a DC of 3. What do you choose, better penetration or better stopping power? A .357 Magnum or .45 Long Colt revolver is seemingly the best of both worlds, with a PEN of 4 and a DC of 3, but you only get six shots and reloading takes longer. A .44 Magnum revolver trumps all of these with a PEN of 5 and a DC of 4, but the rate of fire is lower due to increased recoil. 

Thus we have a nice set of pros and cons for different weapons, which in turn makes the players think about their options.

Pleas leave any comments you have below this post.

Updates; Tasks and Stat Checks

John Dillinger, the famous depression-era bank robber

Today's updates 

Gangsters & G-Men: a new page on character backgrounds has been added, so never fear, source material is being written!

Equipment/Ammunition: tables now include the weight of ammunition (mostly thanks to http://www.pmulcahy.com/ammunition/ammunition.htm), and there is an extra section on how much magazines and ammo belts weigh.

Equipment/Machine Guns: I have clarified whether the listed weight is for a loaded or unloaded weapon, corrected the weights in light of this, and added the weight of ammunition belts to the appropriate weapon descriptions.

Tasks and Stat Checks

I'd now like to write something about the mechanics of the game, regarding Tasks and Stat Checks, the two main mechanisms for getting things done in the game.

A Task (or skill check) is used to decide whether a character successfully uses a skill. The player (or GM for NPCs) rolls 2D10 and adds the character's skill level (a number from 0-10) and relevant Stat for the skill (a number from 3-10), trying to equal or exceed a difficulty number, which is always a multiple of five. Negative and positive modifiers are applied to the dice roll depending on the situation.

A Task: 2D10 + Skill + Stat + Modifiers vs. Difficulty Number

An unmodified roll of 2 on the 2D10 is an automatic failure, and a fumble in most circumstances except a non-critical, no-stress situation. An unmodified roll of 20 is an exceptional success, and a third D10 is rolled and added to the result. If the roll of the extra D10 is a 10, roll a fourth (and so on and so on). This way success or failure are never automatic, unless the GM rules that no Task roll is needed to succeed or that the task is simply impossible.

The average human value for any Stat is six, and a skill level of three or four is considered competent. A task of Average difficulty has a target number of 20, so a character with a skill level of three and a stat level of 6 will succeed on a 2D10 roll of 11: slightly more than a 50 per cent chance.

The human maximum for any Stat (apart from Sanity, which is the sum of Geniality and Nerve) is 10, and a character can have only one Stat at that level. A Skill level of 10 represents the pinnacle of human achievement, and hardly anybody will have even one Skill at that level. For example, sprinting phenomenon Usain Bolt would have an Agility Stat of 10 and an Athletics Skill of 9 or 10, in game terms.

Originally I was going to use a roll of 1D10 + Skill + Stat + Modifiers (with all the difficulty numbers set five points lower), but on reflection I decided that there were advantages to a 2D10 roll. One is that the range of results is greater, making the outcome of any Task roll less predictable. 

Another advantage is that the probability of rolling a particular number is higher for numbers around the middle of the range (11 being the median and average) than it is for results at the extreme (2 or 20). This not only makes fumbles and exceptional successes less likely, but it encourages players to use their heads and role-play by stacking situational modifiers in their favour.

A Stat Check is a roll of 1D10 against the relevant Stat, trying to roll equal or less than the stat. Positive and negative modifiers are applied to the Stat, not the die roll. The exception is the Sanity Stat, which is the sum of Geniality and Nerve and so has a normal starting value from 6-20: A D20 is rolled for a Sanity check.

Stat Checks can be used as a kind of 'saving throw', or when no skill is relevant to the situation. For example, a character would have to make a Toughness check to see whether they recover from a disease or survive poisoning, or a Nerve check to stand up and shoot back when being shot at.

I hope that makes the rules a bit clearer and entices you to play the game. Please leave any comments you have below this post.

James

Hiatus and Site Overhaul

Hi everyone,

This is the first new post on the blog for more than six months, so sorry for the lack of info. I've been working on the Lead & Chrome RPG all that time (the master document has reached 160 pages), but I haven't got around to updating the site or the blog.

But this weekend I caught up with things posted all the latest work to the website. I've added an introduction on What is an Role-Playing Game, reorganised the chapters so that statistics, background and skills are all under Character Generation, and Equipment is now chapter three, with extra material added.

The chapters on Time and Motion, Money, Work and Commerce and In Sickness and in Health have all been expanded with several sub-pages each, and a placeholder page has been put in for the rules for animals.

Lead & Chrome is a work in progress in the true sense: development is continuing but there are still a lot of blank spaces in the rules. I've been working on the four planned setting sourcebooks for the game (which are probably more important than the core rules), and I'll post material from them when I've got something concrete to show for my time.

I'm going to try to update the main website more often and try not to leave it so long between blog posts. Lets see if I live up to that promise.

This, by the way, is lead(II) chromate (PbCrO4), what you get when you combine lead with chrome. Not very exciting, eh?

Please check out the rules and leave any comments you have about them here. Don't be afraid to be critical!

James