The Villain is You, GM

Lone Wolf Fists doesn't do something that Exalted does well: I argue, however, that Exalted (and indeed, no game) should ever do this well. 

Despite the "ten minutes to midnight" energy of the many apocalyptic metaplots, Exalted has the feeling of an established, stable setting, with a well defined status quo. Probably because of the volumes of dull, uninteresting text dedicated to writing about it

Oh how did an image of this book get here

This gives players the experience of being bulls in the China shop of the world. They're not just breaking things, they're breaking old, valuable things

I think it contributes to the player-versus-gm energy of the entire enterprise

If you're the kind of person who both deigns to run Exalted AND wants to keep their setting books as reference material, you're incentivized to sabotage the player's attempts to change established setting

Meanwhile, in what I can only describe as anticipatory design, the powers that players get explicitly outline ways in which the GM cannot fuck with them

Players have (and motherfucker, you better believe *I have*) pointed to the rules when the GM says some version of "no" to one of their hair-brained schemes and stated "that is exactly how this rule works, fuck you”

Nice try bitch, I'm a Solar

For example, good ol' husband-seducing demon dance

"I make a speech and get this whole village, who hate us, to march on that dragon blood blood camp". GM either sets the difficulty, or, more reasonable, scoffs at the notion and says "you can't do that".

You point to the charm:

Some relevant aspects: Characters with Mental DV less than the Solar’s successes must spend two Willpower or fall instantly in love either with the Solar or something the Solar represents.

(For scale, most mental DVs are between 2-3. A Solar's successes from a typical Performance roll number around Five)

This love is a form of commitment (see p. 201). Targets can break the commitment naturally but they must spend one Willpower in each scene where they deliberately attempt to shake it off."

Again, to give you an idea, most mortals have around four Willpower max. And spending a Willpower to resist mental influence is described in the text as extremely unlikely and rare.

"Motherfucker, how many willpower these shit farmers got? Because they're about to be in love with the idea”

 …

Now, obviously, I didn't want to foster those kind of crossed-incentives. I wanted an attitude of collaboration and mutual respect between players and GM.

BUT those decisions mean that the extremely fun, punk energy that Exalted can generate is sacrificed. How can you buck an authority enforcing boring bullshit, when the authority is on your side and everything is explosively cool?

Pictured: the typical LWF GM (chad)

I feel like my path forward here is to advise GMs to make their bad guys absolute dickweeds

"I use Jagi-summoning Technique!"

We need to transfer that punk energy where it always should have been: within the framework of the game itself

"In Lone Wolf Fists, the evil NPC is your enemy

In Exalted, the evil NPC is sympathetic and secretly right, so the GM is your enemy"

GNS is communist gobbledygook

Well, I tried really hard to read GNS theory and my impression is that it is pure gibberish. It can’t even describe the bedrock TTRPG experience as anything but “ …(A) halting and incoherent mix of Gamism and Simulationism”. I actually didn’t set out to condemn it, but I sincerely cannot think of a more damning condemnation of a ttrpg theory than that.

Let me illustrate just how wrongheaded the theory is;

Imagine that you’d never heard of roleplaying games and had no concept of even playing them like games at all. You come up with an idea for an activity, let’s call it “labyrinth explorer”, where you design a huge, elaborate labyrinthine world and its denizens, and your friends all take on the role of explorers creeping through it.

There aren’t any rules to speak of when you start; just a very fundamental “call and response” style play, where:

1. You describe the surroundings to the players (based on your map and notes of the area)

2. They each tell you what activity they’d like to engage in, and for how long

3. You describe the outcomes of their activities

So you have this diceless, mechanicless experience with only a few concrete boundaries:

1. The labyrinth and everything in it is “real”; you, as the narrator, deny yourself the capacity to edit anything you’ve written down during the game. You can edit things prior to play if they haven’t been encountered, but after they’re a part of play, they’re “concrete”

2. The world of the labyrinth operates on generally the same physical and psychological principles as our own; you, as the narrator, and to a lesser extent your players, are all committed to upholding this integrity so that the world can be “explored” as genuinely as possible

As you continue to run sessions of labyrinth explorer for your friends, you find the desire for the unexpected creeping in. It feels somewhat arbitrary to say one explorer can succeed at a task while another fails, and there’s no real tension to a violent encounter, since you’re certain of its outcome unless the explorer’s tactics really surprise you.

So, you introduce a few simple randomizers. Roll a die and get over a target number sort of things, rock simple but satisfying because:

1. They take the outcome of reasonably uncertain but possible actions out of your control, allowing the world to surprise both you and the explorers

2. They create true tension and stakes, despite their simple framework

A simple extension of these principles leads you to devise what we would call “wandering monster charts” based on the untrackably complex movements of the denizens of the labyrinth. Now, the time spent performing tasks risks encounters with the roving inhabitants of the labyrinth, adding another exciting and tense element to exploration.

And so it goes, I’m certain you all see where I’m heading with this. You eventually evolve something very similar to our collectively well-known alliterative hobby, keeping the principles I outlined above intact.

This is, essentially, the most intuitive and reasonable way to develop a TTRPG, but I’m eyeballing the “simulationist” description on the current GNS page and, well…

“Controversy: is that third box really there?

It has rightly been asked whether Simulationism really exists, given that it consists mainly of Exploration. I suggest that Simulationism exists insofar as the effort and attention to Exploration may over-ride either Gamist or Narrativist priorities.”

“Does D&D exist?!” Apparently, that’s a sincere question that was asked by the author of this theory. He was proud enough about this to write it down and make it widely publicly available.

Conclusion: I’m not going to waste any further neurons on GNS theory and I suggest you don’t either. You can read it, in its entirety, at this link if you really want to swallow an ocean of brain poison, but I advise you to spend your time productively instead. The author’s skill at fundamental elements of argument, like definition, is so exasperatingly poor that I can’t even properly describe it. Just, I mean look at this passage, where he flails at, and ultimately totally fails to, define his own re-definiton of “Exploration”:

“Exploration and its child, Premise

The best term for the imagination in action, or perhaps for the attention given the imagined elements, is Exploration. Initially, it is an individual concern, although it will move into the social, communicative realm, and the commitment to imagine the listed elements becomes an issue of its own.

When a person perceives the listed elements together and considers Exploring them, he or she usually has a basic reaction of interest or disinterest, approval or disapproval, or desire to play or lack of such a desire. Let's assume a positive reaction; when it occurs, whatever prompted it is Premise, in its most basic form. To re-state, Premise is whatever a participant finds among the elements to sustain a continued interest in what might happen in a role-playing session. Premise, once established, instils the desire to keep that imaginative commitment going.”

Notice how, twice, he derails his explanation of exploration into the assumed, imagined psychology of the people involved? I underlined those, if you missed them. Absent from this definition?  A FUCKING DEFINITION

How someone could see something that fails this spectacularly and grant it even the most merciful of credence totally perplexes me. This fails basic reading comprehension rules, people, it isn’t written by a genius but an idiot who desperately wants to be perceived as smart.

Whatever telephone game passed for knowledge transmission in the early aughties internet has obfuscated the reality of this drivel to the point where EVERYONE and their mothers refers back to it. People: I take back what I said earlier. I urge you to read this, in its entirety, and earnestly compare it to your actual experience playing TTRPGs. It will reveal itself as nonsensical ramblings within minutes.

My fundamental point: this is so catastrophically incorrect that even taking it seriously enough to correct it is a fundamental error. This is, plainly put, utter nonsense

Lone Wolf Fists: In HARDBACK POD

 Get stoked folks, our hardback print on demand is unleashed, on Drivethrurpg!

Enjoy some glory shots:

Yeah that's Markiplier in the background

THICC

I had to see how the train suplex worked out. God, it's glorious in print

What's on the horizon? New, updated Blood from God's Eye intro adventure, updated character sheets (editable if I can figure it out!), GM screen (maybe?!) and then...?

I guess you'll have to stay tuned to find out!

Talking about Games Winning Technique: Prana Pathway Inflammation

Had ourselves a little contest recently in a cropssover with the Talking About Games channel. He does good stuff, by the way; certainly including his stellar review of Lone Wolf Fists, but he talks about a lot of fine games and gaming philosophy.

Honestly thought he reviewed in the nude

THE CONTEST:

In words: "CONTEST! Write your unique, over the top, super-powered martial arts move in the comments section, with its proper, amazing name! Be creative, it could be anything, from kicks, to punching to grappling, etc., with extreme effects that you would normally only see in anime and manga. Remember that in this TTRPG, you are able to become a God, so there is almost no limit as to what you can do. 

The martial arts move that I like the most, is going to win a Tian Shang Lone Wolf Fists core rulebook in PDF format. The contest ends this Friday the 5th, at 6:00PM CST, and within two or three days, I will announce the winner. If the winner never reclaimes the prize within three days of announcing the winner, another winner will be selected. Good luck!"

Our winning entry was submitted by our true-blue Ronwise Gamgee!  And the text he submitted was as follows:

"The Prana Pathway Inflammation Technique.  With this precise pressure-point strike, you can inflame the pathways of your opponent's open chakras, causing them to constrict and cause a great deal of pain commensurate to the amount of prana the opponent has gathered (kind of like clogging up an artery that is jam-packed with blood cells).  This strike deals an additional amount of damage equal to the prana that the opponent has gathered, all while wracking them in terrible pain (similar to that shocking sensation you get when you hold in a sneeze, put persistent).  Should the subject willingly disperse their prana, they will alleviate the condition.  If the condition is roleplayed, the character suffers intermittent, momentary paralysis every couple of seconds or so.  If enacted mechanically, the target temporarily loses access to one focus slot and suffers a 1-die reduction to their Effort pool."

This is a nifty idea for a Technique; it does lots of stuff! I like the "deals more damage if you have more Prana" thing, especially; there's a neat contradiction there, because the guy you'd like to use it against (the guy with a ton of Prana) is best-equipped to prevent it.

It's also incredibly Fist of the North Star, which I mean come on. That's the whole reason I made this game.

After mulling it over, I came to the following:

1. This Technique rests very comfortably at the Expert level. It's flashy and direct, and it works best when its accessible. The lower Kharma and Prana costs put it within range of most characters.
2. Its too similar to Five Gateways not to be some kind of derivation. So this is a Technique that escaped the grip of the Five Stars and made its way out into the wider Jianghu.
3. This is actually a Technique AND a special Imbalance.

So that lead me to the following design. Enjoy your Technique Ron!

Prana Pathway Inflammation

Expert-Level Technique

A variant of several Five Gateway Techniques, this infamous move somehow escaped the scrutiny of the Five Stars and traveled far beyond their borders. Many upstarts and false claimants to their legacy have trumpeted its mastery, although the true Five Stars would have known its disputed lineage. They would have been impressed, though.

Attack

Requires: (Arm, Awakened Chakra)

Cost: 12

Rank: 3

Facing: 6-9

Effect: You strike several key pressure points in a blur of rapid fist movements, unleashing a cascade of Pranic malfunction within the enemy's Prana Meridians. filling the

Prana meridians with destructive vibrations. Rather than damage, this strike creates Aggravation towards a Prana Inflammation Imbalance. If it deals Aggravation to a foe,

increase the amount by the amount of Prana currently held in the targets Prana Pool.

Skill: Agility

Prana Inflammation: Physical Imbalance

Dramatic: Your body seizes and contorts at the worst possible moments in a series of "Prana Hiccups"

The originator of this Imbalance chooses when you're paralyzed or otherwise lose muscular control from these convulsions, which allows them to amend any of your proposed actions ending in clumsy failure once per turn per Rank of the Imbalance.

Such descriptions can include attacks hitting nearby targets instead of their intended victim, dropping weapons or other held items, falling down in an uncoordinated mess, and other potentially catastrophic blunders.

This Imbalance poisons the well of your Prana; if your Prana Pool is ever reduced to 0, it is immediately cured, no matter its current Rank. This Imbalance can never cause you to die (but it can certainly make your wish you were dead; hiccups of the soul are exponentially more horrible than their mortal equivalent!). For the purposes of reducing your Prana Pool to 0, you may spend Prana for no game-effect (it cascades out of you in a display of pyrotechnics, but otherwise has no effect)

 

I don't want to tell or be told stories. I want to play games.

 Let's start this blog post right, by linking you to a much more competent blog by a much more capable creator. Read that article and then come on back and read this one, if you've got any time or energy left.

And maybe go buy and play Adios.

I don't have a rebuttal to anything the man said or did, but I do have a notion that his masterfully executed article percolated in my brain, and I wished to share it.

I genuinely do not have any interest in telling or playing stories. None. Zip. Zilch. I find the act of fiction writing unsatisfying and I find things like visual novels uninspiring. Mind, I've played a few, but in the ultimate judgment I find my interest in them is where I can actively direct them, change them, how I can monkey with them.... How, in other words, I can play them like a game.

And hence, this thesis-cum-title: I don't want to tell or be told stories. I want to play games.

Let me immediately back off a little; I do actually love stories. What I'm talking about is, when I go to engage with a game, if I get a story instead, I'm upset. I don't want my game to be a story; I want it to be a game.

As an intriguing corollary to this, if a story is in fact, a game (or even game-ish!) I adore it. I found this out whenever I started picking at the mind-puzzles laid out in the fiction of Jorge Borges, by the way, and even earlier in life when I came across a collection of choose-your-own adventure books in the local used book store. The fantastic conundrum of MAZE also stuck with me, although I'm pretty sure the author of that enigmatic toy was playing dirty.

Notion One: I like stories with almost no conflict, but whose toyetic nature allows me to treat them like a game

What sprung first to my mind here was The Library of Babel by Borges. We'd be hard-pressed to find anything resembling conflict in this story; you might consider the past-tense descriptions of people's struggles "dramatic", but you shouldn't; that's a historical account, there's nothing unknown about it, nothing hanging in the balance. The entire tale is told in past-tense, and the desires of its conveyor aren't really even present in the story, let alone central. It is about as close as a dry, historical account of a totally fictional place could possibly be.

And I adore it.

I love the concept that every book that could conceivably ever be written must inevitably exist somewhere within the library, as well as the opposite of that book. By extension, anything which could be conceived and conveyed in English characters must exist, in nearly infinite forms, somewhere in its nigh-limitless (but still tantalizingly finite!) passages. I like that you can, right now, read a page from this mind-twistingly titanic library. Go ahead. Perhaps it will tell the legend of you, perfectly justifying and glorifying every facet of you.

If you followed my instructions and read that fantastic article I linked at the start of this journey, you'll immediately notice the friction between its mentally succulent points and the statements I just made. The Library of Babel is, in effect, not a story in so much as its a brief but dense and enormously interesting lore dump. It barely has characters, has zero plot and about as much drama as a math textbook.

But the universe it describes is going to live in me forever. I can go back to its strange, nearly-empty-of-all-life hexes whenever I turn my thoughts back to the notion it conveys. And I have already dwelled in there for a long, satisfying time.

Why do I love this not-story, this dry recounting of a world and a notion that doesn't and cannot exist? I think its because the concept is toyetic; it is something I can play with in my mind, a chewtoy for my imagination. I find its haunting possibilities seeping into my creative works, my games, even my everyday thought processes.

I don't feel it lacks anything; character drama would get in the way of the toy. Distract from the eerie purity of the idea.

For a less pure version of this notion, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (also by Borges) does actually start with something of a plot, but its ultimately consumed by the ideas (as is the world of the tale, but I'm getting ahead of us). Its a mystery, at first; why does Tlön appear in one encyclopedia, but not another? Is it real, or a fiction of some kind? And our author's self-insert certainly does experience friction and setbacks in trying to satisfying his intellectual curiosity in this matter.

But the more interesting notion, the superior toy, emerges and devours that scant narrative. And that idea is this; is there a meaningful distinction between Tlön being "real" or "fiction"?

It sends us into a spiral of embattled Dualism that ultimately makes a mockery of any concept of story and relapses back, like Library, into simply recounting this idea expanding and morphing its setting, distorting its lore around itself like a battleship displacing water to cut across the sea.

The hrönir, by the way, are one of the most toyetic ideas I've ever encountered. They've found their way, in one form or another, into almost every game I've ever ran.

Notion two: If in playing a game, I realize that it is not a game but a story, I feel cheated

The Stanley Parable jumps out as an example here; it goes so far as to make its single game-esque senquence, the "save the baby from X" sequence, an agonizing chore to mock your desire to play a game. A better example is Adios, of course, which is a story told via the medium of a game; it doesn't mock you so much as entirely forgo the notion that you're playing a game.

I hate that. I hate it like an unskippable cut scene before a boss fight. I hate it like an invisible wall that forces me to do some stupid task before I get to play more of the game I paid for. I hate it more than screen after screen of boring, pointless text that I have to mash X to get through and god help you if you accidently hit it once to much and select "Yeah repeat all that boring bullshit again please, waste my precious fucking time you stupid hooting asshole"

FUCK YOU

The problem with this notion is that I struggle to tell you, in essence, what is distinct between a game and a story, in the same way I can't tell you what's ontologically distinct between a sandwich and two slices of bread and a slice of ham thrown onto the floor. One is recognizably and intuitively a food, and the other is a mess.

Its something of a spectrum, I suppose; I don't mind a bit of story in my game. But I can dispense with story entirely and still enjoy a game (checkers, anyone?), and the more story that you put in my game, the more frustrated I become with the experience. 

This is about my limit

Whenever the story consumes the game, it can fuck right off; its just wearing my beloved game as a skinsuit at that point. Just be a book or a movie or whatever. Stop lying to me.

I think something of a litmus test is this; can I fuck with the ending? Can I depart from the intended experience while remaining within the bounds of the game (ie; no hacking the code or whatever)? The more you can honestly answer yes, the more I'll enjoy it.

The point: I need to follow this instinct when I run and write games

What's all this building to? That I shouldn't forget this instinct whenever I'm writing or running games.

One of the powerfully distinguishing factors between a game and a story is that one is allowed to become bored with a game. Stories should rightfully be criticized if they bore us, but a game isn't like that; a game can still be satisfying whenever its boring. 

I can't count the number of times whenever the player choice in one of my home games has resulted in them going somewhere that there is no further content to be mined; the dungeon is empty, there are no more clues at the Whately Mansion, etc. 

The temptation to roll the encounter dice or have something happen there can be overwhelming in these instances. The players have found an actual dead end; or, if I've properly Jaquaysed the map, they're found a closed loop without any fresh content.

If I were an author, and writing this as a story, I would (and should!) absolutely follow my instinct and put something here. It would be my actual job to do so; if this bit of tedium didn't somehow serve to further the plot, increase the drama, or enhance the mood, and EVEN THEN, it should almost certainly be ruthlessly cut.

But, whenever I play a game, I sometimes perform this exact kind of behavior. And it does actually waste my time. And I would be furious if the game decided to condescend to me by making my choice to make this mistake impossible. Like if there was a pop-up where some dickhead NPC said "Why don't you continue to the castle" or such, I would despise that. And I would be insulted to the point of quitting the entire experience if it simply teleported me to the fucking castle instead of letting me dick around in peace.

Yet that's exactly what I'm doing when I force content into these lulls. I'm breaking my own rules to deliver some preconceived outcome to players. Even when that outcome is just "something exciting happens!"

Same with scenes that "must" happen in a module, either because it's critical to forward momentum or because "it would be the coolest thing that could happen"

The coolest thing would be your players having real agency over their own destiny.

Giving myself advice here: Skip the "cool" boss fight, kill your darlings, let them make mistakes and get bored. If you truly must have someone kick down the door with a gun, lean on an encounter chart so you don't know when the door gets kicked down or who's kicking it down.

Because you'll have more game than story then. And as we've discussed, that's what both you and the players want.

Going full blog mode: observations from two Discord rants

One of the brilliant, witty, and no doubt handsome members of the Fistoverse had an observation about Shadowrun to share with the Discord:

"Shadowrun's set up for lots of good stories, but is a real ballache to run"

 

And as is typical when a comment catches my eye, I couldn't shut up for a for minutes. I share my bloviation with you all, for what scrapes of insight it possesses:

"Speaking as an elfgame maker; it is SUPER hard to get the broth right

Like you want everything to be this efficient little clock, but anytime you put two systems near each other they flip out start devouring each other like those Japanese fighting fish

God help you if you want to have an elegant core system AND distinguish weapon types AND have tactically meaningful combat. There's a reason most armory style supplements are just walls of minute variations of a handful of weapon types

So I feel for the system crafters. It's easy to fuck up and near impossible to get right

God DAMMIT that was more fun and elegant than anything I just spent four hours writing"

 

But our insightful and gorgeous Discordian had further observations, which enticed me to continue this particular tyrade:

"Main books need to be an evocative treatise on the setting and feel, on top of being a functional technical document

The eternal tragedy of the hobby is that TTRPG's don't make enough money to fund the extended playtesting that most need"

 

To which, I blunderingly replied:

"More than that; conceptually, there's a disconnect between what we would expect to be strategically viable in a fantastic universe versus what is ACTUALLY strategically viable in a fantastic universe

So you have games like Exalted where what we want, aka anime hero big sword magic blade beam, is markedly less viable than "guy who picked up the crimson bow and can kill you from another dimension"

The reality is that, as a designer, you're NEVER certain if a new option ruins the anticipated setting. That's the tactical infinity for you; man cannot stand against the infinite

So you have a disconnect between option-hungry players, and designers who only have a small library of options they're more or less certain result in the game as they sold it

My solution was to make the setting an inconstant nightmare, so you can't possibly make that worse by discovering where the setting breaks because too late, bitch! Already broken!

But you'll note, that IS a copout

I can't hope to run a test on every permutations of every idea I have, in every likely circumstance that I could anticipate (which would, at any rate, be only the barest fraction of what it would actually be exposed to in real world play)

So designers are left with, at best, a remarkably robust core and the hope that their latest wiggle from the mean isn't one deviation too far

That's just the nature of the beast

Wow I am in blog mode today what the hell"

Blog mode indeed, past Joel. Blog. Mode. Indeed.

The Long Road to a Fist Game

 Now that the Lone Wolf Fists hardback is on the near horizon, I finally have a little time to write. God that feels nice.

Next time? I'm hiring a layout guy. This was a nightmare.

Today we're gonna talk about the journey to LWF (and Tian Shang in general; we've got starfaring to do soon...)

The History Of Games I Played

Let me give you the truncated timeline of my exposure to Tabletop Roleplaying Games

Around year 7 of my life, my bestest friend in the world (Matt was his name, awesome kid) introduced me to a few important interests that would define my tastes for the rest of my life:

1. Sonic the Hedgehog

2. Spawn comics

3. Final Fantasy IV (at the time called Final Fantasy 2) on the SNES

Skip ahead a few years and I'm listening to the Car's "Just What I needed" and I hit on this idea of playing a game where you're in charge of a kingdom, and you like, promote the random peasants into knights and wage wars with them. I am very taken with this notion and its physical manifestation, so I go on a trip to the friendly local nerd joint and get a Citadel Miniature's catalog from the staff. One of these bad boys with all the lovely pictures of unpainted metal miniatures. 

I went with the Skaven and picked up an even-then-too-expensive box of Clanrats

I kept collecting them for years, but rarely got the chance to play. When I did, I roundly lost.

Somewhere in here I also got my hands on the fantastic Final Fantasy 7, and played it nearly to completion before my little brother saved over my game with a rental game and I had to play it over from the beginning. It's cool; the second time, I played it with him, reading him all the dialogue and going on the adventure together proved to be a lot more fun.

Pictured: a man less dangerous to my quest than my little brother

Skip ahead a few more years and I'm in my late teens and doing everything I can to get out and socialize. My dweeby tendencies and social awkwardness gets me somehow invited to a D20 modern game where I play (what else) a katana-and-trenchcoat badass who hunts monsters. I also get invited to a Vampire the Masquerade LARP, where I decided to play as my version of Moebius from  Soul Reaver 2.

Nye he he!

I pick up a copy of both games whenever I move out on my own a few years later. I only ever ran either game once or twice, because what my friends wanted to play was Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition.

The unholy trinity; if you weren't running d20 in the early aughties, then you would be MADE to run it

My early forays consisted of my players making clear anime stand-in characters, then me quickly thinking up a cool cutscene-style scene that would have been right at home in a melodramatic Final Fantasy of the time, and ushering them towards making that scene happen. The primary method of interacting with the game rules was combat.

My love of warhammer led me to become increasingly interested in trying to make the big battles happen within the encounter XP threshold of D&D. I was convinced that the creation of a steady diet of balanced encounters was the GM's entire job (The third edition DMG drove this conclusion home like a railroad spike). 

My love of Final-Fantasy-style cinematic storytelling made me think of campaigns as long stretches of "gameplay" that was occasionally broken up by boxed-text "scenes" that progressed the "plot"(the plot being "what the bad guys were doing that would inevitably unleash a big boss for the players to fight in an epic showdown").

My love for Vampire-esque approachable player powers made the restrictive, class-based, on-the-rails, linear advancement of D&D feel increasingly like a straightjacket. 3rd edition had a frustrating habit of giving a a prepackaged character (THIS is the kind of fighter you can be!) and making you wait several thousand XP until you got to play them. Build systems were VERY appealing if you already had a character concept you wanted, with the notable drawback that most of them read like math textbooks.

I misquote Steve Jobs: "There's no SEX in this!"

I didn't have a lot of respect for dungeons at this point in my gaming career. Nor "random" encounters. I didn't see the point in them. I put the stuff in my games that I wanted to be there, and I put it in whenever I felt like it would have the biggest impact. I was a very proactive, editorial style of GM. 

In my quest to find a game that fit my style, I stumbled onto what seemed at the time to be the mother load:

On the surface, Exalted had everything:

1. It had a player-empowering Build chargen system, which let players make the ludicrous anime protagonists that they actually wanted and allowed me to make the even MORE ludicrous anime villains that I wanted to make
2. It had a huge power level that scaled, allowing ridiculous battles against armies and huge monsters as well as over-the-top anime-guy on anime-guy super-duels
3. It was lightweight and usable on-the-fly, eschewing the onerous game-prep of 3rd edition in favor of a breezier off-the-cuff style GMing
4. Most importantly, IT HAD STYLE. The ART and the WRITING were COOL and made me want to enter creation and kick ass. Selling my friends on this was the easiest sale of my life

No more tedious lists of painstakingly balanced encounters! No more frustratingly restrictive character classes! No more linear, boring dungeons, nonsensical hexes! Actual real rules for conquering and running empires and fighting armies! Social rules that made talking as powerful or MORE POWERFUL than fighting?! Yowza!

The promise of Exalted was, and remains, one of the great promises in all of TTRPGdom. Sucks that it was all a goddamned lie.

The Big Difference between White Wolf and Old School D&D

I was about a year into my first Exalted campaign when I really started to feel the system sag. It was a death of a thousand cuts, but all the minor niggling issues can be summarized very well by the following distinction that every White Wolf game has in common:

White Wolf Games expect the GM to actively manage outcomes

Must... Fix... Broken... System!!!

Which I was already doing, but let me tell you why that is the central failure of TTRPG design. Let me tell you the same way I was told; by learning the Oldest Ways.

The Old Testament

Turns out the third edition of D&D was something of a catastrophe in the culture of TTRPGs. It had effectively taught an entire generation how to roleplay wrong, and nearly all of our troubles with D&D stemmed form 3rd's failures of design.

Let's revisit our four points from earlier:

1. Chargen. 3rd multiplied and compiled several decades worth of scope creep into the core books and shrugged about how that would either make a compelling setting or like... Why anyone would want to play a Dwarf Wizard. It led with system options, but didn't consider whether the options it presented were compelling.

Old D&D was archetypical; the original game had TWO classes, fighting-man and magic-user. And when you really contemplate those two archetypes, they encompass swathes of different characters by folding them into broad approaches to heroics. King Arthur was a lot of thing, but yeah, he was essentially a guy with a sword. So was Conan. So was John Carter, so was Beowulf. "Guy who fights" is possibly THE heroic archetype, which is to say; the detail of HOW and WHY and WHAT YOU LOOKED LIKE was already up to the creator of the character. You totally could look like Cloud and have a big sword, or like Guts and have a big sword, or like Guan Yu and have the Biggest Hittin Stick Ever.

For real though, don't step to Guan Yu

  Same with "magic-user" (archetypically speaking, at least; actula D&D magic was pretty clownshoes). Gandalf and Merlin spring to mind, but "sorcerer" is one of those concepts so woven into all human myth that "weak-seeming guy with mysterious and super dangerous powers" can realistically cover everybody from Odin to Orpheus.

Now, astute game historians will point out that Thief got added to the cannon VERY quickly, as did the OG cross-class Elf and Hobbits and Dwarves and a host of others like Paladin and Bard, Druid and uh, Gnome Illusionist. So the water got muddy early, but the critical thing was the trend towards archetype coupled with a system whose lightness encouraged hacks for more specificity.

2. Scale. I kid you not, old school D&D characters could rise to powers that rivaled greek myth. Scouring battlefields single-handedly was legit a thing that could be done, be it with awesome magic or Achilles-style through sheer asskicking. Since D&D's roots were the Chainmail wargame, mass combat was natural to the system. And as for gigantic monsters; well, what's more gigantic than a dragon? It's even in the name!

The remarkable thing was just how dammed simple the scalability was; it was your Hit Die. that was it. The major character resource was "not dying". Which, when you think about, you pair that with "ability to kill the foe more efficiently" (gained either through increased damage and to-hit, or through a growing library of deadly spells) and you have the engine that scales characters from heroes to gods. Why was your fighter a demigod of battle? Because he refused to die with a hundred arrows in him and laid waste to his enemies, duh. Hit dice and THAC0, people; it's an ingenious little engine.

Third edition added a lot of bells and bobs to this simple, elegant little engine and obfuscated its genius.

3. Lightweight Engine. There's little that's lighter-weight than OG D&D. Clocking in at a whopping 112 pages split over three tiny leaflets, the OG game required you to hack it for it to work. It was hackable by design, approached the way its creators approached it; like a hobby, first and foremost, rather than a game product. Later compilations and revisions would retain this lightweight format for quite some time, with the Basic edition not even cresting 50 pages. It wasn't until Advanced Dungeons and Dragons that we got the heftier hardcovers that would become synonymous with D&D. 

Critically, the rules-light style would be retained even in the hardbacks all the way through Second edition. With core systems and character classes, monsters, etc. taking up very little pagecount. Although dense with options, tables, monsters, magic and the like, the actual systems were bare-bones, flexible and deeply hackable, keeping D&D's signature "archetype" approach that allowed GMs to craft their own monsters, adversaries, special classes, treasure, etc. for their games.

3rd edition replaced this option-heavy, rules-light framework with a nightmare of interconnected subsystems that relied on constant, deep-design tinkering to fir into their "encounter balance" framework of running. I felt like I needed a degree to design a satisfying adventure in 3rd, where in 2nd and before, you just needed imagination and something to draw a map with.

4. Style. This was the most woeful and tragic loss. dungeons and Dragon 3rd edition was where style came to die. I'll let its art speak for it.

And I'll let the OG D&D art speak for it's editions:

Yeah I bet you expected the red dragon, didn'tcha? Fuck you, this is the real shit. This art has a soul. Its compelling and makes me want to run the game.

How you could lay eyes on the unique creative visions of dozens of talented, visionary artists and come away with "You know what WE need? Some brown renfare bullshit with Absolutely The Worst character designs we can come up with!" is a nauseating thought process to attempt to recreate.

You may have ONE Trampier because you've been good

So I'd been mislead; turns out, D&D was fucking radical and already did everything I wanted, just not in a way that I had been trained to think about TTRPGs. Turns out balancing encounters was a joke that should just be thrown out the fucking window; hooray! Most characters could be approached archetypically, doing an end-run around the need for a "build" system! Dungeons and Hexes allowed me to program flavor and setting information into the fabric of playing the game if used correctly! Conquering armies and ruling empires was seamlessly integrated from the base conceits of the game! Social Systems were better handled by talking in character than by rolling dice! Yowza; why didn't anyone tell me what D&D ACTUALLY WAS ALL ALONG?!

I started running in the OSR style and it fit me like a glove. In the decade I've been running games this way, I have yet to feel the sag.

And that is due to the greatest triumph of early D&D, and the essential Triumph of TTRPG design:

D&D expects GMs to manage setup and Players to manage outcomes

What is the difference here? There are a lot of subtle little pieces that add up to the two divergent philosophies, but it boils down to this:

• In D&D, the game trusts in its predicted outcomes
• In White Wolf games, the game does NOT trust in its predicted outcomes

In other words, D&D builds its engines to reliably produce outcomes that it wants. I cannot fathom the reason why, but White Wolf does not do this.

I suspect it is because White Wolf designers are largely riding off the genius or Mark Reign Hagen, who did design this way, while they lack that capacity.

Let me show you what I mean. Here's the health track from Vampire: The Masquerade. A game in which you are a corpse who is animated by carnivorous magic, whose body is an object, rather than a living vessel for a living soul:

A normal human being's health is about 3 boxes, and the wounds are steeper, as they're crippled by pain and shock. Your "superhuman" endurance is the result of not feeling pain and running your body into the ground like a machine, literally fighting until your bones are pulped or you're burned into ash.

Note that slash, versus the x? That's because you have to go through this tract mutliple times, as bullets and knives which would kill a mortal merely puncture your insensate corpse-form. 

The result is incredible fights where mortals struggle to do meaningful injury to your unfeeling body while you tear apart their bleeding, pain-vulnerable frames with your sick vampire claws.

Here's the exact same goddamn thing in Exalted second edition.

Note that although there are more boxes, you actually start with just the 7 (0, -1, -1, -2, -2, -4, Incapacitated) and the rest are marked out until you get a special power that lets you get more. 

Here's the thing; you don't really deal with damage the same way a vampire does, because you bleed and when you drop, you bleed out instead of entering the mummy-like state of Torpor. So a sword is just as deadly to you as sunlight is to a vampire; effectively, you have seven hit points, and every hit point after the first reduces your capabilities as you're incapacitated by pain and trauma. Finally, most weapons can do enough damage to you in 1-2 hits to drop you.

The result of this is a combat system whose numerous rolls and derived rolls serves the same ultimate purpose as a single attack/damage roll in D&D; its a deadly game where fighting is wisely avoided because a single sword swing can kill you.

But this system doesn't add any new information; its result is a 1hd fighter. It just gets there through a system which was designed with a completely different game in mind!

The real insult is that you never really get any more hit points! Imagine if your 1hd fighter rolled a magnificent 7 on his d8 at first level, then proceeded to roll 3's until he hit his maximum lifetime total of HP he could EVER HAVE.... And it was 19 hit points.

Now imagine if damage scaled up quadratically with each level. That's the system-outcome of EX2. EVERY character is a glass cannon with a lifetime ceiling of about 20 hit points.

EX2 attempts to solve this self-imposed killability nightmare by substituting the game's mana system Essence for your HP. They go about this in quite possibly the dumbest way imaginable; they make you invincible if you use a special defense, aka a "perfect defense".

But because of course that's a terrible idea, they fob off the responsibility of their idiot-design to YOU, the gamemaster! Because you have to judge if 

1. The player even CAN use their system-salvaging band-aid defense, due to it needing to posses one of several flaws that forces them to only use it in certain circumstances. I will remind you that players will absolutely die if you do not say "yes" to their use of ANY perfect defense and it will be entirely your fault, according to the game's designers.
2. If their overwrought description of their actions was "fun" and "exciting" ENOUGH to qualify for a Stunt, which grants them juuuust enough Essence to pull off their perfect defense "for free" if they get it. Again, if they run out of essence and cannot use their perfect, they will die and it will be solely your fault, according to the game designers.

Compare this with D&D

I've got yer Ox-Body Technique RIGHT HERE

For a first-level character, their Hitpoints are determined by the roll of a single die, often a d4 or d6. The damage output of a dagger is d4, and a sword is d6. In other words, the game has explicitly told you that fights are a coinflip and you should avoid a straight-up battle when you can. This encourages caution in players; they ask for detailed descriptions of their surroundings (which are often dark, monster-filled dungeons). They approach foes carefully, lay traps, think outside the box, spring ambushes, light fires, repurpose dungeon traps, make judicious use of arrows and spells, and otherwise play the game like a tense and dangerous death-simulator.

In so doing, they gain player skill. These strategies will continue to serve them well in this campaign and in others, because they work in real life. The advantages of skilled, strategic play are only compounded once they gain and additional d6 hit points... While swords remain static in their damage output.

This means that fair fights become more viable as characters advance in power. D&D characters can be more bold and heroic than Exalts, because their margin of error increases as they gain power. The system's outcomes give you what the game advertises.

The wedding of player skill and character capability is eloquent and effective. By playing the game, you master the strategy of effective combat while your options for what counts as "effective" broaden.

...

The Long Road to Idiot Punch Games

Much like my journey to LWF, this entry has taken longer than expected.

Exalted didn't leave me, even when I left it. I want to be clear on this; for it's failures (which were miserable), its successes were great. It did something that even my newly-discovered OSR simply did not do; it let me play my dumb, overwrought Anime bullshit and it made it rule. 

As much as the combat system was broken, this was true; when you swung around your Buster Sword, the world trembled. When you unleashed your bullshit limit-break Anime magic, something fucking rad happened.

I don't want daiklaves in my game, I need them

Getting the feel of Anime right in a ttrpg was a triumph, however imperfect of an execution it was.

D&D did a lot right, but, to misquote Steve Jobs again, it did not have any sex in it. It had plenty of style of its own, but it was the brusque, pulpy style of Conan, not the grimy, surreal horror of Berserk. It had the mythic heroics of Aragorn but not the stylish brazenness of Utena. It had the cursed heroics of Elric but not the mind-bending scale of Vampire Hunter D. It was The Lone Ranger and I wanted Trigun.

Same guy

The road to my game rose form a desire to wed the sexiness of Exalted to the focus on outcomes of older systems like D&D.

Old Lessons:

1. The system has to give you the outcomes that it promises
2. Character survivability must increase at a greater rate than damage output
3. Elegant, hackable stand-alone rules are to be favored over interconnected systems
4. Generating content (dungeons, hexmaps, characters, monsters, treasure) should be mechanically easy and reward creativity and imagination
5. Appeal to archetype while allowing room for GMs and Players to add specifics

New Hotness:

1. Style Matters. The vision of the game is the cornerstone on which the success of the design rests. It has to look the part.
2. Feel Matters. Its not enough to get to the outcome you want, it has to feel right getting there. Speed and acrobatics should feel thrilling, punches should impact hard. Concrete should crack when you smash an enemy into a building.
3. Solid Things are made up of Lots of Little Pieces. Characters, settings, artifacts, etc. should be made of a collection of smaller bits of design, to encourage modularity and for ease of use. Different mixes of bits will produce different outcomes, which is exactly what we want.
4. Social Mechanics are Explicit. Yeah roleplay is great, but have you ever crushed a political opponent's will under the sheer weight of your dice? It rules and we cannot put this genie back in the bottle. Social Rules are a thing now.
5. The Cool Things You Can Do Are Specific. You can ignite volcanoes with your fist; it specifically tells you how on page XX. You can lift cars with your mind; here's the power that does that. You can punch a tank shell in midair and it explodes and here are the rules for that. The rules have to articulate how you get to the awesome, over and over again, for as many types of awesome as possible.

Fist Game, Arise

Lone Wolf Fists should, ideally, do everything listed on those ten points above (and a lot more I don't have the energy to type presently). Does it? Well, why don't we look?

Can I sell this to my friends?

I have yet to fail to sell the premise of this game to anyone. "You're a super-power martial artist in the post apocalypse"

Can I make my game like (insert nearly any anime)?

surprisingly, not as much as I'd want. I would have had to even further increase the number of kung-fu techniques in the game (and there are over 200 last count) to really go from Astro Boy to Bleach. I'd say its less in terms of bein universal, and more in terms of your options being seriously cool and very specifically letting you do one of a handful of Anime very well.

Give us the Astro Boy RPG, you cowards!!!

For example I'm not sure specifically how you'd do Goku; a lot of Kame Senin style is in the Brotherhood of Freaks styles, while your Kaokens and Genki Damas are sprinkled in other styles. But of course, Goku has been gaining new Techniques since he started his career; it seems like he started as a relatively straightforward Strong Hero with the notable ability to turn into a giant ape during the full moon (a power which is NOT present in LWF, but WILL be present in All Above Heaven).

Pictured: The future!

But Kenshiro? Yeah you could do him. He's the archetype that the Five Star Spirits were built around. Likewise, most of Ken's allies and even most of his adversaries can be built with minimal fuss.

They put the building-battleship in the poster!

So, can you build THE EXACT anime character you want? No, not from concept; a lot of Anime characters, especially the best, are built out of their history and are first-in-class heroes which would be best created with scads of XP and with unique powers not appearing in this game.

But could you do almost everything in:

• Trigun
• Vampire Hunter D
• Fist of the North Star
• Akira
• Princess Mononoke
• Nausicaa
• Castle in the Sky
• Berserk
• Demon City Shinjuku
• Ninja Scroll
• Avatar: The Last Airbender (not an anime, but made The List)

I feel like that's a pretty decent swathe of badass stuff to have realized.

Does it feel like anime?

Yes; It feels awesome to do that stuff. When you fistfight a tank to death with ancient, extinct kung-fu, it feels like you did that. It's not so abstracted that it's just an attack roll and it's HP hits 0. There's enough mechanical realization of the affair that the interaction feels consequential. Also, the interaction is fucking consequential because it's main battle cannon has explicit, detailed rules for demolishing buildings and reducing battalions of troops to chowder. So sweeping that off the battlefield is an actual victory that can turn the tide of battle.

Floating around with an airbending-style martial art feels and plays very different from the rock-lobbing, stone-cracking earthbender-style kung-fu.

When your sword sinks into your opponent's flesh and they erupt into a cloud of shrieking, clawing bats, that feels way different than their skin hardening into stone, or them parrying with impossible speed or vanishing ghostlike as your blade hits a stump.

Tink!

It's aesthetics and the feel of the rules are synchronized. This thing sings in play.

This book is huge! How much boring system crap do I have to learn before I get to the cool?

Actually, almost none. One of the biggest points I learned from old school systems is that simpler is better. 

Things like the move-and-act action economy and initiative should be immediately familiar if you've played any version of D&D. The pain points, ie the stuff you won't find in D&D, winds up either being fun, intuitive, or both.

Effort AKA Matching Dice: Instead of the d20, you roll a pool of d10s and match like numbers into sets. This is the basis of your actions

Health Levels and Aura: A combo of Health Boxes and Hit Points; a box filled with HP, when its filled with damage, you take a wound called  Imbalance. aura is the same thing but doesn't wound you as it fills up; kind've a magic force-field.

Techniques: Your powers, work a little like spells. Do something for a cost in magic go-go juice. Linked to certain limbs or items, you have to keep those limbs/tools working to use the powers.

Chakra, Prana: Yadda yadda magic. Everyone has seven Chakra, which produce Prana, which you spend to make your Techniques work. You can flair up to get access to more Prana, but it attracts attention (dangerous in the post apocalypse!)

Imbalances AKA wounds: When you take enough damage you get an Imbalance, which takes out one of your limbs so that you can't use it to wield weapons, or move, or use Techniques. 

Another thing that's not strictly unique to the game but diverges a bit from oldschool design are the Effect Charts. But these will be immediately familiar to fans of FASERIP, or most modern skill-system games like 3rd edition onward, or even Exalted 2nd edition if you look at the right bits:

All these do is benchmark what you can accomplish with a set of sufficient size. So like, three matching dice are clearly better than two matching dice, and the Power Effect Chart gives you what those dice can do if you're using them for strength, while the Agility Effect Chart gives you what you can use them for in terms of speed and dexterity.

Techniques can be used to boost this use of your Effort, so your kung-fu can allow you access to superhuman feats. This is one of the "intuitive and fun" bits of design; players love looking up how heavy of a thing they can lift, or how powerful of a ghost they can summon. The lists are poppy and neat, and one of the real gems of the game's design.

All of this is to say; there are a few things to learn, but they're not much heavier than their introduction here. MOST of what the book does is serve as a guide and reference document to answer questions in play, so the initial read is really quite light.

The End...?

Lone Wolf Fists was never meant to balloon into as a big a project as it became. Originally it was going to be a svelte 70-page post-apocalypse version of All Above Heaven. Man, I wish I'd known it was going to turn into a 320 page tome All Things Fist.

But much like this blog entry, which meandered crazily and ate an entire day of my precious spare time, Lone Wolf Fist had to grow to the size it had to be and do what it had to do.

The wedding of Exalted's newschool sexiness with Old School design sensibilities meant research, it meant lists of options, it meant much more robust testing of the core system (and some overhauls that I wasn't anticipating). It eventually meant a successful Kickstarter (right after a totally failed one). And now?

Well, its a few years past when it would have been some hot sexiness to release a game like this. In the intervening time, 5th edition came by and swept up the entire gaming scene. Critical Role came and went and came again, to the point they have their own cartoon series that clearly stole a bunch of Avatar's talent.

People don't really talk about Exalted like they used to; the scene is not thriving. Third edition went in a very different direction from previous editions, and it's clear that although its built-up goodwill was enough to clear early sales hurdles, that its struggling more than its predecessors. 

The new wave of 5e players confuse me as to what they want; this is an actually new generation, approaching the game with sensibilities that are alien to me. They seem to like the idea of the game, and appreciate its revolutionary sentiment, but these people don't have the gamer background that my audience had. They came swept in on the winds of theatre-kid-style shows and remarkably different media consumption habits.

For better or worse, my unwashed weeabu culture of gaming has changed into this glittery cottagecore version, where everyone is super queer and colorful and saying things like "Vibes" to one another. Also, I guess "queer" isn't a slur now? That shit would get you punched back in my day.

Does Lone Wolf Fists have a home in all this glam and good vibes? I honestly have no idea. I've been in a cave of dedicated design for the last few years, and I've emerged into a changed world. I thought we'd have a ready audience of hungry Exlated players, still jilted by the story-gamey approach of EX3 and ready to get their fists on something more in line with EX2's sensibilities. I thought we'd have more weebs weebing it up, sperging as one does about all these anime' references and excited for a really good Fist of the North Star game. Nobody cares Fist of the North Star anymore! Apparently My Hero Academia is the new hotness? Jesus I fell off around Bleach, how long was I out? HOW LONG WAS I OOOOUUUUUT

So, I dedicated a not inconsiderable chunk of my life to a game that totally succeeds in doing wat I set out to do.... And I'm not sure that there's an audience for it anymore

But, maybe I'm wrong.

The other option is that my optics have eroded in the last few years. The idiot culture war (which I guess is still raging, but I care even less now than I ever did) did a number of TTRPG players; splitting us into political camps introduced a horrible tribalism to the already elitist and factitious culture of sneering elfgame players. I've been decried as both a communist and a fascist, called a racist, called a chud, called a brainless snowflake, and otherwise had my good name dragged through the mud by every tinpot rpg-pundit who decided political bloviating was more important than, y'know, playing fucking elfgames.

(Ironically NOT by THE Rpgpundit, who has always been a super swell guy to me)

Maybe I just need to get better at talking to elfgame players in their elfgame spaces. Well friends, this is my first little handshake to you in a while. Hi. I make punch-games. And also I'm not any of those awful things. I'm not a bio-essentialist (whatever the fuck THAT is), I don't hate gay people. I'm not a communist. I don't like Nazis. I'm certainly not a racist (except against Canadians, but they know what they did).

I just make games. And maybe you're in the market for one of those. Well my gender-non=specific buddy, have I got a hell of a game for you.

Maybe grab the free version first, give it a pick-through, maybe try it out. I'm going to upgrade this with the newest design soon, but this will stay the same link and at the same low-low-price of nothing except what you want to shove in my tip jar.

And if you want the full monty, it's super cheap right now and it'll answer all the prayers that EX3 failed. Go ahead; Gamble a Stamp on the sickest game you'll ever run!

Disclaimer: hair on chest may vary