Ancestral Knowledge

So, like I said in the last post, I've been reading, and loving, Outcast Silver Raiders. One of the choices it makes that I'm enjoying is presenting the players with no racial (ancestry, species) options up front—everybody's a human by default. The game gives the GM a bunch of the trad demihuman options in the back of the book…but then actively discourages them from actually using those options. An all-human party makes a lot of sense for the Mythic North setting in particular (weird, grimdark 13th-century Scotland, more or less), but it also helps punch up any fantasy setting by making whatever non-humans the players encounter truly unusual and strange.

Besides, the menagerie of D&D demihumans, those intended for players and those intended as NPC foes alike, just isn’t very interesting. I'm not going to belabor this point too much (other and wiser folks have written at great length about it before), but they’re almost all just crude racialized exaggerations of real groups of people.

Most “monstrous” demihumans represent the Western archetype of the “savage.” They're primitive people hanging around on marginal land (swamps, jungles, mountains, caves, deserts) basically just waiting to be colonized or slaughtered. They might do a little raiding, a human sacrifice or two, or some quasi-cannibalism to remind us that they're evil (in case we don't have an alignment system to assure us that they're Evil), but mostly they're passive objects of imperial violence. They've often been given recognizable trappings of indigenous American cultures, or at least stereotypes thereof—feathers, tomahawks, blow guns, spear throwers, and so forth. Goblins, kobolds, and lizardmen fit into this category, among others. It's super racist!

Other monstrous demihumans, rather than being uncivilized savages, represent the anti-civilization of The Horde, threatening to turn the world upside-down and displace the point-of-view culture from its “rightful” place on top. Orcs, hogoblins, and their ilk get a bunch of cultural markers that suggest nomadic steppe people, particularly the Mongols (the centaurs of the Warcraft franchise are an especially ugly, heavy-handed example of this).

Several categories of “civilized” humanoids are just real human beings dressed up in fantasy trappings. Halflings and gnomes are basically “what if little people were magic?” with an extra coat of racist paint on the halflings in WoTC's “they're also Romani” characterization). Dwarves are a bit of the same, although at least they have solid roots in folklore…although of course in contemporary fantasy fiction, their culture tends go heavy on a lazy mashup of Scottish and Jewish stereotypes.

In all these cases, one of the major problems is that there's little or no attempt to imagine demihumans as anything other than simplistic analogues for real groups of people. There tend to be few, if any, internal distinctions within the racial categories. Each group gets one pantheon, one language, maybe two cultures if they're lucky. (Sometimes, what should be a distinct culture gets spun off as an entirely different species.) Maybe a few different tribes, all of which behave more or less identically to each other. Some of the latter-day D&D ancestries have had sense enough to step away from “These guys are Mongols” or “These guys are Aztecs” analogies, but they still paint with a too-broad brush. Dragonborn? They're just some dudes, but with scales. Tabaxi? Well, they're naturally curious, of course. Meow.

* * *

Okay, but what about the two most popular non-human 5E species? Elves and tieflings have been conspicuously absent from my diatribe. And why? Because they're actually pretty interesting, they're probably popular in part because they're interesting, and they show two good ways forward for character ancestry.

Elves have the important distinction of being older, wiser, haughtier, and generally better than humans. At least elves think so, and that makes them novel. Most D&D demihumans exist, both in the game and outside of it, for humans to dump on (and by extension for people in dominant real-world groups to dump on minorities). They're barbarians, savages, animals, misshapen creatures. Elves, on the other hand, look down on humans. Elves are smarter, more beautiful, better at magic. More cultured. More civilized. You can kind of map an envious awe of an older “race” by some young upstarts only recently emerged from barbarism onto, say, the 19th-/20th-century German (and Western European, more broadly) obsession with Greece and Rome, but it just doesn't work that neatly. Elves aren't Greeks or Romans. They're more complicated.

Much more complicated, in fact! They get real internal cultural differences. They get multiple languages. They get varied religious practices. It tends to be a bit thin, still, and it's mostly derived from Tolkien (so no need to give TSR or WotC any credit), but a few different elven nations and some kind of conflict among them is a lot better than halflings or orcs get. Elves are also distinct, surprisingly, for having real physiological differences from humans that actually matter in the game, like resting via trance rather than sleeping. They could certainly be weirder—if we stuck closer to their folkloric roots, they'd be stealing babies and drinking blood—but they're at least a little bit alien.

Tieflings represent the opposite end of the spectrum: not alien and strange like the elves of folklore, not merely foreign like the myriad demihumans who ought to just be replaced by distinct human cultures, but uncanny. Almost normal, almost like “us,” but off somehow. Tainted. Marked. Problematically literal infernal ancestry aside, tieflings are a richer and truer analogy for being a despised minority than the essentially antisemitic dwarven trope of “They’re hardworking and smart and by golly, they just love gold” or anything like it could ever be. To their neighbors, they almost seem like normal people, but something in their deep ancestry is different, wrong, corrupt. They can't be trusted. They're probably up to no good. And there are signs. Blood will out. (Aasimar, on the other hand, aren’t the least bit interesting, because they don't represent anything authentic or recognizable; nobody in real life ever believed that some particular racial other in their society was actually inherently better than them, and descended from angels no less.)

Reinventing the Magical Polyhedral Wheel

"Cosmic Tree (Pochote)" by Jesús Lozano Paredes

The image is basically unrelated to the post; I just saw it at LACMA this weekend and thought it (and everything else there by Jesús Lozano Paredes, and in fact the whole exhibition We Live in Painting) was awesome. Seeing a bunch of cool art while traveling the past two weekends has been one of several factors that's got me thinking about fantasy instead of my usual dogged focus on science fiction (poring over my new copy of Outcast Silver Raiders has been another; more on that below and in posts to come).

* * *

Spring, as I believe Tennyson said, is when a youngish man's fancy turns to magic systems. They're never quite right! And as life returns to the world and hope returns to our hearts etc. etc. we think: I can reinvent this wheel. I can imagine something greater. Unpredictable and dangerous yet elegant and simple, and also redolent of mystery and darkness. Easy.

I've been reading Outcast Silver Raiders, which is dope, and I'm really, really enjoying the game's whole approach to magic. It accomplishes a couple of things that most iterations of D&D have completely whiffed on and even other OSR/NSR games tend to struggle with, which are making magic feel dangerous and forbidden (but still powerful and seductive) and simultaneously making the game world feel hostile to magic-users without turning them into an albatross around the necks of the rest of the party. Rituals are awesome, and worth the trouble because they're so much more powerful than what anything else can do. And yet the sorcerer's basic spells, though much weaker, are still gnarly, flavorful, and quite potent in a setting that has very little magic but does have lots of nasty problems that are hard to solve without magic. Great take on magical healing, especially.

But it's actually none of that that got me thinking about tinkering with a magic system. The way magic works in Raiders strikes me as being really well suited to the game, the setting, and the tone, and I don't see any need to hack it. But Raiders also uses usage dice for a bunch of stuff, and that got me thinking about how different dice could be used to represent a magic-user's powers in a game with a more conventional spell list. I've seen usage dice proposed for spellcasting before, and of course we've all seen a zillion different takes on dice pools, but I don't recall ever seeing this exact concept. Behold!

* * *

The basic procedure: Pick a die and try to roll over the level of the spell you're casting. If you fail, the die is exhausted and can't be used again for some time. You can't cast a spell unless you have a die larger than the spell level; you can use a d8 to roll a 6th-level spell (with a 1/4 chance of keeping the die), but you cannot use a d6 to do the same.

My first thought was that you'd start with a d4, each level would give you a new d4, and you could combine two like dice to get one of a higher level (i.e., 2d4 = 1d6). There are some obvious problems with starting at d4 (brand-new characters can cast 3rd-level spells, for instance), but d2s and d3s are fussy, and the problems aren't insoluble. This gives us the following progression:

Level 1: d4
Level 2: 2d4 / 1d6
Level 3: 3d4 / 1d6 + 1d4
Level 4: 4d4 / 2d6 / 1d8 / 1d6 + 2d4
Level 5: 5d4 / 2d6 + 1d4 / 1d8 + 1d4 / 1d6 + 3d4
Level 6: 6d4 / 3d6 / 1d8 + 1d6 / etc.
Level 7: 7d4 / 1d6 + 1d4 / etc.
Level 8: 8d4 / 4d6 / 2d8 / 1d10 / etc.
Level 9: 9d4 / 4d6 + 1d4 / 2d8 + 1d4 / 1d10 + 1d4 / etc.
Level 10: 10d4 / 5d6 / 2d8 + 1d6 / 1d10 + 1d6 / etc.

There are some nice dynamics here! Even at fairly low levels, casters can specialize into very different styles. You'll get about five 1st-level spells out of a single d8 on average, about nine out of 2d6, and about 14 out of 4d4, or roughly half that many 2nd-level spells out of each, respectively, so there's a distinct advantage to keeping your small dice and not just going straight for the heavy artillery (also, you stand a decent chance of losing your die on the very first cast if you only have one).

But there are more and bigger problems here. It works pretty neatly with a system where spells go from 1st to 9th level (5E, for instance), except that in such systems 7th-level spells, which a level 4 character can use in this system, are extremely powerful. We can make a custom spell list, of course, and save the really crazy stuff for 8th and 9th level, but that's a lot of fussy spell-list granularity for what's supposed to be a simple, elegant system, and lack of easy compatibility with other systems is a bummer. Also, a level 4 caster being about to semi-reliably shoot off 14+ Magic Missiles (or equivalent) is pretty nutty too! Any way you slice it, this is just too much power even for a high-fantasy setting.

Happily, it's easy to slow the spell-dice progression. Let's give our caster one new d4 at each odd-numbered level only:

Level 1: d4
Level 3: 2d4 / 1d6
Level 5: 3d4 / 1d6 + 1d4
Level 7: 4d4 / 2d6 / 1d8 / 1d6 + 2d4
Level 9: 5d4 / 2d6 + 1d4 / 1d8 + 1d4 / 1d6 + 3d4

This both makes a much more reasonable power progression and gives the player more interesting choices. In the middle levels, you really have to specialize in favor of quantity or quality, and even at the highest levels (assuming level 10 max), you have very limited access to really powerful spells and have to sacrifice a lot of lower-level power to get there.

We can slow the progression down a little bit more, too, by separating "get a new d4" from "combine two like dice." You get the former at odd-numbered levels; you do the latter at even-numbered levels. This pushes the big jumps in potential power level back from level 3 and level 7 to level 4 and level 8. It also spreads out the player's choices a bit, giving them something to think about every time they level up:

Level 1: d4
Level 2: d4
Level 3: 2d4
Level 4: 2d4 / 1d6
Level 5: 3d4 / 1d6 + 1d4
Level 6: 3d4 / 1d6 + 1d4
Level 7: 4d4 / 1d6 + 2d4
Level 8: 4d4 / 1d6 + 2d4 / 2d6 / 1d8
Level 9: 5d4 / 1d6 + 3d4 / 2d6 + 1d4 / 1d8 + 1d4
Level 10: 5d4 / 1d6 + 3d4 / 2d6 + 1d4 / 1d8 + 1d4

You can combine any number of like dice you want at any even level (otherwise, you wouldn't be able to get a d8 until max level, which is boring). Can you separate them later? Probably not. At the GM's discretion, maybe.

* * *

Either way, we're getting somewhere. I see two major problems remaining (although there are probably others I'm not seeing). The first is the spell list; maxing out at 7th level is an improvement over 9th, but it's still a lot of different tiers to sort spells into, it doesn't line up very well with other systems (6th being the max level in older editions of D&D, and 5th being common in newer games), and it still lets brand-new characters chuck 2nd- and 3rd-level spells around.

There are a bunch of potential solutions here. One is to step down from a d4/d6/d8 progression to d2/d4/d6. This works very neatly with systems that have five tiers of spells, making the system easy to use with Shadowdark or WWN or whatever. On the other hand, flipping coins (or using custom dice, or using larger dice as ersatz d2s) feels clunky, and this would really limit the number of spells a character could cast without resting or otherwise refreshing their dice. More on that below, but I don't love the d2s no matter how you slice it.

Another solution, of course, is a custom spell list. Could be a great choice if we were building a system for some specific setting—you can squeeze a lot of lore and flavor into a spell list!—but as a module to try jamming into other games, or as part of a bare-bones generic system that we can plug other games' spells into? Not so great.

The best option might be the laziest one (other than adding cantrips): Just let caster power levels be a little wonky. No magic-user knows how to cast Fireball or Fly right from the jump, but if they loot an evil wizard's tower during their very first adventure and find a tome with those spells in it, why shouldn't they be able to try them out? This requires a paradigm in which casters only learn new spells diegetically (through study, from mentors, by looting scrolls and spellbooks, etc.), but that's my preference anyway. As for 7th-level spells, the system doesn't even need them. Getting one d8 in your pool lets you cast a 6th-level spell or two, something that's already very potent at level 8. For a bespoke setting, we could still cook up a partial or complete list of original spells, including 7th-level ones, while maintaining easy compatibility with other systems.

* * *

So that just leaves one other (obvious-to-me) problem: It's really easy to burn through your spells in this system. A max-level magic-user can pop off one 6th-level spell and one 3rd-level spell and be totally spent—in fact, it's more likely than not. We need some way to mitigate this. We also need a process for refreshing exhausted dice; maybe they can go together?

That was my first thought, anyway. There are a lot of knobs and levers here; refreshing bigger dice could require longer rests, dice could be refreshed sequentially (biggest first, or smallest first, or at random), we could roll to refresh dice, etc. That last option could be available even on a very short timescale. A magic-user could take an action, even during combat, to "focus" or "concentrate" or something like that, getting an opportunity to refresh one die—like a monster rolling each turn to see if it refreshes an exhausted power. Could be a good approach for a system that's very granular with skills (Arcana, Concentration, etc.), especially in a high-fantasy setting.

I like simplicity more than granularity for something like this, though, and I like magic being rare, costly, and unpredictable more than I like it being something a highly trained expert can master. A better solution, for me, brings this whole post full circle by actually drawing inspiration from Outcast Silver Raiders (rather than flying off on a free-associative tangent that barely ends up having anything to do with usage dice at all).

If you ever roll a 1 while casting, the die is automatically exhausted. If you roll above a 1 but below your target, however, you can pay in blood for better odds. Need a 7 but rolled a 3? Roll again and add the second die to the first. The total counts toward your target, but is also deducted from your HP. Better hope it's a 4 this time and not another 3! (I think you just roll again if you still aren't at the threshold, and risk going way over; forcing the player to take damage but still automatically lose the die seems harsh without being much fun. They should have the choice to back out with partial damage, though, because that creates interesting situations. If you went into the above scenario with 12 HP, for instance, even an 8 on your first blood-magic roll couldn't kill you outright…but if you rolled that second 3, it might be better to stop at 6 HP than to take a third roll, where a 6, 7, or 8 would drop you.)

This has to be tuned according to how many HP casters get, how much magical healing (if any) is available, the tone we want for the system/setting/campaign, and so forth. Maybe you only take damage from the extra die (or dice), not the original roll; maybe your attribute bonus or an appropriate skill bonus can partially mitigate the damage. Maybe you can get advantage on the initial roll sometimes. But I like the core idea a lot. Adds some danger, and a push-your-luck element, to casting.

Randomness is great, but it's best when it presents players with difficult choices rather than just imposing outcomes on them. We still have automatic successes and failures at the top and bottom of the range; letting players hedge against bad luck by taking on a different kind of risk is more interesting than taking spell dice away fully at random and then restoring them equally randomly with the focus/concentration action described above.