Review: Feats of Exploration

Feats of Exploration is a short (15 pages), cheap ($3 on DriveThruRPG) PDF describing a way to give experience points to PCs in D&D-like games for stuff besides defeating monsters and finding treasure.  Most players are at least somewhat motivated by XP, so if you want them to do things besides killing and looting, giving them incentives to do other things seems like a good idea.  On the other hand, giving them more ways to get XP without removing the existing ways means your players will earn more total XP, which can be good or bad depending on whether you want them to advance faster or not.

It's written by Jon Britton, the GM on the 3d6 Down The Line Actual Play series on YouTube, which I watched because they're doing Arden Vul.  I don't normally have the patience to watch Actual Plays, but Arden Vul is a huge and complicated adventure, and I wanted to run it well, and I figured watching another experienced GM run it might give me some helpful hints.  (The usual spoiler disclaimer: don't watch their series beyond Session 0 if you might want to be a player in Arden Vul.   Even Session 1 has a huge spoiler.  But I do recommend it if you know you'll never be a player in it and you like Actual Plays, and especially if you want to GM it.)

Anyway, there are 13 categories of feats: exploration, lore, rumor, secret, puzzle, trap, hazards, skills, location, NPC, faction, quest, safe haven.  And there are 4 levels of feats: minor, major, extraordinary, and campaign, which each give a different number of XP.  The rest of the pages are XP math: here's how you calculate the exact amount of XP each PC gets for doing each level of feat.  (There's also a spreadsheet for this somewhere, not included in the download.)  And there are some lists with checkboxes, in case you want to print out the PDF and then check a box when a PC achieves one of the feats.

Anyway, I'm not running D&D or anything D&D adjacent, so I didn't buy this for the XP math, so I'm not going into the details of that part.  I don't really care if a 4th level thief needs 8000 XP to get 5th level so carry the zero and a minor feat should be worth 275 XP this week.  I am, however, running a fantasy RPG and giving out character points for loot, exploration, and achievements, so I basically bought it for ideas for achievements to add to my game.   (And also to tip Jon $3 for making all those videos.)

Looking at Jon's categories, "exploration" is redundant with one I already had, though he gives an exact threshold (5 rooms) which it at least a hint that I should try to set objective levels for what counts as "enough" exploration rather than winging it too much.  (My thinking is to have two levels for exploration and loot, where the first levels should be easy to achieve and should be hit in most sessions, and the second levels should be hard to achieve and should only be hit when the PCs actually do a lot of exploring or bring home a great haul.)  "Location" feels somewhat overlapping with "exploration", but I guess the distinction is importance: if you map a bunch of empty or boring rooms you still get credit for exploration, but only important rooms give a location bonus.  So maybe in addition to giving 1 point for exploring a few new rooms and 2 points for exploring a lot of new rooms, I give a bonus point for finding an Arden Vul Iconic Location (tm) or a significant secret area.  (Not for just a random secret door.)

And "quest" is kind of obvious.  I thought of that one myself.  But I did not think of "establish a reliable safe haven," and it's a good one.  Getting a base in or close to the dungeon so you don't have to go back to town as often sounds cool, and if my players pulled that off I'd throw them an extra point.  (It's not quite as critical in Arden Vul as in some megadungeons, because Gosterwick is only a half-day's walk away, but I can see not wanting to make that walk every session if you could find a good alternative.)

I think "puzzle" and "trap" and "hazard" are a bit overlapping and a bit too generous as written; I would only give extra points for solving a puzzle or defeating a trap or avoiding a hazard if it was non-trivial.  Making a single skill roll to spot a pit or disarm a poison needle on a chest doesn't feel points-worthy, but if it's a really complicated puzzle or trap that requires a lot of thought or teamwork or especially formulating a plan and going back to base for knowledge or equipment and coming back later, sure.

"Faction" and "NPC" also kind of blend together to me; I guess you could define "NPC" as town NPCs and "Faction" as dungeon NPCs, but I'd lump it all under "if you do serious roleplay (not just a one-minute negotiation or a single Diplomacy roll to avoid a fight) to serious benefit that's probably some points."

Finally "skills" is for using equipment or abilities in an unorthodox way.  I think that falls under the general umbrella of Rule of Cool bonus points for me; if you have a clever solution that amuses everyone that might be worth a bonus point, but only once per distinct idea.  The first time you use knockback to put an enemy into lava that gets called out as the highlight of the session.  The seventh time you do it, it's just another attack mode.

The last couple of pages of the PDF list examples of other feats you could add.  Some of the examples are pretty good.  I think this is all obvious (if Jon can make rules you can make rules too, you outrank him in your game, as you're the actual GM of your game and he's just some guy on YouTube), but some new GMs haven't yet figured out that they make the final rules and what's in books are just suggestions, so maybe this is helpful for them to start spreading their wings.

On balance, should you buy this PDF?  It's $3.  If you're a 3D6DTL fan or an OSR completionist collector you probably already did.  If not, and $3 is significant to you, you don't really need it, but it might be helpful.  It's probably a bit more helpful if you're running D&D (or something D&D-ish) and doing XP calculations, because he gives you concrete numbers of XP with some examples and a spreadsheet.  (Note: if that gives you a headache, you have my permission, as someone who's played RPGs longer than most people on this planet have been alive, to never precisely compute XP and just hand out levels once in a while.  I think there's even an "official" name for that now, in some versions of D&D-ish games: Milestone XP.  Remember, the points are made up and the math doesn't matter; it's a game.  Do what's fun for your group.)

If you're not running D&D or you don't care about XP math, then this is really just a list of ideas for ways to reward your players for playing in ways that your group finds more fun.  If you need those kind of ideas, get it.  If you already have plenty of ideas, you don't need it, but it's $3 so it doesn't take much value for it to be worth it.  I only got a couple of things out of it and I think I got my money's worth.

Warlock's Tunnel, FoundryVTT, and GURPS

I ran J.C. Connors' Hogwarts adventure The Warlock's Tunnel for two different groups recently.  Using Foundry Virtual Tabletop, GURPS, and Nose and Nick's unofficial GURPS module for Foundry.  Here's a review of all of the above.

First, the adventure.  Without spoilers, in case you might want to play it.  It's set at Hogwarts in 1987, a few years before the first Harry Potter book.  A Hufflepuff prefect is missing, and the PCs should want to investigate.  (But will they?  You never know with players.)  The adventure is for 4 150-point second-year student wizards.  It comes with 7 pregenerated PCs, so the players can basically pick whichever 4 out of 7 they like, and go.  Though it should still play fine, just a bit easier or harder, if you have 5 or 3 players.  The pregenerated PCs are interesting, with various personalities, backstories, spells, skills, and Houses.  One of them has a pet Niffler.  One is an American who's recently moved to the UK and transferred to Hogwarts.  One is a prankster.  One is way too good a student.  Etc.  Very fun characters.

As an introductory GURPS adventure, it only needs the GURPS 4E Basic Set and GURPS Magic.  The various GURPS spells used have been given Harry Potter-ish names, and a few new spells are included in the adventure.  As an introductory GURPS adventure, it's a pretty good choice, as most people already know the Harry Potter background, so you don't have to explain too much backstory.  And you can mostly avoid getting too bogged down in rules, just "roll 3d6 and try to roll under this attribute or skill" can cover most things.  GURPS has a reputation for complexity, but the main rule to avoid problems is to not use all of it.  Just use what you need.  In this case, that's a few basic rules and a few spells.  And the characters are already made for you, which is the hardest part.  I don't want to go to deep into reviewing the adventure, because I don't want to spoil it, but it's your basic investigation / adventure story.  The adventure says you can play it in a couple of hours; both of my groups took about 4 hours, but everything is a bit slower over the Internet.  Overall, I think it's a good adventure, but suffers a bit from the "we're stuck so let's ask a professor for help" problem that's endemic to the Harry Potter universe.  If the PCs have any sense, once they realize their out of their depth they'll run to Professor McGonagall or Professor Dumbledore for backup.  If you're a real-life 12-year-old and you find out that horrible crimes are happening, yes, you should totally get an adult to deal with it.  But if you're the hero in a Harry Potter book, letting the adults solve your problems is no fun.  So the GM has to come up with reasons for the PCs not to do it that way.

(As an aside, J.C. Connors has a bunch of other free oneshot adventures available at 1shotadventures.com.  They are surprisingly professionally put together for free adventures.  Most of them are for GURPS, but some also have versions for other systems like D&D or Call of Cthulhu available.  A couple are solo adventures in case you don't have a gaming group handy.  Check them out.)

How does GURPS work for Harry Potter?  Pretty well, I think.  GURPS has a bunch of magic systems, but the most basic one, used here, is spells-as-skills.  Each of the kid wizards has a dozen or so spells, not too overwhelming, and then a dozen or so other skills.  If you want to cast a spell, you roll 3d6 and try to roll less than or equal to your spell skill.  If you want to use another skill, same thing.  If you want to try a skill you don't have on your sheet, you're free to try, but defaults are usually around IQ-5 or DX-5, so your odds of success are not great.  Of course the GM can apply modifiers ("You want to try to use your Animal Handling [Nifflers] on an animal that's nothing at all like a Niffler?  Fine, roll at -4."), but that's most of it.

How does FoundryVTT work?  Well, there are a bunch of intro videos on YouTube.  But basically it's a virtual tabletop, like Roll20 or MapTools or Fantasy Grounds or Owlbear Rodeo or...  The good thing is that this adventure comes with tokens for the PCs and some major NPCs, so you don't have to make them.  And it also comes with a bunch of picture handouts, which Foundry lets the GM show to the players.  The bad thing is that it only comes with one map, so if you want maps, the GM has some work to do.  I've run a lot of GURPS in Roll20, and a bit in MapTools, and so far, after only running one adventure in Foundry, I like Foundry better than either.  Once you load up Nose and Nick's unofficial GURPS module, you have GURPS character sheets, including import from character generation tools like GCS or GCA.  You can click on a skill or attribute on your character sheet to roll against it.  Foundry supports maps with hexes, not just squares.  It supports token facing, with a built-in facing arrow so you don't have to add one to your tokens.  And token vision, lighting, etc. are built-in.  As are a bunch of token status modifiers for GURPS, like Stunned, Prone, Nauseated, Shocked, Kneeling, etc.

The first group I ran the adventure for were experienced RPG players who hadn't tried GURPS before.  They all grasped "click on the skill to roll against it" immediately, and that's as much GURPS as they needed to learn.  We used Jitsi for voice and video with that group, and it worked great.  The second group were mostly GURPS veterans who hadn't tried Foundry before.  We used Discord for voice, no video, and it also worked great.

Minor issues: tokens don't have vision by default.  You need to click "token vision" to let them see, which is annoying.  I forgot to assign one PC token vision, so that player had problems seeing things until I fixed that.  Then I only fixed it on one copy of their token, not on their "prototype token" that would be used forevermore, so the problem came back when the players moved to another map.  Eventually I got it fixed right.  Also, setting up lighting for each token can be a bit of work, so for the maps that were dark, I just turned on map-wide global illumination once a couple of PCs cast Continual Light spells, to make things simpler.  (I would not do that in a more hardcore dungeon crawling game, but this is a light fluffy oneshot about young student wizards, so not annoying the players too much with limited light radius seemed like the right call.)

As far as Foundry modules go, Nose and Nick's GURPS support for Foundry is under rapid development, but already really solid.  It doesn't support quite as much automation as some of the Foundry D&D modules do, because GURPS doesn't have a free System Reference Doc with rules that you are explicitly allowed to use like D&D does, and Nose and Nick want to keep Steve Jackson Games from getting mad at them for automating too much, but it supports the basics like "click on a number on the sheet to roll 3d6 and try to roll under that number" and "click on a weapon's damage to roll that much damage."  And that's most of what you need.  (If you want to add tables that they have deliberately left out to respect copyrights, like the critical hit table or reaction table, it's not that hard: Foundry makes it easy to add rollable tables.)  Other modules we used include PDFoundry (PDF viewer built into Foundry, so you can click on a rules reference on your character sheet and bring up that page of the rules, if you own that rulebook in PDF form), Dice So Nice (animated dice flying all over your screen), and Turn Marker (put an animated marker under the token whose turn it is in combat so the player hopefully notices and goes before you have to remind them).

Overall, I enjoyed this adventure and will probably run it again in the future.  It's a good simple short demonstration of GURPS.  I was also pretty happy with my first experience using Foundry to run an RPG.  Thanks to the authors of everything we used.

Next up: I'd like to run another J.C. Connors oneshot, Who Tracks the Steps of Glory, because it's Star Trek and I haven't run a Sci-Fi game in a while, so I need practice with stuff like high-tech ranged combat and starships.  After that, I want to run a GURPS Traveller campaign.

Review: Five Easy Pieces, from Pyramid #3/113

I was recently posting about GURPS Dungeon Fantasy / Dungeon Fantasy RPG character generation options, and a couple of people suggested the recent article Five Easy Pieces, by Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch, from Pyramid 3/113.  So let's take a close look.

The basic templates in both GURPS Dungeon Fantasy and Dungeon Fantasy RPG are 250 points plus 50 points of disadvantages.  (Plus another 5 points of quirks, but the quirk points are not spent in the templates, so those are available for the player to spend elsewhere.)  The basic idea of Five Easy Pieces is that instead of picking one 250-point template, you pick 5 50-point modules and combine them to make your own template.

All of the modules cost 50 points.  Most of them are just 50 points of positive abilities: attributes and advantages and skills.  A couple (the Priest and the Monk) are instead 60 points of positive abilities and a 10-point disadvantage.  None of the modules are exact lists canned of abilities; they all have choices, like "+1 to this attribute plus 30 points distributed among this list of abilities."  So they're very similar to the DFRPG templates, just smaller.

Some of the modules can only be taken once, some twice, and one (the Rogue) can be taken three times.  (Levels 2 and 3 of templates are not exactly the same as level 1; they're similar in flavor and sometimes reuse some of the optional abilties, but sometimes level 2 adds new abilities.)

So if you grab the right 5 modules, you can mostly (but not exactly) rebuild the DFRPG templates.  Like, Brute Warrior 2 plus Leader 1 plus Physical 2 gets you pretty close to the Knight template.  Not quite there, because the DFRPG templates spend your 50 disad points, where the modules (mostly) do not.  So if you choose modules with no disads, you can take 50 disad points and have another 50 points to spend.  You're only supposed to spend those on abilties already in your 5 modules, not on other things.

DFRPG gives some special privileges only to certain templates, like Knights being able to spend character points on melee weapon skills at any time, and doesn't charge points for those special privileges.  The article makes it clear that if you build your character using modules, you do not get any of those special privileges, only the normal abilities you actually pay points for.  You're a Cerebral Lore-Master Mage, not a real Wizard, so you can't buy IQ past 20, sorry.  (Don't worry; you'll never have enough points to buy your IQ past 20 anyway before you get eaten by a Purple Worm, so this is mostly academic.)

Finally, the idea of "lenses" to add 50 points of another template's abilities, first seen in Dungeon Fantasy 3, is repeated here, saying that if you save up 50 points, you can add another module.  So rather than needing to make special lenses for every combination of templates, it's a bit simpler this way.

So, do I like it?  Well, it looks mechanically sound.  (It's from Kromm.  Kromm is the GURPS Line Editor.  Of course it's sound.)  And it's certainly more flexible than the base DFRPG templates.  If you've always wanted to play an AD&D-style cleric/fighter/magic-user, you can do it.  (Of course you might not be very effective at any of those things, compared to a specialist, because you're spreading your points so thin.  Life is tradeoffs.)

And the other cool thing that the article doesn't directly mention is that it lets you easily modify the starting power level of your campaign in increments of 50 points, without redesigning all the templates, or throwing away templates entirely and going freeform.  I wrote previously about maybe going with 150 points + 25 disads + 5 quirks for the Whiterock campaign.  It would be pretty easy to do that power level with this system, just use 3 modules per PC instead of 5.  ("Three Easy Pieces.")  Then spend your 25 disad points (minus any that were already used in your modules) on more abilities from those 3 modules.  Done.

The thing I don't like is that the modules kind of throw away the idea of strict templates for niche protection, but then turn around and impose strict modules instead.  You can be a crazy mismatch like Cerebral Finesse Warrior Crusader Rogue, but you'd better only spend your points from disads within those modules, because a Cerebral Finesse Warrior Crusader Rogue is fine but a Cerebral Finesse Warrior Crusader Rogue with Magery 1 is crazy talk.  You obviously need to be a Cerebral Finesse Warrior Crusader Rogue Mage to have Magery 1.  I can see the argument for niche protection, especially in a large party.  I can see the argument for flexibility.  I don't think you can argue for both at the same time out of opposite sides of your mouth, like this article is doing.  So, if I were to use this more flexible system, I'd take it a bit further.  Spend your starting module points within those modules, but spend your other points on whatever, as long as it makes some sense.  You want to take Swimming without buying the entire 50-point Outdoorsy module?  Go right ahead.

Fortunately, even if you don't agree with every single thing in this article, you can take the parts you like and change the parts you don't and be happy.  Kromm will probably not come to your house and yell at you for playing wrong.  So, I think this article was worth the $8 the Pyramid cost, and the Pyramid has a bunch of other good stuff too.

Do I think Five Three Easy Pieces is a good fit for Whiterock?  Kinda.  I like the idea of having players build their own templates using these pre-written modules more than I like scaling down all the DFRPG templates to 150 points.  But I think I also like the idea of making templates optional and letting players just build characters.  So, I think I won't make a final decision until Session Zero, so players can weigh in.  I do plan on making some pregen characters / NPCs for the game though, and will use this system for those to get some real experience with it.