Time for this month’s Ask Angry mailbag. That’s where I sort through all the questions people e-mailed me and respond to the ones that caught my eye by being interesting, easy to answer, and short. Do you want to submit a question? Send it to ask.angry@angry.games. Make sure you tell me very clearly what I should call you when I answer. And make sure you cut to the f$&%ing chase. I get a lot of these and I don’t have time to read any essays that come in. Here’s an example of a PERFECT e-mail. It just so happens to be the first one I’m gonna answer. The last one I’m gonna answer today is also perfect. The ones in the middle…

Fred asks…

I want to start GMing in the near future, but the system I want to use – Old School Hack – has no published modules. For the first adventure, should I try converting a module to this relatively simple system or should I learn something like D&D 5E which already has stuff? Thanks.

Holy mother of f$&%, that was beautiful. In the first line, you told me to call you Fred. Then you spat out your question in just two sentences. And then you thanked me. And then you STOPPED TYPING. You were clear and concise. You were polite. And you didn’t assume I’m a massive moron who can’t answer a question without seventeen f$&%ing paragraphs of clarification.

Also, Old School Hack. I LOVE Old School Hack. It’s awesome. And if you know it, you know why I emphasized that word. OSH is one of my go-to fantasy adventure games for convention play. It’s lightweight, it’s fun, and it has special mechanics for hitting monsters right in the f$&%ing face and for being awesome.

The answer to your either-or question is ‘neither.’ You should neither try to convert existing modules from other systems like D&D to OSH. Nor should you abandon OSH for D&D 5E. You don’t need the kludge and the bloat. And D&D 5E is soulless by comparison to OSH.

Thing is, OSH is pretty easy to work with. So easy that you can pretty much make up s$&% for it on the spot if you want to. Writing homebrew adventures for it is a breeze. Write your own games. Make them awesome. You can do it. I believe in you.

The reason you don’t want to lift modules from other games is that OSH has some unique features that other games’ encounter designs just don’t take advantage of. For example, it’s use of arenas in combat.

For those not in the know – and it’s easy to get in the know about OSH because it’s free and it’s barely 10 pages – for those not in the know, combat encounters take place across multiple battlefields or zones called arenas. And each arena has a mechanical feature that tells you how it interacts with the combat system and what weapons and tactics work best there.

And yes, I do know that SOUNDS just like what Fate does with zones and aspects and s$&%. Superficially, they are very similar. What a brilliant observation you probably already skipped down to the comment section to make. Look, they SOUND the same if you’ve never actually played with either. But there’s a key difference. OSH doesn’t suck. Anyway…

Combat in OSH tends to suddenly expand into new arenas on the fly. While a battle might start out in the relatively OPEN arena on the ship’s deck, once a character gets thrown down the hatch and into the DENSE cargo hold or climbs up into the HAZARDOUS rigging or seeks shelter in the TIGHT quarters in the aft castle, you end up with a bunch of interconnected battlefields.

Encounters in other games’ modules just don’t think in terms of arenas and ways to expand combats into new places. Most D&D combats, for example, take place in single rooms. And those rooms are mostly open floor space with the occasional obstacle or chunk of difficult terrain. OSH encourages expansion into new arenas by literally allowing characters to shove or throw each other into new battlefields. Yeah.

That said, if you have a D&D 4E or 5E Monster Manual, you can find some good inspiration for creating your own OSH bad guys, monsters, evil villains, and freaky big monsters. Those two editions of D&D focus heavily on giving monsters unique powers, and those categories of enemies in OSH usually have a unique power or ability. Yes, ‘bad guy’ and ‘freaky big monster’ are game terms.

Point is, you’re going to have to rewrite modules from scratch to take advantage of the stuff that makes Old School Hack special. And there’s a lot of bloat and baggage in other games’ modules that you just don’t need. Which is why I say you shouldn’t bother converting anything. Take inspiration, sure, but you’d be better off just building something of your own.

Have fun, Fred. Thanks for your question. Take an awesome point. Which is nothing like a Fate point.

G.M. Joe asks…

I’m going to try real hard to comply to your requests.

Who wants to bet Joe’s going to fail? Any takers?

How can I encourage my players to do more role-playing?

Well, that was nice and succinct. Maybe I was wrong about you, Joe. Oh, wait, there’s more…

Ok, I feel like I need to elaborate a little…

F$&%!

Did you try? You said you were going to. Did you actually f$&%ing try to NOT elaborate? You didn’t. Did you?

Anyway, I have no idea what Joe said in the paragraphs that followed. I hope it wasn’t important. Because if it was important, it should have been part of the question. And I’m sure it could have been. Easily. The question could have been something like:

I hear a lot of GMs talk about how their players spend entire sessions talking to NPCs in the tavern, but my players get bored with it after five minutes. How can I encourage my players to do more roleplaying?

That’s just hypothetical. I’m just GUESSING that was the essence of what was buried in all the unnecessary words following Joe’s total and complete failure. Because I sure as hell didn’t read that s$&%. And I hope the rest of you are paying attention.

Protip: after you type the question mark, just STOP typing! It’s easy. All you have to do is NOT do something!

Anyway, I get this question a lot, Joe. That’s why I’m glad you didn’t feel the need to waste both of our times with two entire needless f$&%ing paragraphs of explanation. I actually get a lot of e-mails from frustrated GMs who want their players to interact more with the characters in the world. Or interact with each other. Or even just talk in character for five minutes. And I understand that it’s very frustrating. Which is why it’s a shame that there’s nothing you can do about it and you should get off your players’ f$&%ing backs and let them play the game.

GMs have lots of ideas about how RPGs should be played. How much interaction there should be. How it should play out. What modes of play players should engage with the most. How much the players should explore. How much interest they should show in the world’s lore and history and backstory. Whether there should be puzzles. All that s$&%. But, guess what? Not everyone actually finds all that s$&% fun. Not everyone enjoys sitting around at a table for five f$&%ing hours trapped in an episode of medieval fantasy Cheers. I sure as hell don’t. I’ve had sessions where all the players did was sit around shooting the s$&% with each other and with NPCs. I’ve played in games like that. And it’s boring as f$&%. If you find it fun, good for you. Don’t comment. I’m all out of f$&%s to give.

You know what else GMs have? They have this weird idea that their job is to constantly expand the players’ horizons and push them beyond their comfort zones and show them all sorts of new and better ways to play. But this is a stupid game about pretend elves; it’s not an edifying, spiritual life experience. Truth is, most people already know what they like. And when it comes to entertainment, they like to be IN their comfort zone. That’s why it’s called that. And you can’t force people to like things they don’t like.

Maybe the ‘night of nothing but role-play’ is a thing you like. Maybe you want it. Maybe you need it to enjoy the game. Fair enough. But if that’s the case, you probably have the wrong players. Because they don’t want to play that game. Which is why they won’t. So maybe you need to find a group of players that’s a better fit for you. Or maybe, your players might actually be willing to try it out. In small doses. And that brings me to a solution I like to call ‘JUST TALK TO YOUR F$%&ING PLAYERS!’

Sit down with them and say, “hey, guys, I’ve noticed you don’t really engage with the characters in the game. I was wondering why.” Then, see what happens. Listen to what they say. And respect what they say. If they say they just don’t find that s$&% fun, there’s nothing you can do to change the way they feel. You can’t argue fun rationally. But if you admit that it’s important to you – that it’s something you really enjoy – you might be able to reach an understanding. Moreover, you might find out there’s some other issue that keeps them from engaging with your NPCs. Maybe they’re nervous. Maybe they don’t know what to do or say. That might be a sign, by the way, that you’re not driving the action properly. Maybe they just don’t LIKE your NPCs. Point is, if you talk to them, you might discover something is getting in their ways.

Just don’t get your hopes up.

Look, I like polka music.

SHUT UP.

I like polka music. But, in my circle of friends, I’m alone in that. If I want to go to a live music performance, I’ve either got to compromise on the genre of music or go alone. I can’t encourage my friends to like polka music. But sometimes, my friends will go to a polka show with me. Not for the polka, but because they like beer and they like spending time with me. Sometimes, that’s what friends do. And that’s what this is like.

Your friends probably don’t like that interaction crap. You can’t make them like it. But if you talk to them about it, they might go along with it once in a while if you integrate it properly into the stuff they do like. Or they might go along with it because it makes you happy. Or they might not because it makes them miserable.

And let me head something else off right f$&%ing now. Because I know SOMEONE is going to bring this up:

But Angry, this isn’t like polka at all. Role-playing is CENTRAL to a ROLE-PLAYING GAME. They’re playing wrong if they don’t role-play.

I hate to be that guy, but what Joe called role-playing isn’t role-playing. It’s interacting. It’s playacting. Role-playing is making the decisions a fictional character would make in a hypothetical situation. If you make a choice that you, personally, wouldn’t make about a situation you, personally, are not actually experiencing, you’re role-playing. And besides, the game is called Dungeons & Dragons. And it’s 95% combat engine. The only things central to that are dungeons, dragons, and killing s$&%.

Besides, if you insist on telling your players that role-playing – as YOU define it – is central to RPGs like D&D, all you’re doing is telling them they don’t like RPGs like D&D and they should probably spend their time playing something else.

Eric asks…

Can you help me work out how to present players with the expected six encounters per day in 5E for a campaign in which the PCs spend one to three days traveling to a given location?

It seems ludicrous to blah blah blah unnecessary useless extra paragraphs that just go on and on and on for f$&%ing ever…

Pardon me one moment. I have to go outside and kick a hole in the building.

Thanks. I’m back.

Look, I do know how a reply button works, you know? If you asked a really, amazingly compelling question that I somehow didn’t fully understand despite my immense brain, I could just ask you to clarify things.

Anyway…

This is a big issue with D&D. Like, all the editions of D&D. And Pathfinder too. And a lot of RPGs that involve rigorous balancing and attrition-based challenge. I’d even call it a design flaw. Partly because it gives the D&D apologists something to whinge about in the comments, but mostly because it’s true. There’s clear contradictions built into the fabric of the game and the game does nothing to resolve them. And it’s all to do with this adventuring day bulls&$%.

The major strategic gameplay element in D&D revolves around resource management and attrition. No single encounter is dangerous enough on its own seriously jeopardize the party. That’s not a flaw, by the way. That’s just a choice. The players don’t just need to deal with every encounter they run into, they need to effectively manage their resources so they can deal with as many encounters as they need to before they have a chance to recover their resources. D&D 5E assumes that a reasonable team of average players should be able to do that well enough to get through six consecutive encounters before they run out of resources or suffer drastic losses. And D&D calls that an adventuring day.

Now, that’s a useful bit of design. It makes it easy to create D&D adventures. And it lessens the impact of individual combat encounters. That’s helpful not just because it prevents poorly designed or poorly handled encounters from ending the game completely. It’s also helpful because it allows for open-ended adventure design. Players can tackle encounters in any order they want. They can skip around. They can bypass encounters completely. And that won’t wreck anything too bad.

The adventuring day also provides a good guideline for structuring adventures. Short adventures need about six encounters to actually feel dangerous. Longer adventures should be broken down into parts and the players need opportunities to rest and recover every six encounters. Explorable spaces that include more than six encounters will require multiple forays to fully explore. And so on.

But there’s places where that structure breaks down. It doesn’t account for incidental encounters, for instance. Those include random or wandering encounters in dungeons or improvised encounters the GM adds during play due to the players’ crazy-a$& choices. One or two incidental encounters in a full adventuring day can really f$&% with the party’s resource management.

Further, because individual encounters have very little impact and most of the high-level strategy is about managing resources across multiple encounters, short adventuring days are pretty trivial. If the party only runs into one encounter in an adventuring day, they’re going to steamroll it.

Now, those aren’t necessarily bugs. They’re just part of the way attrition-based challenge works. The reason that they’re design flaws in D&D is that D&D assumes that incidental encounters and short adventuring days are parts of the game. If you follow the rules and guidelines in the DMG, your dungeons will have wandering monsters and your players will run into trouble once every couple of days on the road. And that second thing is where you’re having trouble. You just can’t fill every day of travel with six encounters. It wouldn’t make for a fun experience and most parties would end up gaining one or two experience levels before they even got to the dungeon. And since D&D makes a big deal out of balancing encounters against the party’s level, that would mean rewriting the whole dungeon if the party got lost and spent an extra day on the road and got another level out of the experience.

At the same time, you can’t just ignore the wilderness. One of the assumptions built into the D&D world is that the wilderness is dangerous. That’s where the monsters live. Stuff has to happen on the road or else the map of the world just becomes the menu screen where the party picks the next fast travel destination.

So what can you do?

Well, you can not care. Just run an encounter here or there on the road and accept they’ll be pretty trivial. Players aren’t actually THAT sensitive to challenge and the game’s balance is built around not letting the players feel too threatened anyway. I find that if the players have two substantial encounters every three days – on average – and run into a handful of minor obstacles, decisions, and incidents between, that works okay for wilderness travel.

Alternatively, you can adjust the scope, scale, and threat of individual encounters. Make wilderness encounters more deadly dangerous than planned dungeon encounters. And make incidental encounters at the adventuring site less dangerous. Using the encounter balance guidelines in the DMG, you can just assign different kinds of encounters to different difficulties. So, planned encounters during the adventure are always medium or hard. Incidental encounters and wandering monsters are always easy. Wilderness encounters during travel are always deadly.

Combine those two approaches and you can make getting to and from the adventure feel like a challenge without having to load down every trek with three adventures worth of monsters.

Queezle asks…

How would you run a D&D campaign in which the PCs are commanders in a medieval/Renaissance military or navy? I’ve been looking back at Chainmail for inspiration but I can’t seem to settle on a good approach.

First, I love this question because it’s clear and concise and doesn’t have three extra useless paragraphs for me to ignore. Thank you.

Second, I love this question because it reminded me of good times with my father. Who is still very much alive, I should point out, but who is far away and who doesn’t really play games anymore.

Third, I love this question because it sent me down a f$&%ing rabbit hole. And that’s because I’m really not qualified to answer it. Not completely. I can give you a few bits and pieces, but there’s going to be a lot of assembly required. But I’ll get to that.

Let’s make sure we’re on the same page though. The way I read this, I see a game with two modes of play. In one mode, standard D&D characters do standard D&D things. They delve into dungeons, encounter dragons, and kill s$&%. Callback. In the other mode of play, the PCs lead armies and deal with s$&% like this:

Sire, we’ve reports that Lord Baddington is marching for the crossing at Estuary with 2,000 foot, 1,000 horse, and 250 orcish irregulars. He means to reinforce Empress Foulevil’s forces laying siege to Capitalburg. You must gather your banners and hold the river lest Capitalburg fall.

Interestingly, this is exactly what D&D was before D&D was D&D. See, Dave Arneson – co-creator of D&D – was a wargamer. And he had his club playing a Napoleonic war campaign. But he was also a history student and loved alternate history and counterfactuals and s$&%. So, he had the players actually play the roles of the different military leaders in Europe. They’d cut deals, negotiate alliances and treaties, that kind of thing. And then, one day, he gets ahold of a set of fantasy wargame rules called Chainmail by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren. So, he starts a new campaign in a fantastical world called Blackmoor. His players alternated between questing for glory and gold and fighting large-scale military campaigns. And he was running a Blackmoor scenario with an elaborate castle model at a convention one day when Gary Gygax walked by…

But putting aside that historical aside, you don’t actually need anything special to run that sort of game. If you stay focused on the PCs, you just need to deal with the actions they take and the results thereof. Before they march, the PCs can issue commands to their vassals to come in force to Estuary. And you, as GM, can resolve that action. Decide whether Baron Cowardleigh, for example, actually shows up with 500 light infantry and 200 knights. Before the battle, you can describe the situation and give the players a map and you can ask them what orders they give to their vassals. During the battle, you can tell the players what they see and hear and ask them what they do and resolve it. Once the battle got started and orders had been given, things just played out and the military leaders sought out their opposites in the enemy forces and tried to bring each other down. So it wouldn’t be a bad way to handle medieval warfare.

There’s a couple of problems with that approach though. First, while it’s totally reasonable, it doesn’t really feel much like playing out a massive medieval battle. It just feels like playing D&D with a lot of really chaotic flavor text in the background. And the players may not have the sense of control they’d like over the battle itself.

Second, D&D – and most games like D&D – doesn’t have a good, systematic way to resolve actions that aren’t based on an individual character’s physical and mental abilities. D&D can handle it when there’s one character sneaking around, for example. Just have the player make a roll based on the character’s agility and training in sneakery and compare it to the guard’s perceptivity or whatever. Easy. But when even a small group – like a party – tries to sneak together, D&D doesn’t know what the hell to do. The best it has are rules about helping people do things and some clumsy group check variant rules. And D&D really doesn’t know what to do when an inanimate object drives the action. Like a vehicle or a siege engine or even a trap. The solution usually involves just clumsily assigning people-like ability scores to inanimate things or basing everything on the operator’s physical and mental abilities and calling it a day. Sometimes, that even makes sense. But usually, it’s just a bizarre-a$& patch.

As an aside, I’ll mention that this is a big issue with a lot of mass combat systems people try to make for D&D. Most of them are just about taking D&D’s rules and applying individual stats and mechanics to groups. Thus a platoon of 50 orcs has basically the same stats one orc has. AC, HP, attacks and damage, et cetera. We just say it’s 50 orcs. And that’s a mistake. Because combat between formations of troops doesn’t – and shouldn’t – feel like combat between individual fighters. Unit classification, unit size, unit training, flanking, terrain, those things are the important things. And playing sorties as individual blows traded back and forth ignores the fact that engagements involve both sides fighting simultaneously and that the attacker is in just as much danger as the defender during a battle. Usually more danger. And such sorties are rarely fought until one unit is destroyed. Units rarely get damaged or destroyed in a way that makes sense in terms of hit points.

Anyway, the rules of engagement for armies are just different. And they have to be. Otherwise, it doesn’t feel like armies clashing on the field of battle. It just feels like PCs and monsters having a slap fight in a really big room.

That’s why I think you need to just run two different games. You need to run a D&D game and you need to run a wargame. That’s how I’d do it. I’d find a wargame I could file the serial numbers off and use that for the mass combats. Problem is, I’m not really qualified to help you do that. Not completely. I’m not a wargamer. My experience with wargames is pretty casual. But I do have enough experience to warn you about something that’s probably making it hard for you to find what you’re looking for. Let me explain.

My dad was really into historical wargames. Board wargames. Hex-and-counter games. I played a lot of his games with him when I was a kid. I played Gettysburg and Panzergruppe Guderian and a whole bunch of others. My favorite, though, was a game called Starship Troopers. It was based on the excellent book of the same name by Robert Heinlein. And neither the book nor the game had anything to do with the also quite good 1997 film directed by Paul Verhoeven. That’s because the film was actually a completely accidental and unintentional adaptation for totally legal reasons only. But that’s another story. I still liked the movie. You heard me.

Anyway, this is what Starship Troopers looked like. And you can see why these games were called hex-and-counter games.

But Starship Troopers is an odd eight-legged alien duck. See, the little counters each represent individual space marines. The player controlling the humans had about fifty marines to play with. One platoon with two sections of three squads of eight soldiers each and a couple of officers in command. But in most hex-and-counter games, each little counter represented hundreds of soldiers. An entire platoon or company, for example, or a battalion.

A lot of the miniature wargames you see these days are skirmish-level games. Each miniature represents a single soldier and the battles, at most, involve a few dozen combatants comprising opposing warbands. The updated version of Chainmail that came out during the 3rd Edition D&D Era that you’re probably looking at is a skirmish-level game. If I remember correctly, anyway. So is the D&D Miniatures game that existed alongside D&D 3E and D&D 4E.

I’ve played several miniature wargames, but only casually. Years ago, I played some Necromunda; I’ve played some versions of Warhammer in Space and Warhammer in Fantasy Germany; I’ve tried some Malifaux and War Machine; and I even did some light playtesting for this neat thing called Wreck Age a couple of years ago. But I’m not what I’d call an expert and I can’t even say that they’re all skirmish-level games. For all I know, each little ork and space marine on the table represented a hundred troopers. But it sure didn’t feel like it.

My point is, if you’re not a wargamer, you might not realize that there’s two different scales of wargame. Three actually, according to some of my research. But only two you have to worry about. Skirmish-level play and campaign- or strategic-level play. Those are the terms that

My impression is that you want campaign-level warfare for your game. And that’s way more similar in feel to those old hex-and-counter games I played with dad. Honestly, if you want skirmish-level play, I’m not sure you really NEED anything other than D&D. There’s nothing that stops you from just playing fights between 50-critter warbands in D&D. Or using something like Chainmail or the D&D Miniatures Game for your mass battles. There’s still a group keeping the rules and stats up-to-date for the minis game, in fact. It was a fun game.

If you want campaign-level warfare, though, you need to know that that’s what you’re looking for. You can use the filters on Wargame Vault to narrow your search.

That said, I DID go down the rabbit hole on this one. And I did find a few things you might find interesting. I haven’t had much of a chance to dig too deeply into any of this stuff. It’s just what caught my eye.

First, I’ll mention Wreck Age from Hyacinth Games. I did some light playtesting for Hyacinth a couple years ago on it but haven’t played it since. Now, it’s a skirmish-level game set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, so you can’t use it as is. But it IS interesting because it’s a hybrid role-playing game and skirmish battle game with resource gathering and base-building mechanics. So, it might be worth looking at how it manages all that crap in the same game.

Second, there’s actually lots of generic rules for skirmish-level warband-on-warband action using whatever minis you happen to have. The idea is they provide rules for statting up individual fighters based on what the mini looks like. I bought one such set of rules – Thud and Blunder by the Ministry of Gentlemanly Warfare – last year. And then I leafed through it and stuck it on my shelf next to all of my other “someday, I’d really love to try that” games.

Third, I stumbled on this thing called Fistful of Lead from Wiley Games. Same deal. Generic rules for statting up miniatures for skirmish play. It’s not tied to a specific era or genre, but it does have expansions for a couple of genres. Neat. But what’s really neat is there’s also an add-on called Fistful of Lead: Bigger Battles which allows you to scale the rules up to larger unit sizes. And that might be helpful. It also seems to have a cool card mechanic that adds some spice to the battles.

Finally, the thing that really excites me is this product line called Empires that I stumbled on at Wargame Vault from War of Life Gaming. And I am not sure what to make of it yet. But I sure as hell am going to look into it. It seems to be a generic, campaign-level wargame you can use to play all sorts of different scales of battle in all sorts of different eras. There’s several versions that all seem to be the same except they use a different die for their core mechanic. And there’s a diceless version. There’s also a bunch of specific add-ons for different eras of play – including fantasy warfare – and for different kinds of fantasy armies, like undead. It’s very inexpensive. And there’s printable cut-out counters you can use in lieu of miniatures. There’s even variants that involve armies fighting giant-a$& monsters. If you’re interested, they offer a free PDF that explains the four different variants and will help you figure out what products you actually need.

I’ve downloaded both Fistful of Lead and some Empires stuff out of my own interest. That second one REALLY intrigues me.

Unfortunately, that’s about the best I can do for you though. You’ve got a lot of work ahead of you, but hopefully, I’ve got you pointed in the right direction. Best of luck. And you also get an awesome point.