It’s like this: I’ve got a ton of s$&% to do to get ready for the Angry Games NonConvention in Ohio this month. Meanwhile, I’m still behind schedule by, like, three days on content creation. So, I’m treating you all to some interactive content. That’s right: I’m responding to reader questions with quick, half-a$&ed, swear-laden answers.

In other words, it’s Ask Angry time.

It was either an Ask Angry Mailbag or a Bulls$&% article about why Angry ain’t worrying about DBox One and neither should you. But no one wants to hear that.

Do you want to submit a question for a future Ask Angry Mailbag? Send it to ask.angry@angry.games. Be brief, get to the f$&%ing point, give me your name, and give me clear, explicit permission to use that name.

Take Ice for example. Ice did this s$&% right.

Ice asks…

How do you determine the number of resources (rations, ball bearings, oil, etc.) vendors have for sale?

Nice, Ice! Not only do you know to introduce yourself and get to the f$&%ing point, but you also dodged my snarky sarcasm. Without even trying, I’ll bet.

See, when I first read that question, the response my brain came up with was, “why would you do this? Unless the players are buying ludicrous amounts of s$%&, why would you care about vendor stock? What’s wrong with you?” And I kinda stand by that.

For normal adventuring supplies in a normal town where nothing is wrong, assume any item listed as Adventuring Gear in the PHB is readily available in reasonable quantities. What’s a reasonable quantity? If your brain doesn’t scream, “you want to buy how many days’ worth of rations” when your players give you a number, it’s reasonable.

But there’s a reason that ain’t the end of the answer. Two reasons.

First, note I said, “in a normal town where nothing’s wrong.” That’s because you can use the costs and availabilities to tell stories and build adventures. If a town’s suffering a famine, for example, it makes sense to limit the number of available rations and drive up the cost. And if the mine outside town is haunted by mine ghosts, metal goods might not be available at all.

Doing that s$&% makes your towns feel like parts of a real, dynamical world instead of like menus where you select goods and click Buy Now. And I’m all about that s$&%.

But that s%&% also gives the players reasons to solve a town’s problems. As such, it can add an extra challenge to an otherwise simple adventure or it can even provide the hook for an adventure.

If the party’s gearing up for an expedition into the wild to follow a treasure map they found and there’s no food to buy because bandits, they can either try to survive by foraging in the wild or they can take on the bandit sidequest as part of the treasure hunt. And if the town’s supply of metal is guarded by angry ghosts, the party might discover that problem exists by going sword shopping.

That s$&% doesn’t need a system though. It just needs a GM’s brain. It’s the sort of thing you write into a town or just adjudicate on the fly. Which is your job. And you’re doing yourself a terrible disservice replacing your brain with systems and mechanics.

That said, the other reason this answer’s still going is that, while I don’t think vendor stocks are a thing worth tracking most of the time, I do agree that shopping in D&D is kind of crap. And it needs something. Right now, D&D just provides a list of buyable things, all of which are equally available in every corner of every civilization at the same price. There’s nothing to connect shopping with the world the characters are shopping in.

And that s$&$ grinds my dice.

One thing I’m working on for the Town Mode Reborn project is a better kind of shopping. How to present shopping as a thing that happens in the world. How to build a town from shops and services quickly. How to tinker with and tweak that s$%& if you’re a control freak GM who wants every shop to feel unique. And how shops might change in response to the conditions in town or the characters’ reputations.

But that’s a little way out and I haven’t even talked about Town Mode Reborn and the future of The Angry GM. So forget I said anything.

Meanwhile, don’t sweat vendor stock unless you’ll looking to tell a story or make a game of it.

Ben asks…

Is it possible to fit the enjoyment of builds into the eight Aesthetics of play? I’m thinking of video games like Etrian Odyssey, Darkest Dungeon, and competitive Pokémon where the joy is “seeing the plan come together” or the “well-oiled machine.” Could this be classified as Discovery of game mechanics rather than the game world? Is this even a viable way to be interested in RPGs given the usual limitations on a single PC’s capabilities?

That’s quite a f$&%ing question. Holy crap. And I’m excited to answer it. Because it lets me explain why you’re a little off-base and also lets me clarify something that lots of people have been missing for more than half a decade now. But before I do that…

Halfway through your question, you veered off and started asking a totally different question instead. Two totally different questions. Maybe more. I’m not sure. So this is going to take a lot to unpack.

First, let me recap for those of you who missed the early episodes in the series. Many years ago, I wrote a pair of articles about the MDA model of game design. One of them got really popular. Everyone loved it. It’s one of my oft-quoted features. The problem is, I emphasized the wrong lesson and so people learned the wrong thing and everyone’s been getting it wrong ever since.

I guess that’s my bad.

MDA is a game-design model first described by Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubek in their 2001 paper MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research. And it posits that there are three parts to the conceptual idea of playing a game.

First, you’ve got Mechanics. That includes the game’s rules, systems, methods of play, advice, and anything and everything else the designer writes down. An orc’s stat block? Mechanic. Map of the battlefield? Mechanic. The encounter with three orcs? Mechanic. The flavor text? Mechanic. The combat rules? Mechanic. The actual GM actually sitting behind the screen refereeing the game? Mechanic.

On the opposite end, you’ve got Aesthetics. The players’ motivations for playing games. The subjective mental itches they’re looking to games to scratch. And you can break down all the possible motivations into eight broad categories: Challenge, Discovery, Expression, Fantasy, Fellowship, Narrative, Sense Pleasure, and Submission. So, some players want to win games, some want to lose themselves in pretend worlds, and some want to hang out with their friends.

Between the two are the Dynamics. The act of playing the game. When the players open a door and three orcs leap out and start a fight, the players are interacting with the game’s Mechanical elements. By so doing, they’re satisfying their play Aesthetics. Hopefully. So, players who like challenges enjoy defeating the orcs. Players who like stories enjoy how the fight fits into the narrative’s rising action. Players who like playing with their friends will enjoy teaming up and working together.

See how this s$&% works?

The point of this isn’t to suggest that there’s this one-to-one pairing of Mechanical elements to play Aesthetics. In fact, the opposite’s true. The designer — and the GM — bring the Mechanics, the players bring the Aesthetics, and hopefully, in their Dynamical interaction, everyone has fun.

Notice that the combat I described satisfies three different players for three different reasons. That’s important. A good designer can guess how Mechanics might favor some Aesthetics over others. Enhancing some and ruining others. But it’s not as simple as simply knowing combat equals Challenge. Easy combats don’t equal Challenge; they equal Submission. Except they don’t even equal it so much as give a player who likes Submission a chance to enjoy the game. And a good combat can give lots of players lots of chances to have fun.

Then there’s the fact that no one’s an Aesthetical purist. At least very few people are. And people looking for just one Aesthetical thing are better off doing something that ain’t playing games. Want a pure Narrative? A book’s better than a game. Want pure Sensory Pleasure? How about a fidget spinner? Just want to Express yourself? Go write a fanfic or draw a DeviantArt. Discover? I don’t know, go explore a continent or something.

Games are great because they let players satisfy lots of Aesthetics at once. And unique combinations of Aesthetics too. For me, video games usually give me the right mix of Challenge and Discovery with some Sense Pleasure and Fantasy thrown in. I get my mix of Fellowship, Expression, Fantasy, and Narrative from running RPGs.

Consider, for instance, competitive Pokémon, which I know literally nothing about because I don’t play video games with other humans. Does all that synergistic combo-building you mentioned satisfy some players’ need for Discovery? Absolutely. Does it also satisfy a need for Challenge for some people? Maybe even the same people? Yes also. Does the fact that you’re competing satisfy a need to play games with people and therefore satisfy some people’s desire for Fellowship? Hell yes, it does.

There’s no one-to-one matchup. And it’s a mistake to try and find them. It’s more important to just be aware that Aesthetics are things. Know which things your game’s likely to feed and don’t sabotage that s$&%. TTRPGs, for example, provide a lot of opportunities for Discoverers to have fun. But if I display the entire dungeon map and play the game as a board game, I’m ruing that.

In short, don’t try to pair up Mechanics and Aesthetics because it doesn’t work that way. And yes, for the right player, grasping game mechanics is a form of Discovery. But that’s on the player, not the game design. Because game designers don’t Aesthetic. Players bring Aesthetics.

And that’s two garbled, mashed-together questions down and one to go.

Is it possible for Discoverers to enjoy TTRPGs like D&D as a game of synergy, optimization, and mastery? Have you ever seen the Internet gaming community. Build optimization and synergy is a good half of all online discussions. Some people spend so much time exploring the mechanics and building perfect characters they never get around to playing the game. That sure as hell sounds like they’re having fun with it.

The other half, by the way, is people too busy drawing crappy anime art of their furry characters to play the actual game. Because Discoverers gonna Discover and Expresioneers gonna Express.

Tithron asks…

What are the pros and cons of using multiple dice for the core mechanic instead of a single die? Basically, using 2d10 or 3d6 instead of 1d20?

Hate the question, not the questioner. That’s what I always say. Shut up, I do.

I hate this question. I’m going to answer it, but I want to be clear it’s a crap question. And I’m not mad at you. Just annoyed by the question. Exhausted really. It ain’t your fault, Tithron, but you’re gonna take the blame. Which you had to know was a risk when you e-mailed a guy named The Angry GM to submit a question to a column called Ask Angry, so it’s on you.

I’m sick of gamers making such a big f$&%ing deal about which dice get rolled. Especially when it comes to the whole d20 thing. Because everyone, these days, loves to piss and moan about how the d20 is the worst evar because swinginess and randomness and overriding talent and training and all that crap. Because, apparently, there’s nothing more offensive than the idea that people who aren’t good things might still be given a decent chance to succeed and that, sometimes, very rarely, by pure luck, a weak-a$&% wizard will manage to break down a door the mighty barbarian just bounced of. And that’s terrible instead of a fun chance for the barbarian to shrug sheepishly and say, “I loosened it for you,” before everyone moves on and totally forgets that happened five f$&%ing minutes later when the beholder-bees start spitting disintegration honey at everyone. Holy mother of f$&%.

All right… I feel better now. Just promise me that you’ll remember this s$&% doesn’t matter and the people pissing and moaning about d20s versus n-dice systems and bell curves and s$&% are high-strung dumba$&es who need to shut up and sit down and have fun. And also, remember, randomness ain’t supposed to feel good, and feeling good is a terrible way to rate a game mechanic. Especially because people have loss-and-risk-aversion biases so whenever anything doesn’t go the way they want, they flip the f$&% out.

What’s the difference between a single d20 and an n-dice system?

Basically, what with the laws of randomness and probability, rolling multiple dice reduces the overall variability in the outcomes. When you roll a d20, any outcome’s equally likely. You might get a three or a fifteen or a seven or a twenty or any other number. Each is equally likely. One chance in twenty.

When you roll multiple dice, the numbers in the middle of the spread are way more likely to show up than the numbers on the edges. Roll 2d6, for instance, and you’re much more likely to get a 7 than a 2. Almost half the time, you’re gonna get a result between six and eight.

This applies to crits and fumbles too. You’re equally likely to roll a twelve on a d20 as you are to crit or fumble. On 2d6, assuming twelve crits, you can only expect one crit out of every thirty-six rolls but you’ll see a seven once in every six rolls.

Sort of. I’m just putting this in simple terms. Because I know someone wants to remind me that probabilities don’t mean you’re guaranteed one crit in every twenty or thirty-six rolls or whatever. Which I never actually f$&%ing said.

The more dice you roll and sum, the more clumping you’ll get. Again, for math reasons. But I ain’t going into variability and standard deviations and s$&%.

But the laws of probability do not a game make. What matters far more than the whims of the plastic math rocks is what the game does with them. For example, in most RPGs, you’re usually rolling to meet or exceed, you ain’t trying to get a specific number. Crits and fumbles notwithstanding. And that f$&%s with everyone. In n-dice systems, if you’re already likely to succeed, you’re very likely to succeed. And if the odds are just slightly against you, you’re very likely to fail. Every tiny effect is magnified. In d20 systems, it’s just the opposite.

But there’s more yet to this analysis. Take good ole d20 D&D for instance. Truth is, failure doesn’t mean a whole lot in D&D. A failure won’t kill you. It won’t usually even hurt you. Usually, it means a wasted action. You’ll have to try again or try something else. So the high variability doesn’t mean a whole lot. And given the game’s about legendary fantasy heroes who are expected to do amazing things — when heroes try to do things, they usually succeed — the high-randomness, low-value-of-training-and-talent thing works really well.

Use the same d20 mechanic in a game where failure carries a steep cost and where expertise and training are meant to be everything — like a gritty modern espionage game where the agents have tiles like the Face, the Fixer, and The Hacker — and that’ll suck. It doesn’t work there.

The same’s true the other way. Shove an n-dice system into a game where failure doesn’t mean much and everyone’s meant to be heroic and where reversals of fate and fortune and high drama are the norm, and it won’t feel as good. Why? Because heroes are supposed to be improbably awesome and the whims of fate are supposed to raise you up and drop you down. If everything’s mostly just mediocre success then the game’s bland as f$&%. It ain’t heroic action.

Randomness doesn’t feel good because sometimes it’ll screw you even when everything’s in your favor. But that also means sometimes, when you’re down and desperate, it’ll save your a$&. That’s why mathematicians on the Internet piss and whine about the d20, but the average player just enjoys D&D for what it is.

Fintleroy Gribbleton Paisley III asks…

Mr. Rehm,

I hope this e-mail finds you well.

What I’ve learned from your book and website in the last six years has given me the confidence and skill to run TTRPGs for the public since 2019. It’s fair to say you’ve had a tremendous impact on my life.

How would you structure your play sessions for groups with these constraints:

• Any number of players from four to nine, levels may vary, but characters start at 1st level and earn XP
• Could be the same players, a mix of old and new, or all new players
• Ages 12 to 18
• Three-hour sessions

I’d be interested in blah blah blah whatever…

Holy mother of f$&%. You’re lucky this s$&%’s exactly the kind of question I love to answer because I was so close to hitting the delete key on this s$&%.

First, who the motherloving f$&% is Mr. Rehm? Second, you hope this e-mail finds me well? You know this ain’t a f$&%ing Elizabethan Agony Aunt column, right? I’m The Angry GM and I give sweary advice about pretend elf games on the Internet.

Third, by the way, I’m sick of hearing bulls$&% about how my book and website gave people the skills to be a better GM and run awesome games and have fun. No. Wrong. They did not give you anything. I ain’t taking the blame for that s$&%. You did it. You built the skills. You put yourself out there. You gained confidence and self-esteem by actually testing yourself and succeeding. I offered you advice and a direction and a kick in the a$& and out the door, but you took it, went out the door, and turned it into something. That. Wasn’t. Me.

Fourth, how f$&%ing hard is it to explicitly introduce yourself? Do you all get some sick joy from forcing me to invent dumb-a$& names for you f$&%ers? Because I swear I’m just going to start calling you all no name given or anon or AFGNCAAP — look it up — rather than trying to make a joke on it. Just give me something to call you and tell me I can call you that. Cripes, how do you people manage to operate computers without drooling all over yourselves?

Anyway…

Thank you kindly for your missive, Messer the Third. It would be my great pleasure — nay, honor — to provide guidance concerning this most vexing problem. Forgive my forwardness in asking, but pray, might you be starting some kind of gaming organization for youths, perhaps at the finishing school you are no doubt headmaster of?

Anyway, here’s how I think you should handle this s$&%. It’ll take a bit of extra work over a standard campaign setup, but I’m guessing you’re cool with that.

First, think short, simple, and modular. Focus on simple adventures with straightforward goals and make them mostly about overcoming strings of challenges. No complex mysteries or mazes. Learn the Five Room Dungeon format and all its variations. Including the branching and non-dungeon-delving ones. Start with Nerds on Earth’s overview of the format then hit up Gnome Stew and The Alexandrian for everything they’ve got on 5RDs. Or, you know, search engine.

Also, learn how to write adventures where the middle encounters don’t matter and can just get cut out. That’s an important skill for organized play in general. When you’re running out of time, it’s good to have content you can cut from the adventure so you can get to the ending.

Now, you’ve got teens playing D&D, so you can lean on combat. That’s the easiest thing to do in D&D anyway. But because you’ve got between four and nine players showing up, you’re going to have to design scaling combats. Instead of this:

In the room waits the hobgoblin general and three goblin skirmishers.

Do this:

In the room waits the hobgoblin general and one goblin skirmisher for every two PCs in the party.

Speaking of which, while an occasional fight with a lone bada$& monster is cool, focus on fights with groups of monsters. They’re easier to scale and less likely to get torn apart by a big party.

The variable experience level thing is going to be tricky as hell, but I’ve got a solution for you at the adventure-design level.

First, read this article I wrote about custom monster building. But ignore the crap about building monsters. Just note how I broke the game down into tiers of play instead of levels. Because you’re gonna do that.

When you design an adventure, design it for a tier of play. Say Journeyman Tier. Balance the encounters and challenges — roughly — for the experience level in the middle of the tier — so 4th level for Journeyman Tier — but don’t be too picky about it.

Next, you’ll want to gradually build a library of adventures at different tiers. That’ll take some time, but you don’t have to do it all at once. And three-hour, five-room dungeons that are mostly fights are simple to make. Develop a shorthand and a way to scribble quick, good-enough maps. You need quantity, not quality.

Start by writing three Apprentice Tier adventures. And then write at least one new module every week. As long as the players are still buried in Apprentice Tier, don’t write for anything higher than Apprentice or Journeyman. As they move toward a new Tier, start writing modules for that Tier.

The point of all this? When a group sits down to play, you want to have a pile of modules to choose from. One that’s an appropriate tier for the group and one the players at the table haven’t played before. This means you’ll want to keep a list of who’s played what adventures with the modules themselves. I’m imagining one of those accordion file things organized by Tier of Play with copies of each of the modules you’ve written and a roster of players who’ve beaten it.

To explain this s$&% in-world, build a frontier region around a single city with an adventurer’s guild or with the king’s secret agents or something like that. The characters are all members and they get assigned jobs by the guild high-ups or something. That way, the piles of available adventures being assigned to random groups of adventurers of varying levels who showed up that day makes sense in the world.

That’s called diagetic design, kids.

When some players show up to play, just pick a module that’s right for their levels. If there’s an outlier character — a character too high or too low — just average the levels to pick the tier. Should work fine.

That said, there are a couple of things you can do to balance things out and smooth them out. First, start every 1st level character with double their normal starting hit points. And then just add HP normally at each level. That’ll make Apprentice characters survivable if they end up in Journeyman Tier adventures and it won’t break the game later. Trust me.

Second, when a character participates in a tier higher than their own — like a 2nd level character joining some Journeyman on a quest — boost the XP they gain by 50%. But never, ever let a PC level up more than once between adventures. Likewise, when a character plays a lower-tier adventure — like a 4th level character helping a bunch of Apprentices clear some rats from a cellar — reduce their XP by 50%. Overall, that’ll speed up laggards and newbies and slow down the long-timers so everyone will stay at a more even pace.

Of course, that 50% XP penalty will feel crappy. So, whenever a character is stuck helping out some lowbies on a lower-tier quest, the Guild — or whatever — should reward them for helping train the greenhorns.

Thanks for taking the acolytes rat killing. I know that wasn’t much of a challenge for you. Here, take this level-appropriate-for-you magical item from the Guild vault with our thanks.

You can even hand out titles like “mentor” or “helper of newbies” with cosmetic rewards to help the old-timers feel good about breaking in the ‘cruits. Hell, titles and cosmetic rewards will probably increase camaraderie and loyalty to the club.

And that’s how I’d run my Adventurer’s Guild with a library of assorted-tier, five-scene adventures with scaling encounters and evened-out advancement.

I hope that I have provided ample assistance in this long-winded, but hopefully engaging missive. I wish you all the best. And remember that I remain faithfully yours, my dear friend, and will ever be available to assist you in your endeavors. May the road ever rise to meet your feet.

Sincerest, kind regards…
The Angry F$&%ing GM!

PS: Get it right next time.