Pictures and Words

I thoroughly enjoy an occasional game of Dungeons and Dragons. I’ve never completely understood the negativity that surrounds pen-and-paper roleplaying games – I have friends who have met their spouses over the internet, who own every episode of Star Trek ever made, who will argue for hours over whether Han or Greedo shot first, who own and have finished a hundred and ten computer games, who have been blogging since before it was cool…I have friends who seem to be involved in every “geeky” activity known to man laugh at me and call be a nerd because I like Dungeons and Dragons.

The logic escapes me.

Dungeons and Dragons, for those not in the know, is a game in which you sit around a table and pretend to be someone else. There are a group of players and a “GM”, the “Game Master” (or DM/Dungeon Master) who controls the world around the players – all of the non-player characters, any natural events (“Rocks fall from the sky. Everybody dies.”) and everything that is needed to keep the story going. I like the idea of calling the DM the “StoryTeller”, but it’s never really caught on.

I have a friend who doesn’t enjoy any of the standard “nerdy” activities, but he loves Dungeons and Dragons. “It’s a game about building a character and using your imagination. It’s like writing a book with friends,” he has said to me before. “I don’t understand why that’s so nerdy?”

If I had to guess, I’d say the nerdy part comes in when you start dealing with specific situations – if two players (or a player and a non-player character, etc) want to have a fight, you can just sit there and describe it (“I aim for your neck with my sword.”) but you’re unlikely to come up with any kind of mutually satisfying resolution. Enter the rulebooks and the dice – when you create your character, you roll a number of dice, and assign the resulting numbers to attributes – Strength, Dexterity, Charisma etc etc. You could choose to put all of your higher rolls into the attributes that will help you in combat, and create a great fighter who is lacking in social charm and smarts, or you could decide to have a well-spoken, intelligent character who is as weak as a kitten.

Then when you decide that you want to fight, rather than just sitting there and talking about it, you consult the rulebook. Wait for your turn, roll the dice, and see if your sword successfully hits your opponent’s neck.

There are various roleplaying systems that use only 6-sided dice (those are the ones that you think of when you hear the word “dice”) but Dungeons and Dragons, the daddy of all the pen-and-paper RPGs, and the most famous one, uses a number of different-sided dice, most notably “d20″s:

A 20-sided dice, commonly known as a "d20".

Dungeons and Dragons, popular and fun though it is, is a flawed system. As the pen-and-paper RPG system that’s been around the longest (there are now literally hundreds, and more springing up every day) the rule-system has grown larger and more bloated – if you want to attack someone in D&D with your sword, it’s a simple roll. But if you want to move from one square to another, there are dozens of factors you have to take into account – How many enemies are in the squares around you? What sort of terrain are you running on? What have each of those enemies done in the previous round? Whate are they planning to do in the next round? Are you trying to cast a spell? How tall are you? Does your uncle live in this village, or the next one over?

Each one of those factors (except maybe your uncle’s whereabouts) can factor into whether or not you successfully run one square over. It started simple, but then people started wondering “Hang on, why can I just run past a guy holding a sword while he stands there and looks at me?”, and added rules in to deal with it. The rules upon rules upon rules…it can be a bit overwhelming.

And don’t even think about trying to physically grab another character (grappling) – you’ll be there for months, just trying to work out whose arm is where.

As well as the bloated combat rules, there are other bits and pieces of the Dungeons and Dragons rules that a number of players just find impossible to deal with. A lot of people write their own little patches to fix these up, others have house-rules like “No one is allowed to grapple anyone else” (when I first started playing D&D, we just ignored the more complicated rules completely), and some work around them however they can. (“just as you are about to grapple them, rocks fall from the sky. Everybody dies.)

On top of the bloated rules and inconveniences, there are a lot of other little bits and pieces about Dungeons and Dragons that have always just annoyed me – they’re not badly made or overly complicated, they just bug me. In combat, for example, everyone’s rounds are supposed to occur simultaneously, but you can see what everyone else has done before deciding upon your move. The magic system has always frustrated and annoyed me. Dice randomly determining how good your character is – that can go well, but more often than not it goes horribly wrong. The god that you choose to worship has almost no bearing on your character at all. Little things like that.

Rather than work out dozens of increasingly complex house-rules (which would, of course, layer on top of each other and end up being horribly bloated) I decided, like so many have decided before me, to create my own set of RPG rules.

This was in 2006. Around the same time, I was doing a lot of writing – I was in that stage that every young writer goes through where they want to write short stories about vampires. (mine was called Jhusmet. He was a gentleman thief. The stories were about as bad as you’d expect them to be.)

These vampire stories were set in their own distinct universe – it started out as a modern fantasy version of this world, but the more I played with the idea, the less like earth it became. I started toying with various “what-if”s – What if no one in the world had pets? What if wheels had simply never been invented? What if magic, instead of being a mystical, mythical thing, was an ordinary everyday part of life?

Working simultaneously on my RPG and my own world, they slowly got mixed together, and my new RPG system became specifically tied to this universe that I was creating. It stopped being modern fantasy, and just became regular fantasy. I don’t actually read much, and I’ve never found a fantasy book that I enjoyed (other than The Hobbit when I was a child) so it doesn’t really have much in common with most of the fantasty you’ll see on bookshelves, I’ve been told.

(the closest series that I’ve seen is probably Discworld, simply because they’re both comedic fantasy. I hadn’t actually read any Discworld until 2008, when I got into it at the recommendation of my cousin Gavin - he suggested it would be a good study of world-building. It took me a while to get into the series, but it does pay off. I personally recommend Going Postal or The Truth (but not both, because they’re essentially the same book with different characters) as a one-off, or the series of Guards books. And the world-building side of it is fascinating. Once you’ve found a few Discworld books that you’ve enjoyed, go back and read the first few – they’re written in a completely different style.)

The RPG system got shelved after a few months, and instead I simply worked on expanding the universe. It eventually became known as All-That-Is, and I created a wiki to put all of my notes on. Each year for NaNoWriMo I’ve tried (and failed) to complete a different novel set in All-That-Is (in 2008 it was Life on the Wall, in 2007 it was Basil Turret and the Prisoner of Algebra, and in 2006 it was a novel called Writing a Novel.)

In 2007, I started working in a map shop, which inspired me to start drawing maps of the world I was creating.

I’ve invented hundreds of characters, dozens of locations, and designed more than a handful of games for All-That-Is. I’m yet to actually finish anything, but I consider myself more of a geofictionist anyway – I do it for the fun of creating the world. It’s a hobby, it doesn’t necessarily have to lead anywhere.

Recently, at a pen-and-paper roleplaying convention, I met a number of people who had created their own RPG systems, and (in some cases) published them. In the several years since I’d last worked on my own RPG system, Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition came out, and fixed most of the major issues I’d had with the system.

But All-That-Is had grown from its humble roots of “let’s fix a few problems”, and become its own universe, and I feel that it’s time to pull out the very first notes that I’d ever written – the class list, the weapons, the combat system – and revisit them, see if I could put together an All-That-Is RPG System.

I find it extremely interesting when other people share what they’re working on. I like to see something created from nothing, watch as the creator makes decisions – I especially like it when people do it in blog form, and allow input from the comments, so I thought that I’d share my notes, share the creative process, and garner audience participation and suggestions.

This blog will primarily be focussed on the mechanics of the world, not the flavour. (except, of course, when they cross-over.) If you want to know more about All-That-Is as a world, I recommend visiting The All-That-Is Wiki, or checking out my (unfinished) novels. In 2007, I did a series of All-That-Is-themed entries on my livejournal, they’re worth a read as well.

Whenever I use a term that may not have the same definition in All-That-Is as it does elsewhere, I’ll explain it (Demons, Hands, Halflings…) and for the sake of people who have never played a pen-and-paper roleplaying game in their life, I’ll be explaining all of that terminology as we go as well. (d20, classes, skills…)

At the end of this project (which I predict will be around the end of the year, included play-testing) I hope to have a completely playable RPG set in the land of All-That-Is. I haven’t decided if I’m going to have any kind of art in it (the map above is about the extent of my artistic abilities, so I’d have to get someone else in for that) or if I’m going to print it, or just have it as a downloadable set of rules. I’m not going to be working full-time on it, but there should be a new post about about once a week.

At the end of this project, I hope to have a completely balanced, playable RPG set in the land of All-That-Is, and probably an adventure or two to go with it. The entire process will be documented right here, on Pictures and Words, and audience input will more than likely  be taken into account.

Should be an exciting ride!

Next time: Writing in-universe, a bit about the book, and Open Gaming License.

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