Go to Part 1

As a first step in experimenting with urbancrawl structures, I simply broke down the three basic elements of ‘crawl-based play and tried to apply them to an urban environment:

1. Keyed Locations
2. Geographic Movement
3. Exploration-Based Default Goal

KEYED LOCATIONS

What are we keying? Neighborhood? Buildings? Organizations? People?

Neighborhoods seem too large. For example, here’s a map of Green Ronin’s Freeport as found in the Death in Freeport module:

If you look at something like the Temple District, it’s pretty easy to imagine multiple locations that the PCs would want to interact with. If you’re trying to key multiple entries to a single location, it’s a dead giveaway that you’re keying at the wrong scale. For example, the idea of writing up multiple key entries for a single dungeon room probably sounds inherently weird to you. Although, just for the sake of argument, here’s an example from Lords of Madness I recently stumbled across:

Hexcrawls tend to be a little more forgiving of multiple keys per location, but even there I would argue that if you’re frequently keying lots of stuff into a single hex it’s an indication that your hex map is at the wrong scale.

Individual buildings, on the other hand, seem too small. Even a small city like Freeport has hundreds or possibly thousands of buildings. Keying even 10% of them would be a daunting task, and if you left 90% of a dungeon or a hexcrawl unkeyed you wouldn’t have enough material to hold the scenario together. (And even if you did key them, most of them would be boring. It would be like keying every tree in a forest for a hexcrawl.)

Keying organizations or people would give you a very different way of “navigating” the city. For example, Monsters & Manuals talks about building a relationship hexmap for urban-based sandboxes.

But since our next bullet point is geographic movement, I’m going to at least temporarily steer away from that and propose that we should be looking to key a geographic entity somewhere between neighborhoods and individual buildings.

GEOGRAPHIC MOVEMENT

How do we move through a city?

It seems like the obvious question to ask here, but I find that it ends up being a trap. If you’re like me, when you go out “into the city” you’re generally pursuing some specific goal: You’re going to the grocery store. Or driving to Suzie’s house. Or walking to the park.

I’ve come to think of this as “utility-based” or “target-based” movement. It’s the way I’ve run movement in an urban environments at the game table for years: The PCs say they want to go to Castle Shard and, at most, I figure out how long it takes for them to get there before segueing directly to, “You arrive at Castle Shard.” (Occasionally there might be an encounter along the way that gets triggered one way or another.)

But target-based movement is anathema to the ‘crawl structure. The PCs aren’t making a choice of geographic movement, they’re making a choice of where they want to be.

The distinction might be clearer if I apply the same logic to wilderness travel: Let’s say the PCs are in City A and they say, “I want to be in City B.” You can resolve that by looking at a road map, calculating how long it will take them to travel along the road, and then say, “Three days later you arrive in City B.”

But if you do that, you are not hexcrawling.

Which is not to say that there’s anything wrong with that. There are plenty of situations where that is exactly the right way to resolve that sequence of events. But it’s not a ‘crawl.

Similarly, if my players say, “I want to go to Castle Shard.” And I respond by saying, “Five minutes later, you arrive to find the drawbridge lowered and Kadmus waiting to greet you outside.” There’s nothing wrong with that. But we aren’t urbancrawling.

EXPLORATION-BASED GOAL

The key distinction here appears to be the difference between travel and exploration. Which neatly brings us to our third bullet point: A default goal based around exploration.

What does it mean to explore a city? Does it mean anything at all? How are we interacting with the city when we’re “exploring” it?

If you google “explore a city”, what you generally find is a lot of travel advice. And most travel advice takes the form of target-based movement (“take a tour”, “go to a museum”, “visit a club”, etc.). Alternatively, we have this guy who explored a city by flipping a coin at every intersection to determine his route. And here’s a blog post talking about women walking through New York on foot, but they’re doing so just for the experience.

This may be an insurmountable hurdle. If “exploring a city” doesn’t actually mean anything – if it’s not a naturalistic behavior that characters would actually pursue – then we’re trying to model something that doesn’t exist.

But let’s not despair quite yet. Let’s tackle this from a different angle: What’s the goal we’re trying to pursue in the city?

For example, in the dungeon we’re looking for monsters to slay and treasure to loot. In a dungeoncrawl this naturally carries us from room to room looking for the room which contains these things. Similarly, in the hexcrawl we go from hex to hex seeking locations filled with interest.

So if you’re a fantasy adventurer who has just walked through the gates of a city… what are you looking for?

Go to Part 3: Vertical Integration

Tagline: Buy it! Buy it! Buy it! Buy it! Buy it! But it! ………. Buy it NOW!

This game kicks ass… and not just because it’s a fight game, either.

Real time card games (a term which I am almost certain was coined by James Ernest) are, in my opinion, one of the coolest developments to hit gaming in recent years. Collectible card games may have been innovative, but the sheer power of the real time concept easily blows them out of the water without blinking.

I have reviewed two other games in this trend – WOTC’s Twitch! and Cheapass Games’ Falling! — elsewhere on RPGNet with words of glowing praise, every one of which they earned and more. Now it is with great pleasure that I review Brawl, which takes all of this to a new level.

The game is currently marketed in the form of six interchangeable decks, each named after a fictional “fighter”: Hale, Chris, Bennett, Pearl, Darwin, and Morgan. It is well worth your time.

(This is not – repeat, not! — a collectible card game. You need two decks – one for each player – to play, but each and every one of the decks is stand-alone. You aren’t supposed to combine the decks.)

THE RULES

Okay, first off: What’s this “real time” concept?

Basically it means what it says: You play the game in “real time”, instead of artificially breaking the game into a series of “turns” or “rounds” or “hands” or whatever other gimmicky term the creators have come up with.

How does it work in practice?

Each deck in Brawl is composed of a variety of cards: Bases, Hits, Blocks, Clears, Hit-2s, Presses, and Freezes. The exact number of each type of card (as well as their presence and/or absence) is determined by which character you select – in other words, different characters have different strengths and weaknesses. In actual play you need to be aware of these, because it can have a profound difference on your success or failure.

To begin play each player shuffles their deck. Then they put one base in the middle of the table and put all of their Freeze cards on the bottom of their deck. You play cards off of these Bases in the following manner:

Hit. All Hits are colored. You can play a Hit card directly on the base, or on top of a Hit or Hit-2 card of the same color.

Block. All Blocks are colored. A Block can be played on a Hit or a Hit-2 of the same color. (Because Hits can’t be played on Blocks, a Block thus prevents further Hits from being played.)

Press. A Press is played on a Block, allowing you to resume playing Hits on that Base.

Hit-2. Functions just like a Hit, but you can’t play it on a Press or a Base.

Clear. A Clear card removes a Base (and all the cards which have been played on it) from play.

Freeze. A Freeze is played directly onto a Base (regardless of which cards have been played off of it) and prevents any further play on that Base. When all Bases have been frozen, the game ends.

Base. Additional Bases may be played as they come up, but there can only be three bases in play at a time.

Play proceeds off both sides of a base (each side being given to one of the players). When the game ends you count up the number of Hits and Hit-2s which have been played on your side of the base (Hit-2s count for two points) – that’s your score. The player with the higher score wins the base. The player who wins 2 out 3 bases wins.

“Wait a minute,” you say, “Where’s this ‘real time’ thing come in?”

Well, like I said, there are no turns. Once play begins you begin playing cards off the top of your deck (i.e., you take the top card off your deck, look at it, and then play it, before looking at the next card and playing it) as quickly and as effectively as you can. (You can also discard cards into your discard pile, and can play the top card from this pile instead of turning over the next card in your deck as you wish.)

WHAT YOU SHOULD BUY

As I mentioned before, there are six decks to choose from. Conveniently, on the back of these decks, Cheapass Games has provided a series of three important guides: Skill Level (rated Easy, Moderate, and Hard); Advantages (a couple sentences on potentially successful strategies); and Weaknesses (a couple sentences on the potential soft spots in the deck).

I’d suggest starting with Hale and Chris, the two Easy decks. Hale is a bruiser – he’s easy to play because he’s all hits (offense is easier to handle than the finesse of defense). Chris is a well-balanced girl – easy to play because she doesn’t require any special strategy.

I’d tell you where to go next, but once you’ve played the game with those two decks you’ll be totally addicted, so it doesn’t matter. The other four will fall neatly into your pocket without a second thought.

SUMMARY

What makes the game so effective is a combination of factors: First, the real time mechanics are a perfect fit for the fighting motif (Video Fighter, which I review elsewhere on RPGNet, looks stodgy by comparison). Second, the variety of decks for different fighters (a concept which was imperfectly originated by Video Fighter, coincidentally) shows the ability with which a simple set of rules and cards can be combined in various manners to create very specific dynamics and tactics. Third, the entire package is beautifully put together – great artwork, great design, great appeal.

Finally, and most importantly, the game is just damn fun to play. James Ernest, once again, proves he has an ineffable sense for near-perfection in game design – balancing a disparate set of elements in just such a manner to make them, ultimately, totally enthralling.

Whatever you do, don’t start playing this game unless you’ve got plenty of time on your hands.

Otherwise, you’ll regret it.

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Author: James Ernest
Company/Publisher: Cheapass Games
Cost: $6.95
Page Count: n/a
ISBN: n/a

Originally Posted: 2000/03/12

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Recently got involved in a discussion about the sidebar in CthulhuTech that proudly proclaims their intention to use “he” as a gender-neutral pronoun:

THE PRONOUN GAME
Okay, here it is — we use he, him, and his when we’re talking about people playing the game. It just seems weird to alternate pronoun genders within the same book — it make it feel like the book is written for two different audiences. The masculine pronoun is the standard and right or wrong we’re used to seeing it. It may not be politically correct, but you can’t please everybody.

This sidebar has enraged some people. Other people have cheered it on. Still others (who, I pray, are the majority) are just left scratching their heads.

My personal mileage is that I’m mildly annoyed by it. But my annoyance is pretty much identical to the RPG rulebooks that include sidebars expressing how amazing they are for alternating pronouns or whatever their hobby horse of a “solution” is for the gender neutral pronoun in English. The fact that RPG rulebooks somehow became a major battleground in the gender-neutral pronoun wars is one of the truly What The Fuck?! moments of the ’90s for me.

With that being said, I can certainly recognize that for people who actually care deeply about this issue that the CthulhuTech sidebar is basically a game designer going out of his way (and unnecessarily so) to say, “Fuck you.” I would find that fairly off-putting, too, if I was in their shoes.

 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE GENDER-NEUTRAL PRONOUN IN ENGLISH

Historically, “he” was the gender-neutral pronoun. Several hundred years ago, people came up with “she” to specifically differentiate women. Once women had been differentiated, the previously all-inclusive “he” picked up the specific connotations of being male.

As “he” lost its gender neutrality, however, the language reflexively adapted and “they” was used as a gender neutral pronoun. This worked fine until the the original grammar nazis of the 19th century arrived on the scene: A lot of the work they did to systematize the language was a huge net benefit to the English language, but they also had a lot of weird ideas. (Like trying to force English to obey the laws of Latin: For example, in Latin a split infinitive is simply nonsense. In English, however, phrases like “to boldly go” make perfect sense and people use them all the time. The attempt to ban split infinitives in English because they don’t work in Latin is nonsense. It’s like trying to ban people from playing Halo games on the X-Box because they don’t work on a Linux computer.)

One of the things these guys strongly objected to was the use of “they” as a singular gender-neutral pronoun. So, like split infinitives, many of them declared them to be bad grammar and insisted that “he” should be used exclusively as the singular gender-neutral pronoun. (Note that this was a choice: Either “they” could serve as both a singular and plural gender-neutral; or “he” could serve as both masculine and gender-neutral.)

Despite the grammarians, lots and lots and lots and lots of people kept using “they” as a gender-neutral singular. That made sense, of course. There was a reason that the language had evolved that way. And the situations in which “they” being singular instead of plural could cause confusion were much rarer than the situations in which “he” being treated as gender-neutral instead of masculine could cause confusion.

Fast forward to the 20th century: People begin noticing that “male = human, female = other” is really fucking problematic. And, yes, the grammarian attempt to enforce “he” as a gender-neutral pronoun hundreds of years after the language had attempted to naturally evolve away from that was part of that sexist memetic structure.

As a result, several varying efforts to introduce a gender-neutral pronoun separate from “he” or “they” have been attempted. But language tends not to work like that. Instead, “they” has simply continued merrily on its way as a gender-neutral pronoun with ever-increasing levels of acceptance.

MY TWO BITS

I’m a pretty big fan of people communicating clearly and correctly. But I’m also a huge fan of telling prescriptivist grammarians to shut up.

So I strongly endorse making it your personal mission to boldly go forth and use “they” as your gender neutral pronoun in English.

For RPG rulebooks specifically: If you want to swap the gender of your pronouns when writing specific examples, I fully support and endorse your gender-inclusive agenda. Toss some zes and zirs in there, too. And if you aren’t talking about vis character, then you’re unnecessarily excluding future generations of AI players. Seriously: Specific examples of characters and/or players should be multi-ethnic, multi-gendered, multi-everything. Not because it’s politically correct, but because it’s awesome.

But trying to make “she” a gender neutral pronoun is like “fetch”: It’s not going to happen. Please stop trying.

Many moons ago I presented a series of essays on Game Structures in roleplaying games: Learning them, prepping for them, using them, creating them, and so forth. What’s about to follow may make a bit more sense if you click through that link first.

One of the things that was originally supposed to be part of that essay series was a discussion of urbancrawls: A structure that would have completed the triumvirate of dungeoncrawl-hexcrawl-urbancrawl and given an essentially “complete” structure for running exploration-based fantasy campaign worlds.

When I started the Game Structures series I thought I was really close to cracking the urbancrawl nut. But as I wrote the series, it became clear that I was not as close as I thought I was. I eventually excised the discussion of urbancrawls from the series, but was fairly confident I would be able to solve the problems and present it independently in the very near future.

Six months have passed since then. (And another year and a half since I wrote the previous sentence.) And I still don’t think I’ve solved it.

WHAT I’M NOT LOOKING FOR

First, let me clarify something: I am not trying to figure out how to run urban adventures. With the recent uptick in people being interested in dungeoncrawls and hexcrawls, I’ve seen a fair amount of people using the term “urbancrawl” to just mean “a D&D adventure that happens to be set in a city”. But that’s not what I’m talking about.

If that was what I was talking about, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. My current 3.5 campaign – set entirely within the city of Ptolus – has been running for 100+ sessions. I know how to run effective adventures and entire campaigns that are set in a city. Node-based scenario design is a flexible tool and I’m not afraid to use it.

WHAT I AM LOOKING FOR

What I’m looking for right now, though, is an urbancrawl. A scenario structure that would use the same fundamental principles that dungeoncrawls and hexcrawls use.

Let’s take a moment to review the characteristics of a ‘crawl (based on our analysis of the dungeoncrawl and hexcrawl):

1. It uses a map with keyed locations. (This provides a straight-forward prep structure.)
2. Characters transition between keyed locations through simple, geographic movement. (This provides a default action and makes it easy to prep robust scenarios.)
3. There’s an exploration-based default goal. (This motivates player engagement with the material and also synchronizes with the geographic-based navigation through the scenario.)
4. Characters can engage, disengage, and re-engage with the scenario. (You can go into a dungeon, fight stuff for awhile, leave, and when you come back the dungeon will still be there.)

This fourth property appears to exist because:

(A) Material within the ‘crawl structure is firewalled. (In general, area 20 of a dungeon isn’t dependent on area 5.)

(B) The default goal is holographic. (You can explore some of the wilderness or get some of the treasure and still feel like you’ve accomplished something.)

(C) The default goal is non-specific. (You can get a bunch of treasure from Dungeon A then get more treasure from Dungeon B and still be accomplishing your goal of Getting Lots of Treasure.)

(D) The default goal isn’t interdependent. (You can clear the first half of a dungeon and somebody else can clear the second half. By contrast, you can’t solve the second half of a mystery unless you’ve got the clues from the first half.)

The dungeoncrawl structure provides these features for location-based adventures. The hexcrawl structure provides these features for wilderness-based adventures. A fully functional urbancrawl structure would theoretically provide these features for city-based adventures.

WHY I’M LOOKING FOR IT

If I can already use node-based structures to run urban-based scenarios, why am I interested in figuring out this “urbancrawl” thing?

Open game tables.

My current open table campaign started with dungeoncrawling. It later expanded to include a surrounding hexcrawl. In both cases, however, I had vestigial cities hanging out as “home bases” for the PCs: They were safe havens and places where they could resupply, but active adventuring wasn’t taking place there.

And it wasn’t taking place despite the fact that I had specifically prepped them the way I normally prep cities: With interesting NPCs and scenario hooks hanging all over the place. In non-open campaigns all of those hooks would get developed using node-based structures as the players explored them. But node-based structures are generally interdependent, specific, and non-holographic: When every week sees a different group of PCs sitting at my table, the node-based structures don’t work. They fall apart.

But if I could develop an urbancrawl scenario structure that works the same way the other ‘crawl structures work, then I would be able to prep effective material and the players would know how to engage it.

Beyond the open table, I’m also just generally fascinated to see how an exploration-based urban environment would develop in play. I also suspect it would give rise to a lot of interesting, faction-based play and also open up alternative realm management possibilities. (But those are just gut instincts, obviously, since the structure doesn’t actually exist yet.)

SO WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE?

I think I’m narrowing in on an urbancrawl structure, but it’s not quite gelling for me. So I’m hoping to present my own thoughts on the topic, open up a dialogue, get some feedback, and maybe crack this thing once and for all.

Go to Part 2

THINKING ABOUT URBANCRAWLS
Part 2: Applying the ‘Crawl
Part 3: Vertical Integration
Part 4: Experimental City Hexes
Part 5: Using the Ptolus Hexmap
Part 6: Old School Inspiration
Part 7: City States of the Judges Guild
Part 8: Other Old School Cities
Part 9: New School Urbancrawls
Part 10: One City, Many Urbancrawls
Part 11: The Investigation Action
Part 12: Exploring the Advanced Urbancrawl

Yesterday I posted Don’t Prep Plots: The Principles of RPG Villainy. It was the first article here at the Alexandrian that was made possible entirely through the support of my patrons. I want to take a moment to call attention to the Patrons of the Alexandrian page I’ve created to thank them and recognize the contribution they’re making to the site.

This is the last post I’ll be making about my Patreon for awhile, but there’s a lot of nifty content coming down the pipe that will only exist because of the Patreon. Everyone reading this is going to have the opportunity to enjoy all that niftiness because of my patrons and I really can’t express my appreciation for that enough. It’s amazing to me that we’re basically only $7 away from the So You Want To Be a Dungeon Master? milestone goal. If just 30 people interested in seeing a step-by-step practical guide to GMing from me were willing to pledge $0.25 per post, I’d be able to start tackling that truly monumental project.

It’s so cool.

$0.10? $0.25? $1.00?

… even the smallest of pledges can add up to wondrous things.