Be Like Zammo: Just Say No

(Age appropriate reference there – it’s Grange Hill. If you don’t know, ask your grandparents. If any of them suddenly bust out either ‘Rooooland’ or ‘You boy!’ they’re not mad, just older)

Let me start with a tale of regret. Back in the late 2000s, I introduced one of my friends to a new emerging genre of ‘indie games’ – story games, if you will – and he was hooked. The implicit freedoms of this new style of gaming seemed to energise him. It was lovely. Then, we sat down to play Hot War. I pitched a gritty, ‘hearts and minds’ game, visiting the horrors of a community complicit in its own horrors. One player offered up an aged old policeman, past his prime and mourning his lost wife. Another suggested a traumatised civil defense volunteer, struggling with the new normal. My friend? A former SAS member, who was also an IRA double agent and who happened to be possessed by a demon. 

When I suggested that this might not sit well in the tone of the game I was planning, his response, said with his full chest, has lived with me since that day.

“But I thought you indie game players were all about saying ‘yes’ – or are you just blocking me?”

And ‘blocking’ was said with a full weighted accusatory tone. It was a proper, indignant weaponisation of the collaborative ideals of story games, to get his way. And to my shame, I let him play his whacky invention and the game was fine – mostly because I ignored his excesses and drilled down so hard into the horror, he forgot his own demon and was more concerned about mine…

With that in mind, I read an article on Wargamer recently which properly triggered me and this piece is a response to it. The article – ‘My partner wants to learn DnD, but here’s why we’re playing Daggerheart instead’ – suggests that because Daggerheart explicitly says you can ‘adjust (the game) to fit your style of play’ the author’s partner’s desire, in their first ever RPG experience, to play a necromancer wizard who conjures dinosaurs, can be realised easier in Daggerheart than D&D.

(And an aside, in this age of social media disclaiming – this piece isn’t griefing the author at all. It’s talking about some of the concepts in their article. The idea of chain lightning velociraptors actually tickled me no end!)

So Neil, you crusty old fool – what’s your problem?

One: Daggerheart is not more flexible than D&D

Something I have struggled with for years is the need for explicit permission to act from some groups of gamers. There’s a part of the hobby which seems to need a ruleset to give them permission to act outside that ruleset before they will do it. Like there are clans of game company ninjas watching from the corner of your games room, ready to pounce on you in punishment for transgressing against the rules. 

(As another aside, this thing is the reason you might see me use the Omnininja icon in places – it was a running joke back in the D&H/BtQ days that the Omnininjas, my anti-rulesbreaking strike team, were having a cuppa, so people were safe to bend the game how they wanted….)

Sure, Daggerheart gives you explicit permission, but so does D&D! Check this out?

‘House rules are new or modified rules you add to your game to make it your own and to enhance the style you have in mind for your game. Before you establish a house rule, ask yourself two questions.

• Will the rule change or improve the game?
• Will my players like it?

If you’re confident that the answer to both questions is yes, give the new rule a try. Present house rules as experiments, and ask your players to provide feedback on them. If you introduce a house rule that isn’t fun, remove or revise the rule.’
(DMG 2024, pg.13)

Additionally, there are also rules in the DMG for ‘Creating a Spell’ (pg 59) which are pretty loosey-goosey, but they do tell you exactly what damage would be done by ‘Stampede of Lightning Raptors’ at what level.

However, every game is ultimately as flexible as you are willing to make it. The author does say that they could reskin Chain Lightning, but worries about the effect of changing the Lightning damage type to say, Piercing, on game balance, and suggests that the swap between Physical and Magical Damage in Daggerheart is ‘more adjustable’. Is it though?

The minutiae of the conversion isn’t the real issue though, it’s the need to create the damned dinosaur summoning necromancer in the first place…

Two: TTRPG isn’t wish fulfilment (well, not all of it anyway)

Imagine, if you will, this scenario? You sit down to play Traveller and do character generation, and a new player says ‘I want to play someone like Captain Kirk. I want to be the Captain of the Enterprise and have a crew and also, a robot companion like Data from Next Gen, and I want a lightsaber!’- how do you react?

I imagine the discussion would, at a good table, be that having a billion credit ship is possible in the game, and there’s probably stats for a light sword in supplement somewhere, and robots are definitely a possibility, but this isn’t Star Trek, there is no Federation and well, in this game you start off as rugged old veterans and work your way towards some of these things. Yeah? And that would be fair.

You would say no. 

Mecha in Middle Earth? No.
Drow in Glorantha? No.

Wizards in Pendragon? Almost always no.

You play the game and the campaign that is presented to you. That’s sort of the social contract here. And unfortunately, for this player, there is no part of D&D that has a Wizard with the Necromancy school of magic having all dinosaur powered spells. Can you do it? Probably, but you’re going to have to do a lot of ‘homebrew’ to keep it consistent. It’s work that the author of the article was unwilling to do.

How about a ‘No, but…’ instead?

No, but instead of being a Necromancer, have you thought of being a druid? And using the Animal Companion feature to have your own little (and increasingly big) dinosaur pet? And being a Circle of the Moon druid, and turning yourself into a massive dinosaur? Your Spike Growth can be Stegosaurus spines? Barkskin can be an Ankylosaurus hide?Your Thorn Whip can be a spiked tail? It sounds really quite cool actually.

No, but let’s embrace the Necromancer part, and have you casting your spells using the ancient bones of dinosaurs, drawing from a magical pact between ancient blood lizard sorcerers? Flavour up the spells as much as you can towards dino-stuff -Toll the Dead can be a massive spectral set of T-Rex jaws chomping down on the victim.

So you can do it, and stay within the game, but you don’t need to port the wish direct.You can say no. You can modify a player’s concept to fit with the way the game works. D&D might have shift somewhat from the ‘zero to hero’ concept it started at, but you are still starting essentially as Samwise in the Shire, Harry on his first day at Hogwarts, or Jon Snow being given the runt wolf by his adoptive brothers. You (generally) don’t start off riding dragons!

Three: RPGS have limits

“With Daggerheart, my partner still gets to experience what he thinks D&D is – a heroic fantasy roleplaying game with no limitations.” 

I think, beyond all the chat about lightning raptors, this is the line which got to me the most, because D&D is not a game with no limitations. It has a fair few limitations! All games do – that’s what separates them from school yard make believe. It’s working within those boundaries that challenges us and gives us the boundaries within which we can fairly exercise our imagination.

Or to use another analogy, if the author’s partner thought Chess was a game where pawns exploded and took out every piece within one square of them, would we be modding chess to accommodate? Searching for a game which allowed this? Or just say ‘No, you silly goose, that’s not how it works! Whatever gave you that idea?’

In the same vein, whatever gave you the idea that RPGs had no limitations? Of course they do! From the system, to the setting, to the social contract around the table, RPGs are packed with limitations and when we see someone moving outside those limitations we should say so, right? Right…?

This is why session zero tools like C.A.T.S. (Concept, Aim, Tone, Subject Matter) can be so important. They establish the out-of-rulebook parameters for the game. 

But was this just Clickbait?

I have pondered on whether the article itself was just clickbait. The net has been rammed with articles like this since the launch of Daggerheart. They either point out some tiny flaw (usually solved by reading the text, which is remarkably thorough if you read it) in Daggerheart which proves beyond all doubt that it is a broken, failed and terrible game OR they point out one of the 1001 ways it is different (and by this read, better) from D&D and thus D&D is a broken, failed and terrible game. Fans of both games form ranks, comments fly, engagement spikes, ad revenue increases, job done.

However, with respect to the author, I’m not going to treat it like this – I think it really is a straight up case of looking to give their partner a great introduction to roleplaying and to help them have the most fun they can – and honestly now its been mentioned, necro-saur concepts are lodged in my head!

My suggestion would be to do one of two things:

One: Be like Zammo, and just say no. Tell your partner that D&D doesn’t accommodate dinosaur-powered necromancers. You can get necromancers. You can get dinosaurs. You might be able to get them close, but as an introductory few sessions, probably at low level, you might want to tone things down a smidge?

Two: If you’re willing to switch to Daggerheart instead of that culturally relevant D&D touchstone, go the whole hog and play Fate Accelerated. Now, there’s a game where you can do loads of roleplay, is painlessly simple for people to pick up and within which you could create a necromantic dinosaur summoning wizard in moments, and it would work perfectly. 

In Conclusion

Some people might read this as a nit-picking punch down at a simple article showing a preference for one ruleset over another. It definitely isn’t meant to be that. What I felt the need to illustrate was the importance of ‘no’ as a concept in games. We need to be able to say ‘no’ as GMs or there is no point in having a GM. One of the crucial roles of the player in the GMs chair is to maintain the parameters and limitations of the game. We do it explicitly – ‘No, you cannot have a Gundam in Middle Earth, Brian….’ – and we do it within the rules – ‘You say that your warrior lops the head off the Balrog, let’s see whether you have the dice to back it up?’ – and we do it at the table – ‘I know you want to do something, but Emma hasn’t acted yet, so let’s go to her, and then back to you,’

And we should be able to use it in our tools of expectations management for the game, and indeed, the hobby as a whole. And I wish I could say no to my brain but I’m off to make a necromancer dinosaur mage, goddamit!