Ill Gotten Gains

Something that my players may or may not be aware of, but most likely should be at some point, is the idea that you are watched..

maybe not always,

maybe not specifically,

but if you notice your neighbours, a new car, new paint on the house, doing up the garden, maybe some expensive looking things, coming and going.. fridges, washing machines.. you cast your mind back to before it all happened, and they were having some big party, late into the night..

could it not be likely, they just won the lottery?

So, in a medi-eval town, where no television or radio exists, and the most common entertainment would be gossip. Everyone is watching, and talking and comparing notes..

Everyone.

They watch, they talk, they whisper.. and word gets around.. who lives where, what do you think they do, what have you seen them doing, do they display means of wealth or are they poor as dirt, do they have manners, or are they drunkards (or both)


So, if you lived in a medieval city, and you acquired a few thousand gold, even without spending.. the sheer joy and fear of having that much, would surely be noticed...

World Development: Civilization 2, 3 and 4

There's one thing I seem to be very good at, figuring out how to be lazy and yet still get good results.

Civs Tech Tree, Mine Tripled it, for just the Middle Ages

So Way back in '96 I got Civilisation II, and while I played it probably non stop for a year, I got bored enough with its generic, simplification of technologies and the early years of the game.. so like many Civ players, I learn how to Mod the game.

But I had more purpose than that.

Civ created a Map for you, Major cities, borders, races and politics, within the Cities you could list the basic buildings available to its citizens, you had access to a wide variety of information, did they have access to resources, what kind of population was happy (rich) vs unhappy (poor, criminals)

You could create an entire roleplay world in a matter of hours, what would take an average writer months and months..

So I did... but it wasn't good enough,

Lord of the Rings Icons suits many a fantasy setting!

So I edited CivII, Added in more relevant techs for a historical setting, high fantasy but low magic world, I joined Civ Fanatics, I wrote about changes, I uploaded and downloaded images, shared ideas and developed a Fantasy Themed Civ game..

Then I inflicted it upon my friends and roleplay group.. Civ II only allowed 4 human players. so we had to replay the map in sections to create a decent enough history & backstory..

My group liked it well enough to want to do it again, So I decided to create some 'back story' maps too.

Tyranosaurus Rexicus Maxiumus Invades Cairo

 There was a Mod for Civ II something to do with dinosaurs, they 'ate' forests to increase their size, nested for created baby dinosaurs, some could chew up the land to create lakes & if nearby sea beds..

This was like a terraforming Mod (I went on to make this into 3 games) which worked brilliantly.. It got my players interested in making the land masses, shaping the world, choosing if a region should be forested, or chewed up by the dinosaurs to become grasslands (or when a dinosaur died, become oil fields)

My team, inflicted once again, played out 3 rounds of this.. I amalgamated the maps into one, and this determined some 'ancient structures' as well as some 'interesting landscapes'.

Around 1998-1999, Civ III came out... with a far easier editor.. but better yet 16 players! I took a year to create a Mod for this, all new graphics, all new designs, new Units, new tech tree..

Dragons, Magicians, Knights, Castles. Civ IV has enough models, I could do it all again!!

and we never played it. Real life took everyone in new paths..

But, it did give me the impetus for Fantasy Kingdoms, years later, I would discover, this idea that players are very willing to participate in world generation.. if you give them the right tools.

So, if you're looking at this great big world you're thinking of creating, and it seems like such a huge job.. why not do the same.. Start one of the many Map ownership games that exist out there, with some friends (maybe even your gaming group) and build the back story of your world together.. share the workload in a fun manner

Your play team will often surprise you and include things you could have never thought of.....

Original Stats: The Mage

When we first started looking at putting together the Mage in our system, we had 3 players who tried magic, Mattius the Thaumaturge, was an experimenter, he had no real spells, just things he picked up along the way, Reym the Elven Mage/Fighter, who had some augmentation for combat, and finally Sutekh, the sprite, who had a range of natural abilities, but not specific magics.

Remember, this was back in 2nd Edition Rules, The Amalgamation of all systems had begun, but magic was far down the list.. so in order to make a playable game, I just hobbled together the spell lists, averaged out some spells and levels to match something clean, and ended up with a hodgepodge of mismatched rules that made little to no real sense..

which is magic, when you think about it.

Magic is either science or its Not

My First big problem was that I was reading far too much Science Fiction at the time, Issac Asimovs stories of Azazel the 'Demon' using high level technology to create the effects, which seemed like magic. 

In '96 I went to a community college to get a degree on Computer Science and was learning about databases.. one thing I put together was a structure of 'cause & effect' for spells.

Then at the Same College I met some teachers, who put me onto some Professors at University, who were very keen to discuss how magic could work under the laws of Thermodynamics, Electromagnetism and Looking into Spirituality and how it could be represented in a magical system.

Now, while I have remade the rules of Combat several times, Archery several times, Stealth several times, Magic remained the same system for many many years..

Here's how it worked then, and still does for Version 3..

All spells, based on their school, had a difficulty level to study, A Study requirement, an Imperfection level to cast spells. The Caster would roll for cast spell, if passed, they had an imperfection chance %, but if failed, this value was increased by the spell difficulty x The failure result.

Back then, Magic worked on a number of d8s  x the spell level. so 1st level spells could fail up to 8 pts (if you had no score) and the highest 16th level spells, could theoretically fail by 128pts. We were experimenting with varied dice pools at the time.. my colleague was trying to make a 3d8 version of the whole system, arguing if 2 dice gave a good bell curve, 3 dice would be better.

Again though, Maybe because the magic was so broken, or so difficult to learn a spell, or the number of players I had was so limited, I needed a group to play some mages..

So the OS team were born.. 5 Mages, down on their luck, driven out of town after town for some shocking trickster attempts, vowed to return to vent their revenge, sought out some powerful magics and blew themselves to smithereens when the imperfection failed far too much. But in that time, I did manage to clean up the magic rules from v2 to v3.

v3.5 is another story for another day.. 

The Lists

In the endeavours of my system, my best friend Craig, had joined me in the idea of creating this awesome system. He introduced me to rolemaster, Wow, I thought my game was complex... I am curious how modern gamer kids view it, or if they even come across it..

But what we did back then was to grab all the systems we had access to and write out this big lists..

All the Skills, All the Spells, All The Traits, Flaws, Statistics, Modifier charts, Everything.. including all double-ups.. until we had this big BIG set of lists..

Early on, we check for things that were similar duplicates, but also, different duplicates.. wrote notes about how or why they were different.

Skills were broken into three groups.. easy medium and hard.

Spells were left in a big pile for much later.

While things changed, we always came back to these lists to check if we missed something.. sometimes it was a tweak of an idea, where we had the concept wrong from the start.. other times it needed to be scratched out.. too many skills based on the same thing, just because English language has two words for it, doesn't make it separate skills (but often it does)

Original Stats: Ranger

After Reading the Players Hand book on Rangers, AD&D, I thought that making a Hunter Profession was too specific.. By about now, I'd figured that while I liked the concept of Professions, like Warhammer, I also liked to group classes, like D&D.

Warrior was Obvious, Rogues too, One was the straight up fighter, in your face, strength, brawn, maybe leadership for the common good.. and Rogues were more about Self, sneaky, back handed, back stabbing, maybe stealing or conning, or just not giving two shits about another person..

D&D Rangers are/were warriors.. but there were so many aspects, hunters, travellers, herbalists, that didn't fit this concept.. so we though about the loner..

Warriors are about leading groups, and direct confrontation, and rogues, no confrontation, but maybe rangers were in between distanced.. ranged confrontation.. so anything archery based, scouting at a distance,. travelling distances.. became the rangers style.. Rogues were about people, rangers about places.. so Three (of my eventual eight) classes were forming.. but they were more than classes.. they were underlying themes.. lifestyles if you will.

Soon Enough we identified that while a Warrior was about power in combat, Mages were about Power in Magic.. or just power without punching.. maybe they should be rangers counter part, now that I think about it, Clerics and Priests are about people, but either by using them (for their god) or benefitting them (for the people).. is more the Rogues Priest vs the Warrior Priest.. Hmm, seems we're onto something here.. The Idea of Psionic was definately in my notes.. but it seemed that D&D had sewn up that in legal rights at the time, so I wanted to be clear of such things.. and we had Thaumaturge listed from the extended professions list that we created..

Oh the lists.. you should have seen them,,..

So, After some time we had 6 nice clean Classes, Warrior, Ranger, Rogue, Mage, Priest and Thaumaturge. something wasn't quite right.. and still today has been under the ringer... 

The Original Stats: Warrior

For the Longest Time, The DW stats were just the same as Dragon Warrior Stats, with the addition of Ranged Attack...

But we had some problems..

Dragon Warriors Stats are: Attack, defence, Evasion, Stealth, Perception, Magical Attack, Magical Defence.

But how do you compare a Monks attack skill to a knights defence? Monks use Hand fighting.. so.. a knight has a defence modifier? or Monk has attack modifier?

Again I was kitting this wall of 'modifiers' Sure sure, it makes your charactersheet look cleaner to have one stat, then your GM has a table of modifiers to play with.. but either I was too lazy or my players wanted to have more information, we decided that this wasn't good enough..

So we had to have Melee Attack, Melee Defence, Weapon Attack and Weapon Defence.. which was sorta cool..

Then there were some great skills in Warhammer.. Strike Mighty blow, Strike to Stun, Strike to Injure. Some of the other game system had more skills of combat.. always there was a modifier.. -7, -5, -6.. when looking at what they did.. it seemed that they were just the same values, just different to what they actually did.. so why have 3 skills.. 5 skills.. 100 skills.. so we spoke to some Combat Simulations Experts, and for the most part what we got was, a strike, no matter what type.. was a kind of moment when you felt that your opponent had left themselves open, and you took advantage of that to get in a decent blow.. be it harder, faster, or to incapacitate.

So, this Damaging strike.. it was really a kind of regular skill, which in many systems were just Statistics..

Thats really what a Stat is.. its a skill thats used so regularly, by so many classes that you need its value on the front page. So thats where we put it..

Of course, the names needed a change.. Melee, Weapon Skill, Damage Strike, Block, Parry .. but sometimes you just need to get out of the way.. so.. Dodge.

Warrior Stats Down.. what next  Archer..

Health, Bruises, Bleeding and Tracking

Ever forgot to rub out the arrow box when you shoot off arrows? or had arguments with your GM about provisions or potions that you had or had not drunk?

I'm sure its staple roleplay, there are many small aspects of the game that you might forget.. If its in your favour, you turn a blind eye, but against you, well I've seen entire tables rage against the DM about whether a potion was drunk or not..

So Imagine a system, where you tick off XP bonuses for each and every stat.. I tried tick boxes, rising numbered boxes.. mathematical equations, all sorts of things.. the biggest problem was tracking.. and worse still for health..

We had introduced a kind of non-lethal damage, called Body Ready.. not sure where I got the name now.. but you had a set of boxes.. and to nominate if the physical damage you just took was light, you ticked the box.. you could 'take a breather' in combat and get back d4+ con bonus BR.. if you didn't each tick cost you a -1 to all skills & stats (out of breath) and if it was medium, you crossed the tick, you needed a full round of breathing to stop that one.. but was still only a -1  and the final heavy, circle that crossed tick.. this one need a nights rest (or at least an hour per circle)

Health was another matter, When you got cut, you got health damage and bleed damage (per 5 pts of health = 1 bleed), you needed to stauch the wound to stop it.. else you'd lose that much bleed as health per round.

Then we also had a problem, If I smacked you over the head.. how could I knock you out? most systems had a rule about, if you're at 0 HP, you're unconcious... but as often as not, you were also bleeding to death too.. we had to lower death down to -15 to be able to counter that.. but what if you were poisoned, ok so now poisons had to have more damage to match the sword + bleed numbers.. ok so what about if you fall off a cliff? slam into the ground, maybe you break your legs.. do you pass out? walk away?

Health has always had a problem in Roleplay Games, its dumbed down to make it a game.. there we are again, referring to it as a game.. well I'm sorry, but by this stage this was no longer a game, this was a way of representing reality within a game system.. its called gamification..

Yes, some of my players riled against this attitude that I had (I've changed a bit since.. but I used to be very sheldon about it)

I was slowly developing something that was no longer a roleplay game, I was trying to understand how we represent ourselves as a set of statistics... why? because that has to be the basis to things.. a solid foundation, before making things playable.. and I think its become one of the reasons why alot of players actually like my game, because they can see themselves doing things, rather than a list of actions in a choice menu.

But I digress (I'll write more about this later) At this stage of development, we had Health, Body Ready, Knockout and Death.. you could get values of up to 100 Health as a moderate 7th level character.. but to get to 120, took an extraordinary ammount of bonuses, skills and game events.. 20th level characters might get 125... but We forgot healing..

The first iteration of the game, was WHFRP, health was out of 10, starting around 3... Dragon Warriors has something similar.. starting around 8 and sometimes getting to 25.. both systems had a fairly even idea that you'd wait a few days to get back 1 point, then 1 point per day after that.. seemed ok..

.. but after we added in bleeding, we needed to multiple everyones health by 5, (so that 1-3 points of bleeding per round, was less problematic), which meant all weapons x5, ok, so that made healing easier.. you started healing 1 point on day 1, and rose by 1 per day.. by 10 days, if you were still damaged, you healed by 10 that night..

Damage dice for weapons was now broken, poisons and spells broken.. everything was broken from this bleeding rule. So we scrapped it. I had to think of something new, something that worked.. infact the whole Body ready system was flawed, but for the longest time, I had no other solution..

But we did add all the Rolemaster Criticals in.. that made things fun. 

Initiative and All the Other Numbers

So Characteristics and Statistics were in.. but we still had a lot of little left over numbers. Days until starvation? ABR bonuses? Initiative? For the bulk of it, it was values that got listed on the back of your character. Your "background".

Height, weight, hair colour, all part n parcel of your character..

well that changes quickly as we needed Initiative & ABR on the front page, for combat.

So what was needed? Initiative was a value that has gone up and down over time, most games have some value of Initiative, Actions from Warhammer, Armour Bypass Rolls (ABR) from Dragon Warriors, Punch Damage was needed, Study & Crafting base abilities were added, as players would need a quick reference for 'deciphering manuscripts' or 'researching information' or just plain old 'make rope bridge'

Later, Some of these become core Statistics, or even reverted back to Skills. What is Crafting? at its core, its some level of mechanical reasoning and dexterity to perform the task, well thats just a WIS + DEX roll if you don't have any associated skills.

ABR was and still is, a nice clever way to increase damage, based on your characters strength (to puncture armour) and dexterity ( to aim for the weak spots) with a dash of wisdom (plain ole smarts) plus players could improve this value over time with skills, spells and attributes.

But Initiative.. well this was one of my crowning joys

Initiative

In the beginning, Initiative was based on Speed, and that meant reflexes. But also wisdom, because you had to be able to think quickly. But what was Initiative?

So, with a lot of research..  Initiative is: your ability to swing a weapon fast (strength & dexterity) your ability to act quickly under stress (courage) your ability to take a blow (constitution) and recover from the pain (willpower), Your speed of though and wit (Intelligence and Wisdom) your attunement to the external forces (psychic), how quickly you can word your speech (charisma) and any distraction bonuses from your (Looks) and of course if your (Luck)y, Oh did I forget.. Reflexes? Speed? the Initiative starter.. lets include that twice for good measure.

Actually the inclusion of all the numbers didn't happen until later in '97, according to older charactersheets, it'd have been a set of bonuses from the above stats, to make a number to match a dice, then you rolled that dice. But for some insane reason, we abandoned that, in favour for something that was far more like D&D.. until years later when I was compiling version #3 and thought long and hard and said.. you know what? this makes more sense.. and put it back in.

But back in 97-00, it was something along the lines of Initiative of around 150. which divided by 10 into a combat Initiative of 15, which was your turn order & told you how many times you could swing a sword. and still works, mostly, like that today (except + a dice like as above)

[DWDev]Statistics Part 2

In Part 1, I discussed how I got to this place.. now what I did about it.

Skills, and how it affected the decisions on stats:

'96 was the Year I really ripped apart the system I had and started again. My Mate Craig and I grabbed a whole slew of skills from all the systems, correlated them into one big list of skills. Crossed out all the double ups, so many systems have skills that are just pointless. Light Lantern! in comparison to Climb. Its all about balance, if a skill is worth a 'slot' of your game, and players can spend X time learning a skill and one give you access to the +Dex/Ref bonus to all climb skills/checks and the other allows you to light a lantern..

The Skill system has pretty much had the same core mechanic from the beginning, but changes the dice used. The Idea was instead of a flat "pass/fail" I'd just recenly seen Vampires 'number of success' system, which made far more sense.. Alot of D&D stories involve some incredibly exotic and mind bending events,.. but give than you have a 5% chance of exotic death, or exotic success in any given roll.. I'm not so surprised. 

My core mechanic was.. each time you roll, you had a chance of gaining experience in that skill.. when the skill experience is equal to or greater than the skill, your skill score increases. 

In Examples below.. I've quickly done the maths to show how much XP would be required to get the skill to that score. i.e. score of 5 = 15 or 1+2+3+4+5xp

back to the story...

We then took a big look at how the rolls were being made.. the first thing to start on was the Mathematics of a flat d20.

The Beginning of it all .. 

In most systems, the d20 for example, is a flat rate of advancement. each point is worth exactly the same as any other point. It matches the human mind as much as a ruler can be a balloon. Other systems were using piles of dice, while I'm ok with maths, adding up 16d6 to determine values every single combat.. slows things to a crawl.. I wanted a clean and quick system like a flat d20, but with more realism...All the literature I was reading at the time suggested that the human mind took 4 stages of learning.. so I looked into that first.

The first, the stage where you know nothing, struggle with everything, have to think about what your doing & fail constantly. You are Unaware of how Ineffective you are.. you just keep trying. So I needed characters to take an amount of time, that was fairly quick to get to a stage whereby they could sometimes perform the skill, but still have a large chance of failure...

Next, you are aware of how bad you are, you study under some master or something, and you become better faster. only showing a slight slowing in the speed of learning.

Then you begin to become pretty good at the skill, showing aptitude at performing the task.. you are aware of how good you're becoming, and are still improving, but less noticeably as you progress.

Finally, you are very very good, almost natural, but it takes months and months of effort at this stage to become just that tiny bit better. 

How to Represent that with numbers.

So, we all know that the d20 system uses 3d6 to start stats, it always had that little problem of the 1/2 and 19/20.. it felt uneven to me. The Maths of 4d6 sorta looked nice, and matched this 4 stages thing I just learnt.. but 4 dice was still clunky.. Then Shogun happened..

My Cousin and I used to play shogun, Japanese medieval warfare.. used d12s.. something majestic about the dice, I just sorta looked at it and said.. wow.. that's what I'm looking for.

The first thing that was so noticeable was the bell curve. the plain straight forward understanding that while mid point 13, is a 50/50 chance.. 1 single point of difference, up or down, is approx 9%. its the real deal, its worth far more than any other edge of the spectrum. The next point is around 7-8% (remember I'm doing this from memory, sure I could go look it up, but its the idea, not the pure maths of it) so now if you are 2 points higher than someone.. you are almost 20% better to hit them.. Its the sweet spot..

Why is it? 

I wanted players to find a 'zone' kinda like if you think about it, it many swashbuckling movies.. they dispatch the npcs pretty fast, swash here, buckle there, and you're done with the guards and fighting the mini-boss.. He's a bit of a fight.. and then you face off against the boss.. now comes the hard and drawn out battle, all your skills are pressed into this one.. until you finally defeat him..

to d20 this.. you'd need to be rolling above Thac0 1's for the guards, but 1's wouldn't be fails, they'd just be a miss for that one attack.. then the mini boss would need to be a 10, a crit couldn't be a crit, it'd just be a booster, otherwise you'd spoil the scene.. and the final boss, you'd need 20's to hit him, and only when his HP are at their last, a critical would be needed to finish him off.. 

to get such values in a D&D game, (or pathfinder these days) you'd need all the guards to be 2nd levels.. the mini boss to be 10th, and the final boss to be 18th! that'd be the most imbalanced module ever...

worse yet.. the 1st 1 against a guard would result in being flatfooted, and he'd have a chance to injure you and knock you down a peg, then the mini boss would screw through your remaining HP if you fumbled any further.. you'd critical him as a splat into the wall.. and finally the big boss would be impossible to hit, and you'd all be there roll after roll after roll.. no story.. just waiting for the dice to finally get the 20 to...

ok I'm being melodramatic.. it'd be fudged by the GM to make it more playable.. and if you have a nice GM, that's ok.. but a evil GM.. well sorry.. your evening of fun became a TPK to tell your friends.

No, I wanted something that would get those 'edges' and give more scope to play. I needed this 7th level mission to have 5th/6th level guards, a 7th level mini boss and an 8th level boss.. to ensure the right balance of enemies.. with the aforementioned variances in combat..

With 2d12.. less than 10 has a 25% chance to hit.. while less than 16 is 75% chance to hit, that's only 6 levels of difference between bad guys.. more believable that a 16th level BBG has a 13th level 2nd in command, and hires 10th level guards and I get my mathematical variance with very little shift in numbers.

Will it still work with the skill system:

So, that learning chart.. Stage #1, don't know how, or how to improve. At this stage of a skill, your score is less than 8, It took 36 xp to get to an 8.. in those days you got an xp every time you rolled, + bonuses for rolling a double 1 when you didn't need it. so you only needed to try the skill 36 times to get fairly much out of the first stage. 

Stage #2, you have 20% chance of success.. your a beginner. but you're getting better. It now takes 63 more xp to get to the mid point.. little less than double.. but that's a quick progression to get to 50% success.

by Stage #3, each point progresses you further and further into higher chances of success, +8%, +7%, +6%, +6%, +5%. by a score of 19, you have 90% chance of success, sure it took you 99xp more to get here, but with barely a 10% chance of fail, you're on the home stretch.

The Last Stage #4, you know your skill, and you know its going to take ages to get further.. Later we added in the ruling that A) if the modifier took the 'roll' above 24, you didn't get to roll, you just 'did' it. No rolling meant no xp, so the last 90 xp took much longer.. the standard 'this is easy' task was a +3 and a very easy task +6, so it became obvious to the players that an 18-21 was the point when skills needed a 'challenge' if they wanted to progress further. 

The last thing we used, was the idea of 'pass by'.. but more on that later...

So that was the start.. a nice balanced 2d12 system for Chats, Stats and skills, which had a balanced progression system, matched the reality of how we learn skills, a nice progression from zero to hero, and a set of easy pointers on how to roleplay the game for far more player friendly balance, swashbuckling adventure and a way to put the rules to one side and just play the game.  

Later, much later, I would discover how the number 12 just came to make everything in my system

Resources:

https://psygrammer.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/learning.png

[DWDev]Statistics, Part 1

6 months of roleplay, moving out of home, meeting new friends, getting a job as a telemarketer, and gaming into the wee hours of the night.. seems like such a blur..

I really got down to business in the next 6 months, we had a regular group every Sunday, I was writing up professions.. gawd I can still remember the order: Knights Crusader, Knight, Hunter, Forest Assassin, Thief, Magician, Sorcerer, Priest, Templar, Thaumaturge and Commoner.. (ok, so maybe I missed a few)

To make things simpler, I didn't want to bog myself down with all the Warhammer professions.. It seemed that I re-wrote the character-sheets monthly, and with them some rules, which meant that I managed to have around 20 versions of Knights Crusader, before I gave up and decided to get something done about it..

You see we had the period of time when the players were sick of me adding or tweaking rules.. they just wanted to play.. so I'd stick to a set of rules, but at the same time, would be making the next set for the next campaign.. at the table, I'd often get confused between the two.. Should a Knights crusader actually start with a horse & barding? one player started as a KC and sold off the horse, to buy some nicer magical gear, forgoing the crusade, because that was 'who he was' but in reality, he abused the rules to get a better start..

This is the inherit problem with players, treating the game as a game.. they don't take it seriously. Many RPGs create their rules to balance out this problem, which creates their own problem.

Imagine a world in which the wizards never managed to develop spells above 4th level.. why would a player play as a mage.. maybe it'd be ok for the first few years.. and possibly there would be some way they could use their 5th slot to develop a new spell, or they'd be stuck just casting the 4th as a 5th with a +1.. most would probably multi-class.. I don't remember, would a rolemaster wizard be better off?

Imagine an Island, where the largest creature is a squirrel or flying fox or a shark.. The Druid can transform into any animal he knows.. sharks only ok if he's near the water.. but everything else? becomes useless...

Image roleplaying in 200BC Rome, No Iron, No Steel, No Longbow, No Crossbow, but the Druid can become an Owlbear, Wizards cast Lightning and Fireball, Clerics can bring back the dead.. but the warrior.. reduced to semi-magical versions of short swords of Bronze..

Sure, I'm not being realistic(!) but that's the point, No given class is supposed to be 'equal' to another.. you play it because it suits you, or your temperament, or you'd interested to go outside the box, If we played it like a board game, we'd pick a character and level suited to the adventure and go from there.. sheesh..

So there I was.. stuck in this quagmire of players who wanted to stay stuck.. and I just wanted to make things right, or better.. We broke up the gang.

Now, sure, some of them were roleplaying other games, and some weren't, some had gotten jobs and lives, no-one had Girlfriends so that wasn't it, so I can understand that the frustration of not knowing the rules had gotten too much.. people wanted stability.. and I was a leaky boat of a GM..