So I was working on something¹ and in doing some edits/revisions, I decided I needed eight elements for a RPG and DnD-adjacent …um, thing and settled on stone, metal, water, wood, flame, wind, and guile.²

I guess I still need an eighth but its fantasy so stars and/or dragons or quintessence or… no.

No, seven is fine. That’s a decent set of six + the seventh is already a stretch; no need to go for the hail mary pass on top of what’s already a stretch.

Guile is a great word. Quite flavorful. Not used much. Has maybe a negative connotation but that’s fine too, I can work within that as a constraint.

The term I was leaning toward before finding guile was just… Magic. Generic “magic”. Super basic and boring.

What I wanted was ~Magic~ but also in the sense of Art. Tékhnē. Works. Craft. Mage-Craft. Also with a sense of invention, discovery, innovation, and science. Something to embrace spells and potions and clockwork and crafts like blacksmithing, as opposed to just the usual amorphous cosmic preexisting always-there force kinda sense to magic. Elemental Guile, which works for the project just fine.³

But man, guile is such a good word. Let’s see where else that might take us:

What if we add Guile to the ‘standard’ set of six attributes. I’d position it as the spellcasting attribute – cunning, craft, wile, artifice, insight; to be inventive, imaginative, creative, innovative, ingenious, artful; to be deft, clever, shrewd, sly, subtle; to have perception, comprehension, acuity; to devise, contrive, improvise, and invent.

Intelligence is a mix of potential, aptitude, and learned knowledge. Wisdom a mix of insight, empathy, and self-mastery. Charisma a mix of assurance, persuasion, and appeal.

I’d set Guile as being equal to any of those and equivalently relevant.

##

If I were to go back to a different set of old notes⁴, at one point I was thinking on the standard set of six stats and also, being kind of disappointed in them? At the same time, I was entertaining the random idea of writing a RPG source book using Wikipedia⁵. Possibly because I was relying on Wikipedia for a lot of preliminary research⁶. Anyway, if I go back to those notes, I found that Guile slotted right into place. Almost like I was always meant to add it.

I present these notes with some light formatting but also with the disclaimer – I’m going for a low-effort post today so these are just notes: equivalent to pre-first-draft and more about getting the ideas down on paper⁷ than getting everything formatted⁸ and in perfect prose. With that caveat I Present:

10 alternate RPG attributes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_(role-playing_games)

Strength
Endurance
Hardiness
Agility
Deftness

Resolve
Wisdom
Intelligence
Charisma
Guile

Strength
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_strength
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(running)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_training
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_exercise

Endurance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiorespiratory_fitness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-distance_running
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerobic_exercise

Hardiness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_fitness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_density
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liver#Functions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immune_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wound_healing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_repair
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_healing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_tissue_injury
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injury
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disease

Agility
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agility
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_(ability)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_coordination
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexibility_(anatomy)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_intelligence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_memory#Physiology

Deftness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_motor_skill
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye-hand_coordination
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambidexterity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_memory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_memory#Fine_motor_memory

Resolve
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardiness_(psychology)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coping
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_resilience

Wisdom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_sense
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patience
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy

Intelligence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptitude
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_memory

Charisma
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charisma
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superficial_charm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_skills
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_intelligence

Guile
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insight
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discernment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_solving

“Your character may have 18 INT but you, my friend, are as dumb as a bag of hammers”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning

The 5 Physical and 5 Mental Attributes can be thought of as parallel and corresponding. mostly. kinda-sort-of

Strength/Resolve
Wisdom/Endurance
Intelligence/Hardiness
Agility/Charisma
& Deftness/Guile

On Agility and Deftness: “A person with high Agility (i.e. good reflexes) will be able to put a hand up when thrown a ball; a person with low Deftness (i.e. bad hand-eye coordination) will have their hand up but not catch it”

On Endurance and Hardiness: “Endurance is running a marathon. Hardiness is surviving the flu.”

“Pick two” – Most DND abilities combine two of these traits (or aspects of two)

• ‘Constitution’ as Endurance and Hardiness
• Or ‘Strength’ as Strength and Endurance
• Dexterity as Agility & Deftness
• ‘Wisdom’ as Wisdom & Resolve
• ‘Charisma’ as Charisma & Guile
• Or ‘Intelligence’ as Intelligence & Guile

Claiming copyright over this set-of-10 would be difficult (and probably not enforceable) & so: I don’t. CC BY-SA 4.0 like the rest of the blog but I’m only asking politely; effectively as common terms in English the list is CC0. Well, “guile” isn’t that common in English anymore but that was kind of my point, way up there at the start. It’s a great word. Feel free to steal it off me.

¹ I half-remembered some notes from, I kid you not, twenty freakin’ years ago and yes, I have been transferring them from archive to archive and PC to laptop to laptop to PC and to my current rig. I was using OpenOffice (or maybe even excel?) back in 2002, instead of LibreOffice and Google Docs, but I still have them.

² Sky/Stars was the original 7th, I added Guile (over Magic) as the 8th, & then made the executive decision to pare back down to seven.

³ It is a tarot-style deck of cards and the seven elements are suits in a minor arcana. Yes, with seven suits it’ll end up as a double deck [78×2 = 156]

⁴ these are just from 2020, not 2002.

⁵ I don’t know what I was drinking at the time, but it was merely alcoholic. Not anything stronger.

⁶ …as one does. Not the best way to do research — and of course, you should find a 2nd/backup/reinforcing and perhaps better source before you rely on wiki for anything vital, but wiki is (true to name) fast and with all the cross-links and linked sources (where available), it’s a decent enough place to start.

⁷ Like most of us, I do almost everything from a keyboard into digital files but ya get me

⁸ This includes turning those links from text back into links. Ain’t nobody here got time for that, you are perfectly capable of ctrl-c ctrl-v if you really needed to get there.

Let’s just ignore that I haven’t written anything for the blog in two weeks & we can skip the apology/excuses/justifications and get back to a topic.

“Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down,” per Robert Frost, and he also described it as playing handball without a wall. Most of us don’t play either sport but handball, I’m guessing, is even rarer which is why the front half of the quote is the bit we remember.

I like the handball analogy better because sometimes I don’t get really creative until I literally¹ bounce off a wall. Or until I find the right kind of person to bounce ideas off of. The tennis net always seemed more arbitrary, and when a ball hits the net, it stops. And then you have to reset and go through all the motions to get the ball back in play, which is why players avoid it.

Anyway, the point of Frost was that without some structure and a few rules², you’re not really writing Poetry™, at least as he preferred it. But just like a couple of kids can have fun with two rackets and a tennis ball without having to keep score, free verse is still poetry³.

In designing games, particularly board games where many of the rules will be given both representation and often physical form in the printed board and components, we have all kinds of structure to work within. Our game is the board is the structure is the rules. Folks can ignore the rules⁴ but since we’re using the same pieces, even variations tend to be pretty close to form. Italian sonnets and English sonnets are not the same but 14 lines is 14 lines. Board games are fun, but playthroughs of Monopoly and Risk all tend to look the same – and while both are now traditions in some families, the tradition is also usually to play them just once a year.

Card games, particularly those that use the now-standard deck of 52, in four suits, are probably the closest we get to a “Frostian Poetic” genre of games: there is structure, there are rules. But there is also a lot of creativity in the variations. A single deck but ‘according to Hoyle’ we have a couple hundred variations of play. Within the limits of 10 + 3 times 4 we get Poker, Bridge, Rummy, Cribbage, Blackjack, Solitaire, and War, with all kinds of ways to match, count, or rank cards and just as many ways to ‘take tricks’ and keep score. Eventually we hit limits, and we add a joker — or we get variations like Pinochle, or the UNO deck. We keep the vocabulary (draws, hands, playing out of the hand face up on the table) but use new alphabets.

And eventually we get things like Mille Bornes [1906 or 1955] and Magic: The Gathering [1993]. Is MtG still playing by the same design rules as Poker?⁵ There is a very distant family resemblance. MF Doom and Robert Frost stand a century apart but Doom and other rappers are most assuredly still using rhyme and meter.

And with that, I think I have stretched the analogy just about as far as it’ll stand.

##

RPGs have rules, obviously. And many, many available accessories, minis, and tokens that can make some sessions play more like board games or war games, at least in part.

But RPGs, at least those played on table tops⁶, are more like a free-form collaborative story-telling game. The rules we start with give that story some structure, and also help shape the course of play, but over time we’ll change the rules, too, to get closer to the kinds of stories we want to tell.

Maybe more importantly than the rules of an RPG is the vibe of the RPG. And I specifically chose vibe to describe this because I am Gen X and cringe and trying too hard to sound cool, but also because the Vibe of a Game is a mix of things: quite a bit comes in the published settings or ‘worlds’ of the game, some in the rules-as-written, some from other media including the sources used for inspiration by the game designers, and some from roughly 50 years of playing these games and the 20 years of mid-century sci-fi and fantasy that came before them.

Mork Borg is a Vibe. Apocalypse World is a Vibe. Blades in the Dark is a Vibe.

Pathfinder has a lot of overlap with D&D but the settings of Golarion and Forgotten Realms have very different vibes. [Even within D&D: Dragonlance, Spelljammer, Dark Sun, and OG Greyhawk are all very different games to play though technically they share a common rule set — if we fudge a bit. Different D&D settings came out for different editions, and 2nd isn’t 4th isn’t 5th.]

A really neat thing about RPGs is that the rules almost don’t matter. Characters can be defined in different ways, the labels can change. A paladin could be called a Holy Warder, Realm Guardian, Templar, or Lightbound but if a player wants to play a character with that paladin vibe, we find a way for it to fit the overall vibe of the game world and we give that character Smite, because paladins, even if the rest of the class kit and power set are wildly different. I can build a paladin by rolling 4d6 multiple times to generate stats or I can start with 100 points and break out some of the GURPS manuals. I can search online and find the appropriate PbtA Playbook [edit to add: Dungeon World’s Paladin. there ya go.]. I can grab my copy of Band of Blades (it’s in my to-be-read pile) and see what the deal is with Chosen [edit to add: It’s a whole different Vibe].

When even whole rule sets are optional and swappable (to an extent) what is the limitation we put on our RPGs? What’s the rhyme scheme and meter?

When your game can technically be played across an entire whole world, it’s often necessary to drop two sets of parallel lines down and make ourselves a board. Starter village, dungeon, quest hub, capital. Quite a few early sessions fall back on the familiar so we can ground ourselves and figure out the Vibe, both of the game and setting, and also what this particular table, this set of players with with this GM, how that’s going to feel as we play 3-5 hours at a time.

That’s our ‘board’, I think. And across many different genres, I find the parallels. It could be horror-survival on a sci-fi space station but we’ll have a Safe Starting Area, a Dungeon equivalent, eventually a quest hub, and probably a goal, destination or end game — in a fantasy context, the ‘Capital’ — whether that means impressing the monarch or taking their throne. A wild west setting will have some sleepy frontier town, Canyons and Badlands and the things in ‘em, and maybe eventually some sort of slowly simmering plot that leads the story to the Big City, or even Back East. The road there and back again starts in the Shire but eventually takes us to Minas Tirith, and as a “road movie” it’s more about hitting the landmarks than bouncing around a quest hub but there’s comparable story structure there.

Twisting expectations, and (as a GM) finding whole new ways to make a “starter village” and “dungeon”, that’s what keeps the game fresh⁷. And of course: with the biggest dungeons, the whole campaign can just be town and vaults, back and forth but always exploring deeper or farther, until we find the story in it and the eventual endgame.

A lot of us have stuck with D&D (various editions with various additions and often a lot of homebrew) but only because that’s where we started. The basics of D&D have proven to be pretty adaptable, and folks have done some wild things with just 12 classes and a handful of character backgrounds. But the tropes of D&D and our expectations going in are also ‘grounding’ in a way – and grounding in a couple of senses: a foundation underneath us, and a sort of electrical ground for the rules to keep things from short-circuiting.

So to answer my own question, yeah, the tennis net is kind of necessary. Arguably, the rules we agree to, at the table, keep the game ‘on the rails’ just as surely as the clockwise track around Monopoly, and the limits of the setting (fantasy or otherwise) are also the edges of this (huge, imaginary, but still contained) game board. RPGs don’t have to be limited, but we accept the limits. That’s the vibe we like and the type of stories we’re looking to tell.

Just like no one is actually playing Monopoly by the official rules, no two GMs run their table the same way, and no two groups are playing the exact same game either. Everyone adapts something. Every GM has had a player who wanted to do something that required either a creative interpretation of the rules or some sort of exception (hopefully minor) from them. This flexibility is core to RPGs; not unique to RPGs but much more common among them.

So you might disagree with me. The poetry of what you’re making is maybe more spoken word than dactylic hexameter or alliterative Old English or strict quatrains and couplets.⁸ But I feel like some limits are probably necessary, especially when the boundaries of what we can imagine are basically limitless.

##

The image at the top of the post is only tenuously, tangentially related. Though I needed some starting point for thinking about the post today, & I took the literal boundary drawn on an otherwise completely open-ended map. It’s the latest version of the template I’ve been working on for making hex World Maps (for fantasy settings or other things that work well on hexagonal grids) – you can see the last couple of posts for more on the scale for the map, and what the rectangular overlay is for.

Eventually I’ll find a final template I like and work up a couple of samples that use it and put together a packet, a pdf, & make that available on Itch.io

¹ “literally” in its modern meaning, not literally literally.

² Like the Pirate’s Code, rules for poetry is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules

³ Frost was using a version of the tennis-and-net analogy as far back as 1933, Ginsberg wrote Howl in ’55. So whatever trend Frost was responding to, it wasn’t specifically the Beats or Ginsberg. And arguably the use of repetition in Howl gives it a structure and, especially when performed, the spoken word cadence is just as effective as a strict poetic meter would have been. But enough commentary on poetry I am way out of my depth here.

⁴ Everyone is playing Monopoly wrong, for example.

⁵ Magic should probably be compared to games like Rummy instead of Poker, in that a bunch of cards are played in front of each player and you can react to what your opponent played on your own board, albeit in a limited fashion

⁶ Table tops, real or virtual. A lot of people play the game on screens these days, so we can’t differentiate just based on ‘is it software?’ anymore. But for MMOs, JRPGs, and other computer RPGs the game world is kind of a fixed thing, and you interact through your PC (both your Player Character and your personal computer) and your options are strictly limited to those of the interface. For “table top” RPGs, we’re playing as the PCs and we interact with each other. The options are close to being unlimited, so long as we agree to keep telling this particular story to each other, even if we do occasionally let the dice decide some outcomes. There may eventually be some sort of hybrid, certainly some companies keep working toward that as a goal. But the original sort of game, played in person in living rooms, dens, and at kitchen tables, with or without a lot of battlemaps and minis, will always be an option available to us.

⁷ …plus new options for character fantasies: classes, subclasses, ancestries, backgrounds — we’ve been building this kit for decades.

⁸ makin’ that analogy work.

I have bitten off more than I can chew. In fact, what I have bitten is chewing back and may be bigger than me.

The Unnamed 2022 Project is still an on-going, living breathing beast of a thing. But (yeah there’s a qualifier) — I haven’t risen to the self-imposed challenge and I’m about to blow past my first self-imposed deadline. I would have preferred to announce today that the first “drop” of 2022 was ready and that you’d be able to download PDFs of this first content pack for free (or pay-what-you-want, if you felt like tipping) from at least two digital stores including… um… Gumroad.¹

There isn’t a release this week. So let’s talk about what I *have* been doing for these last 16 weeks—including a selected sampling of the diversions and dead-ends encountered so far—and where the 2022 Project is at.

I have a name, and a website, and that website is running a Wikipedia-like software implementation², which will be the home of the always-free parts of what I’m working on. The working title for the project was “System15” [riffing on the xkcd comic, Standards] and is now called Plinth·RPG

https://plinthrpg.com/

Plinth·RPG, properly, is the game: a rules-light tabletop fantasy storytelling RPG that I’m still working on. When I’m finally done with the mechanics of it and have wrung it through several additional future drafts, it’ll probably be at least 16 pages³ but not more than 64, with art, and available as a slickly formatted PDF⁴. Since the objective is to write a rules-light game, the overwhelming majority of the content (the rest of plinthrpg.com) will be a whole new fantasy setting, more or less as I write it. That’s one reason, though not the only reason, that I went with wiki software rather than a blog format for the Plinth site.

That fantasy world will probably need its own name at some point. Though I’m fine with moving forward under the really-is-that-what-you’re-calling-it, the-name-just-seems-generic-to-the-point-of-obfuscation brand of “Plinth” in that Plinth has at least two things going for it: no one else is using it, or anything close to it, and also (as you might have noticed) I registered the dot-com.

Today is, was, my first deadline, as I noted in the last blog post. This announcement, and the reveal of the still-skeletal website, was not what I intended to release.

##

My goal for the Untitled 2022 Project was to prepare and release a “content drop” every six weeks: digital files available for download and containing, well, something like an old school D&D adventure – some maps, some descriptions, a few notable NPCs and perhaps a new faction (to add to my collection), and if appropriate, some monsters or creatures or critters to go along with.

This was a good first impulse and is still a decent idea. I never got anywhere close, though, because I rapidly careened off that course on onto a different track.

My idea for a simple adventure map was sabotaged when I asked, “Well if I’m making a map anyway why not make it part of the world we’re building?” and that led me down a rabbit hole of medieval and renaissance travel modes and travel times and appropriate map scale and wait, how many kilometers is the Earth’s equator again and what about the distance to the poles, and say has anyone done a world map projection that works with hex maps⁵, and now I have a lot of notes and some fun things sketched — but I’m not really closer to that first Pack drop and I still don’t have a format or template that I can iterate on and drop things into.

[Image caption: you can maybe see how things like this became a distraction]

So I don’t have the neat, initial adventure model that I thought I would have ready at this point. I’m not at the finish line; I am only just now getting ready to run this thing and enter the starting gate. It sucks, and it’s not where I want to be, not where I planned to be, but I know whose fault it is⁶ and all I can do is keep going.

My next self-imposed deadline is six weeks from now, Week 12 of 2022, and Friday 25 March;
I’m already anticipating that I’ll miss that deadline too.

##

One of the blacksmiths I follow on YouTube⁷ has a neat saying that I’m going to borrow for this, “Need a tool, make a tool”. The concise version is memorable and I can’t improve on it, but I’ll expand on it just a bit so you know what I mean by it: If you know what you need for your end goal but you can’t find the exactly right tool to get there, go ahead and make the tool (or tools) first. Which he literally does in many of his early videos, making hammers, tongs, drifts, dies, all kinds of tools.

For what I’m working on, I need a couple of tools first. I need to get up to speed on Scribus and build the PDF template. Of course, it’ll probably be a two-column layout that looks like every other RPG rulebook but even just saying that assumes a lot – font choices for headers, body text, tables, sidebars—oh yeah we’ll need to figure out formatting for tables and sidebars, and we’ll also need allowances for spot art. The goal is to have something that looks familiar to the target audience but in the ‘house style’⁸ that stands out a little bit from everything else. I haven’t done layout since 1990 and that was on the school Macs and I’ll be honest, I don’t even remember what the program was called, and many intervening years of banging my head against CSS hasn’t honed those skills any. But once those decisions are made, the template is a tool, and I can just (hopefully) drop the words into it.

The other tool I need is for maps, and surprisingly, the best tool that’s available may just be Clip Studio Paint. But that’s more software for me to learn and another template to build. I don’t know that I’ll be able to do both in twelve weeks, let alone six.

But that’s fine. And I have two tools that already online and working: The new Plinth·RPG wiki, and this blog. I can keep the lines of communication open, certainly, for anyone who is following me on this weird new adventure, and I can describe the process of learning how to build new tools and also the tools themselves, if they’d be of use to anyone.

That’s where I’m at. It’s a new starting line. And I’ve got a six week sprint ahead of me.

##

¹ if you’re not on twitter or not following enough artists & content creators on twitter you missed the drama: The CEO of Gumroad (a smaller but once a decently well regarded e-commerce platform where you could sell, among other things, PDFs and digital files) was caught out trying to mint his own batch of NFTs. Twitter, at least the twitter I’m following, was collectively not amused. Ko-Fi and Itch.io have been the most commonly recommended alternatives.

² for those who must know, either to suit their own similar needs or just to be nosy: DokuWiki, https://www.dokuwiki.org/, which is available under the GNU General Public License (so: free) and which was both easy to install and easy to get started with

³ If I’m a good editor and manage to reign in all my usual bad impulses, like including footnotes for everything, then I might be able to keep things down to a taut, efficient 16 pages. I anticipate it’ll be more like 32.

⁴ and maybe also print-on-demand, if I barrel past the upper page limit I just set and project bloat inevitably sets in and the whole thing is closer to book size than not.

⁵ the answer is yes, but figuring out how many times it was answered yes and the ins-and-outs of each is a whole week shot, I tell you.

⁶ I’m going to blame ADHD of course

⁷ Yes there is more than one. Alec Steele in this case, and I’ll just note that’s a fantastic name for a blacksmith

⁸ Graphic design is my passion

⁹ I’m not sure why I started leaning so heavily on footnotes for jokes and asides but I think it’s too late to stop now. And that probably means I’ll have to include some sort of allowance for footnotes in the PDF template, dammit.

“A scale of one to ten, or scale from one to ten, is a general and largely vernacular concept used for rating things, people, places, ideas, and so on. The scale has 10 as a maximum score, as a denotation of exceptionally high quality or of another attribute, usually accompanying 1 as its minimum, although some common variants have a minimum of 0.” — Wikipedia entry for ‘Scale of one to ten’

Simple, common, intuitive, perhaps pervasive, perhaps universal(?)¹ and widely applicable: a scale from one to 10. Or zero to ten (but we’ll get there).

You may have been asked to rate your pain on a one to ten scale in an ER or doctor’s office, and there are many common systems, like gymnastics and ‘perfect’ 10.00 scores² and informal usage, including the “on a scale from 1 to x” memes, “These go to 11”, “Listen up fives, a ten is speaking”, and even gems like “On a scale from 1 to 10, your mama’s so fat she’s a 747-300”

So one aspect of a commonly-known, commonly-used linear numeric scale like “1 to 10” is that we’re all aware of what it is, what’s best, what’s worst, where it maxes out, and have a mental picture (if not a precise mental Gaussian probability distribution curve) of what the scale spans and how a difference of one—up or down—looks, feels, and works. Except…

There is another commonly-known, commonly-used ordinal-based convention with a whole lot of overlap on 1-to-10 and that’s the top 10 list. The top 10 list is probably more common (is certainly more common every December) and now we have an issue of ‘perfect ten’ vs ‘number one’ — is being a 2 an almost-great thing or a terribly bad thing? This is why, on questionnaires, any prompt to rate something on 1-10 nearly always specifies “with 1 being the worst and 10 being best”³

The easiest way to short-circuit this particular automatic pathway, “1 means ranked number one”, is to add a different lower base value:
zero.

There are other reasons to add a zero⁴, but the main one is that you almost never have to qualify that zero is worst and ten is best, and after an appropriate introduction (one shorter than this blog post) readers rapidly adapt and the numerical values allow for easy comparisons and the underlying questions (e.g. “how Strong is my character?”) can be left unstated entirely.

This system seems like it might be an improvement [The blog post title, above, is a teaser-in-three-parts, so you know at least one more part is coming] but there’s an additional gloss I picked up from a roleplaying system called FUDGE, written by Stephen O’Sullivan⁵ — and that is the use of comparative terms, on an ascending adjective scale. We bolster the ok-maybe-it’s-not-as-intuitive-as-I-thought zero to 10 scale by pairing (and pinning) the numbers with common adjectives. Broadly speaking, things that are ‘good’ are better than things that are ‘fair’, and if asked to pick between something ‘good’ and something ‘great’, of course you pick the merely good one⁶

The Fudge scale only uses 7 adjectives for this, but with a zero to ten scale, we’re going to need a total of 11⁷:

0. fatal (or near fatal)
1. terrible
2. awful
3. poor
4. meh.
5. fair
6. good
7. great
8. rare
9. epic
10. legend

“Meh.”, at 4, has some pushback from my early testers (roughly half)⁸ but isn’t carved in stone; if a term like ‘mediocre’ or ‘meagre’ has more fantasy flair and you’d prefer it to the more recent coinage (my editorial on that is also the term under discussion: meh.) then by all means change it for your own use. And while I like the Rare-Epic-Legend ladder for the top end of the scale, again, that’s my preference and you’re welcome to check as many thesauruses as you like to find alternates (I couldn’t find any I liked better).⁹

In my proposed system, the zero-to-ten scale balances at the midpoint, 5, though you might think of 4 as being the stock-NPC default baseline.

Because here’s the thing: all our characters are above average.

Part of that is part-and-parcel of playing a role playing game; we take on the role of an adventurer or hero (of whatever type) and we play through that fantasy. Of course we’re nothing special at the start and we have to grow and learn and gank monsters that are basically piñatas made of loot and that sweet, sweet XP — but no PC, even at level one is (ugh) ordinary . It’s an unspoken rule at the table. Even our flaws rarely have gameplay consequences and while barbarian Barbomight Stumpswinger of the Great Northern Woods may be about as sharp as a sack of oatmeal (Intelligence 3, poor) he is creative and improvisational in a fight (his namesake weapon is a stump! which he picked up as the only thing to hand to swing in one of his earliest adventures) and is not, as played, dumb.

There are role-play reasons and character ‘flavor’ reasons to take an low attribute, trait, skill, or ‘flaw’ but these are usually balanced (and over-balanced) by the role-play and ‘flavor’ of a character’s background and heritage, and their chosen class or skill set.

So, just embrace it, your stock-NPC defaults to 4, meh. Anything better is fair, or fair to good, and for most player characters we’re working in the 7-10 range anyway^10&11

Coming back around to the first third of the blog subject:

ZTT. Zero-to-ten. As defined above. It will be a whole lot easier to just say “ZTT” and link to that — or actually, link to this¹² —which is not only a brief intro to the idea but some behind-the-curtain thought process and also a definition of terms.¹³

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¹ at least for sophants with 10 total digits on their manipulation limbs

² the International Gymnastics Federation uses a system of points, not a rating scale, that coincidentally maxes out at 10, or at least did so before 2006. Under the revised code, scores can theoretically exceed 10, based on difficulty and event, but you’d probably still need the Russian judge in your pocket to even think about that

³ on a scale of 1 to Michael Bay, one being no explosion and 10 being Michael Bay, is 10 a good thing or a bad thing?

⁴ I’d read the articles at waypointgroup.org/why-a-0-10-scale-is-your-best-option/ and www.primary-intel.com/blog/the-magic-in-a-0-to-10-rating-scale/ for some good discussion and non-meme, non-RPG based context

⁵ links to additional resources, the open licenses available for other creators, and a general discussion of O’Sullivan’s FUDGE are about half-way down this page

⁶ oh no, I don’t want to be a bother, no no you take the bigger piece I’m not that hungry. please, no, I insist

⁷ having eleven terms is different from “These Go to Eleven” but “These Go to Eleven” is in fact a game mechanic that I have considered and am iterating on.

⁸ though everyone immediately understood the meaning

⁹ One design consideration was finding a clear, strong, monosyllable (whenever possible) for each, 0-to-10. This constraint is why ‘meh.’ is a clear winner at no. 4, though even in my own use I’ll likely use ‘meagre’ if it comes up

¹⁰ with muchkins and min-maxers already looking at my proposal and thinking about how to get 7-out-of-10 stats at 11 or better, and their primary at 14 or 15. If you’re a DM looking to homebrew a system or just with a robust set of house rules, the idea of a “working range” for skills and attributes is probably more helpful than the mechanics and terms anyway. What is our “working range” for a 3d6,d20 D&D-like system? 10 to 20, functionally, with bonuses for those scores ranging from +1 to +5. So really, arguably, just a five point scale, at least for the player just looking at those plus-ones. Or maybe a six-point scale, with the occasional bad roll (or PC choice) putting a score at 8-9, -1. Coming around to my zero-to-ten scale, we start at 4 and go to 10, legendary, with the occasional 3 and a working range of 5-6-7-8-9, hopefully. Enough for meaningful gradations and for each point/step/plus-one to feel weighty.

¹¹ building on that, you could easily add half points to the ten point scale (e.g. 7.5) which sets the new legend, max value at 20. This hack gives you some more direct correspondence between 3d6 and a zero-to-ten, and I may have to explicitly say that in whatever final version of the system (one page ‘lite’ versions, even) rather than hide it in an endnote. Here, I’ll walk you further down the path: 7, great, is a 14 on a 3d6, and a +2. 7.5, still great, is a 15; get up to 8, rare, though and we’re looking at 16 on a 3d6 and a +3.

¹² or put it in the endnotes, as applicable

¹³ On a scale from zero to ten, overall, I give this a 9, epic, for asides and endnotes; an 8, rare, for introduction of new ideas to TTPRGs; and a 4, meh., for readability, perhaps trending down to 3, poor, for virality or share-ablity of the post itself.