Quote from: Baron Opal;886691East of the Sun and West of the Moon, by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, is a collection of Norwegian fairy tales you might be interested in.

I've noticed that too; trees are significant in the North, even to the point that the gods made the first people from trees. I've heard that clay or earth is the desirable raw materials for people from Egypt to India. I vaguely remember a story somewhere that people are made from the clotted blood of the gods; Navaho, maybe?

Oooh it's the one with the Kay Nielsen illustrations those are almost as good as the Harry Clarke ones.

Also Korean stuff (which I'll be hitting eventually) mixes in interesting ways with Scandinavian stuff since Korean shamanism fits in well (once you strip out all the Buddhist stuff) with the same circumpolar tradition as Siberian and Saami stuff so I can cheat by using Korean stuff to fill in any gaps in my knowledge of Nordic witches from the woods.

Meanwhile in Korea you have humans being birthed by a bear stuck in a cave munching on garlic. And the cave is in a big mountain because everything magical in Korea happens on mountains.

Fairy Tale 32: Clever Hans

Int must be the main dump stat for fairy tales. Just look at this story...

The style here is interesting with even more repeated language than normal, seems like it's meant to be a call and response between the storyteller and the audience.

Hans is courting Gretel but instead of giving gifts he asks for them. He gets a needle but brings it back in the hay wagon and looses it. His mom tells him he should've put it up his sleeve.

Next time he gets a knife and puts it up his sleeve. His mom tells him to put it in his pocket.

It goes on like this with Hans suffocating a goat in his pocket, dragging bacon across the ground with a rope, carrying a calf on his head and taking his beloved home by leading her with a rope, putting her in the stable and feeding her hay.

His mom tells him that was dumb and he should've cast friendly eyes upon her so he cuts out the eyes of the farm animals and throws them at her which results in him finally getting dumped.

There's a second version of this story written out in a more normal narrative style.

Here "Clever" Hans demands that his mom set up a marriage from him or he'll smash the stove, windows and staircase.

Here Hans messes up nice gloves by getting them wet, puts a hawk in his shirt, etc. etc.

The mom gets frustrated and goes off the set up the marriage herself leaving her son in charge of the house. While she's gone the idiot makes a terrible mess of the house (the floor is covered with wine-soaked flour etc. etc.). This freaks out the goose so he decides to get naked and stick a bunch of goose feathers to himself with honey and sit on the eggs himself.

The story ends like the first version with Hans chucking eyes at the girl.

What can we get from this one?

Some NPCs should take everything literally

Not only "clever" humans but a lot of fae NPCs should take everything the PCs say literally which can lead to a lot of comedy. It's a well-worn trope but it still works.

Encumbrance

Usually in D&D people just write down shit in their inventory and then pretend to add up the weight for encumbrance but we see here that where you put you stuff actually matters.

So Clever Hans definitely needs to use this: http://rottenpulp.blogspot.com/2012/06/matt-rundles-anti-hammerspace-item.html kind of encumbrance system, maybe with some tweaks to have a image of a character and equipment slots with arrows pointing to where in the body they are.

Also I like the idea (what I read in a blog somewhere that I forget) of having material components often be reusable but very bulky so that a wizard's gear is as bulky as a fighter's armor. This can shift some magic items into material components and add some interesting flavor to the magical system. "Suuuuuure you can cast the divination spell when you want, it'll make the answers come out of the nearest severed pig's head, you did bring one didn't you?" It also makes it important for the wizard to actually have a home base and workshop as a place to keep all of the bulky material components that they can't take on every single adventure.

Screw You Harvest Moon

Marriage matters a lot in fairy tales with marriage to someone of high status often being the main goal of the protagonist in a story. In many cases it's basically impossible to make a rise in status "stick" without marrying into the rank. Nobody's going to take the PC's efforts to build a castle very seriously unless they've married a princess and no princess wants to marry some grubby adventurers.

Think this would be a good use of the Desires system I posted about a long while back. To make a marriage really work you have to tick the boxes of what the spouse and their parents desire (royals don't like peasants eloping with their kids) and those can be most anything. Simple gift giving isn't going to cut it, nor will simple flirting in most cases.

Up next: Puss in Boots

Heretical Interlude

Took a long hike this morning at the break of dawn up a mountain past a hundred piles of meditative stones to a wizened five hundred year old tree outside an iron-shod gatehouse topped with winged tiger banners while listening to an audiobook of Russian fairy tales.

Got me thinking about things like the guy who can drink a lake or run to the end of a world in a day and how the border between the mundane and the fantastic is a moth-eaten rag in fairy tales, with the feats of sorcerers often seem more mundane than a random peasant's special skill. In a later Grimm fairy tale there's a guy who can shoe a galloping horse while his brother can swing a sword so well that he can keep his head dry in a downpour.

How to model all of these fantastic feats in an RPG?

Previously I was thinking of having spell slots for the magical stuff (often nerfed in power down to the "summon mice" level) while also having NWPs (and non-weapon specialization and non-weapon masteries, often powered up to the "can run across a lake you're so damn fast") level. These would be able to be used whenever.

The more I think about it the more I think that this distinction might be artificial. There just doesn't seem to be a clear line between "sorcery" and "really good at something" in fairy tales so I'm not sure that it makes sense to have them in the rules.

So let the players learn different kinds of skills (summon ants, turn into a mouse, eat a dozen cows) and then have them all feed off of the same pool of bennies. If your pool of bennies has run dry then you can't do any magic or any amazing feats because you're too tired.

I'm wondering if this is elegant or a simplistic cop-out that makes everything too samey.

Also I'm thinking of having these bennies work like 4ed healing surges because I'm feeling heretical like that.

Will think about this and see if I want something along these lines or a more traditional OSR set-up with fairy tale-flavored spells and strong-ass NWPs.

Quote from: Daztur;887254Heretical Interlude

Took a long hike this morning at the break of dawn up a mountain past a hundred piles of meditative stones to a wizened five hundred year old tree outside an iron-shod gatehouse topped with winged tiger banners while listening to an audiobook of Russian fairy tales.

Got me thinking about things like the guy who can drink a lake or run to the end of a world in a day and how the border between the mundane and the fantastic is a moth-eaten rag in fairy tales, with the feats of sorcerers often seem more mundane than a random peasant's special skill. In a later Grimm fairy tale there's a guy who can shoe a galloping horse while his brother can swing a sword so well that he can keep his head dry in a downpour.

How to model all of these fantastic feats in an RPG?

Previously I was thinking of having spell slots for the magical stuff (often nerfed in power down to the "summon mice" level) while also having NWPs (and non-weapon specialization and non-weapon masteries, often powered up to the "can run across a lake you're so damn fast") level. These would be able to be used whenever.

The more I think about it the more I think that this distinction might be artificial. There just doesn't seem to be a clear line between "sorcery" and "really good at something" in fairy tales so I'm not sure that it makes sense to have them in the rules.

So let the players learn different kinds of skills (summon ants, turn into a mouse, eat a dozen cows) and then have them all feed off of the same pool of bennies. If your pool of bennies has run dry then you can't do any magic or any amazing feats because you're too tired.

I'm wondering if this is elegant or a simplistic cop-out that makes everything too samey.

Also I'm thinking of having these bennies work like 4ed healing surges because I'm feeling heretical like that.

Will think about this and see if I want something along these lines or a more traditional OSR set-up with fairy tale-flavored spells and strong-ass NWPs.

I agree completely with that logic, but you risk to end up labelled as a storygamer;).

Quote from: AsenRG;887714I agree completely with that logic, but you risk to end up labelled as a storygamer;).

When Wishing Still Helped

It's not storygaming when Amber characters can create entire worlds, a good Neverending Story RPG would hand huge amounts of authorial fiat over to the players without being a storygame (http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-neverending-campaign-and-problem-of.html) and it's not a storygame if it helps for the characters in a fairy tale game to wish for things.

Also breaking with D&D has the advantage of letting me put in some stuff from my son's favorite board games so they'd be instantly recognizable for him in much the same way that OSR stuff is instantly recognizable for most gamers.

To dig into the details, one big organizing thought here is that you've got to write a rules for stuff you don't want the players to do. 0ed has a lot of combat rules but if the players rely on their combat prowess (rather than administering beat downs after cheating first) they're going to end up very dead. That applies to fairy tales as well but so does standard RPG skill rules. Except for maybe some VERY narrow specialties fairy tale characters never ever win because they're good at anything but rather because of cunning, luck, aid and their enemies being really stupid. In a fairy tale RPG, characters should win in the same sort of ways and a good way of doing that is making them pretty much suck at combat and most skill use. Let's hit it.

Players have three stats which start at 1d4:
-Strong: gives you your HPs (one for one) and is the basic physical stat.
-Smart: gives you your Proficiencies (one for one) and is the basic mental/fine motor control stat.
-Luck: gives you your Luck Points (one for one) and is your basic magical/charisma/willpower stat.

Combat would work pretty much like in D&D with armor being DR. So with starting characters having 1d4 HPs and 10 AC, swords that do 1d8 damage are terrifying. To hit people with the sword you'd add how Strong you are to a d20 roll and try to hit 10. Blunt weapons would still do 1 HP damage if you hit no matter how high the DR is.

For out of combat stuff, doing easy stuff would be automatic. Doing hard stuff you don't have a Proficiency in requires you add your stat to a d20 roll and try to hit 20 (or roll under your stat on a d20, same difference). As these stats start out at 1d4 this is intentionally punitive to keep people from relying on their stats to do stuff and forcing them to use cunning instead.

However, PCs would also have Proficiencies and Luck, those help out a lot.

Proficiencies would be very very narrow and would cover the weird niche abilities that seem to crop up in fairy tales such as being able to eat a dozen oxen or shoe a horse that's galloping or know whenever someone is lying to you, knowledge of magic (being able to make pacts with animals or being an ordained priest who can perform sacraments would both cost a proficiency). Each proficiency would have rules for how to use it, many would be automatic, some would require an easy roll and others would cost Luck, which leads us to...

Luck Points. These are basically MPs by another name but they'd be a bit broader than that since characters without any obviously magical Proficiencies would still be able to spend them, for example all of the fairy tale characters that we're told are "pious" have mountains of Luck but aren't sorcerers. What you could do with them would be include:
-Power those Proficiencies that use Luck Points as fuel. For example summoning an animal who owes you a favor would cost one Luck Point.
-Giving yourself 5ed-style Advantage for a roll, additional Luck Points would give you more d20s to roll and choose the highest of. This could be used when characters are choosing high door to open/which road to follow blindly.
-To wish/pray for things, which would be blind unfocused and unpredictable magic that the DM would be encouraged to twist.
-Claiming a hex as its King/Queen.
-To cement a relationship with someone, giving that relationship magical force.
-To use a magical thingie that someone else has given you (you can still use it without spending Luck but using magic without having Luck on your side is dangerous).
-To give people a chance (still unsure about how much of a chance) to weasel out of otherwise certain death and have something very bad happen instead.
-To recover HPs a bit like 4ed healing surges, but with much longer time intervals (in 4ed terms a "short rest" would be a night's sleep).
-Simply having a stack of unused luck points would reduce the frequency of hostile wilderness encounters (which is why all of those pure-hearted kids never get eaten by wild beasts).
-If you turn into a ghost, how powerful a ghost you turn into is determined by how many points of unused Luck you had when you died.

Stuff like starvation, exhaustion, sorrow and anguish would do Luck Point damage so having a lot of them represents determination.

Luck is powerful but it can be used in so many different ways that it'd be easy to exhaust so players would have to husband it carefully.

Luck Points and Hit Points wouldn't refresh with a simple night's rest, they'd require an extended period of time spend at home or in what Tolkien calls a "Homely House."

Luck Points lost of anguish and sorrow (often due to horrible things happening to people/critters that PCs have a Relationship with) wouldn't refresh with simple rest and neither would Luck Points used to maintain an ongoing effect.

Since Luck Points can be used in so many ways you'd have different characters using them differently and feeling quite distinct despite some pretty simple base mechanics. Pretty easy to have different stats translate into different fairy tale archetypes. Sorcerers would be mostly Smart with a bit of Lucky to fuel their power, your standard "fool of the world" fairy tale protagonist would dump everything into Lucky while a huntsman would be mostly Strong with some Smart and Lucky to back it up.

For advancement you'd need a number of XP equal to the next level of your stat to bump it up one. XP would be hard to come by.

Fairy Tale 33: Puss in Boots

Interestingly, this fairy tale doesn't appear in later editions of the Grimm collection because it (and a few other stories) are cribbed from Perrault (who got them from an Italian writer) rather than it coming from the German oral tradition.

I don't think I have to give much of a summary of the story here as it's pretty well known and this version doesn't cover much new ground. Just a few things I noticed:
-Originally the miller's son wants to make gloves out of his cat.
-The cat's first task is catching partridges by putting wheat in a sack so that they rush into a sack to eat it.
-The cat says that the partridges are a gift from his master the Count.
-Why does the cat go through the facade at the lake to get clothes for the miller's son when he already got enough money to buy clothes for the king by bringing him partridges?
-He makes the sorcerer's servants say that their master is the Count before he even bothers killing the sorcerer.
-The cat becomes the kingdom's prime minister.

What can we get from this one?

Polymorph self is good fairy tale magic

Especially with people swapping between multiple forms. Keeping it to animal forms helps limit its power but I guess PCs turning into rampaging elephants is a nice power boost.

Partible Inheritance

In fairy tales, property is split between the children and in old Germanic kingdoms when the king died his kingdom was split between them. This lead to constant civil wars with the kids trying to reunite the kingdom of course and is a good source of drama. Perhaps this is why kings send their sons of ridiculous quests, to thin the ranks a bit?

Passing for Noble

In a lot of these stories marrying a royal is the win condition for both male and female protagonists. Some characters do it honestly by performing amazing feats, in which case they meet massive resistance and are usually pressured into doing more feats and their future in-laws (and even spouses!) often attempt to murder them.

As in puss in boots, it's often a lot easier to simply fake nobility/royalty. This gives PCs a good incentive to burn through some gold to keep up appearances as appearing to be of a high social class is as helpful as it is expensive and it opens up a lot of chances for drama and comedy as some NPCs will want to test the PC's high status as in the princess and the pea. It isn't often that knowledge of etiquette can be the difference between life and death so take advantage of it.

Up next: Han's Trina

Quote from: Daztur;886313Well here's a third. Hope you like it: http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=28659

Very much! Interestingly, my girlfriend teaches here in HK and has also started using RP techniques. She also agreed with a lot of what you had to say.

Fairy Tale 34: Han's Trina

Trina is really lazy and eats and sleeps all the time and doesn't work. So Han cuts her dress short while she is sleeping and when she goes outside she's surprised that her dress is so short so she wonders if she is herself. So she goes home and asks "is Trina there" and people reply "yup, she's here sleeping" because they assume that she's always sleeping so she decides that she isn't herself and leaves.

That's pretty damn stupid, even by fairy tale standards.

What can we do with this one?

Well in fairy tales identity is very important especially with people who get transformed into animals holding on to their identities and people (as in Puss in Boots) faking their way into a better position. I could see PCs pulling a con along these lines with them convincing an ogre that he's really a human who has been transformed or something along these lines. That fits with what I think would be a good dynamic in fairy tale games: very powerful NPCs who are dumb as bricks. That makes trickery a lot more appealing than combat which fits with how fairy tales operate.

The other point is the importance of marriage in fairy tales. In so many of them the main is securing a good marriage but here we have Hans weaseling out of a bad one. In traditional D&D the most important goal for characters is cold hard cash but in fairy tales a lot more focus is on people with a lot of stories having the goal be saving family members of marrying up rather than gold, although gold does figure as well.

That got me thinking about how you could work people into D&D's GP = XP system. I really like the GP = XP system because of the sort of behavior it encourages and how objective it is. The problem is people are a lot harder to pin down than gold coins. I poked around that before with treating humans as treasure according to their ransom value but let's expand that a bit.

All humans have a GP value. That GP value is how much you can ransom them for if you kidnap them. This number is a bit harder to pin down than counting up coins but not any more so than valuable artwork and similar treasure in traditional D&D. Because you can pin a GP value on people and GP = XP then it follows that you can gain XP in the following ways:
-Kidnapping people: people are worth GP so stealing them gets you XP. This gives both PCs and NPCs a reason to take prisoners rather than murdering everyone.
-Rescuing people: stealing a ruby worth 5,000 gp from an ogre's castle and rescuing a princess worth a ransom of 5,000 gp amount to the same thing: you're taking things of value so you should get the same XP for both.
-Marrying people: if you marry someone then they're "yours" so why not get XP from them? If you get married you get XP equal to the ransom value of your spouse. If your spouse's ransom value increases then you gain XP (if it decreases you don't lose anything but you don't gain anything either until it increases above the previous baseline). This does mean that marrying people, murdering them and then marrying more people is a great method of XP farming, hence Bluebeard.
-Increasing your status: you obviously own your own body so if you increase your own XP value then you get experience from that. Just getting a lot of gold doesn't really increase your ransom value (anyone kidnapping you can take your gold) but increasing your social status does, therefore if you find a way to worm yourself into a kingdom that'll give you a massive XP boost right there.
-Getting pets: players, especially kids, always love pets. The horse you own is as much treasure as the sword you own so make sure that players get XP according to the value of the pets that they get their hand on if they acquire them in interesting ways instead of just buying them.

Am thinking about working having children into this as well as that opens up some interesting adventures (the king I married is impotent, but screw that I need to get pregnant anyway, kids are great for XP!). Am thinking about how to include the strange desire of kings of have children all of one gender and if there can be any rules basis of this.

Now I just need a few tables for determining how much of a ransom people are worth and I'm good to go.

Up next: The Sparrow and His Four Children

Fairy Tale 35: The Sparrow and His Four Children

Let's make up for lost time!

Some asshole kids try to kill some baby sparrows for fun but a sudden windstorm blows them away. Their father isn't able to find his kids until quite a bit later in the year when he finally finds them and talks about how they've been surviving since then. Their father talks with them about the best way to survive and get food in various places.

Then the smallest and weakest sparrow speaks up and says that he's been hanging out in a church and that he doesn't need to be careful to avoid being eaten because God will watch out for him and that he doesn't need to worry about finding food because God will provide.

It's interesting how much religion gets stripped away in modern adaptions of fairy tales. It's so thorough that you don't even realize that it's gone until you run into a fairy tale like this that's basically about nothing but God and in a lot of stories simple piety matters more than the cunning we normally think of in fairy tales.

In fact if you really think of it, it's startling how little religion comes up in pop culture. In the young adult novels I teach my students I can't even remember the last time religion came up in any of them except for a short Easter service in The Bridge to Terabithia. It makes stuff like the Simpsons with the kids bored out of their skulls in church seem almost out of place in its uniqueness despite that being a pretty common part of childhood.

Don't think this is really an Evil Atheist Conspiracy so much as religion being a touchy enough subject that people just avoid it entirely and instead we get Hollywood Spirituality: "it doesn't matter what you have faith in or even if what you have faith in is true, just having faith is awesome, because all religions are based on entirely on faith, right?" which is just idiotic.

Interestingly, despite a lot of fairy tales assuming their modern forms in the wake of the Thirty Years War, denominations never seem to matter in fairy tales but simple faith and piety very much do. The problem with that is that succeeding at an adventure because your character was a good little boy and always listened to his parents is boring as fuck. But if the way of succeed at adventures is to always be a cunning ratbastard and never by being nice then that doesn't really fit with how fairy tales are presented.

Think the best way to make being pious actually be helpful is to look at NPCs. Often in D&D people with Good alignment are nice guys who won't try to kill you even if you act like a dick to them while people with Evil alignment will try to fuck you over no matter what, while Neutral PCs are rare and mostly just regular dudes. While in fairy tales it seems like a massive chunk of NPCs are Neutral and their modus operandi is to be incredibly helpful if they receive just a little kindness but they light you on fire and then piss on the ashes if you're just a tiny bit rude to them.

In general make how the NPCs treat the PCs be determined by PC behavior rather than NPC alignment.

In generally NPCs that are both incredibly grateful and touchy does a better job of rewarding in-genre good behavior than any kind of meta system. Just seed the random encounters with stuff like hideous beggars who are really sorcerers in disguise.

Up Next: The Little Magic Table, the Golden Donkey, and the Club in the Sack

Aside: the Fundamental Attribution Error

The Fundamental Attribution Error is a psychological term that means that people are stupid because when they think about their OWN behavior they think about the circumstances but when they think about other people's behavior they think about innate character traits. For example, "I shouted because I had a really bad day but HE shouted because he's an asshole."

In a lot of fiction the Fundamental Attribution Error seems to be baked in. The hero sometimes has misunderstandings or makes mistakes but the antagonist does bad things because they're evil. I can see this with the cartoons my son watches, "the bad guy is fighting the good guy because he's a bad guy." This gets baked into a lot of RPGs as well with things liked alignment systems.

The reason this way of thinking is such an error is that is discourages moral behavior. If good people are always going to be good it doesn't matter if you're a bit dickish to them, they're fundamentally good so you can still patch things over and if bad people are always going to be bad then being nice to them is for suckers.

What's interesting is that fairy tales do a really good job of avoiding this pervasive error. Again and again and again in fairy tales characters act in certain ways because of how they're treated, not because of any set characteristics. Think of all of the stories in which the hero is trapped in a cannibal's (or giant's or sorcerer's or whatever) house and then gets help from the cannibal's wife or mother or other character who's been there cooking the long pork for years. These aren't nice people, but they still respond well to kindness and help the people who are kind to them. Or the dwarf/beggar/old woman by the side of the road who responds to mild rudeness with lethal curses but showers magic items on people who give them a heel of bread.

Of course there pure heroes and thoroughly vile step-sisters but the characters that people meet on the road, the characters who really drive the story forward have their behavior determined by circumstances: namely if people treat them with kindness or not.

This works in RPGs as well, the more the behavior of NPCs is driven by circumstances rather than hard coded then the more player behavior matters, which is what these games are all about.

Good observation.

Quote from: Daztur;903489This works in RPGs as well, the more the behavior of NPCs is driven by circumstances rather than hard coded then the more player behavior matters, which is what these games are all about.

Side note: there's this weird, hard to describe in real world thing, working on some deeper level of reality, that makes people act in specific way towards each other. Call it "charisma", "presence", "attraction", "animal magnetism" and such, but it's there. We kind of know that, hence proverbial "beautiful people have it easier" and "sexy blondes don't need no brain". Pretty much everyone knows people they can't stomach for no apparent reason, and the other way around - assholes, whom you seem to always forgive and give 25th "2nd chance", just because.

RPG addresses this thing too. Plenty of mechanisms feature "how much I influence other people's hearts, minds and behavior" attribute or set of skills, not to mention mind-influencing magic and powers. Unless properly dealt with they might act like "morality killers", a workaround of your idea, because heck, with my CHA:20 I'm simply gonna say "sorry" if caught red-handed, and then everyone's gonna forgive me anyway.

Quote from: JesterRaiin;903508Good observation.



Side note: there's this weird, hard to describe in real world thing, working on some deeper level of reality, that makes people act in specific way towards each other. Call it "charisma", "presence", "attraction", "animal magnetism" and such, but it's there. We kind of know that, hence proverbial "beautiful people have it easier" and "sexy blondes don't need no brain". Pretty much everyone knows people they can't stomach for no apparent reason, and the other way around - assholes, whom you seem to always forgive and give 25th "2nd chance", just because.

RPG addresses this thing too. Plenty of mechanisms feature "how much I influence other people's hearts, minds and behavior" attribute or set of skills, not to mention mind-influencing magic and powers. Unless properly dealt with they might act like "morality killers", a workaround of your idea, because heck, with my CHA:20 I'm simply gonna say "sorry" if caught red-handed, and then everyone's gonna forgive me anyway.

Right the way charisma works in a lot of games can short circuit that, which isn't necessarily unrealistic.

What I was thinking about is that in a lot of modules there are all kind of encounters with critters who are hostile pretty much no matter what and often try to pretend to need help in order to get you to leave your guard down. But the thing is not even the biggest assholes in the world are so universally hostile. Not even Manson is knifing everyone he meets there should be ways to get positive interactions with all but the most diabolical NPCs even if doing so isn't easy.

For Charisma my idea was that the old D&D model works well, charisma helps determine NPCs' initial attitude but not much beyond that. So maybe the sorcerer who looks like a beggar tells the guy with 20 cha "for a few crumbs I will give you the benefit of the wisdom I learned at the feet of Severard of the Seven Circles" and tells the guy with 4 cha "gimmie eats, ya ugly bastard, I'm hungry and it looks like you've had plenty to eat!" but in both cases he curses you if you don't give him food and gives you help if you do, it's just a lot easier for the 20 cha guy to get a handle on what's going on.

Upthread I go on about having social mechanics be based on haggling. NPCs have Desires that describe the things they want. In order to get the NPCs to do stuff the PCs have to give them things that they Desire and avoiding going against those Desires. Desires could be anything from "true love" to "human flesh" to "the moon" depending on the NPC.

Quote from: Daztur;903511What I was thinking about is that in a lot of modules there are all kind of encounters with critters who are hostile pretty much no matter what and often try to pretend to need help in order to get you to leave your guard down. But the thing is not even the biggest assholes in the world are so universally hostile. Not even Manson is knifing everyone he meets there should be ways to get positive interactions with all but the most diabolical NPCs even if doing so isn't easy.

I agree with you when RPG application of the concept is discussed. 100% support, thumbs up & stuff.

However (ah yes, the inevitable), I'd like to say I think you're damn optimistic man, who has a lot of faith in the mankind.

During my voyages I've met people, who were pretty much hostile and angry all the time, no matter what. Sure, they had their own private safe space where they suspended their violent behavior, or reacted positively towards certain people, but aside of that - pure anger, hate, often rage. Most interesting thing, while some had some sort of "explanation" as to why they acted like they did, others were just angry for no apparent reason.

Quote from: JesterRaiin;903516I agree with you when RPG application of the concept is discussed. 100% support, thumbs up & stuff.

However (ah yes, the inevitable), I'd like to say I think you're damn optimistic man, who has a lot of faith in the mankind.

During my voyages I've met people, who were pretty much hostile and angry all the time, no matter what. Sure, they had their own private safe space where they suspended their violent behavior, or reacted positively towards certain people, but aside of that - pure anger, hate, often rage. Most interesting thing, while some had some sort of "explanation" as to why they acted like they did, others were just angry for no apparent reason.

Certainly. But still there's a wide range of ways in which their dickishness can manifest. They're not going to automatically be taking a swing at everyone they meet. In RPG terms there's a big difference between someone who shouts at the PCs and someone who takes out a knife and tries to stab them.

Fairy Tale 36: The Little Magic Table, the Golden Donkey, and the Club in the Sack

There are two versions of this story included. In the first one a son feeds his father's goat but the goat tells the father he didn't get fed (stupid goats) so the father beats the son and drives him off. The same thing happens to the other two sons. Then the father feeds the goat and the goat lies to HIM about being fed so he realizes he's been an idiot so he shaves the goat's head for some reason. The shaven donkey looks so weird that it scares off bears until a bee stings it.

Meanwhile the three sons have worked hard and gotten some magic items: a table that produces food (which an innkeeper steals), a donkey that shits gold (which an innkeeper steals), and a club that smashes you in the face (which an innkeeper steals and gets smashed in the face). The third son then recovers the table and donkey.

The second version of mostly the same with no donkey (father sends his kids into the world with a penny and a pancake) and a moral about how going to parties is bad is tacked on.

What can we get from this one?

Goats are Assholes

Stupid lying goats. http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2014/08/and-goat-had-notable-horn-between-his.html

In general the importance of talking animals to give a story a fairy tale vibe can't be overstated, just look at the Hobbit compared to the Lord of the Rings. In general starting with the familiar ("it's a goat!") and then adding on the weird works a lot better than just going straight to gibbering tentacles as it gives something for the weirdness to be hung onto.

Magic Items

So we've got three magic items here:
-Table that produces food.
-Donkey that shits gold.
-Club that smashes you in the face.

So cursed items are yet another D&Dism that has a lot of precedent in folklore. The other two are great treasure as well, especially considering how useful an infinite supply of food and drink is if you're tracking encumbrance.

PCs and the Status Quo

The gold shitting donkey raises a very important point about campaign structure. If the PCs get their hands on a donkey that shits gold then why bother to go on any more adventures? You've got everything you need right up your donkey's butt. And this doesn't just apply to donkey poo, it applies to any other situation in which the PCs can get their hands on a passive income stream, especially if the money in that income stream gives them XP under GP = XP rules.

A lot of DMs wouldn't include magic items like this donkey, the goose that lays golden eggs and draupnir (Odin's gold-dripping arm ring) despite them having a lot of folkloric basis since they really shift the relationship of the PCs with the setting away from them being lean gold-hungry adventurers. But is that necessarily a bad thing? I like game design that organically changes how the game is played as it progresses rather than the late game being the same as the early game with bigger numbers so how do gold-shitting donkeys fit in with that?

Since I already linked to one D&D With Pornstars post I might as well do it again: http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2010/01/sandboxes-and-roguish-work-ethic.html and http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2010/01/rogues-and-sandboxes-basic-edition.html

Although it's not how Zak phrases it my main take-away from those articles is you have some PCs that are fundamentally at odds with the status quo of the setting and that those PCs are proactive and good for sandboxes because they'll initiate conflict with the setting. These PCs are often rogues in the Sword & Sorcery vein whose main problem with the status quo is that there is so much gold in the world that is not in their pockets but they can be freedom fighters in a totalitarian nightmare or survivors in a Post-Apocalyptic setting just as well. However if PCs are basically OK with the status quo of the setting then these characters will be reactive as the GM has to feed them threats to the status quo in order to get them to do stuff rather then them initiating conflict by themselves.

How does this apply to fairy tale characters? Well starting characters are very much NOT OK with the status quo, they're poor smucks in a nasty world (the aftermath of the 30 Years War in Germany seems a good approximation of the setting of these stories and that was not a good time to be a poor nobody) who want to be rich, famous, comfortable and, if possible, royal. They're not going out defending the kingdom from threats or helping strangers in need, they're trying to worm their way into royalty and riches.

However after a PC becomes king or gets a gold-shitting donkey then things change. It's good to be king (or to have a gold-shitting donkey) so at that point the PCs is fine with the status quo and starts to defend it. Rather than wandering around poking holes in the setting the PC is tied down defending what they have and spends more and more of their time playing wack-a-mole against an array of threats. The PC has becomes more and more reactive as they gain status and the nature of the game changes accordingly which gives things a good "heavy is the head that wears the crown" vibe. So why not have a few adventures about the PCs defending their gold-shitting donkey against various thieves while they try to stockpile as much gold as possible and feed it as much as they can before it dies or gets lost. Sounds like a good chance of pace. Would love to see what kind of creativity PCs could unleash when given the task of "defend the donkey at all costs."

Up next: The Tablecloth, the Knapsack, the Cannon Hat, and the Horn