The Burgeoning Chatter Of The TEETH
Ominous! You are reading the TEETH newsletter, written and compiled by the snapping jaws Jim Rossignol and snuffling maw Marsh Davies.
This is a newsletter about table-top role-playing games: our own—that we’re publishing over here and also here —as well as interviews, links, and general noodling. Want us to see your work? Get in touch!
Hello you.
Links!
Big TEETH is coming! Here’s some discussion of the rules and stuff with Handsome Marsh and Clever Jim.
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Hello, you.
This week Marsh and I had an extensive catch-up on what we’ve done with Forged In The Dark rules to make TEETH’s main campaign book work, and why we did that. That’s never the full story, of course, because things evolve in play and get lost along the way. We’re super pleased with how it has turned out, however, and the detailed feedback from our beta-testers has allowed us to make some last minute refinements that we’re super pleased with.
Here’s are a couple of previews of Marsh’s incredible design and art!
To celebrate, I’ve also put the second and third TEETH games, Stranger & Stranger and Blood Cotillion, on sale for the week. If you are reading this and haven’t delved, now’s a convenient chance.
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LINKS!
Not that I want to do anyone’s marketing for them, but I have read two 2d20 books in the past year and been extremely impressed with the system. I hope to play/run one soon. (Mr Gardiner has been threatening Conan!) More specifically, I had somehow missed that the Dishonored RPG uses that system, too! My heart. All this and Xd20 more on Bundle Of Holding.
Extremely impressed by procedural space-station explorer One Breath Left.
I was very into Thomas Manuel’s “Games For GMs” comments here, but later ended up wondering whether or not a game being for a GM just depends on the type of GM they are? I know a few who love reading slab-sized adventure modules. It’s good to see Thomas has found his type, anyway. (He’s still right that something should always happen on a miss, eh?)
I have just learned of Appendix N: The Eldritch Roots of Dungeons and Dragons and the premise of a compendium of the stories that might have caused the Dragon came to come to pass fascinates: “Drawing upon the original list of “inspirational reading” provided by Gary Gygax in the first Dungeon Master's Guide, published in 1979, as well as hobbyist magazines and gaming periodicals that helped to define the modern role-playing game, Appendix N offers a collection of short fiction and resonant fragments that reveal the literary influences that shaped Dungeons & Dragons, the world's most popular RPG. Appendix N also explores and contextualizes the ambitious lyrical excursions that helped set the adventurous tone and dank, dungeon-crawling atmospheres of fantasy roleplay as we know it today.”
Random book recommendation of the week (which is nothing directly to do with TTRPGs, but is just really good) Otherlands by Thomas Halliday. I mean, some sort of Deep Time RPG is probably a cool thing, but even putting our obsessions aside this is an incredible book, and maybe the most poetic work of paleontology anyone is going to write this decade.
Research this week led us to a medieval Italian soldier named Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta. If that wasn’t impressive enough, there’s also this: “In a unique ceremony, he was canonized into Hell with the curse, "No mortal heretofore has descended into Hell with the ceremony of canonization. Sigi shall be the first deemed worthy of such honor." Blimey, Sigi, you have been a bad man.
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The Fictional Pig-Pen: Rooting Through The Muck In TEETH’s Beta-Testing and Rules Wangle
TEETH is finally grinding to completion! We actually had the full text down by early October of last year but we felt we really needed to find GMs beyond regular group of goblin-fanciers and trick, bribe or bully them into playtesting TEETH for us.
It's been great, partly because feedback has generally been either positive or constructive and we are vain little men who require constant flattery to be remotely productive, but mostly because it was extraordinarily fun to see other people muck about in the fictional pig-pen we've created and emerge with their own, largely disgusting, stories. Much thanks is due for the extremely detailed and thrilling accounts of Tom Lando (whose Compare & Campaign podcast is a fab listen for tabletop aficionados) and Jamie Brittain (who I hope will accept some stretch goal money to transform his group's tale of narcotic hog-milk into an official TEETH supplement).
The playtests have picked up typos, forced us into greater clarity, initiated some minor rebalancing and helped refine some of the larger ideas in TEETH. It also made us look again at some of the rules we borrowed from the Forged in the Dark ruleset which underpins TEETH and wonder whether they were right for us. Maybe they never were, we whispered, lips hidden behind hands.
Let's chat about it, Jim!
Jim: Well-
Marsh: Sh! I'm going first. Me, Jim. ME. I want to talk about the Action roll. It's how players do anything that tests a skill, and it's the very core rule of both our game and Blades in the Dark, upon which our rules are based. John Harper, the creator of Blades in the Dark, recently reappraised the language around it: clearly he feels like people were looking at their character sheets as a list of verbs, picking one, and deciding how to apply it. Instead, he emphasises that the player should specify a general intent first, then the GM decides whether that's sufficiently difficult to warrant a roll, they suggest what challenges the player might face in approaching the task, and then the player selects the Action which best describes how they perform their task. I do agree with that up to a point. And that point is that, for a decent amount of the time, you kinda know you are going to want to do (e.g.) a Persuade roll—because you want to persuade someone! And sure, you could instead say, "I want the housekeeper to tell me about Lord Batchley's unsavoury predilection for ham," and then um and ah about whether that could be a Persuade or a Command roll—but sometimes you might well know how you want to play it from the outset and the back and forth with the GM becomes a weird rules kayfabe. Basically, there's a certain procedural stodginess implied by Harper that I think works against Blades' snappy, improvisational style. Do you agree?
Jim: I read it the other way, I think: my understanding from both this and the original text is that Harper is trying to exaggerate Blades' improv aspects by removing the "check a stat" or "call for dice roll" impulses of those trained in the trad RPGs. He wants what you want to do to come first, and not what you could do, and definitely not what amount of dice you want to roll. I look at this way: the list of verbs going to be a thing which essentially limits your imaginative space, and so the idea behind this clarification, to my mind, is to formalise the story-telling and the character-driven experience—the intent—and suggest that the dice roll, both check of personal ability and chaotic capricious interventions of complication, should be how to make the Forged In The Dark system be freeform and chaotic. And actually we do play it like that! People will just come up with something and then figure out an action or series of actions to get there, often getting lost in the chaotic repercussions along the way. I often find myself saying, "What do you hope to achieve there?" and then immediately, "Do you think that's an action roll?" However, the flipside of this entire approach is that there is so much freedom—and I have heard this complaint from a number of players we've run these systems for—that actually they aren't sure what to do. Another way of looking at any game that has a character sheet is that for many players the sheet acts as a prompt: "This is what I can do", and so looking at that list of actions and then using one as a springboard for what your character intends to do gives everyone an advantage and a signpost, especially when improv is not their talent. Not only that but looking at your sheet and remembering that "ah yes, I use muscle to solve my problems" means that you continue to act in character. Most of the time, anyway.
Marsh: The other part of it is that, according to Harper, the GM pretty much enshrines the possible consequences for failure in discussion with the player before the roll. And again, I see how bringing the player into that is sometimes fun. But equally fun as a player is being surprised. You are particularly good at this, Jim, and I feel like always foreshadowing repercussions would rob our games of a particular spontaneous pleasure. Obviously, the heavy lifting for that spontaneity falls on your GM shoulders though, so maybe you feel differently?
Jim: I do a bit! I love surprising players with hairy consequences in all the games we play and I have got good at it. But actually what you're talking about is an inconsistency on my part as a GM. With our core FiTD group we always seem to have a very good idea about what could go wrong and I don't always explicitly open that aspect of the game up to the group. Consequently we are often pretty fast and loose and informal on how we apply this stuff, which makes for fun and relaxed games. But getting consequences nailed down is definitely a key part of the FiTD system (I mean look at Devil's Bargains: a complication has to be agreed upon for that. Also, as a further parenthesis, there's a uniquely odd aspect to this rule set, which is that players are supposed to decide on what the consequences, good or bad, of an action they have to roll for is before it happens, but not for one they don't roll for, which I think has some interesting implications for the way we played the game.) Anyway, returning to your point: one habit we got into was to run a lot of scores or missions via heavy use of Clocks, which I overused massively when we were running Blades: the consequence of action failure was always a tick on that clock or other, no need for discussion. It made the process faster. And I think actually in most of our scores adding a tick to a Clock or risking Harm ended up being the key complications! Which isn't at all improvisational, and clearly not at all what Harper intended for FiTD. We have moved out of this habit over the years, but I think it lingers. I was thinking about this as we played Trophy Gold, because in that we were being much more consistent about making sure everyone contributed to the complications discussion, rather than me, the GM, saying, "This is what goes wrong!" Mr Harper's rules clarifications here remind me I should just be better at it and open our games up to very clearly decided escalations or calamities that don't all come out of my GM's reading of the situation.
Marsh: One rule from Blades we've binned off entirely is Special Armour. Armour in general is an intuitive way to transfer the normal cost of avoiding an injury to another resource pool. So, instead of taking Stress (the game's narrative currency) to evade a snapping maw or cleaving blow, you can just scribble off an armour point to reduce the harm you take—but armour eats into your equipment load in a big way. It's a neat trade-off. Special Armour is slightly different. Players use it when activating a special skill they've unlocked which allows them to boost a roll in an area of their character class's particular expertise or automatically resist its consequences. For me, that never quite joined up. I totally see how armour has the qualities of being protective and heavy, but as a resource you optionally use to, I dunno, do a really cool ninja jump or something, it felt a little abstract. Plus, it's basically a tiny bespoke resource pool for just one special skill, which is itself hogs a spot in each class's sheet that could be used for something more thrillingly asymmetric. I can see its application, but for me that doesn't outweigh the fussiness of its very existence.
Jim: I think the critical thing is that we just didn't have any abilities that made any use of it. If we had developed special power usages from the outset we might even have used it more! Blades use of it does seem vestigial in that sense, but then it's often the little esoteric elements that people like in a system. It makes little difference to TEETH in the end, though, I agree. We also had to resist the temptation of replacing it with something or adding too many of our own new boxes and tick and resources to track. So easily done when you are tinkering with a system!
Marsh: So, Blades hangovers aside, the thorniest—perhaps even unresolvable—issue we face is one of pacing. TEETH is a game with an ending (most likely a horrible one). Players enter this cursed corner of England in the guise of monster hunters, invited by His Majesty to maintain some manner of order and ensure the vital trade in occult items continues unimpeded. But they also possess a secret agenda—revenge, revolution, resurrection or worse—which they must seek to fulfil across the course of a year. Stay too long in this corrupted place and the Royal Commission they possess will expire and they will be judged too contaminated to leave. They might yet still remain, attempting to complete their mission at ever deadlier cost, but this framework creates a natural time pressure which the GM tracks by advancing the Season Clock at suitable intervals or as a result of some massive player fuck-up. Making sure that time advances such that the players feel the urgency but still have a chance at victory, is essential, right?
Jim: Oh no, I have just realised this is me over-using Clocks again! I'm obsessed. (But in all seriousness, yes, the sense of building urgency, the idea that you only have a few moves left before this thing blows up is absolutely how I have run FiTD games and I wanted to provide even greater formality for it here.)
Marsh: I think we've hit an acceptable balance now, but we had to tweak down using advancing time as punishment: it was too easy to blow through a quarter of the calendar in a single disastrous mission. We've also made one fail state elective, potentially even attractive: players who attempt to reduce Stress during downtime—by sinking pints of cursed cider, gambling on eel jousting, spending a night rolling around with the Hog Lady, etc—risk overindulging. One of several possible consequences the player can choose from is that their character simply goes AWOL for some time, advancing the Season Clock. This was too harsh a penalty for the entire group to suffer on one player's bad roll, and it was unlikely anyone but extremely dedicated roleplayers or antisocial trolls would go for it—so, based on feedback, we let the remaining players conduct another round of useful downtime activities while they wait. In certain circumstances that could even affray the cost of advancing time, letting the group finish off an important research project, for example.
Jim: It sounded like a weird solution, but it's oddly thematically coherent: waiting around in the cold and darkened rooms of 18th century England, experimenting with pickled monster organs while your fellows recover from a bout of madness or melancholy. That's the stuff.
Marsh: The other thing about the Season Clock is that it's hard to reliably translate into actual time around the table for different groups. At the rate the our Dice Club plays, we might seek a contract to hunt a creature, travel to the hamlet it has perverted, perform an investigation to pinpoint its lair, confront the beast, marry it in a grim and polygamous ritual, betray our paymasters, sacrifice them at the command of an unborn god that screeches to us from a pewter tin, and have time to kick back afterwards with a pipe of toad venom—all within one session or two. Other groups can spend the same amount of table time choosing their equipment load. And here's the thing: they aren't wrong. It's their game to play as they please! But it does mean that our estimates for how long a campaign is will be kind of meaningless.
Jim: Yes, that's one of the things I have found most interesting when watching or hearing reports of how different groups play these games. Some, like ourselves, crash through at breakneck speed, making wild decisions and dice rolls, while others are much elongated discussions, with single missions taking several sessions and many hours to complete. And that means that both the sense of urgency we are talking about and the time pressure we are applying will feel very different. But I don't think any two groups really play TTRPGs in quite the same way: they're always a function of the group, and the mediation of house and rules and personal style.
Marsh: What else was controversial? Not everyone liked having the setting first and the rules after. "But how do I play?" is a reasonable question, and I think if you are haunted by that you'll just have to skip to the rules section straight away. For me, though, the setting is the key motivation to play a thing—but even if it weren't, having the rules in the second half (and then bookended by the opening scenario, GM resources, tables and Playbooks) makes it much easier to quickly reference the things you need without leapfrogging reams of worldbuilding or burying important stuff in the centre.
Jim: Yes, I've found that some folks regard it as a convention to have the rules at the front? I mean, is that because in D&D you would buy the rule books first and then buy the sourcebooks for settings and adventures after? My own experience has, naturally, been the reverse: when I was twelve I awaited the 2nd Edition AD&D books for my birthday, and wasn't allowed to have them and read them before then. But, months early, and in anticipation of those gifts, I had bought and read (and stuck maps on my wall) of the Forgotten Realms box set. I didn't know what the stats meant, and didn't care! I just knew that my players had to face devils in the Ruins of Myth Drannor.
Marsh: I guess another thing that will be broadly divisive is the use of quite structured phases that offer quite game-y ways to perform and measure the completion of tasks such as investigating the scene of a macabre crime. I like them, but Blades purists may well ask why this isn't all just freeform roleplay.
Jim: Yeah, I think you’re right there, but then again what we’re doing is based loosely on the formalism that Blades provides via stuff like the Downtime phase. That’s built for roleplay, but the actions being taken are very clear and very structured. Like, it’s a distinct thing that shapes the rest of the experience, which is what we’ve aimed to do with our own phases of play. I feel like there’s a degree to which that’s the lesson we took from Blades, as well as other games like Harper’s also-incredible Agon, which is that making the experience feel like a game of the subject matter really does require you to have a scaffold of process and system which shapes it in distinct ways. No, you can’t just expect a generic system to support amazing heists or detective work or dalliances with Greek god-powered heroics, you have to build the systems for it.
Marsh: A bit of a classic FitD adaptation blunder this, but we found one of our Actions was too narrowly defined: Shoot. It sounds extremely Picard-head-smack.gif obvious now that this would be limiting, but I think we were tempted at one stage to have a deeper acknowledgement of guns as elaborate contraptions that took time and effort to prepare and fire a single shot—quite apart from the challenge of actually hitting anything with them. However, it turns out this is really quite fucking boring. And, while we had stretched the rulebook's definition of Shoot to include notions of precision beyond combat—who were we kidding? It just wasn't intuitive. So it's Aim now. The dickhead pedant in me regrets that a GM might let a player whip out a revolver and fan-fire it, but these are matters best left to the Anachronism Police. How do you feel about our verbs, Jim?
Jim: I feel great about them! Just look at that list of words. So handsome, so ready to be employed in unexpected ways. My favourite is Evoke, which we explicitly invite people to make use of as a magic-related action, but one which I think actually could be used in a few other ways, like Evoking social station. As I mentioned elsewhere in this conversations, I do sort of see Actions as tantamount to prompts, and so perhaps the critical bit is that the actions we’ve decided upon (which, to be fair, do mirror and shadow Blades’ own) are faithful to the monster-hunting possibilities we’re alluding to in the rest of the book. The critical thing is that we made actions that are evocative of our setting. See like evoking. A joke there, of sorts. I’m quite tired.
Marsh: We also have an optional ruleset for magic which makes it more situational, in line with other player Actions. What I mean by that is in a freeform ruleset, where Actions are not specific in the way a D&D spell is, it's easy for magic to become an attractive solution to any problem. Obviously, one way of handling that would be to let players just do whatever they like, but have the GM curtail its effectiveness or punish excess through consequence. However, that feels a bit like telling the player "no" while also not encouraging them to think outside the box. We've suggested a different system, whereby players select magical disciplines in which to specialise, like elementalism or transmogrification magic, and then a method by which their magic is applied, say by directly touching something or by concocting potions. More disciplines and methods can be learnt over time. The idea is that this retains the power of magic while also forcing players to think about where, how and if they can apply it. So instead of simply saying, "I make the magistrate's head explode with my mind," and the GM wearily setting a low effect and desperate situation, the player now has to improvise a solution out of the verbs, nouns and prepositions at their disposal. Maybe their method requires a memento of the subject, so they have to flashback to stealing his wig. Maybe the method requires luring him into a circle of salt, so a player has to seduce him dressed as a hot nun. Does the player fire a mesmerising beam from a desiccated monkey head to overload the magistrate's neocortex with thoughts of detonation? Does the player spike the magistrate's gin with a potion that transmogrifies his brain into a mass of bees that erupt in an irate cloud from his nose and ears?
All this finds an even more excessive expression in the Ritual Flashbacks players are able to perform: multi-stage group actions that escalate in horror and silliness. Playtests were a riot, with one group of players gobbling earthworms and drinking corpse-blood before puking up an entire spiral staircase made of magic vomit. I can't claim that this is a specific outcome we had in mind, but it is exactly the sort of nonsense we desire and applaud. Is it well-balanced? Could that ever be the point?
Jim: I think the point is here that we made magical worm vomit happen, Marsh, and nothing else could be a finer legacy for two awful English gentlemen like ourselves. I raise a glass of unpoisoned brandy to you! Let us enjoy what people make with what we made, and the consequences (and complications) be damned.
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More soon! x