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So What Are "Victoria Rules"
and How Did They Come About?
HISTORY and RATIONALE:
During the 1979-80 heyday of Gary
Gygax's Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (or AD+D, now commonly
known as "1st edition" of what has since
become 4), DMs Alain Hargreaves and Rob Von Rudloff took the
game, turned it upside down, and shook it to see what might
fall out; they started making rather dramatic changes to allow
it to play a little differently than designed. They were
later gleefully joined in the process in progress by DM Keith
Piddington, and along the way by a host of players offering
suggestions – some of which were better than anything the
DMs could dream up! Here follow some of the more significant
changes, preceded by the perceived need that drove them into
existence….
The
game-as-campaign needed to last longer.
A system where characters reached "name"
level (usually about 9th) in just a year or two
of consistent play just did not allow enough playing time
to properly mine a campaign for all the stories it might hold.
Further, even in these early days there was an inkling that
the game's best moments might lie between about 3rd
and 7th level, when characters have some powers
but are still somewhat vulnerable, and thus there would be
benefit gained from stretching that period out somewhat.
Armed with this knowledge, the AD+D rule that gave characters
experience points for found treasure was scrapped on the spot…and
level advancement slowed to a relative crawl. (a pleasant,
though unexpected, side-effect of this was that players in
general began to focus more on the story being told than on
the numbers on their character sheets) We have since learned
our system tended to collapse on itself around 9th
level in the early days (as was the case in original Dafan);
the changes made by the major campaigns since have managed
to add about a level each: Telenet fell apart at about 10th,
Riveria around 11th, and the projected collapse
point of the current ongoing campaigns is perhaps 12th
-14th level…in other words, a long time from now
as this is written (July 2008)!
The
game needed to be easier to play. This
was driven largely by the player base at the time (and since),
who had little patience for minutiae such as weapon speed
or weapon-vs.-armour-type tables. These were removed, and
replaced with a much simpler combat system; over time, many
other tables have also been streamlined or reworked both on
the players' side of the screen and the DM's. Another major
development here saw spellcasters put on a partly-pre-memorized
spell point system rather than fully pre-memorized slots;
more recently, in one game casters have all been shifted to
work much like 3rd-edition Sorcerers, with no pre-memorization
required at all.
The
game needed to, where practical, reflect reality at least
to some extent. To this end, rules
were adopted to allow for critical hits and fumbles in combat;
aiming of spell effects (thus can miss); re-rolling of initiative
dice each round in combat – for each individual participant
– to reflect the chaos of battle; and so on. And training
rules were adopted, such that one had to undertake a period
of study or practice before gaining the full abilities of
a new level; alongside this, rules to allow some untrained
acquisition of experience points were developed as the AD+D
rule requiring advancement to stop completely while awaiting
training for a new level made no real sense.
The
game needed to allow for a few more character archetypes
by both race and class to allow players to play characters
more in line with what they imagine. The release of Unearthed
Arcana provided a much-needed Knight archetype in the
Cavalier class; by that time, the battle-oriented priest archetype
had already found its place in the game through the in-house
War Cleric class, and the Bard was in process of being redesigned
so as to start at 1st level like all the other
classes. Along this same line, the AD+D restrictions on what
races could be what classes, and how far they could advance
in said classes, were relaxed significantly and-or eliminated
entirely; to compensate, some races had their benefits reduced
slightly e.g. Elves were no longer automatically proficient
and superior with sword
and bow regardless of class. Further, racial stat requirements
were taken out and replaced with a system of bell-curve adjustments
such that whatever was rolled for initial stats (Strength,
Intelligence, etc.) could be slotted in to any race and still
function. For example, the bell-curve for all Human stats
is 3-18 (the possible totals from rolling 3 six-sided dice)
with an average of 10.5. But a Dwarf is naturally stronger
than a Human, thus their racial Strength range was determined
to be about 8-19; a Dwarf with a rolled '3' in Strength would
see it adjusted to '8'. Many of these changes led to a slight
increase in the time and effort required to create characters;
but players generally found this not to be a detriment, as
it only occurred once per character and added to the sense
that this was a *role* playing game.
The
races needed to make sense. Gnomes
in particular were difficult to tell apart from Dwarves, and
thus they were made smaller (and Hobbits [aka "Halflings"]
slightly larger) and nimbler to better distinguish
them; in effect, Gnomes and Hobbits roughly switched places
on the size charts. Barbarian was made a sub-race of Human,
to reflect the vast difference between civilization levels
encountered in the historical melting pot – e.g. classical
Greeks living a few hundred miles away from early-renaissance-era
Spaniards, with crude Vikings (Barbarians) not far to the
north – that these games tend toward.
And
above all else, the game needed to be entertaining,
both on the small scale and the large. Not so much a rules
change as an ongoing philosophy, where there's been a choice
past or present between a dull outcome and a whimsical or
amusing one, whimsy has tended to win out somewhat more often
than random chance would dictate. Wild magic, mis-aimed spells,
weapons clanging into stone walls and breaking, characters
of grandly-opposed alignments or ethics trying to operate
in the same party (and occasionally killing each other; it's
allowed) – all have been and are still facts of life in a
Victoria Rules game…along, of course, with great heroism,
swashbuckling derring-do, and the princely rewards that make
the adventuring life worthwhile. But it's not all good times;
the game also needs an edge of risk and danger, and can and
must in its ebb and flow sometimes be rather cruel to its
characters and – by extension – players; and players are well
warned of this on entering the game. It was a player, in
fact, that introduced the rest of us to a very apt philosophy
for the game: "Dungeons without mortality are dungeons
without life." On the large scale of entertainment,
well, that's where the DMs – sometimes with great assistance
from the players – come in: a long campaign gives all kinds
of opportunity to tell not one good story but several, sometimes
intertwined; and on the odd occasion we manage to pull it
off the game almost takes on a life of its own.
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