The final day of #RPGaDay2020 brings up the prompt "Experience."
Before I knew it, I was thirty minutes into writing a Gaming Curriculum Vitae, but since #RPGaDay has never been how big your dice are (just how you roll them), I scrapped that for a fun trip down memory lane: The Hackmaster 4th Edition GM Shield.
Hackmaster had the nostalgia, the crunch, and the parody to endear players, but it also had a knack for gamifying processes. Critical hits were an adventure. The random tavern name generator was an event to be witnessed (The Burning Trogs had a safe track record in taverns with the word "keg" in them.)
The game within a game for me were calculating Experience Points and Honor.
I had over a decade of experience behind the screen playing (A)D&D before Hackmaster came around, so I was quite aware of how to divvy up xp to the party. I don't think Hackmaster turned it up to 11, but perhaps a good 10.5. They expanded upon class-based xp, They had all the base monsters xp from the Hacklopedia of Beasts on one of the flaps.
And then there were the "Common Individual Awards"
Well before I even watched the D&D cartoon, much less rolled some polyhedrals, most of these were standard recommendations to offset the gold/murder theme of fantasy xp. In my experience and anecdotal observations of other campaigns, these were one-off events: a good idea was 100xp, a great one 250, perhaps for a player's birthday you'd throw more at him as a gift. This was a beautiful system that forced us to do an end of session collaboration over what was cool (and what wasn't).
The most gamified award on that chart was most damage in a single blow. Players would keep track of damage on a folded index card for all the world to see, so when one of the non-fighters pulled off the feat, there was a great celebration for one of the smaller awards.
The MVP award was selected by peer vote at the table, and the Gnome Titan players were lucky to win it at least half of the time. Playing a race where all earned xp was halved, that MVP reward was a big help.
The honor reward system worked in a similar manner. A huge chart gauged temporal honor based on the characters' actions compared to their alignment. It was a necessary post-session event to review everything with the players (cryptically), but honor (and dishonor) had a huge impact on die rolls, re-rolls, and NPC reactions.
Those were the little things that have kept Hackmaster fondly in my heart, despite not playing it in a campaign for over a decade.
Before I knew it, I was thirty minutes into writing a Gaming Curriculum Vitae, but since #RPGaDay has never been how big your dice are (just how you roll them), I scrapped that for a fun trip down memory lane: The Hackmaster 4th Edition GM Shield.
 |
| My previous ode to the screen can be found here. |
The game within a game for me were calculating Experience Points and Honor.
I had over a decade of experience behind the screen playing (A)D&D before Hackmaster came around, so I was quite aware of how to divvy up xp to the party. I don't think Hackmaster turned it up to 11, but perhaps a good 10.5. They expanded upon class-based xp, They had all the base monsters xp from the Hacklopedia of Beasts on one of the flaps.
And then there were the "Common Individual Awards"
 |
| Yeah, it was EP in Hackmaster. I was a loner, Dottie, a rebel. |
The most gamified award on that chart was most damage in a single blow. Players would keep track of damage on a folded index card for all the world to see, so when one of the non-fighters pulled off the feat, there was a great celebration for one of the smaller awards.
The MVP award was selected by peer vote at the table, and the Gnome Titan players were lucky to win it at least half of the time. Playing a race where all earned xp was halved, that MVP reward was a big help.
The honor reward system worked in a similar manner. A huge chart gauged temporal honor based on the characters' actions compared to their alignment. It was a necessary post-session event to review everything with the players (cryptically), but honor (and dishonor) had a huge impact on die rolls, re-rolls, and NPC reactions.
Those were the little things that have kept Hackmaster fondly in my heart, despite not playing it in a campaign for over a decade.
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