Review of Bakto's Terrifying Cuisine

What It Is

Your party finds themselves in the kitchen dungeon of Bakto, a picky eater for a demon. Satisfy his culinary demands or die trying. This is a small hardback book written for The Vanilla Game or OSRs, and easily adapted for anything else. Here is one of the monster stats. It should look very familiar. If you can't work with this, I don't know what to tell you:

Bakto's was written by Giuliano Roverato, Gustavo Nassar, and Rodrigo Melchior, with art by Sam Mameli. Lovingly inspired by Iron Chef and other frantic cooking shows; the party scours the dungeon for ingredients, encountering wild situations, engaging NPCs, deadly foes, and powerful magic items all the way. I found it has a lot of replay value as the ingredient randomization and time limit make it different every time you run it.

Get it at Spear Witch, itch.io, and DrivethruRPG. As far as I can tell, the only way to get the physical book is through Spear Witch, so do yourself a favor and get it there. If you do itch.io you get a coupon for the physical book, I gather. That's kind of second-best stuff though, and you are better than that.

What It Isn't

One misconception I had going in is that this was a scavenger hunt. Turns out, Bakto was apparently not prancing around the dungeon like a demonic Easter bunny beforehand, hiding just the right things for your players to find. Maybe they were never supposed to succeed. Try to concretely find the abstract flavors he demands like "Drama" or "Nuclear" and you will fail. As you should, fool.

To survive, the party has to shoehorn dungeon debris and monster giblets into some passable mockery of bespoke cuisine, and do their damnedest to cater to his flavors. This is how my game went - my players grabbed what they could and somehow made it work. Barely!

The Time Limit

There is a time limit, which means the party can only explore some of the rooms. Think of the mad shopping cart dash through the grocery store in cooking contests - they can't get to every aisle, can't get everything they wanted. Probably don't know where to find them in the first place! It is small, but every party you run through it could viably experience a different dungeon. You and your party can be surprised even if they already ran this, and the latter part of the book gives some solid ideas for changing things up on repeat runs: teams, secret ingredients, etc.

The Tone

Due to the art and theme, you can forgive people for thinking this is light in tone. It's definitely gonzo, but it is a very deadly adventure with great risks and rewards. Think of the lore lurking behind the bright palette of Adventure Time or the deceptive depth of most Troika! adventures. There are rooms that defy the visual tone, my favorite of which can easily lead to transforming and stranding the party, or worse.

Just some light-hearted whimsy, as long as you don't look too close.

This leads into one of my only concerns about this adventure; curiosity can really kill the cat here. Several rooms I am sure I would lose character after character to as a player. If you run this game you will need to calibrate how many cues and chances you give the party to notice something is amiss. Read it beforehand and you will know which rooms I mean. Definitely memorable though, and not as light-hearted as the tone suggests.

My Bakto Session

 

My Bakto was transparently based on Aku from Samurai Jack. The author says he was based off the 1st edition AD&D DMG cover, and I can see that. Once you picture Aku in your head though it is hard to get that impression out. I doubt I am the only one. I had him really brag about the rubedite cookware he had, pulling from the real life memory of one of my foodie friends always boasting about his goddamn copper pans.

 

Brothers from another mother (maybe, I don't want to think about that.)

My party found out about the allergy from an NPC but were deceived about its nature. This lead to a great moment where they expected Bakto to die upon eating their dish, were baffled when he didn't, started to feel horror that they now had to go through with the contest they thought they would fail, then did not, barely.

 

They only got into actual combat once, on a random encounter. I can see less fortunate parties finding themselves in great danger, especially at the low levels suggested.

 

It was a fantastic game overall, everyone loved it and I begrudgingly admit they may have enjoyed it more than the foray into B4: The Lost City they were amidst (I run B4 a lot). 

 

I now keep this game in my bag, not on my shelf. Loaded and ready for the slightest window of opportunity to play it.

 

How to Enjoy

I ran this as a one-shot and feel like this is its best use. Spreading it out over more than one session might squander the beautiful anxiety from the time limit. As a one-shot, it would also make a great palate cleanser when switching game masters or settings. The best thing I did was to make sure the party would occasionally hear Bakto's booming voice announcing the dread passage of time, describing exactly how he would cook and eat each of them, etc. Normal stuff.

End Note: Author's Discussion 

I generally refuse to read anything about the author explaining their game before I play it, and you should too. If you already played it or just don't care what I think you can read the author's story about its development here.

Hit Points as Doom Timer

 

I'm going to poop out what is sure to be a wildly unpopular idea. We all know the ancient discourse about how hit points (HP) in D&D alternate between physical or "meat" points and luck/fate.

In this hack we focus on HP purely as fate or luck, a timer set between the character and their ultimate doom. We achieve this by simply disallowing healing. Every hit is either just flesh wounds or near misses until the last one. Healing, natural or otherwise, is purely a narrative conceit. Levels would still add HP if anyone manages to eke out a level under this method. It would in fact be the only way.

The draw to this method is that getting to the end of your HP means you are probably nearing the end of your story too, so make it count. Does only the player know, or is the character also aware of their upcoming demise?

I think you will find that the longer you play, the more you will realize that the death of a character is often the best part of their story. Too many players are robbed of the best experience in role-playing by intrusive systems that prolong their lifespans unnaturally. Do you really want to hear about that party of super heroes knocking God on its ass, or the scrappy adventurer who tried to grapple a Grell under the light of a dropped and guttering torch? Look deep in your heart, you know the truth.

Naturally this makes Clerics and healing potions useless. C'est la vie. Leave them out, or make healing potions exceptionally rare. 

Enjoy, if you dare. 

The Vacation Game

A brief play report of my kid's dungeon, made without any of my input and played during a beach vacation.

If you're dead tired of dads talking about their 7-year old wunderkind role-players, turn back now. You're looking at two of those little drawing tablets; above is the map, below is health and inventory.

 

There's a bit of "video game brain" polluting the free kriegspiel nature of this. For the inventory he drew Zelda hearts and filled them in when I took damage. We had a hard time when healing, because he would just cross off the row and draw them again. The long bar is magic, which he kind of gave up on tracking because it was annoying, as MP systems tend to be.

 

The top row shows a monster and its two minions. I had to guess which key and door would open the way to it. If I guessed wrong it was instant death and I respawned. There was actually a pause the first time I died, because he wasn't sure what to do if I screwed up. Then the respawn, which felt like a bit of a plot armor thing. So, more video game brain but funny.

 

Above is part of stage 2 that I got a picture of. It's more sophisticated. There are hallways, doors, chests, secret doors (the supine Ss), etc. I managed not to die here and got a stick, which I could use with my dagger to make a spear. I did, and killed the thing in the central room.

There is a VIP $2 at the top. He wanted me to give him two dollars and I would get a good item. I passed, he was disappointed.

A long hallway with some prison cells. I searched them and there was nothing in them, which made me proud. People, there doesn't have to always be something there.

Adjoining hallway, two slimes at the far right, a mystery potion in the room below (two triangles on top of each other)

The maze before the boss monster room above. There is a key in the maze that opens the chest, which had a staff I needed to defeat the monster. The staff was fueled by the potions I found - a nice touch as they were frequent finds. I tried to talk to the boss and see if we couldn't find some common ground, but it just attacked. The strategy was to use the staff to zap it down out of the air then hit it when it was on the ground. Neither by themselves worked. Again, very Zelda but fun for a TTRPG.

Went out for night kites and pizza on the boardwalk after.

 

Grid Cells and Hex Maps

 

Image by Ermal Tahiri from Pixabay

In RPGs, dungeon maps are usually square grids and outdoor maps are usually in hexes. There are certainly good reasons for it. Dungeons and other artificial structures, are usually built square. Outdoors, the directional flexibility of the hex make it ideal for plotting out chunks of travel. Some of it is most certainly tradition from early Avalon Hill games and the Outdoor Survival supplement from 70s D&D.

So you have two main tesselations for mapping in RPGs, competing away in your game books.

Does anyone ask what the brain thinks? Our poor ignored little brains?

Grid Cells

For that, we look to neuroscience. A while back, a group of researchers (Hafting et al, 2005) filmed a rat with an electrode in its entorhinal cortex - an area of the brain important for navigation and closely connected to the memory-laden hippocampus.

 

In the video below, a dot is added at the position of the rat every time the cell spikes. As the rat explores, more and more firings are recorded, finally converging into a roughly hexagonal grid. You have to squint a bit to see it, but it is there towards the end. 

 

Spoiler:

You'll note this fits a hex grid well, if a bit distorted. It doesn't fit squares all that well unless you tilt them 45 degrees, and even then it is off.

Is this proof that the hex is superior for mapping, because it already has a presentation in the navigation system of the brain? Probably not. But, it's something to think about.

Initiative and the Next in Line effect

 

Image by Cdd20 from Pixabay

I'm sure you have noticed this over and over: you call on a player and they have no idea what the current situation is. They need a refresher before they act, everyone groans and fills them in on what just happened while they were zoned out. The player insists they were keeping up but just lost track for a minute. It won't happen again (it happens again). Maybe it happens to you as a player, and you don't know why.

Everything that took place prior to their precious turn is just... blank. Why?

• Is this just a failure to pay attention? 
• Are they only interested in themselves? 
• Is your game boring?

Or is there something more basic going on?

Background

A ways back, some researchers (Brenner, 1973) did an experiment on the long-observed phenomenon of how being next in line to perform can effect attention. To do this, they had participants sit down in a square, with each participant taking a turn to read a word aloud from a card. Turns out the participants had more trouble remembering the words they heard just before and after their turn.

If figures help for you, see below. It is a little crowded, but the dotted lines are the ones we are concerned with. The peak in the middle is their ability to recall their own word (of course). Notice that the lines on the left sink just prior and rise just after - showing that they remember less before and after their turn.

 

The article, and a decent amount of later research has attempted to fill out the explanation, including failure to convert the recent words from short term memory to long term memory, performance demands (which they show evidence to discount), and helpful sensory cues that occur during their own performance to explain the peak. 

It is all however, a little unsatisfying when applying this to role-playing games. It may be our closeness to the subject, but the the intuitive gamer explanation is that there is a simple competition for attention between preparing for your turn and noticing what the player before you did on theirs. I believe this remains to be tested in the context of RPGs - perhaps a job for an aspiring games researcher.

Solutions 

As interesting as it may be from a scientific perspective, it is a goddamn nuisance during a game. The problem clearly relies on using an Initiative system where the turn order is known before hand, as in nearly all D&D. If the players are less certain of when their turn takes place, this zoning-out effect may be avoided. Fortunately, there are many such ways to run Initiative:

• Volleyball Initiative: turns are passed from the actor to the actee, with strategies like bumps and spikes. I mention this first because I made it, it is awesome in play, and it still gets ignored by people who make big, supposedly definitive lists of initiative types.
• Troika/Bag Initiative: turns are decided by pulling rocks or chits out of a bag.
  
• Popcorn/Balsera/Elective Initiative: turns are passed by the actor.
• Side Initiative: turns are decided by the side holding Initiative.
• No/Spotlight Initiative: turns are decided by GM fiat.

 ... etc.

Conclusion

It's natural for players to space out before their turn. If this is unbearable, consider switching to one of the many types of Initiative that mix things up enough that they don't know exactly when their turn comes up. Will it work? Who knows.
 

D66 Overlap Tables

 

 

The D66 table made it possible for games that only use six-sided dice to stay true to themselves when they needed a random pick list. The first incidence was almost certainly Traveller, but I associate it most strongly with Troika these days.

Briefly, roll a d6 for the ones place, another for the tens place, and consult a table of 36 options. This is more than enough for most random tables, and you can reduce the options by lumping results together (i.e. 1,1 - 1,2) and expand upon it by adding dice (D666, etc.) or nesting results. See this page for some common variants.

Birth of D66 Overlap

Anyway, I like them quite a bit. I was just writing one up for post-apocalyptic weather in ROACH (working title), when I got an idea. I was thinking of using the entire D66 table for fall and spring, rolling twice and taking the highest for summer, and the lowest for winter. It struck me how awkward it is to roll a D66 twice, and how it was a bit of a stretch to still get hot weather in winter and vice-versa, even if it was less likely. That's two counts against it.

So what if instead I made the D66 table partially exclusive - fall and spring would still read the D66 and span the entire table normally, but summer would read the highest die first, and winter would read the lowest first - reducing their possibilities. Except for doubles, this would split the table during summer and winter. This may be a bit weird to wrap your head around until you see it in action:

• Doubles (11, 22, 33, 44, 55, 66): put all the results possible during winter and summer here. In this case I put all the gonzo apocalyptic weather here, as it did not feel overly seasonal.
  
• Lows (12-16, 23-26, 34-36, 45-46, 56): put all the cold or wintery results here, plus a few of the warmer ones because the climate is a bit too warm, even winters can run a bit hot.
  
• Highs (21, 31-32, 41-43, 51-54, 61-65): put all the hot or summery results here.
  

I like to split these up as above when designing the table, with three columns for the 6 common results, 15 lows, and 15 highs. I even made a spreadsheet that automatically sorts them into a regular D66 table format to keep things convenient. You can find it here if you want a template for your own uses.

For example, the weather table I was referring to above:

This was made by entering the list into a spreadsheet - the column on the left with entries stacked together for the low (blue), high (orange), and both (clear) lists is on the left. To the right, it restacks the types into a D66 list in regular order, you can see how it shuffles them for publication style.

(coloring added due to a good suggestion by "PolarFrosty" on the OSR discord)

I'm not too concerned with whether I was the first one to think of this. RPGs suffer from a lot of lost history. It is useful to me however, and I am damn well using it. If this sparks any ideas for any of you, feel free to comment below.

 

 

Unified THACO Resolution

The 1st Edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide contains the seeds of a standard method to resolve actions. In the example adventure, a party member can try to catch a scroll case before it floats away. It's just a regular hit against AC 4. This has all the feel of an on-the-spot "ruling" enshrined by happenstance, but it may also hint at an underlying unified "check" mechanic in early D&D. These pages are clearly instructive, showing how to handle uncertain events out of combat. I will talk about how to develop this into a very organic OSR house rule later:

Page 96 (as a room description):

Page 99 (as a play-by-play of the same room):

They seem to have abandoned this subtlety by AD&D 2nd edition, the idea-space being filled up by roll-under ability score checks for things like non-weapon proficiencies. Pretend for a moment you do not want to follow down that road. Your OSR-type game might benefit from a unified mechanic, especially if it is basically invisible. It's so natural you can even just pretend it was an on-the-spot ruling.

The Unified Hit

This is just taking the hint from the DMG and sticking with to-hit against AC as a general unified "check." As this was only ever a hint, let us flesh it out a little. Gauge the AC of a task by considering how well armored it is: a normal task is like an unarmored target (AC 10), a very difficult one like a foe in full plate & shield (AC 0). If the task is easier maybe don't call for a roll, but you see where this is going. If you are using the roll-high variant in OSE instead of THACO, this is going to look just like a modern D&D skill check.

Undoubtedly, you are now raising your finger, opening your mouth, and closing your eyes, a well worn "well akshually..." on your lips. You've found a great and terrible flaw in this system: "But this means Fighters are better at things - even basic knowledge! Congratulations, you are very smart. Consider this though: Wizards are good at spells and such, but their weirdo brains are not wired for practical solutions. Half of their education is probably calling up Imps to do things for them, like fantasy ChatGPT. Clerics and Thieves are kind of average folk who specialize in their divine magic or criminal hobbies. It is the humble fighter who must deal with actual reality and live by their wits, such as they are. Plus, just let them have a thing. They need it.

Note that Fighters do not always have a definite advantage either, especially at low levels. For example, it is good to set the AC of athletic or stealth checks equal to the AC of the character performing them. As such, it is harder to sneak or jump around in armor. In the case of thieves, this ends up giving them a slight advantage over more heavily armored fighters despite a lower to-hit. Furthermore, Thief class abilities should kick in on a failed roll.

Modifiers

Adjustments like bonuses or penalties can come from a relevant Ability score and/or the situation. This can get weird with AD&D or earlier, as the bonuses are not standardized. Do the best you can, using the recommendations below as a guide:

• Advanced D&D: For INT, use the Possible Number of Additional Languages, which is higher than the others but who cares. For WIS, use the Magical Attack Adjustment. For DEX use the Reaction/Attacking adjustment. For CON use the HP Adjustment. CHA is a little more complicated because it is all percentiles (way to go Gary); just use the tens place of the percentile as the modifier (i.e. -25% is a -2).
• Basic D&D: For INT, use the number of added languages. For WIS, use the Saving Throw Adjustments. For DEX use the Missile Fire Adjustment. For CON use the HP Adjustment. CHA uses the Reaction Adjustment.
  

The Dread Spectre of Skills

A good half of you read this and immediately started working up a way to cobble together a skill system for D&D and AD&D. You're probably oozing with greasy little homebrew standbys like using a d12 instead of a d20 if unskilled, patching on advantage/disadvantage, using wizard/magic-user THACOs if unskilled, implementing the Turn Undead table somehow, working up a massive trad skill list...

...maybe cool down a little.

Instead, just leave it all be. If the character would be good at something, due to their background or whatever, change the outcomes instead of the check. Don't even have them roll if it is something they would know. This is completely intuitive and demands no changes to the game. It's already there.

Example

The important thing is that you can implement this without changing anything in the game. It's more of a ruling than a rule, as they love to say in these circles.

In game, it could look like this:

DM: Fleeing onto the docks, you see a small sailboat, bobbing in the waves.
Player: I jump in and sail off!

DM: Does your character have any experience with boats?

Player: no, desert tribesman.

DM: You're missing something important, but fairly obvious. Make a to-hit roll vs. AC 9, add your WIS save adjustment.

Player: a 7, I miss whatever it is.

DM: You start to paddle out but the rope pulls tight and you stop with a sickening jerk. The mob on the docks is gaining, your lead disappearing.

Player: Oh damn I forgot - I reach over and cut the rope!

DM: You paddle out just in time.

If the character had a nautical background of any sort, the DM would probably just skip the check and just remind them, or even better allow a Check to paddle out of the dock even quicker and raise sail like a champ. In any case, whether someone has a background in something rarely needs rigid definition. It should be obvious after playing the character for a while.

Feel free to chime in below with observations, experiences from those who have tried it this way before, etc.