TOM HANKS: I played a game called Mazes and Monsters a little too much.
KATE: No kidding. What level?
TOM: Uh, nine. Ninth level.
KATE: So am I! Isn’t it wonderful to be finally creating your own scenarios?
TOM: Yeah, yeah, and your own fantasies too!

OK, the above dialogue raises a few questions. For instance:
WHAT

It’s hard to see how these fit into standard RPG structure, and, indeed, upon first hearing, it sounds like arrant nonsense – nonsense that merits slaps to the writer. But if we’ve learned nothing else, we’ve learned to TRUST MAZES AND MONSTERS. If we haven’t learned that, we’ve learned nothing.

And we’ve been wasting our time.

Scenarios

Here’s my theory: a “scenario” is the intro text that introduces an adventure. For instance, “You stand before the palace of the Ghosts of the Gravelands. Fell spirits float through its ancient corridors. It is rumored that among the palace’s treasures are mighty gems that may trap men’s souls.”

At ninth level, players gain the ability to write this intro dialogue, thus choosing the nature of the maze, typical monsters or a boss who inhabit the maze, and the kind of treasure that can be gained. The Maze Controller still writes and controls the adventure within these parameters. After all, the Maze Controller’s powers are like unto those of a god. Even gods take suggestions, I guess.

Fantasies

We know that Mazes and Monsters grows progressively more psychologically difficult (and powerful) as you advance in level. However, we haven’t really explored the dangerous world of the unconscious mind. Our current rules sound like pretty vanilla 80s RPG design. We need to push the pop-psychology envelope with our Fantasy rules. As Blondie says, “We work out our problems in the caverns and then we leave them there.”

Like scenarios, fantasies must give players some agency over the perils they face. Again, Mazes and Monsters anticipates the shared narrative of modern indie RPG design.

Let’s start by getting some information about the players’ psyches. We’ll use this information to populate the game’s mazes with suitably cathartic (or destructive) challenges. At various levels, every player rolls a d12 to select a question from the following chart and gives the answer to the Maze Controller.

1. What makes you angry?
2. What betrayal do you fear?
3. In what way do you feel like a failure?
4. What part of your behavior feels out of control?
5. What’s one thing you’d like to preserve from harm or change?
6. What would you like to tell someone so they really understand? Who?
7. What do you worry about most?
8. What would make you a success?
9. What would you like people to admire about you?
10. Describe your most frightening nightmare.
11. What event could drive you to madness or despair?
12. What magical power would allow you to solve all your real-life problems?

Armed with this information, the Maze Controller can create thinly-disguised, hamhanded challenges and rewards that have real psychological effects on the players. These are called “fantasies”. For instance, if a player says that they would like the power of resurrection to bring back a dead relative, you make up a pretend relative of the character, kill them off, and then offer the character a quest that will let them conquer Death! The Maze Controller can do real psychological healing! Or harm. Hard to predict which. That’s part of the fun!

Example of play:

Maze Controller: OK, Tom, your real brother died, right? Your character, Pardieux, has a brother, and he just died. You watched him fall off a building! As he fell, he called, “Help me, brother!” but you were too far away!
Tom: (weeps)
Maze Controller: If you can find the Clock of Chronos, you can reverse those events! It will be as if it never happened. The Clock of Chronos is in the Dungeon of Lemnos…

At level 9, players can “create their own fantasy”. Once per level, they may seize control of the story and narrate their own thinly-disguised challenge, quest or hero’s journey. The Maze Controller sets all the RONAs and makes the dice rolls, but otherwise, the player has control over the fantasy until it has been conquered – or until it conquers!

Example of play:

Maze Controller: OK, guys, you’ve just returned from the Maze of Whispers. You –
Tom: Just a minute: I’m creating a fantasy. My character gives his earnings to his brother, who immediately runs away and gets lost in the city. After a few days, he has been robbed and beaten. He’s starving in an alley… he’s attacked by thugs… he cries out! “Brother! Save me!” but I’m to far away to help! He’s… (weeps)
Maze Controller: Right. Guys, if you can run through the mazes of the Slums of the Golden city, you MIGHT be able to intervene before Tom’s brother is killed.

Wow, it sounds really irresponsible to hand that kind of manipulative emotional control to people with no psychological training! Unless, of course, those people are fully licensed Maze Controllers or players able to play at the 9th level.

Next week: traits!

Last week we started work on the Mazes and Monsters combat system, figuring out HP and damage. That was the easy part: hit rolls are really the central feature of combat.

Let’s use RONA for this. As you may remember, using RONA, you roll a D12 and try to hit a target number. If you have an applicable trait, you roll 2d12 and take the highest number.

Wimpy monsters require an Easy Rona (a roll of 3 or more on an exploding d12); middle-range monsters Average (6) and tough or well-armored foes Hard (9).

Characters don’t necessarily get much better at hitting as they level. As soon as they get a trait that lets them roll 2d12 for their attack, they’re as good as they’ll ever be.

This is a departure from fantasy RPGs like D&D, which give the PCs (and monsters) steadily increasing hit chances as they level. Mazes and Monsters, on the other hand, provides steadily increasing damage; we don’t need to double-dip.

Armor

Armor in Mazes and Monsters is very limited! Iglacia the Fighter has listed among her possessions “armor”, “shield”, and “helmet”. No “leather”, “chain”, or “plate”; no armor+1. Just “Armor”.

Let’s say that hitting an unarmored character requires an Average success: in essence, you need to roll a 6 to hit them. We’ll give each of Armor, Helm, and Shield a +1 to that number, so a fully-armored character like Iglacia requires a 9 to hit: a Hard RONA.

Is there anything on Iglacia’s character sheet to bear out this theory?

Well, there is a stat right below H.P. I can’t make out the acronym: it’s two letters, and its value is 10. If I had to guess, I’d say that the letters were “P.T.” or “T.P.” or “B.R.” or something like that. Since I can’t figure out what it is, I’m going to declare that it’s “P.R.”, “Protection RONA”. It’s 10, instead of 9, which gives Iglacia a better defense than we theorized! Maybe Armor grants +2 P.R. while the helm and shield grant +1 each.

Weapons

Iglacia has a couple of weapons on her character sheet: mace, axe, and the Talking Sword of Loghri. She must have had some reason for keeping her mace even after she got her Talking Sword of Logrhi. How are we going to differentiate these weapons?

I’m tempted to adopt the D&D3 solution of giving monsters resistances and weaknesses to bashing, piercing, or slashing weapons. We can extend that to spells, too: maze mummies are weak to fire, for instance.

Actually, given that the only type of armor is “armor”, the list of weapons in Mazes and Monsters probably isn’t very long. No footman’s mace or Bohemian earspoon here. Instead of dividing weapons into categories, we can just give monsters resistances to specific weapons.

While we’re here, let’s come up with the weapons list. It probably looks something like

sword
mace
axe
spear
dagger
bow
staff

Let’s handle monster weaknesses and resistances by adjusting the monster’s P.R. (Protection RONA): +3 for resistances and -3 for weaknesses. For instance:

Mystic Skeleton
PR: 6 (9 vs arrows, swords and daggers)

Maiming and Slaughter

We’ve already come up with a colorful Maiming table. We can now tie that to the RONA system. If you (or a monster) get a critical success (10 higher than the RONA target number) you can roll on the maiming table. If you happen to roll a double crit (20 higher than the RONA) let’s say you kill your target instantly. We’ll call that a slaughter because that’s the sort of term that probably would have distressed 80s parents.

Say, what are the odds of having a character get Slaughtered by a freak roll of the dice?

I tend to think that monsters always roll 1d12s: the extra d12 from Traits are one of the ways that players have an advantage over their environment. In order to Slaughter an unarmored character with a RONA of 6, a monster needs a 26. That means rolling 12 twice, and then rolling a 6 or higher. The odds of this are about 1 in 300.

How many times is a character attacked between level 1 and level 9? Well, earlier we decided that it takes 70 game sessions to get to level 9. Let’s conservatively guess that there are two combats per session. Unarmored characters try to stay out of the way, but they probably get attacked at least once per battle. Over 9 levels, that’s about 300 attacks: you’ve got an even chance of being Slaughtered before you get to level 10. Add to that the chances of death by HP depletion, traps, tricks, and Maze-related madness, and it’s obviously quite an accomplishment to make it to the level-10 cap.

Fumbling

If there’s a special chart for critical hits, there needs to be a chart for critical failures too. If you roll ten less than a target Protection RONA, you have to roll on the Fumble Chart.

Fumble Subtable
1: The character impales himself with his or another’s weapon. Character rolls damage on himself.
1: The character makes the same attack again, this time on an ally.
3: The character’s weapon or spell breaks.
4-5: The character’s weapon or spell flies across the room.
6-7: The character leaves himself open. One opponent may make a free attack.
8-9: The character falls down. He loses his next turn.
10-11: The character misses spectacularly. No other effect.
12: If there is another enemy in range, the character automatically hits that enemy.

On a double fumble (20 lower than the target’s P.R.) the character kills himself with his own weapon.

OK, our combat system is pretty solid. We maybe erred in basing it on the same mechanic as everything else in the game; to maintain fidelity to 80’s RPG style, we should have had it be a whole separate subsystem. But at least we jammed in a few unnecessary charts.

Next week we’ll finish off whatever odds and ends of rules we haven’t addressed yet. The Mazed condition springs to mind. Then, the week after: the official release of Mazes and Monsters 1st Edition, just in time for Christmas!

Edit: We won’t do that. Instead, next time: we’ll get mazed!

We’re in the last scene of Mazes and Monsters! In a week or so I’ll be preparing a free PDF of the complete rules. For now, let’s finish up the movie.

Last time, Tom Hanks’ friends found an insane Tom Hanks about to jump off the World Trade center and saved him by DM fiat.

Some time afterwards, the friends pile in a car to visit him at his parent’s house. They’ve heard he’s “doing better” and are excited to see him. They exchange news about their own lives: Kate, for instance, has gotten over her writer’s block! Oh yeah, she’s a writer, and she had writer’s block. I remember that from all the times that came up.

They find Hanks sitting under a tree out behind his house. They’re thrilled to see him! He quickly demonstrates, though, that he hasn’t recovered; he still thinks he’s Pardieux. That’s the bad news. The good news, though, is that his role-playing has never been better! He delivers a magnificent in-character monologue that generations of Mazes and Monsters players would do well to study and imitate, for both style and content. I present it here, with rules annotations in a right-hand column. Aspiring actors, I strongly recommend you memorize this piece for future audition work.
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