Further Down The Rabbit Hole

(Why Didn't I Use That Gag In Part I?)

(I mean, it's not like there's such a thing as "too lame and predictable" for this blog.)

OK, when we last we left our intrepid bunny,  (who is named Hickory, just in case you forgot) I was distracted by trying to figure out why the paging mechanism wasn't working and it seems to have been related to a backslash in the category name. Now that that's been taken care of (I hope), I can get back to writing.

We were discussing Dexterity... well, more technically, I was discussing it and, in theory at least, you were reading it... though hopefully the new comment system will lead to a few more posts here and there... and this led to the fact you need dexterity to carry things, and that led me to go off on a tear about how the cover and interior art of the book promises one kind of game (humanoidish rabbits with at least iron age technology) and the actual rules of the game deliver something completely different, namely, a much more "low key" experience where you play a sapient but decidedly non-humanoid rabbit, the ultimate in anti-powergaming. This was way ahead of trends from the 1990s, where "munchkinism" was sneered at and the more inept and useless you were, the better. (And this led, in turn, to the trend where the game text and the game rules were horribly out of sync, a trend mostly exemplified by White Wolf, which had endless pages of black-on-dark-grey prose discussing your gloom, angst, and personal horror, and then even more pages, oddly enough far more legibly laid out, which detailed a seemingly infinite list of cool, kick-ass abilities. "This is a storytelling game of personal discovery" said the marketing, and "Here's detailed and complete mechanics to RIP someone's HEAD off and then SPIT down his THROAT!" said the rules. Or, sort of, the opposite of Bunnies & Burrows, which sold you this and then gave you this.

And it took me like an hour to learn enough CSS to get that to work, so, please, click "Read more" to read more!

Dexterity And Design

As noted, the first use listed for dexterity is carrying things. A bag can hold 10 small items or two apples, or, I'd guess 5 items and one apple. It's also possible for a rabbit to snag a bag while he runs, leading to many opportunities for the GM to arbitrarily state that little Loppy has strangled himself and by the time he gets free, he'll be torn apart by the vicious hounds. With bees in their mouths.

Other uses for Dexterity include disguising yourself as a dog. Or, I suppose, any animal, such as a horse. Naturally, there's yet another specific rule for this, with various chances based on if you're trying to foll a low level rabbit or a high level rabbit or... uh... wait a second. Your attributes have levels; you don't. At least, this is the first time I've seen a generic "level of creature" reference. Maybe it's opposed by the target's Dexterity level? I don't know. As written, it seems that your skill is the only real factor in success/failure, though the GM is encouraged to apply modifiers as needed.

At this point, at least to me, it's becoming apparent that while "attribute level" is a pretty good idea, especially for 1976, the rules really, really, can't make up their mind what they want to do or how they're supposed to apply. Every frackin' thing has its own chart, table, or mechanic, and the use of arbitrary breakpoints for many of the tables that rely on the raw attribute score just makes it worse. Just flipping around, we see various tables which grant bonuses or penalties or change effects based on completely different value ranges... on one chart, the break may be from 9->12 and 13->15, on a another, 8->11 and 12->16. If you wanted to add a new rule or judge an unusual situation, you had far too many options. Do you base it on attribute level? On raw attribute? Is it a percentage chance? Is it opposed or reduced by the target? All of these mechanics are found lumped together, and there's no consistency in where they're used, as if the authors rolled on the Random Mechanics Table.

Pretty much, you can blame this on D&D. The first "brown box" of Dungeons & Dragons was rushed to market, and was itself a confused hybrid of the Chainmail miniature rules, Gary Gygax's constantly in-flux house rules, and Dave Arnesons mechanics and ideas, more or less cut and pasted together, a success because of the revolutionary newness of the idea itself and the fact the game was taught mostly via oral tradition. However, when people saw an incomprehensible jumble of inconsistent mechanics, they tended to take away from it "This is how you design an RPG", and while many early games were much more cleanly designed (Traveller, Runequest), it took a long, long, time before consistent rules became commonplace. (Even by the time of D&D 3.0, the first version to be truly "designed" in any sense of the word, you had things like clerics turning undead and concealment as a %age miss chance that broke the general rules structure.)

Alright, enough digressions on design. Back to bunnies!