The Misadventures of Hareng Rouge

Twenty-Five Per Cent Leroy Jenkins

I am not well suited, emotionally, to playing Dungeon Crawl Classics and other Crawl Classics games. That is why I am playing so many of them at the moment.

I am a staff officer. Planning, redundancy, contingency. I am a slow strategist. I am a theorycrafter. I am a game manager. I am methodical. I manage my character. I optimise skills, loadouts, and abilities. There are planning documents. Tactical doctrines. I think about how to encourage the other players in the group to synergise with my character in a way that feels organic but is carefully cultivated. I write up the session notes and the loot acquisition schedule. I like managing the battlefield. I am the kind of player who would have strapped an explosive vest to Leroy Jenkins and then let him run through the door whilst I sharpened my bayonet to deal with the aftermath.

I have handwritten cheat sheets for managing my character: combat role, parlay role, default weapon selection, and first actions when ambushed—or, better, when ambushing. These include reminders to structure questions for the GM in a way that invites useful information. I don’t ask, “What is the light like?” I ask, “Where are the shadows I can hide in?”

This makes me a bad person, but a successful lawyer. I am not proud of it, but it paid off my mortgage.

Part of that game management is shaping and managing probability. I do things to narrow the probability range that the random number generator throws up. I do things to move that range in my favour. I do things to remove randomness entirely. The Crawl Classics games have probability matrices so random and so wide in outcome that managing them is closer to dealing with uncertainty than with risk. Risk you can assign a value to; uncertainty you can only point in a direction and manage through scenario planning.

I am much more comfortable in my Cyberpunk 2020 campaign than in Mutant Crawl Classics. I have found a way to grab control of the battlefield and the operational tempo. Take two current examples. In my ongoing Cyberpunk 2020 campaign, my character has developed into a competent marksman. REF 8 and Rifle 7 give me a base of 15 before rolling—plenty to hit in most circumstances at close range. As my GM remarks: don’t roll a one.

I hate fighting at close range. I would rather shoot the enemy in the back from a distance before they know I’m there, then loot their body for fancy kit. So I’ve been working up my sniper abilities. One way to climb the power curve in Cyberpunk 2020 is through equipment, so I’ve acquired a very good sniper rifle and supporting gear. I can now reliably engage and destroy enemies at long range. Uncertainty has been turned into risk, and then that risk has been managed and mitigated. Everyone wins, including roleplaying games.

My level 1 character in Mutant Crawl Classics is a mutant with Telekinesis as her main combat mutation. She has decent ranged capability but poor non-mutation melee ability. Telekinesis is effectively a melee attack at 5′ range at level 1.

Mutant Crawl Classics uses a table for each mutation: a banded table running from 1–34+. You roll 1d20, add permanent modifiers and occasional discretionary ones, then consult the result. I currently have a 25% chance of the mutation not working and becoming unusable for the rest of the day, a 30% chance of not getting a formal attack, and a 45% chance of getting one. That formal attack’s damage output varies from an expected 3 to 18, with a maximum of 36. Three is a nasty injury for a low-level opponent. Thirty-six will kill two or three of them.

And there’s the uncertainty nested inside the probability. I enter combat and, one time in four, immediately render myself combat-ineffective and badly positioned. Fifteen percent of the time, I can spread between 16 and 36 damage points across one to four adversaries. I could tickle four of them. I could delete one. I could wipe the whole group. But twenty-five per cent of the time, I am Leroy Jenkins. I won’t know until after I’ve done it.

Some players are really happy about that. They love the chaos, and loving the chaos is a player skill—a social skill. Roll a 1, stamp your character D.E.A.D., laugh, and roll up another character. Some players are really happy to have an opportunity to improvise. That’s a player skill too: sharp minds, keen eyes, and fortune favouring the brave.

I have not embraced the chaos. I don’t actually want to. What I have done instead is acquire ten useful items for combat when Telekinesis doesn’t produce a formal attack: nets, ropes, bolas, bags of sand, and dried poison ivy powder. Things to bind, blind, distract, and dismay the opposition. I have mitigated potential failure, introduced redundancy, and created useful contingencies.

I am not playing Crawl Classics to become emotionally comfortable with chaos. I am playing Crawl Classics to become a better staff officer.