Friday, July 29, 2011

Skill Contexts

I am totally breaking my own rules and double-posting today because I think these ideas are complimentary enough that they would suffer from a split across the weekend. This won't make a huge amount of sense without the post prior to it, so if you haven't read that yet, start there.

Feng Shui's skill system was one that I really came to appreciate as I started digging into other games. It had a very clever element to it that let a reasonably short skill list feel suitably broad yet cinematic. The idea was simple: each skill actually represented three things. The first was the skill itself, the things you would expect to fall under the skill. Drive let you drive things, Guns let you shoot guns and so on.

The second was your knowledge about the skill. That is, your Guns skill also encompassed your knowledge about guns, ballistics and all things gun related. You might not be a scientist, but you could answer serious metallurgical questions if they had to do with bullet composition or gun barrels.

The third was that it encompassed how connected you were within the social network surrounding the skill. That is, your Guns skill represented how well you knew and could find gun makers, gun smugglers, black market gun dealers, the location fo the nearest gun show and so on.

I adopted this idea in a number of games, adding a 4th element: perception. Your Guns skill might not help you spot a footprint, but it would let you recreate a firefight from evidence or spot a sniper. It worked decently, better in soem contexts than others.

Recently, Brennan Taylor has taken this idea and nitro-injected it for his game Bulldogs. In Bulldogs, he has structured his skills explicitly in terms of these broad categories of action. It's pretty slick.

Anyway, I like this idea a lot, and it's one of the best ways I know to distinguish between broad an narrow skills. A narrow skill just does a thing, a broad skill has a whole array of associated things (knowledge, connections, perception and the like) with it.

Now, let's take this back to the skill system as we've proposed so far, with it's increasing narrowness of scope. It's foundation - the culture skill - is one that explicitly depends on context. By creating the culture skill, you are implicitly creating that culture in your setting. You are saying things about the culture based on what the skill does. This is pretty potent, and I intend to use that potency over the course of the game.

Specifically, I intend to make it a necessary part of advancement. That is, I am going to add an extra step between "Soldier 2d6" and "Musketeer 3d6", and that step is the explicit creation of context.

That sounds fancy, but in practice it's much simpler - it requires taking the skill, which is fairly abstract, and concretely nailing it to the setting with specifics. In this case, the specifics might be what military the soldier is serving with, such as "Sargent of the Army of the Republic 2d6" or "The Queen's Guard 2d6".

This difference is easy to point to in the fiction, but it also has the mechanical impact of turning the skill from a narrow one into a broad one (see, there was a reason for that whole preamble). It also now opens the gateway to buying a specific skill at the next die-step up, which also indicates the context within which the character's skill is exceptional.

Doing this as advancement is simple enough - the context should be something that evolves out of play, but doing this as a part of character creation offers an extra bonus: Players may _create_ these setting elements as part of character creation. In effect, character creation can become setting creation.

Obviously, this isn't required. The GM can have a list of contexts to pick from if so desired. Heck, I'd suggest having such a list as a starting point, then letting players come up with exceptions, or drive you to come up with something off the top of your head when they really need a context for the best bakers in the kingdom.


Ok, enough combat for now. We'll need to come back to it after other things have evolved a bit more, but I feel like we've got enough of a foundation to work with. That brings us to something that's potentially even stickier: Skills.

Broadly speaking, skills are going to be what distinguishes one dice pool from another. That may seem like a very pedestrian, gamey way to describe them, but in practice it's the purpose they ultimately serve outside of the game space. Inside the game, in the fiction, there's obviously a bit more to it than than, but to someoen watching your game, they're the reason you rolled 5 dice instead of 3.

There are a lot of different ways to handle skills lists. There's the traditional skill list, where you create an actual list of skills which - hopefully - covers everything a character might do and let players buy from it. There's the broadly descriptive model, where players simply take descriptors (like Cop, Soldier or Pastry Chef) and use those values for anything that fall under the auspices of that descriptor. There are hybrid models that use a short list of broad descriptors to be all encompassing. And we've only scratched the surface - we haven't yet considered, stats, pyramids, simple and advance skills, specialties, descriptive vs. narrative pricing, implicit skills and many many other things.

All of which is to say, there's no right way to build a skill system. Use what you're comfortable with and you'll be fine, but if you try to present it as somehow inherently superior to other models, you mostly reveal your own ignorance. I think the skill model I'm going to pursue is clever, and I like it because it does some novel (and some less novel) things, but it's no great apex of skill design.

The system starts from two datapoints: I like cultural skills and the system has been designed so a d6 is a valid value. For the unfamiliar, cultural skills are a bit of an idea riffed from Over the Edge, where you had a 2d6 in anything you should normally be able to do. It's a super practical rule, but when you try to move the OtE system to another setting, you find yourself asking what "normal" is when you start comparing elves and dwarves. With that in mind, I want the starting point of every character to be "[Culture] d6".

Now, it will probably be pretty easy to figure out what that means, and if that was the only skill then it wouldn't really be much of an issue, but obviously we're going to need to start slicing things thinner. And that's where things are going to get a little bit fiddly, since I'm not going to let skills improve.

That sounds draconian on the surface of it, so let me explain a bit. The character's [Culture] skill will never be higher than a d6, but he can learn more specific skills at a higher level. However, rather than making a fixed skill list and letting people buy up it (So one guy might be Swordsman 2d6 and another might be Swordsman 4d6), I'm going to make the scope of skills narrow as they go up. That is, 1d6 skills (of which [Culture] is the only example) are SUPER broad. Any skill at 2d6 is still going to be very broad, but not as broad as culture. As such, Merchant, Soldier, Noble and so on are all valid 2d6 skills.

Each tier narrows things further. At 3d6 might be Musketeer or Doctor. 4d6 might be Fencer and Neurologist. 5d6 narrows down to a specific specialty, like rapier or diseases of the brain.

Obviously, each of these must be built on a foundation. So you need to have Culture to get Soldier, Soldier to get Musketeer and so on. These higher level containers create natural limiters on the flow of skills, so you don't just get "Rapier 5d6" out of the blue.

Now, this is a good start, but there's one more twist to it that I haven't touched yet, and this is the really crazy bit, but it's going to have to wait until next week. :)

Thursday, July 28, 2011

The Hard Questions

Ok, the remaining questions:
  3. What order do things happen in?
  4. How big an advantage is 1 die?
  5. How does this map over to multiple combatants?
These are some of the hard ones.

How many dice should it take to offset a status?







What order do things happen in?
Ah, now there's a bit of a bear. Initiative.






How big an advantage is 1 die?

How does this map over to multiple combatants?



Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Fighting Questions

Ok, getting into some of the nitty gritty here, so let's review.

The idea so far is that combatants will have die pools of D6's. When they go after someone in a fight, they are trying to hit a fixed target number, with a result as follows:

4 - Inconvenienced
7 - Harmed (possibly handicapped. Maybe another term)
13 - Taken Out

These are statuses which map to in-fiction effects, and they also accumulate, so an inconvenienced character who is inconvenienced again becomes harmed.

Statuses can be changed by spending unused dice. Unused dice are dice which have been rolled, but which were not necessary to hit the target number. If, for example, you rolled 4,3,3 then you can hit a 7 with 1 unused die (or a 4 with 2 unused dice) which you can use for stuff. Much of the stuff is currently undefined (and is expected to be a place for mechanical hooks) but specifically, they can be spent to "downgrade" statuses.

With that in mind, I'm looking down the barrel of the following questions:
  1. Does the attacker choose the target number he's going for, or does he simply take the result?
  2. When a status "rolls up" does the previous status remain? That is, if a second inconvenience becomes harm, is the target now inconvenienced and harmed, or just harmed?
  3. Is there an option to respond to a Taken Out result?
  4. Are statuses the only possible outcome, or are they simply the non-specific outcome? That is, is a disarm a _form_ of harm, or something with a difficulty equivalent to harm (because it has a similar impact but with player-directed outcome)
  5. Are 3 statuses enough? Do we need 4?
  6. How many dice should it take to offset a status?
  7. Who gets to say what form the status/result takes in the fiction?
  8. What order to things happen in?
  9. How big an advantage is 1 die?
  10. How does this map over to multiple combatants?

That's a lot. Enough to tempt me to just accept a standard injury model and move on, but I'm kind of dumb that way, so let's press on and work through these, though it may take a while.


Ok, two options: decide before you roll (declare intent) or declare after you roll ( describe outcome). The argument for post-roll is that the assumption is that every attack is an attempt to finish the fight. It also opens up an interesting decision-point of allowing the attack to choose to get a lesser outcome in order to keep more unused dice. That is, if you rolled 4,1,1,1 then you might feel better off taking the 4 and three unused dice (which probably need a cool name) than taking the 7 with no remaining budget.

The argument for a pre-roll decision is that it adds a little more strategy to the mix. It makes risk-taking a bit more of a calculated gamble, and it does _not_ require any post-roll decisionmaking. That's kind of a big deal, since post-roll decisions are a big source of friction - you totally don't want a player sitting there deciding if he really wants that 7 or those unused dice on a borderline case.

So, there's a clear priority conflict here with no clear answer. I think either option could work well, so it's really a matter of taste, style and (of course) subsequent testing to see which works. It's one of those situatiosn where you make a decision, but put a pin in it to come back to. With that in mind, I'm going to go with decision before the roll because I think it will be easier to test whether that feels frustrating than it will be to test if it's what people want.

The default assumption in most systems would be that the effects stack - that is, that you would now be inconvenienced and harmed. I'm inclined to buck that trend, at least while we have such a short list of statues, because it effectively lengthens the "damage track". This might prove to be too much bookkeeping in the end, but it's what I want to try for now.

I feel like there should be, but the real answer to this can be found in the question of sequencing. If all action is simultaneous, then this is easy to implement - just let overage dice be used immediately to mitigate an effect. Unfortunately, simultaneous action has its own drawbacks, so this question needs to be set aside until we answer the question of order of events.

I'm strongly inclined to the latter, and as I think about it, I think the rubric may be simple. Outcomes are defined by the attacker, harm by the defender. That means that the fiction of being taken out stays firmly in the hands of the player, which is a plus. It also works nicely with the idea of hitting set difficulties, and it also supports players who are very descriptive as well as those who are not.

Curiously, this also suggests an interesting extension of the outcome ladder, which might be a little meta, but kind of resonates with me. To inflict harm AND describe it, you must hit the next target up. That is, the target for taking someone out in the way YOU want is 19. It means the "one shot kill" still exists as a possibility when dealing with very skilled opponents, but it's rare. That has some weird interplay with things when the target is already hurt, so I'll need ot think about it some more, but if nothing else it feels like a good optional rule.

5. Are 3 statuses enough? Do we need 4?
Dunno yet. But the answer to that previous question may prove a suitable compromise.

Ok, enough for today. We'll run through 6-10 tomorrow.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Actual Fight Mechanics

OK, so the basic non-fight component of a conflict is this: take a swing, beat a 4, if successful, the other guy is taken out.

(I like “taken out” as a euphemism because it underscores that all ways of taking someone out of a fight are roughly equal – unconsciousness, death, getting tossed overboard and the like all fall into the same bucket, and it leaves the exact color and fiction flexible. It also leaves a hook in place later to allow players to offer their own taken out outcomes if you want to avoid death in interesting ways, but that’s a matter to think about later.)

Once we’re in an actual fight, we don’t want things to be quite so quick as all that, but we still want to respect the 4+ success rule. We could go for a numeric system (hit points or the like) but let’s think of this in terms of statuses – we have this idea that a good enough roll can result in being taken out, what else might happen as a result of a roll?

Suppose that there are two other results – inconvenienced and harmed. Inconvenienced means that the other side has gotten some transitory advantage - they’ve knocked you back, rung your bell, seized the high ground or whatever. Harm is more palpable – it’s a disarm, an injury or some other major setback. And, of course, the third result (taken out) has already been recovered.

So, at their baseline, let’s map these as follows:

4 – Inconvenience
7 – Harm
13 – Taken Out

Now, that maps to our difficulties, but it raises some immediate questions. Does it mean that you need at least a 3d pool to be able to win a fight? And what happens when two people of high skill go at each other? Do they both just die? Obviously, we need to address these issues.

Now, the first is pretty straightforward, and we’ll do something that has been done in many other systems and just have damage “roll up”. That is to say, if you inconvenience someone who is already inconvenienced, they are now harmed. If you inconvenience someone who is already harmed and inconvenienced, then they’re taken out. Pretty simple. It allows high skills to get decisive results while allowing unskilled combatants to have sloppy, ugly fights that end badly.

Still brutal, though, especially since there’s no idea of defense. Skill won’t keep you standing any longer, and that’s problematic.

The fix for this is tied into how I view the statuses. Note that it would be normal to put a checkbox next to each status an fill them in over the course of a fight, but that’s more static than I like. I actually don’t want them to be static, I want them to come and go – not just inconveniences (which are already often tenuous in games like Fate) but harm and maybe even taken out. This means that, at a high level, I want people to be able to improve their status as they play, so that’s another axis of action. Sometimes it will be a dull axis (shrugging off an injury) and sometimes it’ll be flashy (getting out of a tight corner) but the bottom line is that status can fluctuate over the course of a fight.

(Saying that, my gut is suggesting we need a 4th status, just so there’s more room for things to slide. That may be true, but I’ll sideline that concern for now. If I figure out a good mechanic for this, then one good test for it will be expanding the status list).

So how should we implement this? My first thought is to make it something you can spend extra dice on (that is, for those who don’t recall, dice that weren’t needed to hit the target number). This has an interesting upshot because it provides a double incentive to go for inconveniences and harm rather than KO’s, because you’re more likely to have extra dice left, at least in theory. Of course, the fact that hitting three “4s” may be easier than hitting one 13 may also play into that. This also provides an interesting tool for NPC behavior, since the target number an NPC aims for speaks directly to their tactics, and can be a solid part of an NPC writeup.

Anyway, at the simplest you could just say that 1 extra die can reduce things by one “step”, so a hurt can become an inconvenience for 1 die, or go away entirely for 2 dice. That’s a good baseline, but it might be too easy. This is something to test, but I’d absolutely want to fiddle with different costs, including a higher base (say, 2 dice per step), or a sliding scale (1 for inconvenience, 2 for harm, 3 for taken out if apt – or perhaps the reverse!) but the idea is solid. It just leaves two real questions – how it interacts with a taken out result, and how it sequences. Those are pretty fiddly bits, so they’re best left for tomorrow.

Monday, July 25, 2011

Combat Waffles

All the previous discussion about fights also implies something that I figure I'll state outright - writing a generic combat system is a much bigger pain in the ass than writing one for a genre. So much so that most generic combat systems aren't - they are in fact implicit declarations of genre through the simple fact of how they handle things like survivability, "realism" and such.



This means the first thing to look at is stunting. This is sort of a broad question best phrased as "how tolerant is the system of players doing cool stuff that might be unrealistic or tactically inappropriate but which looks awesome?" This is a kind of important question because, practically speaking, swinging from a chandelier is a pretty awkward way to make an attack, but it looks pretty cool, so how should a game handle it?



At the far opposite end, you have the true stunting school (names thus for it's use in Exalted) where the character gets a _bonus_ on the attack based on how awesome it is, thus making colorful attacks desirable. This can get a little silly as players ham it up to get the bonuses, but it definitely supports the flashy.

Between those, there's a broad band of cinematic styles, ranging from abstract cinematic (like 4e's stunts, where the mechanical effects are sufficiently disconnected from the fiction to allow a lot of narrative flexibility within fairly strict mechanical interpretation. Also applies to many scene-based resolution games) to gritty cinematic (as in Feng Shui, where stunts are penalized, but that penalty is very small and bonuses are very high, which allows them but discourages their constant use).

This cinematic space is probably where I want to aim for, which is definitely on the swashbuckling end of things, but it highlights a few things. My real goal is the 1970's Three Musketeers movies, where fights have flair (and even humor), but also have a sense of danger to them despite reasonably limited bloodshed. That means I'm not looking for Hong King musketeers - it sucks in film and it's not what I want in a fight.

Part of this is tied to the cultural role of violence and death. It's important to remember that while we remember the duels and swordplay in the Three Musketeers, that was criminal activity. Duels are illegal because people killing each other is a terrible thing. It's a sin and a crime, and while you might try to outright murder the other guy on the battlefield or in certain brutal circumstances, those are edge cases. Or should be. The problem is that in any modern game, you can be certain that a player wants to be Wolverine (or the like), and such things quickly move towards the least common denominator. That's rough.

And with that, I find myself wrestling again. Is there a meaningful way to address the role of conflict in the game outside of the conflict rules? Setting design can speak to it certainly, but there's a reasonable case that they can be quite toothless in the face of a setting that says one thing and rules that say another.


Friday, July 22, 2011

What To Do With a Fight











Thursday, July 21, 2011

Combat is a Pain

Ok, back on track. Time to think about conflict. Now, the reality is that if you're designing a game, conflict really means combat. Yes, absolutely, you might need to handle other types of conflict, but combat is the starting point. This is partly because it's such a central part of the hobby, but it's more because if your system is going to break, this is where it's going to happen. That sounds negative, so let me put it a little bit differently - no other part of a game system requires you to think about what the game will actually be like and how that interacts with expectations than combat.


First, because combat tends to have explicit stakes (character well-being) that are measurable outside of the fiction (stats and information on the character sheet) its impact is directly observable in action. That is, while there may be some narrative interpretation applied to how 7 hit points got lost, it's still 7 hit points getting lost. This is not necessarily true of every system out there, but it's common enough to be a default.

Second, there's a huge range in expectations regarding how combat should go, so much so that it's one of the main yardsticks for judging genre. Games might have lethal, brutal combat, or they might have fast and loose, mostly harmless combat. Or they might have something in between. Whatever the case, the usual yardstick is that there is usually a specific look and feel the designer is going for, often epitomized by a particular book, movie or TV show though sometimes through their own personal lens of how fights work "in real life".


Last, we've got decades of training from D&D that have totally shaped our perspective. This is not a sleight to D&D but rather an assertion of its huge mindshare, as can easily be seen in most RPGs and computer games. And not just CRPGs - there are precious few shooters out there that don't have some form of hit points, and there's a good reason for that. If play is fun, then dying (and thus not playing) probably isn't. On the upside, this simple model has supported a lot of fun play, but it also means that the assumptions that might guide you in other parts of game design may fail you here. The blatant gamey-ness of combat does not stick out to people the same way it would in other parts of the game, and in fact if you move away from the established standards, people start reacting badly because they know how things should be.

Now, these are concerns, but not show-stoppers. But they're important to keep in mind as we move into designing conflicts.

Wednesday, July 20, 2011


I'm briefly sidetracked today by a comment on an earlier post which used a phrase I'm utterly delighted by. The poster was concerned about the variance in larger dice pools, but described it as "the mathematical whimsy of dice pool systems". That's a fantastic way to put it, and I'm totally filing that away.

But he raises a valid point, and he's not the only one to do so. Variance is a bit of a specter that has been raised more than once. For those unfamiliar, the concern is basically this: the bigger the pools of dice get, the less predictable the outcomes get. Once you're rolling 5d6, you've still got a curved outcome, but the curve gets shorter and fatter. You can see it when you map out the curves from 2d6 to 5d6, and it only gets more pronounced with time.

Now, this is totally a function of taste. I admit that so long as pools stay under 7d6 or so, the variance is still within my personal threshold, but I completely understand that other people's thresholds are elsewhere. The thing is that this is mostly something that math nerds are sensitive too, but gaming has no shortage of math nerds, so it's not so easily dismissed as all that.



This is an important point to bear in mind when you start looking at these die curves. It's not the specific numbers that matter so much as the bands of results. If hard rolls (13s and such) are common, then the variance starts becoming an issue - possibly a frustrating on - and that's where a lot of systems fall down. By having difficulties creep up along with die pools, you end up feeling like the treadmill is outracing you. Less consistent results combined with consistently escalating difficulties can make "high level" actions feel less heroic.

The solution to this is to take the base difficulty very seriously (Savage Worlds does a great job with this). If the target is really and truly 4 most of the time, then the big die pools feel powerful (especially when paired with the ability to "spend" unused dice). Using higher difficulties to represent specific circumstance is useful as a tool to manage exceptions, not as the default.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

A Little Spin

Ok, so we now have a basic die mechanic (a tally system for dice pools ranging from 1d6 to maybe 5d6) and a basic method for establishing difficulties (numeric steps 4/7/13/19 based on expertise required to perform a task) and a methodology for handling success. That's a good start, but for all the thinking that went into it, there's not much there. In the absence of further details, this is just one more d6 system looking for an answer to the question of "Why not just use RISUS?"

First off, let me state that RISUS is a good answer to many questions, and if the sole purpose of this were to create a not-RISUS, that would be a little lame. There is a lot of desire in RPGS to differentiate purely for the sake of differentiation (or, more cynically, to make something different enough that you can put your name on it) so beware that particular lure.

Thankfully, I have enough things I want the system to accomplish that we still have some very organic work to do. Let's start looking at the bells and whistles.

When looking to add fiddly bits to a system, its worth thinking about when in the process you want things to happen. Are you going to introduce choices before the dice roll or afterwards? Or both? This gets further complicated when you have more than one roll (such as D&D's attack & damage) but let's not borrow trouble. We'll assume a single roll for the time being.

When making this decision it's worth realizing that there's more than just timing at work. Choices made before the roll have a very different texture than those made afterwards, and the difference revolves around the certainty of the outcome. Any choice made before the roll is, practically, a gamble. It's a choice being made on the hope that the subsequent roll will succeed. This has the benefit of being more engaging and the drawback of risking paralysis - it's easy to get hung up on what would be the "right" choice.

In contrast, choices made after the roll are very certain, and tend to be all about working with the outcome. In addition to being simpler, these choices usually are much easier to ingrate into the fiction of play. That is, characters don't use their big attack to miss - they hit, then decide it's going to be a big hit. For some people that logic is jarring, especially if the game has enough missing that it's expected, but other players find the other disconnect jarring.

So, let's say we want a before-the-roll mechanic. We probably want to embrace the gambling element of it, allowing the player to take on some risk before the roll in return for a potential reward. The easiest way to do this with the system so far is to play around with the trickle-down nature of success. Under normal circumstances, even if you don't hit the target you're going for, you still succeed to a lesser extent. You could offer a bonus on the outcome provided that failure will be absolute.

That feels a little awkward, and there are simpler alternatives. Bonus Dice, for example, are a common trick for rounding out dice pool systems. That is to say, you may get to roll extra dice, but only count the best ones. These might be true bonuses (Like in PDQ# or Over the Edge), fixed result pools (like Cortex+ always keeping the best two dice) or roll & keep systems (like L5R).

This is a pretty robust system, and has the advantage of keeping the results within the bounds of the original die pool. It's worth keeping in mind, but it's also well worn territory. I'll keep it in mind, but I'm not particularly inspired. With that in mind, I'm switching the focus to an idea for an after-the-roll bonus.

A while back, a very clever game called Secret of Zir'an failed as a result of a terrible printing failure. One of the more fun ideas it included was a very robust system for using the Margin of Success on a roll for mechanical purposes. That is, if you needed a 20 and rolled a 25, you might spend 2 points to do extra damage and 3 points to knock your opponent over. Neat little mechanic, and one I'd love to capture it.

The problem is that margin of success math is a pain in the ass. Adding up a bunch of dice is enough of a barrier - adding a second equation to the mix is just a bad idea, so the trick is to find a way to make that simple.

With that in mind, we'll try a trick that steals a page from the idea of bonus dice, but keeps the focus on the margin of success. The player may "keep" however many dice he needs to make the roll - if there are dice left over, then those can be spent as currency. It doesn't matter what the values on the extra dice are - the dice themselves are currency.

For example - let's say you're rolling 4d6 trying to hit a 7. You roll 2, 2, 3, 4. You can build the 7 out of the 3 and 4, with 2 dice leftover. Those two extra dice can be spent for extra effects (akin to Dragon Age's stunt points). I don't yet know what the points will be spent _on_, but I think that gives enough of a starting point to start hanging some bits off of.

Now, it's important to remember that these bonuses need to be tangential, not additive. That is, no number of bonuses should be able to turn a 4 result into a 7, which means the bonuses don't make the result _better_, they add additional elements to it. In the most broadly narrative sense, each bonus might be used to declare a fact of some sort. This is a fuzzy distinction, but it gets concrete when you start building specific rules - it's easy to look at any specific bonus and compare it to what a higher roll would have done, and see if there's any overlap.

Curiously, this little test also sheds a lot of light on what needs to be thought about in a conflict system, so we'll probably head that way next.

Monday, July 18, 2011

Failing Failure

Looking at last weeks post, math-oriented folks have probably noticed the diminishing likelihood of failure as die pools increase. Since the absolute worst you can roll is all 1s, once you have 4 dice, you're guaranteed success. Some people might look at this as a bug and propose an easy fix, like "All 1's is a fumble", but I think understanding it requires looking at how the system handles failure.

In this case, I'm against it. Failure, that is.

This is not just a competence-porn issue, it's part of how things stay fun and interesting. This is not to say failure can't be interesting - it absolutely can - but it's rarely interesting all by itself. Failure is interesting because of the complications it introduces into the situation, and I'm all for skipping the middleman and jumping right to the complications. That is to say, if the dice come up short of the target, then it becomes a choice - would the player prefer to fail, or would he like to succeed with some complication or consequence offered by the GM.

This is easy to apply to basic difficulties (4), but how does it apply to higher levels of difficulty. Can a character take on enough consequences to successfully perform brain surgery?

Obviously, that's pretty nonsensical, so the rule of thumb is that consequences can improve the outcome by a single step, and only if there's a reasonable narrative for it (the player can male proposals if he likes). Depending on the scope of the activity, the task might be resolved in some way other than the initial skill rolled if that makes sense to the consequence. For example, if you need a computer program(7) but only roll a 5, then you might get a success by:
  • Having someone else do it, in return for incurring a substantial (and immediate) debt to them. The program might even be held hostage for you holding up your end.
  • You spend all night copy and pasting scripts from websites and you get you program, but your computer is now totally compromised by the various viruses to downloaded in the process.

None of that would help if your goal had been to design a circuit board(13), because that's a 2 step jump.

Having decided when and how failure happens, it's important to also talk a little bit about what failure means. Specifically, some thought needs to go into how re-trying works, and what the impact of failure is. In situations where the situation provides clear context for failure then that's easy, but the situation is not always clear. Looking at the circuit board example, that seems like a task with a very soft failure scenario. If you don't successfully design the circuit board, then why not just try again?

My thought is that if the task is one where the character can keep rolling til it works, then you're not rolling to see if ti works, you're just rolling to see how long it's going to take. That's reasonable, but only if time matters in the context of the game, which it often does not. But if everyone's cool with that being the case, then no problem.

However, some rolls don't invite that. There are situation where you want failure to stick, in which case failure is a demand for following a different course of action, mechanically handled by trying a different skill or by changing (perhaps improving) the situation enough to merit a re-roll.

With that in mind, the trick will be to communicate clearly to players whether they're facing a soft or hard failure. In the case of a soft failure, success is inevitable, and the roll is a shorthand for how many rolls its going to take (see the note on duration, above). In the case of a hard failure, there will be consequences of failure, and either the effort cannot be simply re-retried (or if it can, consequences stack).

So, with that in mind we know how to roll, how to judge difficulty and how to handle failure. That covers the basics. Now it's time to put some spin on it.

Friday, July 15, 2011

Difficulty with Difficulties



The first candidate is 7. 7 is a great number for two reasons. First, it's the likeliest outcome of a 2d6 roll, and second, it's the first roll that's outside of the possible scope of a 1d6 roll. That latter is handy because it provides a fantastic model for something that may not be hugely difficult, but which requires training to be able to accomplish. For example, even if you know how to use a computer (1d6) you don't necessarily know how to write even a simple program. That requires specific knowledge and training - you're not just going to "get lucky" if you keep trying. That's exactly the kind of scenario where a difficulty of 7 is a handy tool.

After that, the next magic number depends on how you look at things. 13 has many of the same benefits of a 7, except that you need at least 3d6 to hope to hit it. The difference is that it's a bit less likely to succeed - 13 on a 3d6 is harder to hit than a 7 on 2d6. Now, this might suggest a compromise middle step of 10, since that's a midpoint on 3d6, and it's +3 from 7 and -3 from 13, and given that 7 is 4+3, and 4 is 1+3 (1 being guaranteed success), there's some numerical elegance in making the progression 4,7,10,13 (especially because it can be expressed as "base difficulty of 4, with quality of success increasing by one 'step' for every extra 3", something similar to what's done in a few other dice pool systems).

The problem is there's some conceptual roughness to it. I mean, yes, I could easily say:
4 - Mundane
7 - Difficult
10 - Complex
13 - Boggling
or something equally pithy and it would still be better than a lot of games (which set their baseline too high) but really it would be utter bullshit. Those terms are crazily subjective, and while I don't object to the GM interpreting situations, they provide the GM no practical guidelines for how those things are actually set, which would be irresponsible of me.

But if we drop the 10 we get something that's not quite as intuitive a progression, but is one that gives us a real, concrete basis for the progression: the numbers are such that if you are not at least operating at a certain skill level, you can't hit them. That means 4,7,13 (and 19, if we really feel it's necessary).


All of which is to say, the difficulty levels are built on a clear understanding of "Do Not Try This At Home". If this is something that anyone with a little familiarity could do with luck or hard work, then difficulty is 4.


Also, doing this implicitly folds in duration of activity. Climbing a mountain is a task anyone could conceivably accomplish(4). Climbing a mountain in an afternoon probably requires training and experience(7). If you roll to climb the mountain and roll a 6, you still successfully climb the mountain (you beat a 4) but it's going to take you longer than an afternoon (since you didn't hit the 7).

Now, this is still just a starting point. We still haven't added in fiddly bits, and we haven't subjected it to the real test - a conflict system - but this seems like a solid start.

Thursday, July 14, 2011


As I step into creating a die system, lets run through a few things I like and dislike, since these things will obviously impact the final product.

1. I want a reliable/predictable measure of the dice to be rolled. Anyone who has read this blog knows I love Cortex+, but my big complaint with it is that I need to pack _all_ my dice to play. Not because a given roll will use them all, but because I have no useful way to predict which dice I'm going to need in what numbers. This may be a small and petty thing, but there's a practical underpinning to it.

2. Next, I want to use d6s. There are some practical underpinning to this - they're ubiquitous and familiar - but it's also strongly aesthetic. I own lots of cool looking d6s that beg to be used.

3. I want the difference between skill levels (or whatever they end up being) to feel substantial, and I do not need more than 5 or 6 tiers of capability. This is a cinematic/fiction driven sensibility based on the fact that such broad distinctions make for solid character shorthands and are easily recognizable.

Up til #3, all of the options were on the table, but that last step there is going to make a count system problematic. Count systems may have very coarsely grained outcomes (based on number of successes) but the actual die pools tend to progress smoothly, with only moderate differences between pool sizes, especially at high levels. I could work around this limitation with something too-clever, but that seems like a peg-hole problem.

A flat system is still technically in contention, though it would probably require stepped bonuses. For example, my cold was game handles this by making skill bonuses (on a 3d6 roll) +2, +4 and +6. Those are a little close (they work better for Fudge) but the idea of stepped bonuses is not entirely off the table.

The tally system seems like the best contender, something in the Risus/Over The Edge/WEG space, with 5 levels ranging from 1d6 to 5d6 or something similar. Historically I might try starting from a baseline of 2d6 so there's a "step down" option and there's at least a little curve in the default roll, but I'm less attached to that idea than I have been in the past.

Now, there’s still nothing concrete to make a decision on, and this can be pretty paralyzing. Almost any choice can be made to work, so what do you do?

Simple: You do -something-. I’m going to go with a tally system because as cognizant as I am of it’s flaws, I’m even more aware of the dangers of sitting here waffling. So with that in mind, let’s see what we can do with a stack of d6s.

The first thing to do is to consider difficulties. I immediately rule out contested rolls because the last thing a tally system needs is more math, so that means fixed difficulties. Since I’m starting from 1d6 I think that means I’m going to pick the classic baseline of 4.

You see 4 show up in a lot of games. It’s a pretty convenient number for a bunch of reasons. On a straight d6 roll, 4+ means a 50% chance of success, and on a 2d6 scale it’s close enough to 75% to be reliable. On a range of die sizes it’s a number that can potentially be hit by a die of any size. All of which is to say that if you’re thinking going with 4 is a ripoff of anything, realize there’s a reason for its ubiquity.

Now, this raises an interesting question: if I’m allowing 5d6 to be rolled, is a base difficulty of 4 even faintly scalable? Certainly, the apex die pools should be reasonably rare, but that’s not any kind of excuse - a known, rare problem is still a problem. Thankfully, I have an instinct that makes this a little less problematic: I’m looking for success to be the expectation. Someone with 1d6 might have some trouble, and 2d6 still has some risk, but by the time you hit 3d6 it’s very nearly a sure thing.

That said, no reason to just leave it at that. Binary success is a little dull because it offers little differentiation between activities. Teaching high school physics ends up on par with crafting the theory of relativity. So that suggests to me that adding additional tiers of difficulty is the best solution.

The problem is that difficulty steps tend to be applied very arbitrary in play. Climbing this hill is this hard, but climbing that hill is that hard and so on. I want them to mean something a little more self-evident. And that, I think, is where I’ll pick it up tomorrow.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Bread and Butter and Dice

Dice systems are, at their heart, kind of dull. This is probably a good thing, since most of the difference between systems can be built upon their framework, so you want them to be simple, reliable and dull. This is on my mind for reasons that are probably a different post, but I've been chewing on a core dice mechanic.

Right off the bat you have three big camps of dice mechanic. You have the flat roll, the tally, and the count. Flat roll is most famous in the various incarnations of D&D, which has used it as both roll vs. moving target (old D&D THAC0 tables) or roll + bonus vs target (4e). The "flat" roll may actually have a curve (as in the case of Dragon Age's 3d6) but it's always the same dice, and differentiations in skill are represented by changing the target number or changing the bonus. Fudge dice are another weird example of a flat roll that don't necessarily look it because the range is wacky (-4 to 4) but it's a fixed set of dice all the same.

Tally systems, such as those used in WEG's Star Wars or AEG's Roll & Keep system, are based on totaling up a variable number of dice. Variations in skill can change the size of the die pool, and while there may be some extra mechanical fiddliness in terms of how many dice are counted (as in the Case with Cortex+ or any game with bonus dice) , the core idea is that the pool of dice is the variable and as a subsidiary idea, the size of the dice may also be a variable.

Count systems are usually considered success counting systems, like Storytelling or Burning Wheel. You roll some pool of dice (of variable size, like a tally), but rather than add up the dice, you count the number of results that hit some particular criteria (such as 7+ on a d10, or 4+ on a d6). Left purely in that form, this is just a highly specialized tally system (effectively the dice have some number of 0's and some number of 1's) but it's worth differentiation from the tally because the ways it establishes differentiation can include changing the rules of success counting. For example, successes might usually be on a 7+, but in this particular area in which you excel, they might happen on a 6+. Thus, while the size of the die pool may be one axis, another will often include the means of determining successes.

There's a lot more fiddly in this. You can add bonuses to a Tally system to make it feel a little more flat-like. In any system, you can add variations in how you measure success and how you handle things like critical successes and failures (all to say nothing of rich rolling). You can get into wacky hybrids or edge cases (like set building), but those three models really cover the bulk of approaches, and they have different strengths and weaknesses.

Flat rolls are the simplest. Even when they require some math, it is usually quite simple, and perhaps more importantly it's _perceived_ as simple. Reading the die results in a flat roll is easy, with almost no learning curve. Even if the "post-processing" of adding bonuses or the like takes soem effort, it is -after- the roll, a critical point of distinction.

Tally rolls are probably the most robust. If you want to hang a million different mechanics off a roll, or make the die rolling a bit of a game in its own right (like rolling lots of dice, then doing many mini-resolutions from the pool) then this is probably the approach to take, but it absolutely runs the risk of daunting players. Even if you don't do a lot of fiddly stuff, the perception is that math is hard and slow, and tallying up the dice creates that sense of friction. This can be mitigated with small or familiar dice pools, but it's always the specter over the system.

Counts are something of a compromise. They offer much of the same mechanical robustness of Tallies, but they promise greater simplicity than doing math, and in my mind they deliver on that, at least to an extent. There can be a little bit more of a curve in picking up a count game, but the act of reading the dice is an educational one, and most people get much faster at it with only a little practice. Unfortunately, there are some problems that come with that. First, that simplicity is based on the method of counting remaining the same, and if the system leans on changes to that, it slows things down. Also, you can only rely on the simplicity scaling so far - if the dice pools get huge (like, Exalted huge) then it will still bog down.

All three methods can work very well. Even more, all three are robust enough that if there's some particular element you want to accentuate or avoid then you can easily tweak them to that end.

I'm dwelling on this because I have a dice system in mind for a project, and i want to step back and consider its weaknesses and strengths before I totally buy into it. More on that tomorrow.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011


Looks like today's post went up early due to my not setting the scheduler correctly, so some of you saw it early.

As such, I'll venture into a tangent, and say that yesterday I had the privilege of meeting Alexander "Xander" Kenvan Hicks, and I can testify that he's a charming young man who I expect great things from.

Welcome to everything, Xander.

Missing the Pointy End

Ok, I'm going to spoil the hell out of Game of Thrones. It's been on TV now, so I can't feel too terrible about this, but on the off chance this is an issue, I want to give some heads up before I dive right in.

Game of Thrones has been hugely influential on subsequent fiction, and I think this has mostly been a good thing. There are some folks who do not like this, feeling that this has overly darkened fantasy, but overall I think it's been a good thing. If nothing else, I'm pretty sure it's made Fred a much happier man.

That said, I think that a lot of people take a different lesson from it than I do, and it jars at time. I think a lot of people take the lesson that Ned's death is an indication that the right way to grab a reader (or a player) is with the death of a well liked character. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for killing off the occasional character for the drama of it, but that's not the important thing.

The reason that Ned's death is so potent is not that we love the character, but because it violates our expectations. Ned is a protagonist, and the expectation is that he'll get out of the situation, no matter how bad. There are lots of reasons for this, but the thing that I think is really important is about is about expectations and status quo. We're pretty well trained by fiction (especially TV and comics) that after a status quo has been established, things are going to find their way back to that state.

Ned's death breaks the status quo of A Game of Thrones quite profoundly. That, far more than the death itself, is the shock to the system.

I bring this up because it's a marked contrast to killing off a character who is important to the protagonists. If, for example, a protagonist develops a love interest, and that love interest is killed, it's often the opposite of disruptive. Usually, the disruption would be if the love interest remained in play, since that sort of thing tends to change the overall dynamic. It's the reason the pulps are full of dying love interests, the difference is that they tended to make less of a big deal of it.

Anyway, what does that have to do with your game? Just this - death is sad, but unless the players are REALLY attached to an NPC, a dramatic death is not going to move their needle much. What's going to matter is what that death _says_, and what it _changes_. This is a reason why PC death can be such a powerful thing when it happens - if players don't think it's on the table, it can shake things up. But like most powerful tools, that's a reminder of why to use it cautiously.

Monday, July 11, 2011

I Read the Red

Many of my friend enjoyed The Lies of Locke Lamora much more than I did, and it was only after some poking that I revealed my reasons why. After that, I was assured that the problems I had with LLL were not present in the sequel, Red Seas Under Red Skies, so I agreed to read it and post my thoughts. I finished it up over the July 4th weekend, so here they are.

First and foremost, yes, I enjoyed it much more. It’s still the adventures of Jean and his annoying friend, but I’m ok with that, and most importantly, the cheating was not nearly so rampant, and is mostly limited to mere hand-of-author stuff rather than caper-breaking stuff. This is, at least in part, a result of the smaller role played by the bondsmagi (and, tellingly, that part lead to me frowning at their apparent violation of their own rules) and I’m grateful for it.

For context, I actually listened to it rather than read it, and while I was originally skeptical of the overly-theatrical nature of the reading, I was quickly won over to it. The reader (Michael Page) does a good enough job with the voices that it was very easy to stay on top of conversations. One of the unexpected benefits of the audio book format is that it makes Lynch’s fondness for fantasy names much more tolerable. Hearing them spoken makes them at least feel like names when they otherwise sit like lead on the page.

The audio book also has a bit of a downside in that it casts a harsh, unforgiving light on the entirety of the text. Because there’s no way to skim, overly detailed blocks of prose that don’t actually move anything along are cast into harsh relief, and this book is awash in them. If I did not know that Lynch was a gamer, I’d suspect it based on his descriptions, which often serve to lovingly showcase his worldbuilding (which, in his defense, is pretty good) far more than they do anything to move along the plot. They’re problematic enough in their own right, but they’re far more problematic in a book that feels too long to begin with.

In fact, this really feels like two book jammed together, the first a city caper, the second a pirate tale. Either one would probably have been a good read, but their combination feels fat, and wrapping them thickly doesn’t help. This is further muddled by a number of unnecessary time jumps, most egregious of which being an opening flashback which more or less reads like a storyboard for the screenplay this book might be. It’s such a blatant structural trick that it chafes, and it also forces a technical gaffe onto the protagonists (check which names they use).

Finally, this is kind of soft writing. There were numerous points where the tension depended upon your thinking the author would be willing to go there, and Lynch won’t. That’s not too bad a thing, since it’s caper stuff, and fun is appropriate, so it mostly becomes an issue when this moves away from it’s caper roots.

That’s a lot of complaints, but here’s the rub. I enjoyed it, and I’ll read the third book – whenever it comes out – with far less hesitation. For all those complaints, there are some good parts to it. First and foremost, when Lynch is on his game, he really rocks it. Dialog and action move along, his fight scenes are great, and by and large when things are happening, they’re a joy to read. If he were more willing to jump-cut between scenes, it would be a joy to read.

I worry sometimes that Lynch is an author out of time. His writing (at least as showcased in RSURS) seems less well suited to the massive fantasy bricks of today than to the novellas and short stories of yesteryear. With only minimal editing, one could turn RSURS into a collection of stories akin to one of Lieber’s Lankhmar collections and vastly improve them thereby. Many of the longish asides (like the event while climbing) would make perfectly serviceable little stories on their own. It would also offset some of the softness of the writing since there's an expectation in short stories of a return to the status quo.

It occours to me that the seams are so clearly visible that I wonder if, perhaps, that was the original format, and it got beaten and spackled into Big Fantasy Book. It wouldn’t surprise me, since I imagine that’s the necessity of the day, but it would be a shame if so.

Anyway, the bottom line is that the book’s not flawless, but it’s a fun adventure yarn, with some surprisingly good setpieces. Glad I finally broke down and read it.

Friday, July 8, 2011


I had a more sober post scheduled for today, but I guess that gets bumped to Monday, since the Ennie noms got posted today!. Sadly (if unsurprisingly), this blog did not make the cut, but a number of really awesome blogs did, so I wish them luck, and in the absence of luck, perhaps they'll all kill each other and clear the field for next year! :)

However, I've no real reason to complain - Evil Hat did very well, with both Dresden Files and Happy Birthday Robot receiving multiple nominations in some very robust categories. The Best Game category is particularly interesting, both for what's there and what's not. Also, best Aid/Accessory and Best RPG-Related Product are full of things that I wish had made the Origins list.

As with any such list, one will see omissions. No nods for Smallville or Fiasco, which is more than a bit of a shame, and similarly sad to see no Dragon Age (EDIT: Fiasco was apparently eligible last year, not this year, and received appropriate honors! My error, there.). Some nice surprises, though - Glad to see Block by Bloody Block get a nod, and definitely pleased to see the love for ICONs.

I'll probably run through the list later, and give my picks and my predictions (because, hey, that's half the fun), but on the off chance you want to do the same, let me share with you my predictive model, honed through years of observation.

Thursday, July 7, 2011

License Renewal




Now, obviously there's a spectrum to this. More popular properties have deeper online resources, and there's still some room for the RPG as Fan Guide in the world, but it's a much narrower window than it used to be. But for a big license, I wonder if the nature of the game has changed. Can a licensed game proceed on the assumption that the Internet is out there and proceed from that?

Honestly, I dunno. Intellectually, I imagine so. To do otherwise is to assume that the Game is at all likely to be someone's introduction to the license, and while there are no doubt some cases of that, my suspicion is that they're far more the minority than those introduced to the game via the license. But even saying that, what would be different?

That's the bit a pound my head against. It _feels_ like this new era should allow us to have even better licensed RPGs, but I'm not yet sure what to do differently to make it so.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Legos vs Action Figures

When I was younger and just getting into RPGs, I read the hell out of the original Monster Manual, and not just for the naughty pictures. For the unfamiliar, monster entries used to be pretty short - an illustration, stat block and a very short descriptive block, often shorter than the stat block, and usually composed of a few sentences of description, and notes on special attacks and tactics.

That may sound a little dry, but I found it inspiring. Those few sentences of description were often quite colorful and suggested much more than they said. Each monster provided an invitation to flesh out the details surrounding it in your own imagination. And people did: the now-famous "ecology of..." line of articles was based almost entirely around the idea of taking that seed idea and expanding it extensively. Today's monster books - illustrated by the fantastic work in the recent Monstrous Compendiums - come down somewhere between those two points, filling in enough detail to flesh thing sout without quite going to the extremes of writing 6 pages on the ecology of the darkmantle.

This range seems like a snapshot of one of the big questions of gaming, that of legos versus action figures. That is, should the game provide you the bits with which you can play the game in your head (legos, old monster manual) or should it provide you everything you need for the complete game (action figures, fleshed out monsters). Now, before you instinctively leap to legos as the better choice (as nerds are wont to do) I want to poin totu that while the Forgotten Realms may be an example of an action-figure style of play, so are many story games. It may seem odd to lump Fiasco in with Dungeon Crawling, but in this case they're in the same bucket. Both provide the structure (in VASTLY different ways) rather than the parts. This, I hope, is a good illustration of why both approaches are fruitful and full of goodness. Anyone who as ever played with action figures knows there's no shortage of imagination applied to the play, it's just within the bounds (dare I say, creative constraints) of the form.

Hopefully that makes it clear that I don't think the question is one of one versus the other. Both approaches have a place in gaming, and that's good, because there are plenty of places where the distinction is hard to make. Take GURPS - the game is designed to be a lego, but any given setting book tends to be deep and rich enough to be all about the action figures. Sure, someone might deconstruct one for parts, but more likely, they'll just mix them up (combining the G.I. Joes with the My Little Ponies, as it were). Rather, the question on my mind is what makes for a more broadly useful _product_.

Evidence points towards action figures. Fiction and structure make money, and at first glance, legos aren't much fun for the uninitiated, but there's a bit of a hidden trick to it. If the potential customer has something in their own imagination which they wish to capture, legos are the tool for it, and this is something that the sparse, almost accidental lego-ness of early games managed to capture. If you had an idea in mind, such as swinging a sword on adventures, then this gave you the tools to manifest that idea.

The curiosity, of course, is that those ideas came from other action figures - that is to say, fiction - as people built ideas based on wanting to play something inspired by their impressions of Lord of the Rings, Interview With a Vampire, Star Wars and anything else. On some level, that created a weird cycle of fiction --> Ideas --> Game built with legos --> Spinoff Fiction (novels, gamebooks) --> new Ideas. I admit that in this context, I become a little more patient with the infinitely-milked settings (Forgotten Realms, Star Wars Extended universe) but at the same time I cement more clearly why it's not for me. I like my action figures, but when they become full on figurines, I'm out.