Category: Game Design

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A Personality Mechanic

Here’s an orphaned Personality Mechanic that I developed for Elves & Espers, before we started using Savage Worlds. It was a pure descriptive mechanics, intended to give the player some ideas for a personality for the character, but having no mechanical affect during play.

Drive: Roll 1d10 to determine your strongest drive:

    1. Sex
    2. Money
    3. Fame
    4. Power
    5. Religion
    6. Knowledge
    7. Thrills
    8. Comfort
    9. Love
    10. Food

    Note that the way you choose to live your life may be in opposition to that drive–it is just what tempts you, not necessarily what you do.

    Aversion. Roll 1d10 on the Aversion chart to see what drive you are averse or indifferent to. If it’s the same as the positive drive, you can choose to either regard yourself as neutral in that regard, or as powerfully conflicted.

      1. Commitment
      2. Work
      3. Attention (you’re shy)
      4. Responsibility
      5. Rules
      6. New Ideas
      7. Danger
      8. Boredom
      9. Rejection
      10. Being Unattractive
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      What is Role-playing?

      The Fine Art of the TPK asks
      A short question, but by no means easy…

      Instead, I have a question. An open call, if you will. Can somebody PLEASE define role-playing? Somebody will be a wise-ass and link the wiki stub, so I’ll just get it out of the way.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role-playing

      Specifically, I’d like to know how or why one game would have it in any more or less abundance than any other. You folks are incredibly bright, but you bicker over minor details WAAAAAAAAY too much.

      Role-playing is playing a role. It is the player getting to make in-character decisions, and making those decisions for the character as if the character’s motivations, personality, goals, and such make a difference, so the character is being driven by their inner mental life. For instance, in role-playing, you try to maintain a distinction between what the player knows and what the character knows. (That’s not completely dispositive, since some hard-core wargames with fog-of-war rules also try to impose that distinction–though most of the time they will try to conceal certain knowledge from the player, such as by having chits upside-down until revealed, rather than asking the player to simply act as if he didn’t know what was there.)

      It can be done from various stances, such as trying to imagine what it might be like to be that character, or by trying to construct a story so that the character seems psychologically plausible the way characters in good (or even not-so-good) fiction are.  The goal is to make it so that explanations of the character’s actions refer to the character’s role, and involve things like knowledge, beliefs, and desires, and to avoid making it so that the actions can only be explained by referring to things outside the role such as the actions of certain rules (“My character hates to see animals abused and goes berserk, so I held my action until the evil guy kicked the puppy because I wanted to trigger his Rage ability for the upcoming fight”)  or meta-game situations (“Carla has to leave in 20 minutes, so I attack the guy with the flag of truce.  We might as well get one combat in this session”).  Even worse is when rules or meta-game considerations prompt actions that are contrary to the role:  “My saintly pacifist attacks, because we might as well get one combat in this session.”

      From this point of view, it’s obvious that some games are better or worse for role-playing. Despite the fact that you are assigned identities in Clue, it’s not a role-playing game. It doesn’t matter for game-play whether you’re Colonel Mustard or Miss Scarlet, and you would be considered strange or playing a prank if you insisted on trying to play it as if Colonel Mustard and the other characters had a distinct personality and approach. “Col. M wouldn’t think that Miss Scarlet was capable of the murder, because he’s a chauvinist, and a rope is not a woman’s weapon.” Even if the other players humored you and let you play that way (or you concealed the reasons for your decisions), the game doesn’t support role-playing and you’d be at a distinct disadvantage compared to playing it as intended, where the piece is just a token to push around the board.

      Games that are intended as role-playing games can have features that aid or hinder players in making in-character decisions. In some cases, they might even make it impossible to make in-character decisions for certain situations; if those situations come up frequently in the game, the game is objectively worse for role-playing than the same game without those features.  For instance, games with lots of coercive personality mechanics can be hell on role-playing.  Even though they’re often built so that you can make a narrative that sounds as if it’s talking about mental state, the actual facts are it’s a narrative about game state that’s out of the player’s hands.  The character did what he did because the rules and dice said he had to, not because the player played it that way.  “I say my character is brave, the stats on his character sheet say he should be brave, but every combat we’ve had so far the unlucky die rolls say that he’s run away.”  Or, in My Life With Master, you’re not making character decisions, you’re rolling to see what the character decides and narrating around that.  The game rules reach in and flip the character’s mental state, and the player carries it out.

      Games can also make it difficult to role-play by putting too much knowledge or narrative power in the player’s hands.  Just as it can be a lot to ask of a war-gamer that he move his units as if he couldn’t plainly see that cavalry screened by the woods, ready to charge his flank, it can be a lot to ask of a role-player to separate what the character would want to have happen from what would make the most sense in the game world, or what would make the most interesting story in retrospect.

      Games can also fall down by making the player have to care about things that the character cannot in principle know.  I’ve gone on at length before about how 4e’s Skill Challenge system falls into this category, so I won’t repeat it here.

      Are there things that games can do to actually enhance role-playing, and make it easier?  Sure.  The very fact that games can be separated into role-playing games and non-roleplaying games shows that there are.  The major thing is to make it as much as possible so that character reasoning and game-rule reasoning are congruent, and that the game is responsive to logical actions of the characters. The biggest thing that RPGs can do to emphasize the RP part is get out of the way.  Every time you tell the players that even though it would make sense for the characters to try X, they can’t because there’s no rule for it, you kill role-playing a little.  Every time you invoke a rule that changes the state of the game world in a way the characters can see and react to, but you can’t actually explain what it was that they saw happen (Own the Battlefield, I’m looking at you!) you kill role-playing a little.  If it’s not possible to eliminate some arbitrary construct in the rules, it can often at least be made real in the game-world so that the characters can think about it.  E.g. if there are things in the game that depend on level, such as spells that won’t effect people of certain level, or have a duration based on level, it can be a big help to role-playing to have level be something that the characters can know and talk about.  Russell does this in his Hero Cults D&D setting, where levels are actual ranks in a quasi-religious hierarchy.  The rules should emphasize giving information at the character level, and explicable in terms of things the characters understand, and game-play should emphasize overriding the rules whenever they give a result that forces the players out of playing the role and just into accepting that’s how things are because the rules say so.

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      Awesome!:The Storytelling Game

      This is my attempt at a (possibly) playable game in a single blog post.

      Awesome!: The Storytelling Game

      Awesome! is a game of telling a story about just how awesome your characters are, and how they kick ass and take names accomplishing mighty feats of derring-do, blockbuster action movie style!  For Awesome! characters, the question is not whether they succeed, only how awesome their success is.  Players take turns narrating the awesome exploits of their characters, ceding control of the narrative only when they’ve run out of their current supply of Awesome! (or when they’ve failed to live up to their awesome potential and delivered some lame narration).

      Beginning The Game

      The players choose one player to be the Director for the upcoming scene.  For the first scene, they can choose randomly, or simply pick the most awesome player in the room.  Subsequent scenes will be Directed by whichever player whose turn it was when the scene ended.  It is the Directors job to set the scene, and to control all the antagonists and provide the challenges that the characters must surmount.  It is not the Director’s job to thwart the characters or make them look silly, but to help them to achieve the highest levels of awesomeness they can.  The Director briefly describes the scenario for the players (“You are all martial artists gathered on a remote island to determine the Best of the Best” or “You are super-spies working for a mysterious agency.”) so they can create their characters.

      Creating Characters

      Starting with the player to the Director’s left and going clockwise, each player briefly describes their character in a sentence or two.  (“Chow Yang is the son of the disgraced former master of the Tiger Fist Dojo, determined to clear his father’s name and restore his style to prominence.”  “Rhode Island Red is a mountain of a man, and the roughest, toughest, biker in the world.” etc).  Then the player to that player’s right adds one detail that makes the character particularly awesome (e.g. “Chow Yang is master of The Roaring Tiger move.” or “Red’s Hog, Betty-Lou, can drive straight through a brick wall without slowing down.”).  Next the player to the left adds one Weakness.  (“Red can’t resist a drink.”  “Agent X always helps a lady in distress, even if he knows it’s a trap.”)  Continue around the table until everyone has a character, including the Director, who will need a character if there are subsequent scenes.

      Characters have only one Stat, called Awesome!  Each player starts the game with Awesome! of 20.

      Turn Order

      Play begins with the Director setting the scene in more detail.  Every scene should be devised around a set-piece action sequence.  It needn’t be a combat, though most of the time it probably will be, but it has to be something that provides scope for death-defying stunts, hair-raising escapades, and, if possible, explosions.  Big ones.  Investigation, travel, preparation and the like should all be handled in passing by the Director or inserted as a parenthetical aside by a Player…Players should never have to take an action or make a decision simply to advance the plot to the next action sequence.  Once the Director has set the scene, the player to the Director’s left begins her turn.  When her turn ends, the Director gets another turn to update the scene, detail the antagonists’ responses, up the stakes, and so forth.  When the Director is finished, the next Player moving clockwise takes her turn.  Play proceeds in this fashion, alternating between the Director and the next clockwise Player until the scene ends.

      Taking A Turn

      In Awesome! the character’s action always succeeds–that’s what it means to be awesome.  The only thing in question is just how much awesome you can cram into one turn. The player describes the awesome action that the character takes, including (if appropriate) what happens to any non-player characters as a result. The other players (excluding the Director) may, if they wish, vote whether the action is Awesome! or Lame!   They need not wait until the action is over, but they may not vote on the same action twice.  “Red punches the thug so hard he lands in the rolling chair and rolls back all the way across the room where the chair tips him out the window and he falls into the dumpster below.”  “Agent X jumps onto the back of the shark and using his spear-gun as a spur, rides the shark like a surf-board all the way back to the beach.”

      Awesome!

      If another player is particularly impressed, she can say “Awesome!” or give a thumbs up after a player takes an action.  This causes the player’s current Awesome! score to go up by one.

      Totally Awesome!

      If every other player voted Awesome! the player whose turn it was goes again immediately.

      Lame!

      If another player thinks that the action described was pedestrian or boring, she can say “Lame!” or hold their hand up in the shape of an L on their forehead.  This causes the player’s current Awesome! score to go down by 1.

      Totally Lame

      If every other player voted Lame! then the player’s turn ends immediately.

      Abstention

      Players do not have to vote one way or the other, and should probably reserve their kudos or jeers for particularly noteworthy actions.

      No Consensus

      Typically there will be no consensus, either because there were abstentions or because there was disagreement on the Awesomeness/Lameness of the character’s action.  The player then rolls a d20, and this becomes the character’s new Awesome! score.  If the roll is higher than the character’s current Awesome! score (after having been adjusted by the votes of the other players), then the player’s turn ends, and the narration moves on, first to the director, then to the next player clockwise.  If the roll is less than or equal to the character’s current Awesome! score, the player continues with the narration.

      Signature Shtick

      If the player incorporates the character’s signature shtick (as defined by the other player at during character creation) in the action, the player rolls 2d20 and keeps the one she prefers (generally the highest one that isn’t over the current Awesome! score, or simply the highest if they both would cause the turn to end, but if she wanted to end the turn for some other reason without tagging out or succumbing to weakness, it’s up to her).

      Voluntarily Ending Your Turn

      Players may voluntarily end their turns by either Tagging Out or Succumbing to Weakness

      Tagging Out

      A player may tag out to another player to continue the narration by describing a set-up for that player’s character (“I toss Maxie the gun.”) and indicating that player should continue (either verbally or by tapping their palm or the table in front of them).  In this case the Director does not get a turn before the next player.  A player may not tag another player if the Director has not had a turn since that player’s last turn (because that player tagged away): the Director must always be allowed a turn before a player can go again.  The character’s current Awesome! score remains in effect.

      Succumbing to Weakness

      A player may voluntarily narrate the character succumbing to the Weakness defined during character creation.  The player’s turn ends, and the character’s Awesome! score is reset to 20.

      When to Roll

      Players are encouraged to describe their actions elaborately and with panache, and it’s quite possible that one “action” can encompass a whole series of maneuvers, as in “Jackie grabs the mop and back-flips over the ninja behind him, then sweeps the mop handle around in a gigantic circle, knocking all six ninjas into the shelves, where they fall in a heap with the cans of paint falling on them and covering them head-to-foot in all the colors of the rainbow.”  How much is too much?  Generally speaking, the action should end when it’s logical and narratively satisfying to do so, usually after both an action by the character and a reaction by the antagonists.  Remember, every time an action ends there’s a chance that the player’s turn will end then and there, either by vote of the other players or by the roll of the die.  A player can have a sense of whether a follow-up action is likely, based on the current Awesome! score, but it’s never certain.  You probably don’t want to end with the mop handle sweeping the ninja’s legs out from under them, but not knowing whether they fall, flip and save themselves, or what.  On the other hand, if you’re going on and on, hogging the spotlight and preventing anybody else from displaying the awesomeness of their character, they may vote that it’s Lame! just to get you to stop.

      Third Person Vs. First Person Narration

      Third person narration is more in the spirit of the game, but first person narration is perhaps more like a role-playing game and may be easier for players accustomed to RPGs.  On the other hand, narrating over-the-top awesomeness may strike some players as being unpleasantly like “power gaming”  if done in the first person. It’s more a matter of aesthetics than anything else.

      The Director’s Turn

      During the Director’s turn, the Director narrates any unfinished results from the players’ turns and the actions taken by the antagonists.  The Director is free to introduce new antagonists or complications to the situation, and is expected to do so to keep things exciting.  The Director does not have an Awesome! score, and may continue as long as necessary in order to provide fodder for the players’ next turns, but should bear in mind that the point of the game is for the players’ characters to be awesome, not for the Director to tell a story.  During the Director’s turn it is legitimate for the Director to incapacitate, sideline, or “kill” any character except for that of the player whose turn is about to commence, with the understanding that it will never actually result in the elimination of a PC unless the player has indicated that is acceptable or she has to leave the game; whatever the Director does to a PC has to be reversible by the time its that player’s turn again, up to and including the apparent death of the character; if the PC has not been restored to action by another player by that time, the player gets a free action (not requiring voting or a die roll) to restore the character to action.

      The Bogus Rule

      If all the players vote that a particular action by the Director is Bogus (by shouting Bogus or holding their noses), then the Director is obliged to retract that piece of narration and replace it with something more to the players’ taste.  If the players vote Bogus three times during the Director’s same turn, the game ends and everybody loses.

      Player vs. Player

      It may sometimes happen that PCs end up fighting each other because of the logic of the scenario (e.g. a martial arts contest) or because of one player’s narration (say, proposing an archery contest).  To keep the flow of the narrative, so that the players dueling don’t have to wait for their turn to come around again each time, resolution changes in the following way:  the first player announces a duel, and if the other player(s) accepts, each takes turns narrating a single action (the character’s action and the opposing character’s reaction).  Voting takes place as normal, and the first character whose turn ends (either because of rolling higher than the current Awesome! score or by votes of Lame!) loses the duel.   The winner of the duel gets one more (free) action to narrate the victory, and play passes to the Director, and then to the next clockwise player from the initiator of the duel who was not involved in the duel.  The Director does not get turns in between the actions of the dueling players.  It is the responsibility of the players to ensure that even as they are narrating their character (potentially) winning the duel, they don’t make the opposing player’s character seem weak; attempts to do so (e.g. by announcing their character one-punches the opponent) should be immediately voted Lame! by the other players.

      Ending the Scene

      The scene ends when a character has achieved the goal for the scenario, explicit or implicit, or defeated the last antagonist present, and the players all high-five each other.  If the conditions for ending a scene have been achieved, but one or more players withholds the high-five, then the current player’s turn ends (and the Awesome! score remains unchanged) and it becomes the Director’s turn immediately.  It is then up to the Director to introduce new antagonists or complications so the players can try to achieve a more satisfactory outcome.

      Starting a New Scene

      If the players wish to continue, the Directorship passes to whichever player whose turn it was when the prior scene ended.  It is up to this new Director to continue the story, using the same characters and basic set-up, but possibly taking it in a new direction.  It is also up to the new Director to narrate the introduction of the previous Director’s character (or re-introduction if the game has gone on that long) as well as possibly the sidelining of the new Director’s character.  Play proceeds clockwise from the new Director.

      Ending the Game

      The game ends by mutual agreement whenever the players are satisfied.

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      RPG Systems and Granularity

      Dr. Checkmate, guest blogging over at Uncle Bears, writes:

      • Dr. Checkmate’s Ode to Savage Worlds | UncleBear

        • On a related note, d4 to d12 (or d4-2 to d12+2) doesn’t allow for a whole lot of granularity. You’re basically talking about all traits being on a scale of 1 to 5. Even some how making it a scale of 1 to 10 would be an improvement.

      I know what he means about granularity, but my experience is that more than about five doesn’t actually make much of a psychological impact.  Too fine a gradation, even if statistically significant, tends to get lost in people’s mental model of how things work.  Despite D&D 3+ grading attributes on a 3-18 scale, what actually matters is the -2 to +4 that usable characters tend to end up with.  Similarly, even though each Skill rank in D&D “matters”, the difference between 7 or 8 ranks in a Skill tends not to get noticed.  Even in systems like Hero and GURPS, which have you rolling 3d6 against a stat, the bell-shaped curve means that some points are more equal than others.   In my own home-brew before I switched to Savage Worlds I used a 1 to 10 scale for both Attributes and Skills, but realistically PCs had about 3-8 in anything the actually did (except for some combat monsters that I actually kind of wish weren’t so crocked).  Having a smaller spread in the general stuff but extra Disadvantages/Advantages actually seems to help players think of the characters as having distinct strengths and weaknesses, as well as opening up more actually playable characters. E.g. middling Dexterity stat but Fumble-Fingers Disad giving a minus to fine manipulation is more memorable and easier to work with than an rock-bottom Dexterity score, which in many systems is a death-sentence.

      I sometimes wonder if something like the seven-plus-or-minus-two rule is at work here.  If a player can’t distinctly visualize all the steps at once, do they just chunk it until they can?

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      Conan Wore Armor, Dammit

      • The Recursion King: Continuous initiative

        • Recently, in our D&D sessions, I decided to resurrect the idea of a continuous initiative system. Continuous initiative means just that – it is continuous – and does not have a one person acting per combat round order.The order is determined by how high the initiative values are (like normal) but then instead of going back to square one after all have moved, the higher initiative combatants may be acting multiple times over low initiative value combatants. This fundamentally changes combat.

          Part of my reasoning in trying this out was because we have a number of house rules which we agree on (me as the referee and the players) and its fun to try new ideas out and see which ones stick. The other part is that if the players ever wanted to create a character like Conan the Barbarian, as it is, the game system would completely punish them for this choice.

      This is a much simpler (and therefor probably workable) approach to the idea of continuous combat rounds that I talked about previously in Fluid Combat Rounds Rules, but that’s not what I want to talk about.  What I want to grouse about for a moment is the notion that in order to simulate Conan, you need rules that don’t penalize characters who go around in nothing more than a loin-cloth. Recursion King is hardly the first game designer to have that notion.  For instance Clint Black at Pinnacle Games proposed rules that he called Pecs and Pulchritude for giving people armor based on Toughness and penalizing their Parry scores for armor, even going so far as to name one of his example characters Konan.  [update: Clint objects that I make it sound like his intention was to mimic the Conan stories and that he failed, when that wasn’t his intention at all–his P&P optional rules were just intended to fulfill the request of a fan who was looking for suggestions on how to make gear count for less and character abilities count for more.] At one point it was even a common objection to D&D–armor was too important, so it wasn’t even a good simulation of its source material like Conan.

      When it comes to the Conan stories, that’s just dead wrong.  Conan wore as much armor as he could afford given his circumstances (in terms of both personal wealth and what was available in the culture he found himself in), up to and including full plate (when taking the field as King).  Indeed, in the very first story he appeared in, his survival was attributed to the fact that he managed to don at least some armor before the assassins got to his sleeping quarters.  Even much earlier, when he had barely left Cimmeria, he wore a helmet while among the Aesir and a point was made both of it saving his life and how many other tribesmen might have survived fighting the Vanir raiders if they had taken similar precautions.  Robert Howard, and Conan, appreciated the value of armor.

      Even in the movie with Arnold, which was shall we say extremely loosely based on the stories, Conan armors up when it comes time to have a big stand-up fight at the end instead of skulking around stealthily.

      So where did the stupid notion of Conan fighting naked against guys equipped with chain or better come from?  I blame the comics by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor Smith.  Despite the fact that quite a few of the stories were close adaptations of the Howard stories, the depictions of Conan, particularly on the cover, tended to have him wearing barely anything at all.  Partly it’s because most of the comic stories are set very early in Conan’s career, when he’s a penniless theif or a pirate, rather than a mercenary captain or king, and partly because, well, half-naked muscular men is somehow an important selling point for action-adventure comics, for reasons that probably don’t bear too close examination.  It’s those pictures that seem to have been seared into the public consciousness, to the point where even in our hobby people who set out create rules to emulate the feel of Conan stories seem to think the first thing they need to do is make armor less important.

      No, what you need to do to a system to make it suitable for Conan-style action isn’t to reduce the relative value of armor, but make it possible to survive battles while lightly armored as long as you’re facing lightly armored foes.  You want a career of piracy or being a desert raider to be possible, while still leaving the heavily armored Aquilonian knights kings of the battlefield.  That is something that D&D and the retro-clones could use some tweaking to adjust, since the armor means you get hit less abstraction makes its lack just too dangerous even against identically armed and armored opponents.  Possibly you could adjust the charts so that they reflected armor on a relative instead of absolute scale, but it’s getting late and I’m not sure I can specify exactly how that would work.  Still, I’m pretty sure that, at least as far as Conanism goes, what you don’t want to do is let the fighter wearing nothing hit so many extra times that his expected damage per round is the same or almost as the fighter in plate attacking him.

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      The Necessity of Random Encounters in D&D

      The author goes on to list what he sees as the advantages and disadvantages of random encounters, but quite remarkably to my mind never actually mentions the real purposes of random encounters in terms of setting and game design.  So he lists Pros as being things like killing off annoying characters or filling time, and the Cons as serving no story purpose or throwing the wealth per level guidelines out of whack (and I need to rant about that some day).   No mention at all is made of anything relating to the setting, or verisimilitude, or even resource management.

      The post seems to ignore the two most important features of random encounters: naturalism, and husbanding resources.  They’re the GM’s chief tool in presenting the setting as a world that actually contains stuff that isn’t there for the sole purpose of being part of the PCs story, and they are the game system’s primary reason the players can’t completely optimize their resources (particularly daily powers in D&D)–the chance of such an encounter is why players have to keep something in reserve.

      (I’d like to get a bit of definition out of the way: by random encounters I mean any encounter that isn’t determined by story needs or the PCs’ direct actions.  It doesn’t necessarily literally have to have come about by rolling dice on a table, though that’s certainly an option, but it’s something that isn’t required as a plot-point of the story or because the PCs have decided to seek out, say, the chief of the palace guard and have an encounter with him.)

      Naturalism is important, in my opinion, even if you’re running a story-oriented sort of game.  If the setting contains no features at all that aren’t independent of the needs of the story, then the world will lack all verisimilitude and feel flat and lifeless…if it doesn’t degenerate into parody.  The central joke of Knights of the Dinner Table, after all, is that the GM is stuck with three players out of four who refuse to see the world as containing any features that aren’t clues, prizes, antagonists or (rarely) allies.  If there’s a cow, it must be a magic cow and they capture it and drag it along; if there’s a gazebo it’s a hostile encounter.  But if you don’t have random encounters, then the players will be absolutely right in assuming that if the GM bothers to mention it, it must be significant.  The world will lack any depth.  This, btw, is the curse of many of the graphically intensive computer RPGs…players correctly assume that if something can be interacted with on-screen it must be significant, because the programming and art resources won’t be wasted on mere flavor.  But if the setting contains random encounters, and the players are aware of it, they are thrust in the much more realistic position of no longer knowing whether something they run into is there by chance or design.  They have to reason about the logic within the gameworld instead of logic about the story, which I think is not only much more satisfying, but makes for better stories.  If the players can correctly reason that the vizier is secretly the bad-guy, because viziers are always the bad-guys and besides, he has a goatee, the resulting story only works as a comedy.

      While naturalism is valuable for pretty much any kind of system, resource management is peculiar to certain kinds of systems and settings…but is a particularly important part of D&D and its progeny.  If you have a system where resources are defined in terms of their availability per day, per encounter, etc, and are replenished by rest (rather than, say, going back to the store and buying more ammo) then it’s an essential part of the design that the players have to consider whether they’re likely to have to call on those resources at times not of their own choosing.  The random encounter is what balances the X times a day abilities against those that can be used continuously (such as swinging a sword).  If you take it away, either you have to add time pressure to every scenario (which can be quite a strain on verisimilitude) or you have to ramp everything up (or scale the resources back) to match the assumption that the party will always have its full resources and be willing to expend them all.

      You could think that it needn’t truly be random, and that as GM you can just devise the encounters just so to make the party expend resources at precisely the right pace, but IMO you’d be wrong.  You’d be wrong because the players aren’t stupid, and they know the game, and they know that as GM you have infinite resources to throw against them, so they will reason that if you hit them with something when they’re particularly low on resources it’s because you’ve chosen to be unfair.  Which is true.  Without randomness whatever you do to them you’ve explicitly chosen to do.  But that means unless you’re willing to be a jerk and kill them just because you can (and good luck getting people to play with you once you’ve established that reputation), you had better not hit them with anything challenging when they’re low on resources–unless you’re also willing to cheat like mad so they come out on top despite it.  But if they know you won’t do that then they’ll be all the more likely to spend all the resources they’ve got and then turtle.

      Openly and publicly using random encounters is the solution to that whole set of problems.  If they know that there’s a certain chance of random encounters per period depending on the environs, and some of them might be hostile, then it’s up to them to decide whether to hold something in reserve or chance it–and whether hunkering down in place to recover resources is worth the risk or even possible.  The GM doesn’t have to decide to punish or not punish them for recklessness or over-caution…the setting has certain known features and the players can roleplay whether and how much risk they want to take given the stakes and circumstances.

      If you’re really considering whether you will eliminate random encounters in your game, what you really need to think about is how you intend to convey the texture of the setting and not give sense that the PCs are locked in The Matrix where everything is just an illusion for their benefit, and in a D&D-like game how you’re going to deal with the players wanting to blow all their resources in each encounter and then to sit around and recover them for the next encounter.  Random Encounters aren’t the only way to deal with either, but I think they’re one of the simplest and best approaches I’ve seen.

      Posted on

      Desirable Generic RPG Qualities

      Here’s a blast from the past, something I wrote ten years ago on what I was looking for in a generic RPG system.  I still agree with a good bit of it, though some of it I’m less certain about, and about one particular issue I think I was just wrong.

      Subject: Desirable Generic RPG Qualities

      Date: 1998/09/22

      Based on some of the recent discussion, here are some of my thoughts on qualities that I would like in generic RPG rules, broken down into the categories:

      • Character Generation
      • Character Advancement
      • Task Resolution

      Desirable Qualities by Category

      Character Generation

      Descriptive

      It should be possible to go from a description of what the character is capable of to a codification of the character in game terms, without the system requiring modifications to the character to fit certain genres, power levels or preconceptions of the game designer as to what combinations/levels of ability/backgrounds are permissible. It should be possible to describe the character as it is now, without having to reconstruct the development or career path of the character up to this point (if you want to that’s a different story entirely).

      Straightforward

      Should have few, if any, subtle emergent properties. The obvious way to build a character should be just as useful/efficient as a more complex way. Character building expertise, rather than character description, shouldn’t be rewarded.

      Utility priced

      In a point-build system, prices should be based on relative utility of a power/level of skill/attribute, not based on rarity. Thus total points should represent how effective the character will be in the setting, not how unusual (although it’s reasonable to increase the price if rarity itself increases the utility, e.g. possession of psychic powers in a setting where nobody else knows they exist).

      Concrete

      Levels of ability should have specific measures, so that it is possible to work backwards from real-world descriptions to ability levels. E.g. if you know that you want the character to be as strong as a weightlifter, and that a weightlifter can lift 1000 lbs, then it should be possible to work out in game terms what STR is required to lift 1000 lbs.

      Fine-Grained

      The system should be capable of making fine distinctions between similar skills/attributes/powers, without requiring them where unnecessary. E.g. it should be possible to build a character who is particularly good at endurance sports, without being particularly resistant to disease, without requiring every character to separately determine how good they are at endurance tasks and disease resistance.

      Wide Ranged

      The system should be able to handle a wide range of power levels and genres without breaking, even when the power levels are mixed in a single setting, and without rendering characters’ abilities at one end of the scale indistinguishable from each other or irrelevant.

      Deterministic

      (possibly w/optional random generation, but if so random generation should only come up with characters that are legal under deterministic generation)

      Simple

      The process of building a basic character should be short enough that you don’t have to cut corners to create an average (or even skilled) NPC, and require little math or extensive consultations of the rules. A spread-sheet or character generation program should be sheer overkill.

      Character advancement

      Exists

      There should be a way to improve characters over the course of play

      Preservative of niches

      The system should preserve the relative rank order of specific abilities among characters, presuming equal initial talent and equal attention to advancement. I.e. if one character starts out more stealthy than another, or a better shot, it shouldn’t be possible for the less skilled character to overtake the more skilled one by accumulating equal experience, unless the more skilled one neglects to advance that skill, or was deliberately bought as less naturally talented at it.

      Insensitive to timing

      The system shouldn’t distinguish between character that have advanced through experience and characters that are simply created as being more experienced. Order that abilities are acquired/improved shouldn’t make a difference to outcome (possible exeption: abilities that improve the learning of new abilities).

      Equivalent to training

      Although for some fields, experience attainable through the school of hard knocks ought to translate to experience from adventuring, for many abilities non-adventuring time spent training or on the job ought to be treated equivalently, and the system should provide for it. E.g. it should be perfectly possible to design a bright NPC high-school student, calculate how much experience she would get from attending college, entering graduate school, completing her PhD, and spending twenty years as a professor, apply it to the character, and arrive at an expert in the field. (It should also be possible to simply buy an NPC as that in the first place, but that’s an issue for character generation.)

      Task Resolution

      Adjustable level of detail

      Ideally it should be possible to fill out interpretations of rules results to as much detail as is desirable, while not requiring that you generate more detail than you want at the moment. For instance, when determining hit location the rules should allow for anywhere from straight success/failure down to “you hit his left index finger” depending upon circumstances.

      Concrete

      Gives results that can be interpreted in quantitative game-world terms. E.g. an attempt to throw an object as far as you can should return results that can be interpreted as a specific distance (whether it’s 1 meter, 1 kilometer, or 1 light-year), not “that was really far, but just short of extremely far”.

      Robust

      gives reasonable results at all power levels and combinations of power levels handles unlikely cases as well as likely ones.

      Easy to extrapolate

      ‘Nuff said

      Intuitive

      It should be easy to intuit the probabilities of any simple course of action, given familiarity with the game system. (I.e. the player shouldn’t have to be an expert mathematician, or perform an elaborate calculation, in order to get a good sense of the chances of success that a character ought to be able to tell at a glance, such as whether a particular ditch can be easily jumped.) The system should have few, if any, strongly counter-intuitive properties (such as novices being just as good at defense as experts), and any such should be clearly labeled and justified.

      Simple

      Shouldn’t involve more math than the players can easily do in their heads, shouldn’t involve looking up rules except for the occasional truly obscure case (which ought to be easily interpolated from known cases anyway), shouldn’t take a long time even when doing simple math (e.g. adding 20d6 is, to my taste, too much)

      Unified mechanic

      To such an extent as is possible. Since different types of tasks sometimes require different levels of detail (even if the requirement is merely the desire of the players to have more detail), there may well be a limit to just how unified the mechanics can be and still satisfy.