Category: Systems

gaming systems

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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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Encounter Savage!

  • Encounter Savage! PDF Now Available FREE | UncleBear

    Update: previous link is dead, so you can get it from here: (and another link rotted, oh well)

    • The complete Encounter Savage! is now available as a FREE PDF! This supplement provides rules for adapting the groundbreaking Encounter Critical for use with Savage Worlds! It’s fully illustrated by the man someone might have once called “the modern day Erol Otus”, Xose Lucero! It’s approved by the keeper of the EC flame, S. John Ross! It’s got a Savage Worlds Fan License!

Plus, I appear in the credits!  What more reason could you want to check it out?!!

Actually, one additional reason to check it out might be that Encounter Critical is one of the inspirations for my Elves & Espers setting.

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Elves & Espers: Klangons

Klangons are a race of bumpy-headed cyborg warriors, fierce and proud.  Klangons are the name given to them by other races, for the way they borg themselves until they clang when they walk.  Their own name for themselves translates to “The People” (or literally, The Non-Wusses).

Klangon

Tough – +1 Toughness
Armor – +2 Armor (negated by AP weapons)
Warrior – Klangons start with a d6 in Fighting
Death Wish – For Klangons, today is always a good day to die.  Klangons seek to die in glorious battle, and while they won’t start unwinnable fights for no reason at all, if given a reason to fight overwhelming odds are considered yet another reason in favor of engaging in combat.
Arrogant – Klangons know they’re better than everybody else, and see no reason to keep it secret.

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Elves & Espers: Drowleks

Drowleks are one of the most feared and hated races in the universe, committed to wiping out all non-Drowlek life everywhere.  Long ago they were a sub-species of Elf that lived underground, until the byproducts of their incessant warfare with the surface-dwellers poisoned their land and nearly killed off their species.  A mad genius constructed cyborg bodies for the remaining members of their species and they set out to cleanse the universe of non-Drowleks, uttering their piercing battle-cry of “Annihilate! Annihilate!”  Physically Drowleks resemble black and silver chess pawns, with eight spider-like legs sprouting from their underside, and a pair of pointed flanges that somewhat resemble Elven ears and have a Jacob’s-ladder electrical effect making a chilling drizzt-drizzt sound when active; these  are the primary ranged weapon of the Drowleks, and can fire tremendous bolts of lightning at enemies.  Their front two legs can extend scimitar-like blades for fighting in melee. Drowleks are nearly impervious to physical harm, but the magical Impermium metal of their outer casings is weakened by sunlight.

Drowlek

Attributes: Agil d4, Smarts d8, Spirit d6, Str d12, Vigor d10
Skills: Fighting d8, Shooting d10, Intimidation d10, Notice d6
Pace: 6 on any solid surface Parry: 6  Toughness: 11
Gear: 2 Scimitars: Str+d8, Lightning Generator: 2d10 Cone attack, ignores metal armor (except self-powered armor, which is presumed to be shielded)

Special Abilities:
Ambidextrous – ignore off-hand penalty.
Armor – +4
Construct – +2 recover from Shaken; immune to disease, poison, aging; called shots do no extra damage; no wound modifiers.  Does not heal, must be repaired.
Fearless – Drowleks cannot be scared or Intimidated, even by magic, though they may proceed with caution if the situation warrants it.
Force Field – Drowleks cannot be harmed by non-Heavy weapons, and count as having Superior Magic Resistance
Sensors – Drowleks suffer no penalty for complete darkness, but are -1 in sunlight, and -2 in bright sunlight (but no penalties for equivalent artificial illumination).
Sphere of Annihilation – The orb on top of the “pawn” contains a Sphere of Annihilation, held in place magically. If it does nothing else during a turn, not even move, the Drowlek can unsheathe the sphere.  Anything that touches the sphere, other than Drowleks, is instantly completely annihilated.  A Drowlek with its sphere exposed is incapable of movement.  It requires another full turn to sheathe it once again.  The Drowlek can also cause the Sphere to expand: on the first turn, the Sphere encompasses the 1″ square the Drowlek occupies, on the second turn it occupies a Medium Burst Template; on the third turn is occupies a Large Burst Template, which is as large as it can get.  This does not harm the Drowlek, but it can not perform any other actions once the sphere has expanded, nor perceive what is going on outside the sphere or communicate with other Drowleks; it will remain blind and immobile until it shrinks the sphere back to its normal size.  While it is in the Sphere is cannot be perceived or targetted in any way, not even by magic or psionics.  Shrinking the Sphere takes the same amount of time as growing it.
Two-Fisted – no multi-action penalty for using both Scimitars at once.
Hated – by ancient tradition and pure self-interest all cultures and races will put aside their differences temporarily in order to fight Drowleks.
Weakness – Sunlight degrades Drowlek armor;  sunlight-based attacks are +2 AP (they must be defined as being sunlight-based, and not ordinary light…generally speaking this requires magical attacks, not lasers), and each turn of exposure to sunlight reduces the protection offered by the armor by 1.  Shade will stop the degredation, and darkness reverse it at the same rate.
Xenophobe – will never agree, even temporarily, to cooperate with a member of another race.

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Let’s Get Critical!

Critical hits are fun.  Players enjoy big, flashy unusually good events.  Some enjoy them so much that they play systems where they can narrate them right in, instead of waiting for the dice to serve them up, but that’s a topic for a different day.  This was driven home to me when I was running games with my home-brew.  It was a skill + roll system based around 2d6 but didn’t contain criticals, automatic hits, or fumbles.  Every time a 12 came up there was a murmur of excitement around the table, followed by a sigh of disappointment when the players realized that it wasn’t a critical hit–in fact, due to the slightly unusual way the dice were read*, a 12 was usually a failure.  After a couple of months I finally gave the players what they were looking for and made 12 a critical hit, giving max bonus and a special result on top, and the cycle of Woohoo!  Awwww…. was over.

Critical hits are one of the first things that DMs think of adding to an otherwise fairly abstract combat system like D&D, and some games became notorious for their critical hit charts.  Since they only get rolled once in a while, it’s possible to have a big chart with really detailed results without slowing things down much at all, and the chance of getting, say, a broken arm instead of just 8 hit points gave combat a grittier feel that a lot of players really appreciated.

The biggest problem with critical hits is that in combat heavy games there’s a built-in asymmetry between the PCs and the NPCs even if they’re using the same rules.   PCs get a lot of dice rolled against them during the course of a campaign–orders of magnitude more than any individual NPC that they might encounter–and depending on the system they may well get more rolls against them than they make even in an individual combat, between often being outnumbered by the monsters, many monsters getting multiple attacks per round (the infamous claw/claw/bite) and PCs usually having lots more hit points before they are rendered hors de combat (once you figure in magical healing).  That means that even really unlikely events will eventually hit the PCs, and on the whole the PCs will take more criticals than they dish out.  At which point the rules that were originally added to give the players some more WooHoo! end up serving up heaping helpings of Oh Crap! instead.  Insta-Kill crits are particularly unpleasant in this regard.  And, as commenter Scott said over on the post Making Critical Hits More Interesting at Inkwell Ideas “a smashed ankle matters very little to the NPC who’s going to die in a couple of rounds, but very much to the PC who’s going to suffer until he can get a heal cast.”

A second, lesser, problem is that with systems that keep criticals fairly abstract (say, by awarding double damage but no extra result beyond that) it’s possible to get a critical hit but follow it up with a disappointing roll for damage…the fact that you’ve done 2 points instead of the 1 you would have rolled is cold comfort, and in terms of the emotions that rolling dice have added to the experience, you’d probably be better off not having rolled a critical in the first place.  It becomes an artifact of the abstraction mechanism rather than a proxy for a game-world event; in the game-world it’s presumably not “My arrow hit him in the eye slit!….But it doesn’t seem to have slowed him down any….”  And if that’s at all a common result of rolling a critical, you have to start asking whether it’s really worth having them in the game.

So, my suggestions for treating critical hits in games like D&D are as follows:

  1. Have them be something PCs do to NPCs, not vice-versa.  Or, if symmetry between PCs and NPCs is important to you (so there’s no “PC glow”) then at least have the NPCs criticals do abstract damage, such as double damage, instead of rolling on a chart for specific results such as limb amputation.  Otherwise you have to be prepared for most PCs to die or suffer career-ending injuries a lot sooner than their toughness as measured in hitpoints and armor class would otherwise indicate.
  2. If you want to have PCs sometimes face the possibility of a long-term or crippling injury, tie it to something less common than a 1 in 20 shot critical hit.  One neat idea (borrowed from Savage Worlds) is tie it to the PC becoming incapacitated.  In D&D that would mean getting knocked down to zero HP.  Whenever the PC hits 0, then roll on the injury chart (possibly the same chart as the PCs have been dishing out to the NPCs); have the penalties for the injury persist even in the face of magical healing unless extra time and a Healing skill roll is made, or a more special-purpose spell (such as regenerate) is used.  If you just slap Cure Serious Wounds on somebody with a shattered ankle, they get the hitpoints back and can fight again, but the ankle has been healed crooked.
  3. If you’re using abstract damage criticals, either just award max damage for the dice (so a crit on a d8 weapon automatically does 8 points, which is about the expected value of rolling 2d8 anyway), or if you insist on rolling have a minimum of the expected value. E.g. Roll 1d8 and multiply by 2, but have it be 9 points minimum (2 * expected value of 4.5) so that you avoid the WooHoo! Awww phenomenon.

* instead of adding the two dice, you used whichever face was lower.  Doubles were zero.  This yielded results from 0 to +5, weighted towards the 0 end; this meant you always performed at least as well as your skill (a concept borrowed from CORPS) so you never had to roll for tasks with DC <= your skill, but you had a decent chance of getting slightly better than that up to a slim chance of getting much better.  But double-six counted as zero…bummer.   The revised version had double six count as a +5 and a special result.  It barely changed the expected value, but had a big impact on the excitement that players got from rolling.

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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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Shields As Ablative Armor

  • Trollsmyth: Shields Shall be Splintered!

    I’m considering allowing the shield to act as ablative armour. One thing historical shields frequently did was shatter. A strong blow with an axe or a sword could cleave a shield, splintering the boards. Viking duels often had a three-shield rule, allowing each combatant to enter the contest with a shield on his arm and two spares in reserve. (I believe this was seen in “The 13th Warrior”, but it’s been a while since I’ve watched it, so my memory could be faulty.)

    With my houserule, you get the usual -1 to your AC with a shield. However, any time you take damage, you can opt instead to say your shield absorbed the force of the blow. The shield is shattered and must be discarded, but you don’t take any damage from that hit. It’s quick, it’s easy, and it’s valuable

I like this so much, I’m considering swiping it for my Savage Worlds Haunted Realm campaign.  Only instead of automatically negating one hit worth of damage, I’ll let you spend your shield on a soak roll as if it were a Bennie.  (Obviously that would only apply to attacks where you got to use your shield in the first place.)

I think that would add color, a tiny bit of historical verisimilitude, and not draw out combats too much…after all if you’ve just sacrificed your shield, in future rounds you’ll lack the shield bonus.  I worry a little that it will devalue getting an awesome damage roll, but since it just uses the existing Soak mechanism it’s just one more chance to avoid going down…and if the roll is that good chances are it’ll reduce the number of Wounds but not be able to eliminate them entirely.

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Spell Books and Spell Variety in Savage Worlds

In the real world magicians (or people who thought they were magicians) had spell-books full of spells and bits of magical lore that served as textbooks for learning and performing magic. If you wanted to cast a spell, say to cause someone to fall in love, or to protect against curses, you’d look it up and perhaps find several variations, differing in ingredients or circumstances. You might have to try several charms before you found one that was effective.

For the Haunted Realm campaign, I’d like the most common form of magic to work more or less like that, but Savage Worlds’ core system relies on magic users having a handful of powers, with it being quite expensive (costing an Edge) to add to the list of powers known.  Even in old editions of D&D, while magic users had to walk around carrying big books of spells, they were mostly blank; the maximum number of spells your spell-book could have per level was about a dozen, a dozen-and-a-half.

I also wanted to address the fact that even though the Fantasy Toolkit has plenty of suggestions for utility spells, the limited array of spells an SW magic-user has would discourage anyone from taking any that they didn’t foresee using almost every session.

Fortunately, Cliff Black published an answer to most of my needs in Shark-Bytes Issue 2, in an article about Arcane Rituals in SW.  Although it seems primarily aimed at settings where nobody (or no PC) has a AB:Magic, it’s readily adaptable to higher magic settings.  The basic idea is that SW powers can be cast as ritual magic, where instead of costing power points they take a lot of extra time: 10 minutes for the first PP worth of spell, doubling for each PP after that.  So, e.g. Healing which costs 3 PP has a casting time of 40 minutes.  Rituals are cast out of books or scrolls, and can be cast by anyone who can read them.  Each ritual has a penalty associated with it based on how widely applicable it is (so a spell that provides armor only against undead would be, say, -2, while a spell that provided armor good against anything would be -4).  For powers that have duration, the ritual is cast on a focus–with what the focus must be defined in the ritual e.g. a human shin-bone for the Avoidance of Death armor v. undead ritual–and thereafter whoever holds the focus benefits from the power.  There are also rules for learning  rituals by rote so you don’t need to consult a book (up to Kn:Rituals/2 rituals can be learned this way), and Quick & Dirty casting of rote rituals in combat time (with severe penalties).

So first of all, I decided to adapt this to the Haunted Realm setting.  Rituals would be allowed, and anybody with access to the secondary sources can cast them, and those with Knowledge:Arcane can learn up to K:A/2 rituals by rote.  Powers cast on foci will only last until you let go of the focus, and the focus has to be wielded in an inconvenient manner (e.g. Tybald’s Water Breathing requires that the focus be a pearl, and you have to hold it in your mouth; Avoidance of Death requires that you hold the human shin-bone tightly in your left hand); this is to prevent Rituals from being used to equip an entire party with cheap magic items. Quick and Dirty casting is banned altogether, to avoid devaluing standard spells that have to be bought with Edges.  If you want Feather Fall as a ritual, you’re going to have to cast it on a focus and carry that focus around carefully.  Each ritual has to be crafted or at the very least approved by the GM, and most secondary sources containing rituals would be discovered during play.

Which leads finally to rituals as cast by professional spell-casters, with their thick tomes of knowledge and arcane libraries.  I decided to tweak the Arcane Background: Magic to specifically accommodate this, coming up with:

Arcane Background: Scholastic Magic

Arcane Skill: Spellcasting (Smarts)

Starting Power Points: 10

Starting Spells Known: 3

AB: Scholastic Magic works the same as AB:Magic from the core rules, with the following addition.  Due to the many years scholastic mages have spent in an academic setting, studying the theory and practice of magic, and the long hours in the library taking copious notes, Scholastic Mages possess a Grimoire of rituals and magical principles and experiments they’ve performed.  Armed with their Grimoire, given time Scholastic Mages can alter the trappings of their Powers and invent new Rituals.  To alter the trappings of an existing power, the Scholastic Mage must spend 1 minute (10 rounds) thumbing through the Grimoire and make a successful Knowledge:Arcane roll (not Spellcasting), the GM may apply penalties for doing this under adverse conditions; the Mage must also give the resulting spell a name.  Alternatively, the Mage may attempt to alter the trappings on the fly from memory, applying a -1 to the casting roll per PP of the spell.

To invent a new Ritual, the Mage must spend 10 minutes and make a successful Knowledge: Arcane roll: a success indicates the Mage has cobbled together a ritual with a UM of -2 (hardest and most general), each Raise makes the ritual one level more specific (+2 to the UM) while still being suited to the situation at hand, and again the Mage must name the ritual.  The Mage may retry for a better (more specific) result, but a roll of a 1 on the Kn:A die (regardless of the Wild Die) means that the Mage has exhausted his current resources and may not try again for the same Power this session.  A botch (1 on both dice) means there was a subtle flaw in the Mage’s reasoning and the the Mage believes he has a good result, but the ritual will have an adverse side-effect of the GM’s choosing. (If you’re rolling in the open and can’t trust the players not to use their meta-game knowledge that the ritual is flawed, the botch means that the flaw is in one of the Mage’s rituals, but not necessarily this one; at a time of the GM’s choosing one of the Mage’s rituals will have an adverse one-time-only side-effect).

The Mage picks the Power and trappings, but the GM will determine what the specifics of the Ritual are and what focus is needed for ongoing spells (the focus must be something that is available or reasonably obtainable given the current circumstances–the Mage is specifically trying to figure out a Ritual that he can use, so it’s not fair for the GM to thwart a success by requiring an impossible to get item).  Rolls to devise a new ritual may be cooperative (as long as all participants have Knowledge: Arcane) and may be enhanced by research in collections of books with a bonus based on the size of the library consulted but a penalty of +1 day or a +1 on the roll, doubled for each additional +1.  Once a Ritual is devised it may be recorded by the Mage, either on a scroll or in the Grimoire; this takes 1 hour.   To find and cast a particular Ritual once recorded in the Grimoire requires 1 minute and a Knowledge: Arcane roll (just as changing a trapping); newly devised Rituals may also be memorized once recorded as long as the Mage has a “slot” left.

Because a Mage’s Grimoire represents a life-time of careful experimenting and note-taking, and is highly personal, they are nigh irreplaceable.  Mages may keep a duplicate copy somewhere, but they have to update it by hand; this takes an 8-hour day if they do it after each adventure, a week (or more at the GM’s discretion) if they do it less frequently than that.  If they ever lose their Grimoire(s) completely, it will take 2d6 weeks with access to at least another mage’s Grimoire or a small magical library before they can use it to alter trappings on their own powers, and 2d6 months and access to a large magical library to replace the information sufficiently to begin crafting new rituals.

Balance

The AB:Scholastic magic is intentionally pretty similar to being a Weird Scientist with the Gadgeteer Edge.  It would be perfectly reasonable to separate out the Grimoire as its own Edge, just like Gadgeteer, but since I wanted this to be the standard way magic is done in the Haunted Realm setting I didn’t want to make mages spend an extra edge on it.  It also will usually take a bit more time than Gadgeteering, since (at least for a new ritual) you have to first devise the ritual (10 minutes) and then cast it (10 minutes, doubled for every PP of the spell) vs. 1d20 minutes (at minimum) for something that can be used instantly once created.

You could probably also allow Quick and Dirty casting without really unbalancing things. The penalties for Q&D casting are pretty severe, so most expensive spells just can’t be cast that way with any reasonable hope of success.  I was more concerned with getting the feel right, and I liked the idea of mages needing to spend time chanting and gesturing and drawing magical symbols on the ground, and as long as they have their standard powers for combats I don’t see much of a down-side to making the utility powers mildy inconvenient.  You could also choose to allow Q&D casting only for certain rituals at the GM’s discretion.

As for foci, I think you have to do something like the restriction I put that the spell ends as soon as you let go and holding it must be inconvenient enough to preclude some other activity, or else you’re going to get everybody in the party wearing various articles of clothing and jewelry with all the rituals the party knows cast on them.  Cliff’s original article, where the foci were essentially permanent until broken, pretty much assumed that the campaign would have a scant handful of rituals with foci that would be hard to obtain or perhaps immoble (where you might have an entire quest to obtain the scale of an Old One so you could cast the ritual, or the focus is a chalk circle).  To use it as I want to in order to open up scads of otherwise-not-worth purchasing spells is just an invitation to abuse, unless you limit it in some way.  One alternative would be to have the foci have a limited number of expendible Power Points, like Gadgeteering, but that’s more bookkeeping than I want, and I think could still be abused by players mass producing magical widgets.

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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.

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Savage Worlds New Edge: Demonic Ritual

Requirements: Novice, AB:Demonology

Demonic Rituals take 1 hour to perform per Rank of the demon being summoned. The TN for the ritual is 4 for a Novice demon, +1 per Rank of the demon. A raise on the summoning roll grants a +2 to the attempt to compel the demon. The demon appears at the end of the last hour of summoning, at which point the Demonologist must make a Spell-casting vs Spirit roll to compel the demon to do his bidding. If successful, the demon must perform one task for the summoner. If the Demonologist fails on the initial attempt to compel the demon, the demon may either return to whence it came or break the summoning circle and attack or possess the summoner. The Demonologist must know the true name of the demon he is attempting to summon; Demonologists collect the true names of demons and hoard them jealously, since while a demon is performing a task for (or worse, is in a pact with) one Demonologist it will not heed the summons of another. Taking this Edge gives the Demonologist the name of one demon of whatever rank he chooses for free; additional names have to be acquired in-game, or by taking the Edge again.

Success

The demon will use all of its normal abilities and powers to carry out the task. If the task is ongoing (such as guard this room), the demon may attempt to break the compulsion (spirit vs. spell-casting) whenever the Demonologist sleeps (treat as once per day for simplicity) and once more if the Demonologist is killed; if the demon fails to break the compulsion that final time, it is bound until released by magic. If the demon manages to break the compulsion, it can never be re-summoned by that Demonologist, and it will attempt to seek out and kill him (this becomes that demon’s Major Habit until the Demonologist dies). Generally it is safest for the Demonologist to specify tasks that can be accomplished quickly by the demon, before the Demonologist needs to sleep again.

Failure

The demon may leave, and the summoner may not attempt to summon that particular demon for 1 year and 1 day. If the demon chooses not to leave, it may attempt to break the summoning circle as an Action; this occurs in the same round as the Demonologist’s attempt to compel the demon, so the Demonologist has already used his Action. The demon makes a Spirit roll vs. the original summoning roll. If it succeeds, then it can leave the circle. Starting the next round it is dealt cards as normal, and on its Action it may try to attack the Demonologist, possess the Demonologist (Spirit vs. Spirit), flee physically, or retreat to its home. The Demonologist may attack it or attempt to compel it, but cannot reform the circle. If it does not succeed in breaking the circle, then the Demonologist may attempt to compel it again or dismiss it. It may not attempt to break out of the circle again until and unless the Demonologist once again attempts to compel it.