RPG

Maybe don’t do that in public (RPGs)

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Last weekend, I was at a convention and played in the single worst RPG session I have so far played. Then, after lots of drinks and retelling how bad it was, I realized I haven’t said anything here about running RPGs. Thus, since I haven’t posted in months, I’m going to talk about running a game at some sort of convention, where you don’t know the players.

First: make sure your session fits in the time slot. Aim to take up no more than 80% of the available time, because your players will likely play slower and be less familiar with the system.

Related to that, keep the game moving. There’s table talk and there’s a 15-minute breakdown of the current Marvel movie trailer. Look for players that are not engaged with either the game or conversation to know when you need to guide people back. Likewise, don’t put an extended focus on one character. Again, a quick glance at the non-participating players can usually tell you when the scene has gone on too long.

If your players are struggling with a plan, it’s okay to point out obviously bad plans. Things their characters would know, like “traveling at night is dangerous and exhausting” are okay to point out if no one else says anything.

Make sure the action the player describes matches the action you’re assuming. “I’m going to keep watch” might mean to the player “I’m nearby but looking for threats”  but you may assume “I’m hanging back a football field away.” Ask for clarification as needed to avoid sidelining players.

Most important for a public game: don’t include controversial content. Generally, keeping content PG-13 is advisable. Keep in mind, people may have had to live through rape or serious abuse or a host of other very bad things. Don’t toss them into the session as a cheap way to up the stakes.

This last point bears repeating, especially because if you are running a scheduled game at a venue, you are implicitly representing them. You have presumably contacted them and offered to run a game. They have presumably given you a timeslot to do it. This comes with an understanding that you will not do something to make the place look bad. If you do not want this responsibility do not run an organized game.

If you instead think, “I’ll just run a pickup game,” that’s fine, but be aware that most of the same rules apply. Mainly, if your solution for avoiding having to moderate your content is to run an unsanctioned game, maybe just don’t run it at all.

Social Characters in Combat

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When I play an RPG, I usually opt for a social character. Bonus points if they have magic (Sorcerers in D&D are my favorite).

Then I played other games that had more robust skills and less focused classes. Other players could be a Sword Guy, a Spell Dude, and the Healer Person. You could be the charmer, with a wit sharper than anyone else’s sword. The problem here is that line is not literal. What faced with someone with an actual sword, you tend to fall apart (that line is often literal).

What’s such a character to do? What’s a designer to do? You can’t have every situation (specifically, combat) be able to be talked out of, or the game suddenly becomes focussed on one character. Conversely, having nothing to do in combat can bore the social character. Sure they can have a weapon, but they’re likely not going to be effective with it. It would be like running through an anti-magic field dungeon and telling the wizard “you’ve got some daggers, you’ll be fine.”

Social characters do have something to do in combat, even if it’s not implemented. Shout the right insults, and suddenly now your target only wants to take you out. No longer cares about staying in formation, staying behind cover, that jerk who insulted his lineage must be stamped out.

So great! Now you have a very angry person charging at you, who wants you dead. Super. That’s not a problem; in fact, that’s great! In a gun fight, that means the idiot is probably out in the open. In melee combat, he’s broken out of formation. You may not be able to deal with this, but the rest of your team can.

 

The current idea for my RPG came about from the short story “Huxleyed Into the Full Orwell” by Cory Doctorow. In particular this line from the start:

Shandra was weirder, though. She’d thought up the whole demonstration, socialed the everfuck out of the news, rallied a couple hundred weirdos to join her in the chicken-farm, shouting impotently at the courthouse, ringed by cops scarily into their Afghanistan-surplus riot-gear.

Isn’t that cool? Just the idea of what you can pull using someone who’s skilled at social media and talking to people seems like an excellent mechanic. So, it got me thinking, for a modern setting:

What if you use social abilities as an analog for magic?

Let’s say you’re in a more modern, or in a near future setting. You’ve got to sneak into a building, without alerting the guards. In a fantasy game, the wizard might conjure something as a distraction. Here, you might summon a flash mob to the convenience store across the street using NeoTwitter. Later, your team gets injured. In D&D, your cleric heals them. Now, you give a short talk to rally them and let them push through the pain.

Over the past 10 or so years, things have gotten, well, werid, at least in terms of how we communicate. Not just in terms of media, but actually what our goals are in communicating. Everyone on social media has a “brand” and they use it to promote that “brand.” Your Aunt’s brand might be “1 Like = 1 Prayer” and talking about how much better things used to be before “They” ruined it. Your Nephew is posting Minion Memes and talking about Minecraft. You’re talking about RPGs on the internet like it’s your Job.

Even more interesting is how we discuss (read: argue) things. Stephen Colbert famously coined the word “Truthiness” for things that “feel right” instead of needing to be right. Isn’t that how many of us argue now? Many of us find someone to argue with, then make the points we want to, and feel satisfied. If they disagree, they’re clearly mistaken and must be corrected. You don’t have to be right, you just have to win.

Why not implement these into an RPG? Your brand and following is basically your caster level, as long as it’s limited to conjuration and divination. You get into a shouting match with the office front desk and by the time you’ve given them so much grief about “Why won’t you just let the server team do its thing? Should I call the CEO?” they just let you through because they’re tired of dealing with you.

WashingCon is this weekend, and I plan to go and test out some of these ideas with the RPG I’m building. Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to test it out.

Prototyping an RPG

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I have actually started prototyping my Cyberpunk RPG. This is the furthest I’ve gotten on just about any personal game-related project since college and I’m happy to report that it’s kind of broken.

But that’s okay! It’s a playtest. I knew it was going to be broken (although I hoped it was less broken than it was). The point was just to get something out so I could at least start.

Here’s a list of likely features in the full game:

  • Cool Augments to customize your character (and their rolls)!
  • Hacking that makes sense!
  • Social media combat and interaction with the game world!
  • Super-fun Action-Point-based frantic combat!
  • Personalized talents to really show where your character shines!
  • Expandable abilities that allow for either Breadth or Depth in what you can do!
  • Abstracted health system to reflect the wear and tear of combat with different damage types!

Here’s what was in the prototype:

  • Some augments that boosted skill rolls.
  • A skill labeled “Computers”
  • “Hey, look, you can totally do some in-combat streaming. If you want. No? Okay.”
  • Actually pretty fun and mostly balanced Action-Point based combat
  • Vague rules for creating talents so I didn’t have to make a list ahead of time
  • Some examples of potential abilities that didn’t make it into the testing
  • A surprisingly functional abstracted health system to showcase different attack damage types.

So, of the 7: 2 actually got in and worked, 1 was totally absent, and the rest were partially implemented.

But how did the playtest actually go? Fairly well. The game is both fun and functional, but there are some problems with it.

What did I learn?

Numeric balancing

Just because the numbers are balanced against each other, doesn’t mean they are fun. Stats were far too strong, and it took me 3 playtests to figure that out. When your highest stat can give you a +7, and your highest skill proficiency can give you a +5, there’s really no point in boosting your skill that relies on a stat of +2. If you can summarize a character as peaks and valleys, all of the characters were basically three mountains sitting on some rolling plains.

Creativity is hard without guidelines

Remember that bit about the talents? Every playtest, someone suggested that I make a list of examples when players need to create something themselves. Which, admittedly, I knew I needed to happen. When your instruction is “Choose a skill to get a bonus is a narrow situation” the definition of “narrow” is poorly defined. Can I get a bonus to shooting while aiming? How about with pistols? What if there’s a guy with no one near him? Having some examples to show the standard “narrow” limit would have helped this problem immensely.

Changing the central roll mechanic

I had a cool idea. Each character had an essence die that gets added to all rolls which started as a d12. This would shrink one die size for every augment they took, but the augment would both give bonuses to 1 or 2 skills, and change those skill to use a more stable 3d6 instead of a more swingy d20. The idea being the machine would perform consistently where a human would have wildly different results, both good and bad.

This was a nightmare that I could never balance properly.

Sure, the mechanic was interesting, but it either was underpowered, and nobody took augments or overpowered so that people would take 1 augment and be sitting at insane bonuses plus a d10 to roll. Despite this, I still think I can get it to work.

The solution could be one of the following:

  • Augments get a reverse-essence bonus, where the lower your essence die is the more powerful the augments get.
  • Augments tag skills and instead give you abilities.
  • Keep the system as-is and overhaul the numbers and re-balance based on the new numbers.

Just start. Anywhere.

I’d been hemming and hawing over whether or not this is ready, and then decided the best way to run it was to tell my friends that we were running a “Mystery RPG” (that is, an RPG that is a mystery and not a mystery-themed RPG) and just playing. A base system was created in about a week with other rules being created on the fly. Just running the game was the most helpful way to make progress. Even if it’s terrible (which it might be), even if it’s broken (which it will be), you won’t know until you see the parts moving and working with each other. A game you can play is always going to more fun than a game you can’t, so just make something and run it.

I forgot about the Star Wars RPG

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I am kicking myself for forgetting about Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars RPG: Edge of the Empire (also Force and Destiny and Age of Rebellion, but EotE is my current favorite). I’m going to talk about it in the context of the last two posts about initiative and action economies.

SWRPG’s Funky Dice

Going into this game requires a brief explanation about the dice. The dice are proprietary, with symbols instead of numbers. These dice Successes which get matched against Failures (to see if the task succeeds) and Advantages against Threats (to see if any bonuses or twists happen). Higher stat/skill values either give more dice or replace dice with better dice.

Initiative

EotE uses a character-based turns but doesn’t limit that slot to the character. Each character rolls their dice, totally up their successes (with advantages as tie-breakers). The GM orders the initiative slots based on which team they’re on (generally PC vs NPC). The players then get to choose the order they act within those slots (which can change from round to round).

This ends up with the best of both Team and Character based initiative. Rounds generally aren’t a curb stomp of whoever went first (since there’s a mix) but characters generally get flexibility in how they’re able to act within a round (unlike systems like D&D). This is probably the best turn-based initiative system I’ve used.

Actions

Similar to D&D, with a standard Action, but instead of a Move there ends up being Maneuvers. These can be used to do combat-oriented quick tasks in addition to moving, like aiming or opening a door. Interestingly, it’s possible to get either a free Maneuver as either a side effect of an action (usually involving rolling advantage) OR spending strain (which is used for other abilities) to gain a second one.

This action economy, like Ironclaw’s, supports the cinematic flair that this system is trying to effect. It’s relatively easy to teach and explain (Actions make you roll; Maneuvers don’t).

This system is my favorite Narrative-based system. Other narrative systems are generally too loose with the rules, to the point of being overly vague, but this handles almost every aspect of it in an elegant way. There are a lot of good ideas to look at here for any GM who’s trying to build their own system, or even just looking for inspiration for their campaigns.

RPGs: Who goes first?

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Initiative Systems are one of those mechanics that don’t seem complicated. Like most things in games, they’re an abstraction . Trying to model everyone going all at once in the middle of a fight would end poorly. What’s interesting is how different systems handle this.

Team-Based Turns

Determine the order of teams to act. Each team decides how their characters will act, and in what order.

Ironclaw does this most notably. The side that initiates combat goes first, in whatever order the players choose. Then, the other side goes. While simple, this leads to two main problems:

  1. Larger groups make this system harder to manage (Who’s gone already?  Who hasn’t? Who’s going right now?)
  2. Whoever goes first has a massive advantage.
    • This problem is made even worse but the first problem

Ironclaw solves problem 2 fairly well. Each side rolls Initiative, but instead of determining the order, it determines readiness. One of the possibilities of readiness is to be “Focussed” which allows the character to perform an action outside of his turn. This makes the first round unpredictable instead of a steamroll.

Character-Based Turns

Determine the order of characters to act. Each character then gets to take a turn, in order, often performing multiple actions.

D&D is most known for this. At the start of combat, everyone rolls for initiative. Order it from highest to lowest, and those characters go in that order. Faster characters tend to go closer to first but can vary in the exact order. Unprepared characters may still go first, in contrast to the previous example.

Shadowrun uses a modified version of this; each round initiative is rolled. After each character has gone (one “Pass”) subtract 10 from everyone’s initiative, people with positive initiative get another turn. Continue until no one has a positive initiative.

This type of system scales well but doesn’t allow for as much on-the-fly strategizing as Team-Based systems. Additionally, characters built to always go first can get screwed over with the die rolls, meaning they may not go soon enough to trigger what they need. Similarly, reactionary characters (like healers) may end up going first, and have nothing good to do.

Shadowrun’s system provides an additional problem: slow characters don’t get to do much. The mage gets to do 1 thing per round, but the cybered-out lunatic gets to take 2-3 turns.

Active Time Systems

Players have an initiative value. Actions modify this value by an amount dependent on the action. The initiative value determines who acts. 

These systems are a lot more interesting since there’s no turns. When the character is up to act, they act, then someone else has priority. I’ve seen two systems that do this, Arcanis and Paragon.

Arcanis does this with a clock system. Everyone rolls one or more d10 and writes down the lowest number as their clock value. There is a master clock that starts at 1 and advances one “hour” at a time. Each action advances each character’s clock value by a different number (Swinging a massive axe might advance it by 4, whereas swinging a one-handed sword might only advance by 2). This allows for a little more accurate combat, where characters doing slow things take fewer (but often more impactful) turns.

Paragon does a priority system. Your roll initiative, and assign increasing priority in decreasing initiative roll (if A, B, and C roll 8, 12, and 2, the priority would be B=1, A=2, C=3). Each action increases your priority similarly to Arcanis. However, each reaction also increases the priority. This can create interesting strategies where one character can be pinned down by spending time to dodge attacks, without ever getting a chance to react with an attack of his own.

This is my favorite system but also has a few problems. From a design standpoint, it’s trickiest to balance since you now need to weight actions against how impactful they can be. Additionally, it’s also the hardest to keep track of. Arcanis’s clock worked well but Paragon required a shared whiteboard to adequately keep track of.

Declare and Resolve (Simultaneous) Systems

Everyone decides ahead of time what they will do. After everyone has declared, resolve the set of actions. Repeat until combat is over.

Mouse Guard (and, I assume, other Burning Wheel games) has both sides declare a number of actions at the same time, and resolve everything simultaneously. This system has only 4 abstract actions (Attack, Defend, Feint, and Maneuver), and have a sort of rock-paper-scissors effect (Attack beats Feint, Feint beats Defense).

Unfortunately, that’s also why this system works. Attempting to declare specific actions (I’m going to move here, then I’m going to attack that guy) doesn’t work as well as more abstract actions (I’m going to do a Maneuver, then I’m going to Attack). It works for some games, usually more narrative-heavy, but not ones that work better with tactical combat.

Which System works?

Cop out answer: all of them do, in their own systems.

The reason for this is mostly thematic. D&D has a particular battle style largely because it grew out of wargames. Mouse Guard has a battle style that’s thematic. Ironclaw has a system that reflects how its action system works. Modeling combat is hard, so go with the next best thing: something close that fits the game’s style.

But really, which one do I use?

It very much depends on the game. Tactical combat works better when the players know the order of events, either the order of the Characters or Teams. Thematic games with more abstract combat are better with a Declaration method since that’s somewhat close to how a combat would play out. Active Time systems are good when the system is trying to highlight the differences : between actions.

What if I want something different?

Other ideas for initiative systems that I’ve heard about or thought of:

  • Nomination: the current character chooses the next character to act, but it can’t be on their team.
    • Upside: Sides are usually balanced, and can create interesting tactical choices of who to choose next.
    • Downside: somewhat easily gamed, especially by a GM that can obscure information. Weird with unbalanced sides.
  • Card Draw: Each character has cards to represent them. Shuffle the cards together in a deck, and draw. That character gets to act.
    • Upside: Good simulation of chaotic combat. Have to make tough decisions on who acts when. Easy to use regardless of systems.
    • Downside: Requires another game component. Can be too unpredictable.
    • Possible Modification: Have the top 3-5 cards be visible to allow for some planning.
  • Order Declaration: Like team based, but instead of randomly choosing who goes first, each side secretly chooses the order for characters to act. Alternate sides as characters act.
    • Upside: Interesting choices but hard to “game.” Characters can’t get screwed over by randomly bad initiative rolls.
    • Downside: Most of the other problems as Character-Based systems. High potential for Analysis Paralysis.

Creating a Tabletop RPG

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The first project I want to work on is probably my oldest unfinished project. A few years ago I ran an Independent Study with a group of other students to try and make a Tabletop RPG. We ended up having 8 members instead of 3, which meant that we could do more more. So we divided up the components (classes, spells, items, mechanics) and set off.

It turned out to be a total mess. The mechanics felt like 4th edition D&D, the classes felt like 3.5 D&D, the spells didn’t feel like either, none of the items really fit the mechanics, the entire system way just a disjointed mess.

So I’m trying this again. Instead of shooting for a complex system, I’m going to go for a simpler system. I want the entire thing to be contained in 5-10 pages (which includes everything from items to rules to character creation). I want it to give a coherent view of the setting (Future Earth; Cyberpunk setting, no magic this time). I want it to have a themes or ideas that the person running the game can easily use. For example: you could replace your human limbs with mechanical ones to enhance your abilities, but at what point do you stop being human?

At this point, it’s just a matter of putting the thoughts to paper and just doing the work. Then endless playtesting and revisions until the game’s in a good place.