I had reason to fiddle with my Blue Rose port this week. It’s one I’m particularly fond of, since it’s more experimental than the others – and a lot more divorced from the original rules, for that matter. Blue Rose, in both its editions, is really just D&D “but without, you know, the problematic stuff.” This is not to say that that’s without its appeal – hey, I may not be refined enough to be acceptable to the woke, but I’m not crude enough to be acceptable to the lowbrow roll-around-in-sewage crowd either! I have my own craving for prettiness and cuddliness. So sometimes I enjoy slaying monsters but in a nice, genteel, socially acceptable sort of way.
That said, there is a considerable mismatch between the rules and the stated intent of the game. If it’s all about teh feelz, then there shouldn’t be hundreds of pages of combat rules. D&D has hundreds of pages of combat rules because it really is mostly about making other living creatures go SPLAT (and keeping them from SPLATing you first). If you want to create a game of noble brightness, cute talking animals and refined tea parties, you shouldn’t take the D&D rules and then add a few stern instructions about not using them too much. You should make a game that is about the thing you mean for the game to be about.
So when I sat down to port Blue Rose, I made personality and disposition central to the rules. More specifically, I took the mostly-irrelevant-except-as-a-roleplaying-aid Tarot motif of the original game and put it first. Every character has three Traits: one card of the Major Arcana that represents their overall goals and ideals, one card of the Minor Arcana that represents their greatest virtue, and one reversed card of the Minor Arcana that represents their greatest personal failing. When you roll to do anything, you try to involve your Traits, and each one you can invoke gives you a bonus. It’s working out pretty well so far.
Which brings me to the damage system. Damage systems are almost invariably the hardest part for me in making a game, because they’re so hard to keep from being fun-spoilers. The risk of getting hurt has to be omnipresent, because that’s always going to be a stake in any sort of action scene (and even Blue Rose should have action scenes). But if characters get hurt too easily, and particularly if it takes too long for them to heal up, then they can end up sidelining players for absolute ages. No fun.
Part of the problem is of course that in real life, injury is incredibly serious. Even a strained muscle is going to cramp your style for days. A serious injury, like you can easily get in mortal combat? That’s going to leave you bedridden for months. A game where there is easy access to magical healing can get around that, but of course a game like that is high fantasy almost per definition; a world where someone can unbreak your leg with a wave of their hand is a world that is very, very far away from our own.
I almost invariably start out making the injury rules too punishing, and then have to scale them back (while grumbling about how I am having to compromise my artistic vision just because those darn players can’t keep themselves out of harm’s way…). In this case, the way I handled injury in the game was by making players “lock” their Traits to indicate emotional distress. A locked Trait still gives a bonus when it’s invoked, but it also gives a penalty to any roll where it’s not invoked. The idea being that the more stress a character is under, the more she defaults to her fundamental convictions and has trouble seeing how anything that is unrelated to them could be important.
So far so good. Now, the rules for healing has been rewritten to the following:
When you give yourself time to heal, roll +Conviction. If you are in some way aided by an NPC who has Touch on you, take +1 forward to the roll. 6-, you unlocked a Trait, but your introspection allows something new to sneak up on you; the Narrator makes a move. 7-9, you unlock up to two Traits. If an NPC aided in your recovery, they put Touch on you. 10+, the same, and if you want you may also either clear Corruption or remove one person’s Touch on you (which can be the NPC who aided in your recovery, if any).
Note: While give yourself time to heal is a fairly passive move and can seem difficult to apply Traits to, the Narrator should encourage the player to describe what she is ruminating on over her convalescence, and what lessons she has learned from the pain. As long as her description is broadly in line with a Trait, it should apply. Thus, it should actually be fairly easy to at least roll with +2 for recovering.
Examples: Bandaging your own wounds, having a drink with your friends, enjoying some me time.
That means that even if the roll fails, you still unlock at least one Trait, and you can potentially unlock more with a success. Hopefully that’ll make players a little sturdier and less likely to spend all their time neurotic and sulking – it’s still suppose to be a nice game, after all…
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