Mister Monster's Workshop

Tag: Game design

  • A game of real losers

    A game of real losers

    Monstrous Mishaps came about because I felt thoroughly sick of fake losers.

    The X-Men are really the ur-example here. Don’t get me wrong, I love the X-Men. They’re cool and colourful and dramatic and they fight giant robots, what’s not to like? But the idea that people like them would ever be some kind of oppressed minority is insane. They’re sexy and rich and hyper-competent and they have godlike powers. They wouldn’t inspire hate groups, they’d inspire fan clubs.

    Aberrant, for all its faults, is right on the money there. If people started manifesting incredible powers, then they wouldn’t be hunted down like animals. Nor would they start conspiring to take over the world. They wouldn’t need to. Because all the normies would hand them the world, free of charge! Power is attractive.

    No, it’s weakness that gets persecuted, weakness that – perversely enough – makes people hate and fear you. I blame evolution, frankly. We’re not wired to respond negatively to people who are strong, because those people are dangerous to cross but potentially useful to befriend. We’re wired to respond negatively to anyone who seems sickly and weak, because there’s no downside in pelting them with rocks until they go away. They weren’t going to help us anyway – they lack the ability – and who knows, whatever they have might be contageous.

    Knowing this from (ahem) painful personal experience, any sort of Randian “they hate me because I’m better than them!” moaning has always rubbed me the wrong way. And for someone who loves his fantasy, that’s a bit of a handicap, because fantasy is shock full of the sentiment. It seems like every other setting focuses on some group of supernatural beings who are stronger, smarter and wiser than everyone else, and who inexplicably get kicked around for it.

    So with Monstrous Mishaps, my starting position was this: can I create a group of supernatural beings who really would be kicked around, without making them have done something to earn it? Could I create beings with magical powers that were so useless, and whose weaknesses were so obstructive and crippling, that they’d naturally gravitate towards the very bottom of society?

    And that idea paired off nicely with another one that’s always fascinated me, that of essential identity unsupported by fact. I think it came from reading the Emperor Norton issue of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman back in the day. Here was a guy who decided that he was the Emperor of America, and was completely unbothered by the fact that no one else took him seriously, because why would an Emperor care what a bunch of peasants thought of him? Of course, his regal dignity was also the only thing that sustained him in the face of a life as a failure and a pauper.

    Or, for a less whimsical example, this angsty short story they made us read in Swedish class, about a guy who through mistaken bureaucracy was declared to be a moose. He ended up having to spend hunting season living at the town zoo since otherwise someone might shoot him without breaking any laws. Now that guy, you must admit, was a real hard-luck case!

    So taking that a step further, what if someone decided they were a dragon, albeit a dragon that inexplicably looked and functioned just like a regular ol’ human being in every way? What would that guy be like, as a character? Well, for one thing, he’d be kind of put upon, feeling like a failure for not getting to roost on a pile of looted gold like a dragon like himself ought to be able to. He’d see himself as a massive underachiever, wouldn’t he?

    So from there, I started sketching out my supernatural Real True Losers, the Monsters. I did give them some supernatural powers, because I felt like it’d provide some flavour, but I tried my hardest to make those powers as underwhelming as possible – the sort of abilities characters in most supernatural games could pull off right out of the gate, I placed at the end of a long and painful learning curve. I also added some supernatural weaknesses, the metaphysical equivalent of Mr. Moose Guy’s exile to the zoo, and made them as bothersome as I could manage without making the characters completely unplayable.

    And, like I outlined in a previous post, the setting of Monster World sort of grew up around that concept. It turned out that while the Monsters might be more benighted than most, no one in the setting was particularly successful. In fact, in the end I decided that Monsters weren’t even oppressed, at least not in any systemic way – their failure at living up to their archetypes was so complete that no one even cared, except for the Slayers (and mostly because they were all even more pathetic!).

    So in the end, I guess I didn’t quite achieve my goal of creating a genuine, realistic oppressed supernatural group. But hey, them’s the breaks. If I was used to succeeded at stuff, I wouldn’t have been inspired to make a whole game about failing!

  • So what is Monster World?

    So what is Monster World?

    The setting for Monstrous Mishaps just kind of developed on its own, and along the way turned out to be in a lot of ways more interesting than the actual Monsters it’s named for. When I first started sketching on the Monster Breeds, they inhabited some sort of vaguely gothic-punk reality, since – not to blow your mind or anything – I was mostly working off of a World of Darkness template, only with everything made as pathetic as possible. There were mentions of knives gleaming in dark alleys and Klutzes fleeing from angry mobs after they accidentally killed someone. It was, all in all, both derivative and kind of pretentious.

    But at some point, I started smoothing out the sharp edges. The fights became less deadly. The conflicts became more at the same time more frantic and with lower stakes. Characters stopped moaning in agony and started sighing in aggravation. It all developed more of a cartoony feel, with bright pastels replacing the shades of grey.

    At the same time, I was hard at work coming up with potential plot hooks for the setting. After all, my complaint about a lot of games is that they don’t give you a sense of what you should actually be doing with all those interesting setpieces. And what I ended up going back to were the sort of sitcoms and Disney comics that I grew up watching and reading. That fit nicely with the more upbeat feel of the characters, and in the end it sort of crystallized into a simple concept: Monster World is a place where people care about things in reverse proportion to how much they actually matter.

    Thus, to create a scenario in Monster World, just put the stakes as absurdly low as you can, and then have every GMC act like the fate of the world depends on them. You have a job delivering pizzas, and your annoying in-law is determined to delay you enough that he gets his pizza for free! Your neighbor borrowed your lawnmower and won’t return it, and has put up traps all over his property to keep you from stealing it back! At the same time, the actual risks and concerns should be treated as irrelevant – nothing really bad is going to happen, and things will more or less go back to normal by the next Story.

    This works really surprisingly well for creating silly situations that will make the players feel faintly ridiculous just for having to engage with them. And the rule system – which functions best when trying to do relatively simple things under trying circumstances, and where basic competence is so rare as to be almost a superpower – works really pretty well for it. As one of my play testers put it, take out the Monsters and it’s basically 90s Sitcom: The RPG.

    Which does make me wonder if maybe I would have been better off just ignoring the urban fantasy pastiche altogether… but, well, it’s a little late to revamp the whole thing now. Still, it might be an idea for a supplement somewhere down the line. I could call it Suburban Silliness…

  • Monstrous mojo

    Monstrous mojo

    All right, day two of my let’s-get-this-stupid-quickstart-finished marathon. I’ve read through everything I’d written so far and found it more or less passable, though I should probably put in one of those boring sections in the front that explained just what in tarnation this thing even is. I mean, I don’t know who would download this stuff without already having a pretty good idea, but somehow it just feels incomplete without it. Anyway, for now I’ve written up the combat section (unusually sparse, in this game – in my experience of playtesting it, fights do happen, but they tend to be short and frantic and undignified, so they don’t need a lot of complicated rules) and I’m working on the spellcasting system.

    That spellcasting system is one that I’m quite proud of, though I concede that there is probably some room for improvement. It draws a little on the freeform magic system from Angel, with some Unknown Armies and Mage: the Ascension thrown in for salt, but I’ve also added some additional structure to make it easier for the GM to manage.

    In its simplest form, it really just comes down to everyone in Monster World being able to work ritual spells. There is a single Ability for it called Hocuspocus, and any spell you might find or invent has a Challenge Level to cast, and if you pass the Challenge it goes off. Sounds a little too simple, right?

    Well, there are two things limiting you from just flinging around magic to solve all your problems. The first is it’s all gated by GM approval. You can cast only what spells that GM tells you you can cast at any given time – even if you’ve already cast a certain spell several times, the mystical conditions can have changed and now it won’t work again for another few centuries. Now, the GM is encouraged to provide at least some kind of suggestion for a spell you could attempt when you want to attempt a spell, because just saying “no” is always boring, but you’ll take what you can get.

    The second thing is the Conditions. See, every spell comes with between two and six Conditions: Cost, Blood Sacrifice, Complexity, Side-Effects, Misfire and Retribution. Cost means that you need something that you can get hold of fairly easily but not in unlimited amounts – you’ll have to spend either money or goodwill. Blood Sacrifice means that it’ll cost HP, either your own or someone else’s. Complexity means that there are some sort of finicky requirements that you’ll need to satisfy, requiring you to either go on a mini-adventure or otherwise have to rearrange your plans for them.

    The second half of the Conditions are sneaky, because when they apply, the GM won’t tell you until after the spell has been cast. Side-Effects mean exactly that, when the spell takes effect something else happens in addition to what it said in the recipe. Misfire, on the other hand, means that the spell just plain does something different than what you were told it would do, though it’ll probably still be in the general area – for example, you might cast a spell for being able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, and instead it turns you into a human rubber ball who can bounce over tall buildings (and then keep bouncing all the way down the block, because rubber balls aren’t known for being able to break on a dime). Retribution, finally, means that you get afflicted by a hostile force that keeps making your life miserable for some period of time after the spell is cast.

    Every spell has at least two Conditions, and the ones that have more get their Challenge Level for casting them lowered by one per Condition. That way, even some top-level spells might be available to novice sorcerers, albeit at considerable effort and cost. And again, the GM is the one who decides precisely what spells are and are not available to you at any given time. She might present you with one that can turn your worst enemy into a toad and which still only requires an Advanced Hocuspocus Challenge and no exotic ingredients, and you know that that means it’s got some subset of Side-Effects, Misfire and Retribution baked into it, but it’s tempting, isn’t it? You kind of want to do it just to see what happens, don’t you?

    That’s the idea. The sweet spot is meant to be riiiiiight where magic is probably strictly speaking more trouble than it’s worth, but it’s still sexy enough that the players want to try it anyway. Then the GM can just sit back and cackle maniacally, which is a thing that any true GM loves to do.

  • Introducing Monstrous Mishaps (properly, that is)

    Introducing Monstrous Mishaps (properly, that is)

    This being my third and final week of Christmas vacation, I have resolved to get my rear in gear and actually do some work on the Monstrous Mishaps quickstart. And while I’m at it, and just to keep my mind on track, I should probably post some information about the game here, too. After all, the blog is named after it, and I originally started it so I could have a place to promote it. It’s just that, being scatterbrained, I ended up talking about absolutely everything other than what I meant to. Oh well. Let’s see about making an actual introduction.

    Monstrous Mishaps takes place in a place called Monster World, which is a looser and sillier version of our own world. It is a world right out of a wacky sitcom or sardonic cartoon, where epic feuds are fought over petty disagreements, people turn their character defects into fervently held ideals, everything seems set up to be as annoying and unhelpful as possible, and no one ever solves a problem by common sense if a madcap scheme will do. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong, but rarely in a way that will actually matter in the long run, and hilarity ensues at the drop of a hat.

    It’s also a world where some people are Monsters – Dragons and Goblins and Werewolves and Aliens and all the staples of pulp fantasy. But in keeping with Monster World’s general perversity, Monsters are only nominally Monsters. That is to say, they don’t look like Monsters, they don’t have the power of Monsters, and for the most parts they don’t even act like Monsters, but by some kind of obnoxious cosmic law they just are Monsters. Which kind of sucks for them, to be honest. It’s hard enough being a working schmoe without the world insisting that you are, in some ineffable way, a Giant. Especially when you keep getting fined for accidentally knocking buildings over, even though you shouldn’t reasonably be able to knock buildings over, and certainly can’t seem to do it on purpose.

    In Monstrous Mishaps, you play one of these long-suffering people as they go about their life. Think of it as urban fantasy playing out as a 90s sitcom. Your goal is to go about your life, impress your crush, keep from getting fired from your job, and foil your annoying neighbour’s attempts to mess with you, all of which is made harder by having a persistent and embarrassing metaphysical condition. It’s meant to be light, breezy, and poking fun at absolutely everything within poking range.

    Mechanically, the game uses an innovative diceless system where you have a fixed set of Abilities ranked with a Score of between 1 and 15. The Score translates into a Level: a Score of 1 is a Minimal Level, indicating the sort of thing that just about any bozo can do, a Score of 2-3 is a Limited Level, indicating a hint of talent or an amateur interest, and so on. When you try to do anything, the Game Master sets a Challenge Score for you to reach, sprinkles with situational Modifiers to taste, and checks whether you’re good enough to succeed or not.

    You can also goose your skill by spending Grit Points, which double your Score (after Modifiers) for the purposes of that one Challenge. You regain Grit Points by maintaining good relations to the important people in your life and by living up to the moral Values you’ve picked for yourself. Conversely, acting contrary to those Values makes you lose Grit Points – having the courage of your convictions is very important for a health self-esteem!

    That’s about the short version. I’ll try to add some more later in the week.

  • Grrrrr! Aaaarrggghhh!

    I got to break out my Werewolf port for the first time in ages (I have one campaign I run for the whole group and one campaign for each player who might be missing… yes, even I think it’s a little OCD, okay? But anyway, the player who needs to be missing for us to run Werewolf is the second-most reliable player in the group, so the Werewolf campaign doesn’t see much use). It was fun, especially since I think the mechanics really clicked for the first time.

    The big thing with Werewolf is supposed to be Rage. You’re a werewolf, you’re going to go berserk, it’s kind of your thing. You’re the Hulk, only furrier. Rage strengthens you but also takes away your control. And a large part of my reason for starting on this port in the first place (which led to my all-around porter madness) was trying to find a way to model that mechanically in a way that wasn’t too fiddly.

    I may have actually worked it out now, at least in a rough fashion. The way it works is, each player has a number of Rage boxes that start out unmarked. Every time a player fails a roll, they mark a Rage box. They can then clear a Rage box to heal wounds, pull off different stunts in combat, fight whole groups at once, and badassery of that nature.

    However! Whenever a player gets taunted too harshly, or fails in a way that feels too humiliating, or gets injured too badly, they have to roll +Rage (that is, 2d6 plus the number of marked boxes). If they roll 10+, they frenzy. If they fail the roll with 6-, conversely, nothing happens, but they mark Rage as usual when failing a roll. So the more Rage you have stored up, the more of an unstoppable killing machine you are in combat, but the greater the risk is of you completely losing your cool and smashing something you didn’t plan on smashing.

    The Rage economy worked out really well in the fight scene we ran tonight – the player used Rage to hit far above his normal weight class, got hurt and had to fight for control, gained Rage from avoiding frenzy, and then used that Rage for more fighting. This player is a relatively feeble little Ragabash (think scout/trickster), and his opponents were two fomori with military-grade rifles and body armour, so it was a tough fight, and I think the Rage mechanic made a lot of difference.

    We never did have to play out a frenzy, which is probably good, because those rules still need some work. Mechanics that take control away from the player are always tricky to formulate – you need players to still have choices, or else you’re just sitting there talking to themselves, but the whole point of Rage is supposed to be that you sometimes lose control. I am sort of considering an approach where I view it kind of like driving a speeding car that you can’t break, only steer – instead of asking, “what do you do?”, I might ask, “do you fight or flee? If the former, who do you attack? If the latter, which direction do you blindly charge off in?” With rolls required whenever they try to do anything that requires hesitation or forethought. I don’t know, though, there are a lot of pitfalls here. I’ll need to think on it.

    But it was definitely fun to try out this part of the rules!

  • Grimdark puttering

    Grimdark puttering

    No major progress on anything important this week – I’ve been two steps away from a nervous breakdown most of the time. Still, puttering around on this and that has, surprisingly, gotten me most of the way through outlining Rank 5 of the Dark Heresy port. And that’s kind of neat, because Rank 5 is honestly where the game actually starts to happen. That’s when you get to play around with power swords and big-boy psychic powers and cybernetic implants that lets you levitate.

    The entire first half of the game is you working your way up from “Imperial Guard draftee” or “underhive scum” to actually becoming one of the people the setting tends to really focus on. Which makes senes in theory – zero to hero is a thing for a reason, right? The problem is that it cuts you off from most of the source material – not all of it, by any means, there is the occasional piece of media that follows the people way down on the ground, but still, the pickings there are a bit slim. And I think the game designers did realise that, since they went on to release special rules for playing as an Inquisitor (even if they mostly amounted to, “just start by spending a gazillion points of XP”) and all the other games in the line were about being some kind of badass.

    I don’t know. I guess I’m not that much of a fan of zero-to-hero in general. It can be cool if you’re playing a really long campaign, but most campaigns don’t last for years of real life – whatever level you start on, you’re probably not going to be moving that far from it, so I think it makes sense to put at least a decent amount of cool stuff on it.

    I’m kind of looking forward to starting to adapt the other games in the series, because there I’ll find out if the system I’ve worked out can be adjusted to higher power levels and plenty of authority. That’s honestly what I enjoy running more – not games where the players are all-powerful or anything, but games where they have juuuuust enough power to get to make demoralising hard decisions. Being powerless means freedom from responsibility, and as my players could tell you (usually with a lot of long-suffering sighs), I do so love to inflict responsibility on them.

    In other news, today’s Mummy: the Resurrection session went well. It was the thirtieth one in the campaign, proving that sometimes they really do go on for a long time (so it’s kind of a shame that this is a system where character progression is a lot more plot-dependent and thus the players still aren’t that far from where they started out). It’s odd, it’s a pretty obscure and unloved game running on a glorified set of house rules, but somehow it just clicked. I kind of feel like I should change to a different campaign soon, because Lord knows there are plenty of other games I want to try, but at the same time, it seems a shame to stop when it’s going so well. Oh well, we’ll see.

  • Battle in the void

    Battle in the void

    Having continued my obsession with Warhammer 40,000, this week I sat down and wrote up some basic rules for void ship combat, drawing on the Battlefleet Gothic table top game and the Battlefleet Gothic: Armada video game. I ran a test session with those of my players who could make it this week, and it actually worked out pretty well.

    SHIP TYPES

    First off, I cavalierly ignored all the finicky rules about different hull types, at least as far as NPC ships go. Instead, I’ve divided ships into these categories:

    • Battleship: Hull 15, Shields 10, Armour 4, Turrets 4, Damage 2d10
    • Battlecruiser: Hull 12, Shields 8, Armour 4, Turrets 3, Damage 1d10h
    • Cruiser: Hull 10, Shields 6, Armour 2, Turrets 3, Damage 1d10 damage
    • Light Cruiser: Hull 8, Shields 4, Armour 2, Turrets 2, Damage 1d10l
    • Frigate/Destroyer: Hull 5, Shields 2, Armour 1, Turrets 2, Damage 1d5
    • Transport/Raider: Hull 3, Shields 2, Armour 0, Turrets 1, Damage 1d5l

    WEAPONS

    Secondly, there’s weapons. There are three kinds that I’ve outlined so far:

    • Lances: ignore Armour, but shields absorb them well. When a lance weapon hits a vessel, reduce the damage by the current Shield value, then reduce Shield by 1, to a minimum of 0. The remaining damage, if any, is subtracted from the ship’s Hull.
    • Macrobatteries: struggle against Armour, but can batter down Shields. When a macrobattery hits a vessel, roll the ship’s Damage, reduce the result by the current shield value, then reduce the Shield value by the same amount, to a minimum of 0. The remaining damage, if any, is further decreased by the ship’s Armour before being applied to the ship’s Hull. The Damage roll is also adjusted by the following considerations:
      • Targeted ship is at boarding range: +1 damage.
      • Targeted ship is at augury range: -1 damage.
      • Targeted ship is moving towards you: +1 damage.
      • Targeted ship is moving on a parallel trajectory: -1 damage.
      • Target vessel is a transport or raider: -1 damage.
      • Target vessel is a cruiser or battleship: +1 damage.
    • Torpedoes ignore Shields but can be shot down by Turrets. When a torpedo swarm hits a vessel, roll the weapon’s Damage and inflict it on the ship’s Hull, reduced by Armour+Turrets. If there is anything behind or right next to the target, roll the weapon’s damage again, minus the damage rolled the first time, subtracted by Turrets but not by Armour. If the result is positive, the object behind the target takes that much Hull damage, reduced by its own Armour+Turrets. Torpedoes can be fired at any range, even beyond augury range as long as the location of a target is known. Torpedoes must be reloaded in between each shot. The damage from torpedoes is adjusted in the following ways:
      • Targeted ship is moving towards you: +1 damage.
      • Targeted ship is moving on a parallel trajectory: -1 damage.
      • Target vessel is a transport or raider: -1 damage.
      • Target vessel is a cruiser or battleship: +1 damage.

    Ranged are boarding (up close and personal), artillery (at the maximum range of most guns), and augury (at the edge of what a ship can perceive).

    Weapons must be fitted somewhere, either as broadside weapons, prow weapons, or dorsal weapons (which can be used either as broadside or prow weapons). You can only fire a weapon at an enemy if it is correctly aligned according to the fiction.

    CRITICAL DAMAGE

    A ship that takes damage in excess of its remaining Hull suffers Critical Damage. That means that one of the following conditions get marked (the GM decides which one):

    When the players’ ship suffers Critical Damage, the GM marks one of the conditions below:
    [ ] Weapon offline (choose one) – the weapon can’t be fired.
    [ ] Shield generator offline – Shields drop to 0 and can’t be reignited.
    [ ] Enginarium damaged – the ship can’t come to a new heading or indeed turn in any direction; it can still speed up or slow down, though.
    [ ] Thrusters disabled – the ship loses forward traction and can only maneuver, poorly, by navigational thrusters; it can’t fire thrusters.
    [ ] Bridge destroyed – the command staff is driven from the bridge; take -1 ongoing to all void moves.
    [ ] Fire – a fire is spreading through the compartments. Until it has been put out, the GM can inflict 1d5 Hull damage, bypassing armour and shields, as a GM move.
    [ ] Augury array disabled – the ship is blind to anything beyond boarding range; it can not make an augury sweep or lock on target.
    [ ] Crew in disarray – the crew are rioting or panicking; the ship cannot fight in a boarding action, brace for impact, or refit and reload until order has been restored.

    VOID MOVES

    The following moves can be performed by any player taking a command position on a void ship. Void moves are primarily executed through dashing leadership and taking decisive charge of a situation, so any player can make any void move, irrespectively of whether it falls within their theoretical authority or not.

    When you fight in a boarding action, roll +Weapon Skill. 10-14, you inflict a Critical Damage on the enemy ship before being pushed back, or push boarders off your own ship before they can do any harm. 15+, you have the option to push onward. If you choose to do so, you either harry the enemy back to their own ship, inflicting a Critical Damage on it before retreating, or you gain a beachhead on the enemy ship; the fight will continue as a regular field battle, with the ships themselves playing no further part. If you do not choose to push onward, see result of 10-14.

    When you bring fire into the void, roll +Ballistic Skill. 10-14, you inflict damage by one weapon you have facing the enemy, and that enemy inflicts damage on you by one weapon it has facing you. 15+, the same, and you may also inflict a Critical Damage on the enemy struck, even if you don’t cause any Hull damage.

    When you fire thrusters, roll +Strength. 10-14, choose 1 option below, but you deplete your fuel stores; take -1 ongoing to this move and the come to a new heading move until you’ve had a chance to feed the engine. 15+, choose 1 option below.

    • You come to a sudden stop or power past a danger coming at you from the side.
    • You escape a pursuer or catch up to a quarry.
    • You ram another ship. You both deal damage to each other, reduced by Armour, and the other ship is knocked off course; if you have any broadside weapon, you may use it to deal damage on the victim on your way past.

    When you brace for impact, roll +Toughness. 10-14, hold 1 that can be spent on negating the effects of a hit. However, while you have any hold at all from this move, take -1 ongoing to all other void moves. 15+, the same, but hold 2 instead.

    When you come to a new heading, roll +Agility. 10-14, you change your heading to another one of your choosing, possibly aiming you away from a danger or getting a particular weapon facing an enemy. If there is an enemy, then he, at least for now, is sufficiently surprised by your deft maneuvering that it will take him precious time to adjust. However, you deplete your fuel stores; take -1 ongoing to this move and the fire thrusters move until you’ve had a chance to feed the engine. 15+, the same, but your fuel gauge remains comfortably stocked.
    Note: This move represents a sharp turn that puts serious stress on the ship and crew. Coming around in a wide, leisurely circle does not require rolling to come to a new heading.

    When you lock on target, roll +Intelligence. 10-14, you identify a weakness in an enemy vessel. Hold 1 that can be spent at a successful roll to fill the void with fire. If that roll is a result of 10-14, you can spend the hold to inflict a Crippling Injury. If the roll is a result of 15+, you can spend the hold to get +2 on the damage roll. 15+, the same, but hold 2 instead.

    When you make an augury sweep, roll +Perception. 10-14, you get a detailed analysis of everything that is currently with augury range of your ship and isn’t trying to hide itself, as well as being told if there is anything hidden or obscured (such as a ship running on silent or within a gas cloud or meteor swarm) within it. 15+, the same, and your excellent data makes planning easier. Take +1 forward to any other void moves within the same scene.

    When you command the ratings to refit and reload, roll +Fellowship. 10-14, choose 1 option below. 15+, choose 2 options, or apply the same option twice.

    • You reload a torpedo tube.
    • You prepare a new squadron.
    • You remove 1 point of penalties to come to a new heading and fire thrusters.

    When you order emergency repairs, roll +Willpower. 10-14, choose 1 option below. 15+, choose 2 options, or apply the same option twice.

    • You restore 1d5l lost points of Shield.
    • You undo 1 Critical Damage.
    • You restore 1 lost point of Hull.

    NPC SHIPS

    NPCs, of course, can’t make moves, and a lot of Critical Damage conditions don’t apply to them. They can be assumed to have a broadside macrobattery and either another macrobattery, a lance, or a torpedo tube in the prow. NPC ships will normally only fire torpedoes once in a fight. They have Shields, but they won’t normally reignite shields once they’ve been depleted.

    They also only have the following Critical Damage conditions that are normally marked in order:

    [ ] Shields disabled – the Shields drop to 0. If the Shields are reduced to 0 by being depleted by damage, this is also automatically marked; it exists as a condition to make it possible to drop shields prematurely (in the test session today, the players manage to bring down the enemy shields with a 15+ result on a torpedo barrage, without ever having to chip away at them).
    [ ] Weapon systems offline – the ship can’t fire any weapon. It almost certainly starts trying to flee or, failing that, shut down all systems and run on silent while performing frantic repairs.
    [ ] Enginarium damaged – the ship can’t navigate but drifts helplessly. The crew likely readies itself for a desperate last stand against boarders, though it might also activate the warp engines (likely resulting in a giant explosion if it’s still within the gravity well of a star system).
    [ ] Core meltdown – the ship explodes in a giant fireball, leaving a cloud of debris.

  • More 40K (now with space battles)

    More 40K (now with space battles)

    I just had to open my big mouth and declare that I was done, didn’t I? Cue me working just as obsessively this week to add in more rules to cover Rank 4. I am almost done with that now, at least. I just have like 30 more Psychic Powers to translate. And a ton of stuff to proofread, of course. Then I’ll get down to something else. Honest.

    I’ve also started consuming as much Warhammer 40,000 media as I can find, which may not be a good sign. But, well, it does have one considerable benefit: there’s a lot of the stuff. Like, a never-ending sea of it. If for whatever deranged reason I suddenly want to immerse myself in grimdark, Games Workshop certainly has me covered.

    One thing I am particularly studying is the main game’s lesser-known cousin, Battlefleet Gothic, since that’s where Rogue Trader cribbed its space combat system from, and I do want to port Rogue Trader at some point (it was actually the one I started out trying to port; it just turned out to be too demoralisingly impossible, partly because of those same space combat rules). Rogue Trader‘s space combat is famously horrible, but the original seems like fun. So it seems like the roleplaying line again took a good thing and destroyed it completely.

    The problem for porting it, though, is that Battlefleet Gothic combat is all about positioning – where your ships are in relation to other ships, where they will both be a turn from now. Which makes sense on a table top, but doesn’t translate well into a fiction-first design. I’ll need to redesign a lot of stuff.

    I guess the thing to do is to break down the whole thing into fiction. Isolate what different stuff happens during a fight – torpedoes launched, systems going offline, sharp turns, shields being knocked out – and trying to internalise it. Never mind a set of distinct moves for now, what I need is to be able to freeform a whole scenario for some players, putting them through a space battle while tutoring them as we go about what their options are and what the risks and rewards for each might be.

    Yeah. That’s what I’ll need to do.

  • Where I Read: Daggerheart (part five)

    Where I Read: Daggerheart (part five)

    We’re into a new chapter, and this one is about how you actually play the game. It starts out by explaining that the basic flow of the game is that the GM describe what’s up, then the players and GM talk about it so that everyone really understands what’s up, then the players do stuff and the GM resolves the stuff they do. Fair enough, that is more or less how it usually works, but I still feel like it’s a pretty clunky way to explain it.

    I mean, the Powered by the Apocalypse influence is pretty noticeable in how they try to distil the flow of play into something you can describe accurately instead of just going with the grand old roleplaying tradition of, “eh, it works at our table, you’ll figure it out.” And I’m technically all for that, but, well, some things really are pretty self-explanatory and every bit of wordcount you spend on explicitly describing them just takes time and attention away from the actually complicated parts.

    … if you’re reading this from a point in the future where I’ve finally gotten around to publishing my magnum opus Monstrous Mishaps and you want to point out that I’m pretty frequently guilty of said over-explaining myself, then I can only say… yes, okay, okay, but don’t do as I do, do as I say!

    There’s a piece of example play about a thief running away after stealing from a noble, nothing very exceptional there.

    Next we’re introduced to the concept of “spotlight,” and this actually gets my attention, because it sounds halfway clever: whichever character is acting has the spotlight. Usually the GM just lets it wander around the characters present, but there are also mechanics that can decree things like, “an enemy gets the spotlight.” A sort of narrative approach to initiative, huh? Interesting, interesting… Let’s see how it works in practice.

    Anyway, there is explicitly no such thing as a turn order or a limit to how many actions you can take at once, it’s up to the GM to decide what is reasonable. Being used to PbtA, I can testify that this works a lot better than it sounds like it should. There’s also the mention that not being “locked into combat” makes it easier to contemplate non-violent actions like running away, which I have also found to be true.

    A player acts by making “player moves” that describe what their character is doing, and a GM acts by making “GM moves” which describe, well, just about anything the GM wants to happen, really. GM moves are usually made when a player either fails a roll or rolls with Fear. Ah, so there is some universal effects to the Fear mechanic. Okay, that might work. The GM can also spend Fear to make additional GM moves if he’s starting to feel bored. NPCs or environments might also have unique “Fear moves” that can be activated by spending Fear.

    We are reminded once again that players roll with a d12 “Hope Die” and a d12 “Fear Die,” and when the Hope Die is higher you “rolled with Hope” and when the Fear Die is higher you “rolled with Fear.” If you rolled with Hope you gain Hope even if you failed, and if you rolled with Fear the GM gains Fear and makes a GM move even if you succeeded. Yep, that’s clear enough. If you roll the same number on both dice, you get a critical success, which means that you succeed with Hope regardless of what the result was. You also clear a point of Stress and, if it was an attack roll, do extra damage.

    Hope can be spent to assist allies with their rolls, to get the bonus from an Experience, or activate a Hope Feature. There are apparently two different ways to assist allies, “Help an Ally” and “Initiate a Tag Team Roll.” We’ll get both described in more detail later. You can only have 6 Hope at any given time, so you’re expected to spend it freely.

    Evasion gets another mention, and apparently it’s not just physical defence, it’s what an enemy rolls against for any sort of hostile effect against you. Hmm, okay.

    Hit Points and Damage Thresholds! Okay, here it gets complicated… But basically, you have a certain number of Hit Points, and you also have two Damage Thresholds, one Major and one Severe. If you take some damage, but it’s less than your Major Threshold, you lose 1 HP. If you take damage between your Major and Severe Thresholds, you lose 2 HP. And if you take damage at or above your Severe Threshold, you lose 3 HP. That… seems like a complicated way of doing it, but okay then. Lose all your Hit Points, and you have to make a “death move.”

    Stress is basically mental Hit Points. You can mark Stress as part of a special ability, as we have seen in several places already, or the GM can inflict it on you when things go badly, or require that you mark Stress to succeed at something you otherwise might have failed at. When you’ve marked all your Stress, you become “vulnerable,” which we’ll find out more of later, and also any further Stress you would have marked gets transformed into Hit Points instead. Fair enough.

    There’s a fairly long and unnecessary description of how to make a roll that just goes over everything we’ve already covered, but it does specify that rolling with Hope and Fear does change the outcome of success and failures. Essentially, success with Hope is “yes, and,” success with Fear is “yes, but,” failure with Hope is “no, but” and failure with Fear is “no, and.” And I guess a critical success is something like, “yes, and even more stuff,” but you get what I mean. Somewhat charming, and I can see the appeal, but my experience with trying to come up with layers of success and failure for Storyteller games have made me a bit weary of that much granularity. Oh well.

    There is a sidebar clarifying that there is no such thing as a roll with no consequences – the story always changes in some way, for the better or the worse or a little of both. That much I can get behind, yes.

    Okay, here is the “Tag Team” roll. Basically, once per session you can spend 3 Hope and explain how you and another player perform some kind of combo move. You both roll, and then you choose which roll you want to keep and have apply to both of you. If the action was an attack and you succeeded, you both roll damage and add it up. There is also a more standard “Group Action roll” where someone takes the lead and everyone else can make separate rolls that provide bonuses for the leader’s roll if they succeed.

    There’s a whole lot of text about how to make a attack roll, but it’s all stuff we’ve seen before. The attack gives you which die to roll, your proficiency tells you how many dice of that type to roll, and you add any bonuses to the result. It’s noted again that damage isn’t subtracted straight from Hit Points in Daggerheart, it’s compared with Thresholds to calculate the number of Hit Points lost, and armour and resistances also factor into it in some way that is yet to be revealed.

    Reaction rolls are a special sort of roll that are done when someone else is in the spotlight – mainly, to resist some action of theirs. They don’t generate Hope or Fear, but otherwise work as normal.

    Advantages and disadvantages on rolls… just mean that you add 1d6 or subtract 1d6. Okay.

    The style of play during battle is described, and here I get a bit confused, because now it seems like the spotlight always shifts to the GM whenever a player fails or rolls with Fear (or when the GM spends Fear to take the spotlight). Is that specific to combat, because I feel like this was described differently earlier? But okay, I guess that works.

    Domain cards! You can hold five cards in your “hand” at any given time, while the rest are going to be in your “vault.” The ones in your hand you can use normally, the ones in your vault are inaccessible for now but can be moved back into your hand when you rest or if you’re willing to spend Stress to get them. You might also permanently lose cards, in which case they are removed from play. When you level up, you also get to switch out one card, presumably so you can start using your cool new tricks immediately.

    Conditions! There are three universal conditions that can affect play: Hidden, Restrained, and Vulnerable. Hidden means that you’re out of all foes’ immediate sight, so they have a disadvantage on any rolls against you. Restrained means that you can’t move, but you can still take actions that don’t require you to move from the spot. Vulnerable  (that’s the one that happens when you’re all Stressed out, you might recall) means that you’re somehow off balance or on the spot, so all rolls against you have an advantage.

    The GM decides how a player can get out of a condition, and it may or may not require a roll. An NPC can always free themselves from a condition when they have the spotlight without needing to roll or spend for it, but then they have to pass the spotlight back to a player.

    Countdowns are mentioned as being a way to keep track of when something bad is going to happen, and they can tick down based on whatever criteria the GM sets – any time an action gets made, for example, any time there’s downtime, or any time a player rolls with Fear. We’ll learn more about countdowns later, apparently.

    There is a section on ranges. Apparently this game mixes the lackadaisical modern approach, where ranges come in a few loose categories like “within arm’s reach” and “within a stone’s throw,” and the grognardy old-school approach where ranges are carefully measured up and woe betide anyone who gets an inch wrong. Specifically, each category is given a precise number of inches on the tabletop. This… seems like the absolute worst of both worlds, frankly. And again, what happened to being all about Teh Story?! I should not have to break out the measuring tape for a game where it’s all about the fluffy feelz!

    Muttermuttermutter… anyway, you can move anywhere that’s Close to you as part of another action, but if you want to move further than that you need to succeed at a roll and the GM decides how hard it will be. Enemies can likewise move within their Close range freely, or can move within their Very Far range by using up their spotlight but without needing to roll for it.

    There are rules for cover (disadvantage to rolls against you) and for targeting groups (all members of the group has to be within Very Close range of whatever you aim for) and line of sight and I swear that there is something about all of this that makes me see red. There shouldn’t be all these fiddly rules! Not in a game where everything in the setting itself (what there is of one) is so fluid and undefined! The rules and setting are meant to match, guys! They’re meant to reinforce each other! If you want to go loosey-goosey that’s fine, and if you want to nail down every stray variable that’s also fine, but pick one!

    Aaaarrrrgghh. Isn’t this chapter done yet?

    Gold! Gold is counted in handfuls, bags, and chests, with 10 handfuls to a bag and 10 bags to a chest. But, it also notes, there aren’t actually any prices set for anything in this book, so it’s up to each GM how much gold to hand out and how much to charge for anything.

    But.

    But.

    Buuuuuuut.

    BUT THEN WHY EVEN BOTHER WITH AAAARRGGGGGH AAAARRGGGGGH AAAARRGGGGGH AAAARRGGGGGH AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRGGGGGH!!!!!!

    Sorry, sorry, I think I just marked my 6th Stress box and became Vulnerable… But I can do this. There’s just downtime and death left in this part of the chapter.

    Downtime! You can take a short rest or a long rest, but once you’ve taken three short rests the next one has to be a long’un. Each option gives you access to different downtime moves, of which you can perform two during each downtime. They involve things like regaining Hit Points, clearing Stress, repairing armour, and gaining Hope. The downtime moves for long rests are, naturally, a little stronger than the ones for short rests – more Hit Points regained, more Stress reduced, etc. However, whenever you stop moving, the GM also gains Fear, 1d4 at a short rest and 1d4+the number of players for a long rest. Works for me. You can also work at some project, like crafting a weapon or something.

    Death! When you mark your last Hit Point, you have three choices. You can go out in a “blaze of glory”: choose to perform one action of your choice that automatically gets a critical success, then you die. You can “risk it all,” in which case you make a roll and if you roll with Hope you regain some Hit Points and can continue, but if you roll with Fear you die. Or you can “avoid death,” in which case you get knocked unconscious and maybe permanently get your maximum amount of Hope reduced by 1.

    Okay, I have nothing to complain about in the last two sections. But man, this isn’t getting any easier.

  • Grimdark Principles

    Grimdark Principles

    Woo! I have been hard at work with my Dark Heresy port – which I realise is all that I ever talk about lately, but when I get manic about something I need to ride it until it starts boring me again, at which point I can get manic about something else – and I’m actually pretty close to having it ready as a playable game. There is some fine-tuning, but most of it is in sorting the rules into a more easily accessible format. The actual function of them I think I can more or less stand by at this point.

    For this week, have a look at my Principles. Principles are one of my favourite parts of Powered by the Apocalypse – they’re specific assumptions and elements of playstyle that goes with the particular setting and genre of a particular game. I had to rewrite these about a million times, but now I think they actually work for the sort of game I’ve been running. Here they are:

    • Never whisper when you can roar. The forty-first millennium has no room for subtlety. Everything about it is oversized, overwrought, overwhelming, and not least of all loud. There are no genteel duels on sunlit streets, only frantic no-holds-barred chainsaw-wielding brawls fought atop the broken stained glass of ruined cathedrals; no calm discussions between dispassionate parties, only furious demands shouted over the thunder of enemy gunfire. Whenever you frame a scene, ask yourself: how could this be more operatic and baroque?
    • Fill the world with brooding ruins; afflict everything with slow rot. The galaxy is old, its decadent empires stubbornly clinging to life even as they are dragged, inch by inch, towards oblivion. Nor is anything replacing them – those that manage to prosper in this time of fire and blood are those that have no interest in building anything of their own, only in tearing down or consuming what already exists. The decay isn’t fast, but it’s omnipresent, visible in the blasted skylines of bombed-out cities and the jagged scars of grizzled veterans. Everything is either old and worn out, or new and crudely inferior.
    • Spin webs of baffling complexity. Nothing is simple and elegant. Everything is covered with unnecessary details and slathered in adjustments, caveats, reworkings and contradictory purposes. Every culture has a convoluted history that has given rise to bizarre practices, and every piece of machinery has been jury-rigged from components originally meant for something else. Things that are meant to be covert are even more so; whatever part of a secret plan you manage to unravel is probably a diversion designed to cover a deeper agenda, or else it was meant to go down a whole different way but was sabotaged by unplanned events or a third faction. If something seems straightforward and common-sensical, it means that you haven’t added enough detail and contradiction to it yet.
    • Beneath every demoralising appearance, hide an even more awful truth. Things always seem pretty bad, and they’re invariably even worse than that. If you think that you have a predator on your trail, there is probably a second one lying in ambush ahead of you. If you’re tracking a skeevy underhive cult, it will turn out to be only the smallest part of a vast, powerful conspiracy reaches into the highest spires. Whomever you most rely on will either stab you in the back or die right before your eyes. Show plenty of problems and threats to the players, and for each one secretly ask yourself: how might this be worse than it seems?
    • Hoard knowledge and spread deceit. Knowledge in the Imperium is at once tightly controlled and rapidly decaying. No one has a complete picture – the real facts are either strictly classified, distorted by propaganda, or simply forgotten or misfiled. As acolytes of the Inquisition, the players have a duty to separate the truth from the lies, but they should have their work cut out for them; even the most trifling pieces of accurate data are furiously protected and once acquired, turn out to have large holes in them.
    • Show that humanity is fleeting. The Imperium is fighting for mankind against all that would see it end, against the alien xenos and the mutating powers of the Warp. However, the way it fights invariably eats away at the humanity of its people in turn. Imperial Commanders accept, or initiate, horrific widespread atrocities because it’s the only way to keep the system going, turning the strong into sadistic monsters and the weak into whimpering animals. Psykers invite the Warp into their own minds for the power to meet it on the battlefield. Tech-priests replace their bodies with metal out of loathing for human weakness. Even Astartes, supposedly the ultimate champions of Man, have turned themselves into lumbering, brainwashed killing machines that have little resemblance to the men they once were. On every side, show human nature suppressed or corrupted, stolen away or abandoned.
    • Let there be no innocence, only degrees of guilt. No one is pure, no matter how impeccably they present themselves. The seemingly noblest of people are still driven to acts of petty spite and hubristic arrogance by the strain of their position. Lesser souls, realising that there is little justice in the galaxy and that their ultimate fate will likely be a grim one, sell out their integrity for a slightly more bearable life here and now. Some people are worse than others – there are depths of depravity in the galaxy that the common, everyday sinner could barely even imagine, much less partake in – but no one is both completely sane and completely righteous, and most are some combination of crazy and corrupt.
    • Explore the brutal power of faith. Faith in the Imperium is not about gentle comfort and community; it is a thing of cleansing fire and blood-soaked martyrdom, of baying mobs and dungeons echoing with screams. Faith can turn a crowd of cowering peasants into a conquering army, can move planets on their axis, can spit in the face of Hell itself. Terrifying, psychotic certainty is a weapon as powerful as any bolter, and as volatile as a promethium refinery. Let the players try to use it to their advantage, but also put them to the risk of finding themselves on the wrong side of someone’s crusade.
    • Make every victory pyrrhic. Victory is always possible even in the grim darkness of the far future. After all, if there was no reason to fight, how could there be war? However, victory is rarely uplifting or hopeful. Rather, it never comes without losses, casualties, and the dismal knowledge that this can’t go on much longer. Never let a victory completely restore the status quo. Every triumph has a too-heavy cost, and entropy always increases, whether from the collateral damage of the fight or from the ever-accumulating injuries and mental scars of the fighters.
    • Treat technology as magic. The Imperium uses advanced technology while being almost wholly ignorant of science. The oldest and most powerful devices are relics that no one knows how to build anymore, and even machines and tools that come off the assembly line are constructed by rote, according to ancient instructions that are treated with religious awe. As far as Imperials are concerned, their weapons and vehicles work by the will of the machine-spirits, who are appeased through maintenance rituals; accordingly, any high-tech device will be decorated with fanciful engravings and colourful prayer rolls to keep it in a good mood. This also means that “high” and “low” technology exists side by side, with waxen candles burning atop cogitor banks and the instructions for operating a mechanic walker being scribbled on vellum. Whenever technology is mentioned, add some detail to hint at how completely its wielders misunderstand it.
    • Relish the players’ fight against impossible odds. The players may be tiny insects struggling against the vagaries of an uncaring cosmos, but the story is nevertheless about that struggle. They are the antiheroes of this tragedy, destined to ultimately fall but compelling for their desperate struggle against their dark fate. Push them to the brink, because that’s where they have the chance to shine; cheer their temporary victories and relish the Heavy Metal brutality of their inevitable defeats. Don’t go easy on them, but always give them a way to fight back, to prove their manful defiance of the odds stacked against them.
    • Portray visceral realities, not abstract rules. Never treat the numbers and the rules like they have an existence of their own. Mechanical effects – injuries, penalties, moves – come from the fiction and have consequences in the fiction. If you’re down a few Wounds, then you have a specific injury; if you’ve gained a few Insanity Points, then some past event still haunts your mind. Never apply a rule without noting what part of the grimdark reality it represents.
    • Demand immediate action. Things in Dark Heresy happens quickly, relentlessly, and often brutally. Threats are always escalating, the chrono is forever running out. Whenever you stop talking, demand to know what the players are doing about what you just said, and then build off of their actions to a new dilemma. Keep the situation ever-changing and the players engaged in it.