Mister Monster's Workshop

Tag: ttrpg

  • Honour to the Administratum

    Honour to the Administratum

    This week, my players ended up exploring the byzantine bureaucracy of the Imperium of Man. Maybe it’s fitting, then, that most of my thinking this week has been about bookkeeping.

    Character bookkeeping, I mean. It’s not an especially sexy topic, but it’s something that really makes a difference for how easy it is to run a roleplaying session. You want to be able to tell, at a glance, just what rules apply to a character – what their abilities are, what modifiers are affecting them, what they can and can’t do. Because having to stop all the time and flip through the rulebook is freaking annoying.

    One of the charms of Powered by the Apocalypse style games is that they seek to make bookkeeping easy. Rules are kept as modular as possible, so that you usually just deal with one paragraph of text at the time, not three or four different ones that are spread throughout the book. When that isn’t possible, information is often repeated so that it appears everywhere it needs to be, even if that means adding to the page count. It’s part of what makes these games so smooth to run.

    As I’ve mentioned before, when porting Dark Heresy I eventually had to admit that I couldn’t make it quite that nice. I’ve tried my hardest to not make rules depend on other rules that depend on still other rules, but it’s still a big, sprawling, messy game set in a big, sprawling, messy world.

    For example, one thing that I struggled with in today’s session was constantly having to adjust the options available for fighting for the particular weapon the players were using. You see, my rules for ranged combat go like this:

    When you unleash the fire and fury, roll +Ballistic Skill. 10-14, choose 1 option below. You may spend Righteous Fury to choose additional options, 1 for each Righteous Fury spent. Each option can only be chosen once. 15-19, choose 2 options. 20+, choose 2 option, and hold Righteous Fury.

    • You manage to disengage from melee and get onto at least a range of reach to the nearest enemy.
    • You hit a single enemy within range of your weapon and inflict weapon damage on them.
    • You inflict 1 damage on an enemy Horde within range of your weapon.
    • A single enemy who has you within range of their weapon does not hit you and inflict weapon damage on you.
    • An enemy Horde who has you within range of their weapons does not hit you and inflict weapon damage on you.
    • You are not forced to retreat or to take or stay in cover.
    • You cause a single enemy within range of your weapon to find or stay in cover.
    • You establish overwatch; the first single enemy within range of your weapon to leave cover (including to fire a shot of their own) takes 1d10 damage, reduced by Armour.
    • You do not need to reduce your Ammo by 1. This can not be chosen for an Ammo-S weapon.

    Examples: Firing a lasgun, throwing a knife, sniping from ambush.

    But when you’re wielding a weapon with the Blast tag (such as the frag grenades my players were flinging around), the following extra rules apply:

    When you unleash the fire and fury with a weapon with the blast tag, you may also choose the following options:

    • You inflict 1d10 damage on an enemy Horde within range of your weapon.
    • You hit every character in a group standing closely together (such as enemies engaged in melee, allies covering each other’s sides, etc) within range of your weapon and inflict weapon damage on them.

    However, when you unleash the fire and fury with a weapon with the blast tag, you may not choose the following options:

    • You hit a single enemy within range of your weapon and inflict weapon damage on them.
    • You cause a single enemy within range of your weapon to find or stay in cover.
    • You establish overwatch; the first single enemy within range of your weapon to leave cover (including to fire a shot of their own) takes 1d10 damage, reduced by Armour.

    So while I can normally just copy-paste in the list of a player’s options as they succeed at something, neat as you please… here I have to edit the whole thing on the fly every time (okay, so after the first time I guess I should have saved the edited list, but I didn’t think of that at the time). And there seems to be no easy solution to it, beyond writing up the full list of options for every single weapon in the book… and that seems a little much even for PbtA.

    And then there are all the things that players can do, which are adjusted when they take certain Advances, and the things they implicitly can’t do because there are other Advances that allow you to do those things… It’s a lot.

    I think maybe I should restructure the port into a more traditional format. Man, Warhammer 40,000 fights back hard against being PbtA-ified! Possibly it thinks that it’s heretical or something…

  • The people who live anywhere

    The people who live anywhere

    I turned out to devote most of this week to session prep for a session that never happened – too many players had to cancel. Still, it let me get into doing some actual research for creating Nunnehi NPCs, which was kind of interesting.

    Nunnehi, for those not nerdy enough to know, are the World of Darkness faerie-folk native to the Americas. I’ve never really gotten into them, despite being a big Changeling: the Dreaming fan – the Kithain always felt plentiful enough to fill any number of campaigns. But given that I’m now running a sometime Werewolf campaign where one of the characters is an Uktena and the other character is a Fianna of American-Indian descent, it felt like they ought to show up.

    Which means first scouring Wikipedia for articles on Apache culture and history, since I figured my particular Nunnehi NPCs were residents of an Apache reservation, and then trying to broaden it to some other tribes who are connected to individual Nunnehi Families (like Inuits for the Inuas, Cherokee for the Nanehi, etc). This may take me a while, but I think I’m starting to get at least some kind of foggy grasp of what sort of folklore the Nunnehi come from.

    Things to pay especial attention to next might include traditional foodstuffs – those always tend to set the tone, and might give me more of a sense for the natural habitat my game takes place in, besides (I really do need to get a better feel for junipers and cacti). And apparently there is a series of thrillers by some dude named Tony Hillerman who features a lot of Navajo characters, and that might give me a better sense of their modern, everyday lives than a lot of theory.

  • Let’s make – ze magic!

    Let’s make – ze magic!

    So… what did I randomly end up working on this week? Because the only certain thing is, it wasn’t what I was meant to be working on!

    Yeah, it was my Mage: the Ascension port. I wrote up some more definite Paradox Effects to have a grab bag of them ready.

    Mage is one of those games that are definitely crying out for different rules. Not necessarily simpler rules, not necessarily more complex rules – just anything other than the mess it’s saddled with, which manages to be at once overly convoluted and vague and directionless. It is, accordingly, one I’ve put a lot of work into, and I’m by no means finished yet.

    The heart of the system, though, is the spellcasting rules, which rely on two separate moves, like so:

    WORKING MAGICK

    When you cast a quick spell, describe the Effect you’re after and how you will use your Spheres and Paradigm to achieve it. Then roll +Arete. 7-9, choose 2 options below. 10+, choose 3.

    • The Effect lasts until the end of the scene.
    • The Effect does precisely what you intended, no more and no less.
    • The Effect affects something other than yourself.
    • The Effect doesn’t deplete your mystical will (-1 ongoing to all Arete rolls until you get a chance to rest).
    • You don’t need to mark Quintessence.

    When you perform an elaborate ritual, describe the Effect you’re after and how you will use your Spheres and Paradigm to achieve it. Then roll +Arete. 7-9, choose 2 options below. 10+, choose 3.

    • The Effect lasts for as long as you need it to.
    • No hard-to-replace resource is lost, destroyed, or used up.
    • The ritual doesn’t take a long time.
    • You don’t need to mark Quintessence.
    • The Effect is especially strong, adding +1 to the mechanical effects (i.e., it does Damage-2 instead of Damage-1, clears 2 wound boxes instead of 1, gives +2 ongoing instead of +1 ongoing, etc).

    Take -1 ongoing to rolls to create a magickal Effect for each Effect you currently have active. Note that an Effect only have to be maintained if it either affects a living being (who inherently exert spiritual pressure to return to their natural form) or if its continuation is considered impossible under Consensual Reality. Thus, witch-light hovering in mid-air must be maintained, but if you use a spell to set a piece of wood on fire, the wood will keep burning on its own once ignited.

    The main power of magick is to change or explore the fiction. If you use magick to create a hole in the ground, then now there’s a hole in the ground; if you use magick to read someone’s mind, the GM tells you what they’re thinking about. Magick rewards creative thinking and clever approaches, not brute force. However, if it really comes down to the nitty-gritty, a magickal Effect can do the following things if the caster can explain how:

    • Create a Damage-1 (Damage-2 for Forces) weapon for its duration.
    • Clear 1 wound box.
    • Give a weapon Damage+1 (Damage+2 for Forces) for its duration.
    • Give a weapon the AP tag for its duration.
    • Grant someone Armour+1 for its duration.
    • Grant +1 ongoing to specific actions for its duration.

    PARADOX

    When you work magic carelessly, Paradox can result. Mark Paradox for each condition that is true:

    • The Arete roll failed.
    • The Effect was vulgar, i.e. obviously magical; couldn’t have been reasonably mistaken for coincidence, a trick of perception, cutting-edge technology, etc. Effects that could be plausibly explained away are called coincidental. This condition never applies in the Umbra or in a sanctum dedicated to your Paradigm. Note that repeated uses within a short period of time can make a coincidental Effect become vulgar; one strange coincidence might be accepted, whereas several in short order can itself be seen as a sign of supernatural power.
    • The Effect was vulgar and at least one Sleeper who is not a sincere believer in your Paradigm observed the Effect take place.

    A character has 15 Paradox boxes divided into Paradox rows of three Paradox boxes each (or 20 boxes in rows of four if the character has Background: Familiar). When the GM makes a Paradox Move, the severity of the move depends on how many rows are fully filled in.

    Paradox is the Consensus punishing you for your temerity in defying it, so to banish it again you must show that you can play by the rules even when it’s inconvenient. Thus, every time you fail an Attribute (not Arete) roll, you clear 1 Paradox box.

    Arete, for comparison, starts at +0 and can rise as high as +2 at the end of a long campaign, but you also take +1 to any Arete rolls that fits your Avatar Essence, and another +1 for any attempt to cast a Rote you have previously memorised. Combined with the way you’ll often have to choose to take penalties to Arete, and the way that Paradox builds up over time, it makes magic something that starts out very powerful as a mage steps fresh into the scene, but gets increasingly iffy as a situation drags on – which feels like how it should be.

    All in all, this system is working out reasonably well in playtests so far, and gives me plenty of opportunities to both make my players feel powerful and to mess with them – both of which are things that I, needless to say, especially enjoy…

  • A matter of time

    A matter of time

    I’ve gotten a bit more work in on my Monstrous Mishaps quickstart. I’ve been thinking, too, that perhaps I’ve been looking at it wrong. Instead of feeling like I’m just writing the same game again but with less stuff in it, I should take it as an opportunity to identify the parts that are important and the parts that aren’t? God knows, I threw in everything but the kitchen sink when I wrote this thing. It might not be the worst thing in the world to consider whether I actually need all of it.

    For example, the Interval rules. Now, in theory I think those are pretty solid. They are essentially a way to manage time-keeping in game, and let different things take different amounts of time without too much nitty-gritty counting of seconds and minutes. And taking significant extra time with a task – as in, spending hours instead of minutes of it, for instance – gives you a big boost to your action, because it should.

    But when I think back to my playtesting… I’m not sure I’ve actually used the system terribly much? Maybe it’s the players I have, but no one ever did say, “okay, I just spend as long on this as it takes.” They usually wanted to be done in a reasonable time or not at all. Likewise, I like the idea of putting events on a timer and counting down to when things happened, but the game actually ran better those times I didn’t do that but let things happen more or less as I felt like.

    Maybe I should be on the lookout for things that should quite frankly be simpler. I’m not going to edit the whole game all over again, because I don’t think I’d ever finish if I did, but still… it might be handy to have a simpler version available. And if nothing else, there’s always the second edition.

  • The Challenge System

    The Challenge System

    I didn’t really do much this week, so let’s talk about something I’ve had almost finished for years now: the resolution system for my great work-in-progress, Monstrous Mishaps. I call it the Challenge System, for lack of a better name.

    The thing that stands out with the Challenge System is that it’s entirely free from randomisers – not just “diceless” (a term people keep applying to games that rely on alternate randomisers, like card draws or coin flips, to my constant annoyance) but completely deterministic, with no randomness except the GM’s whimsy and the players’ refusal to stick to the plot. Because let’s be honest, those two are more than enough!

    The Challenge System gives each character a set of Abilities, twelve Primary Abilities that are bought and raised individually, and twelve Derived Abilities that are each calculated as the average between two Primary Abilities. For example, your Score in Bullshitting (telling lies) is the average between your Score in Schmoozing (charm and charisma) and your Score in Mindgames (psychology).

    Each Ability has a Score that usually goes from 1 to 15. The Score translates into a Level, as such:

    Score 1: Minimal Level, the sort of thing anyone can do just by being a healthy adult.

    Score 2-3: Limited Level, the equivalent of a natural talent or passing interest.

    Score 4-7: Basic Level, the equivalent of professional skill; the I-do-this-for-a-living sort of competence.

    Score 8-15: Advanced Level, the peak of consistent human performance.

    There are three more Levels: Heroic (Score 16-31, anything Batman could do), Epic (Score 32-63, anything Superman could do), and Godlike (Score 64+, anything no one could possibly do), but Player Characters can’t have those in their Abilities. So why do I bring them up? Stay tuned, I’ll get to it.

    When the players try to do something, the GM assigns it a Challenge Score (and associated Challenge Level) equal to the Ability Score it would reasonably take to accomplish it. So anything a seasoned professional might do within an Ability would be a Basic Challenge for that Ability. Advantages come in categories of +1, +3, +5, +10 and so on. They matter the most in Contests (where one character matches one of their Abilities against one of another character’s) since for regular Challenges you can just set the Challenge Score to anything you want to start with.

    Finally, you can apply Upshifts and Downshifts. Those can come from any source that dramatically change the parameters of the Challenge, such as drastically extending or shortening the time the character has to work in, but the most common source of Upshifts is from paying Grit Points (of which a character has a fixed amounts). Paying 1 Grit Points gives one Upshift, while paying 3 Grit Points gives two Upshifts. An Upshift multiplies the Ability Score (after adding Advantages) by 2, and thus also increasing the Ability Level by one step. Downshifts do the same to Challenge Scores.

    If, after all this, the Ability Score is equal to or higher than the Challenge Score, the character succeeded. Otherwise they failed.

    I’ve playtested the system extensively, and it’s actually really smooth once you get used to it. When it comes right down to it, it’s just about deciding whether it would make sense for a character to succeed at something. And it’s nice, sometimes, to always get a result that fits the scene, instead of having come up with ways to justify the swinginess that comes from die rolls.

  • Starlight Dreams

    Starlight Dreams

    So this week I actually ended up working on an original game, just not the one I meant to work on. Oh well.

    The game in question has the working name Auturge, though I have never been entirely satisfied with it – other ones I’ve toyed with are Self-Created or Ex Nihilo, and right now I am leaning towards Starlight Dreams. By any name, it’s about being a genderless self-created god (your pronouns are yt/yts, and someone please shoot me for uttering that sentence) in a young and innocent cosmos called the Sublime that is under attack by evil Nazi goblins called the Sordid. You battle faceless hordes of enemies, treacherous ex-allies, and creations gone bad.

    I guess the game is what you might call an affectionate parody. It came about after I had read one too many threads at the Something Awful forums where people were screeching about every game being deeply problematic because it had sexual themes, or because it wasn’t high-powered enough, or because it depicted the bad guys as anything short of completely irredeemably evil. I started sarcastically planning out the sort of game that these perpetually offended people would actually want… and then, after I got into it, I realised that what I’d come up with actually sounded like a lot of fun.

    So basically, it’s a game that makes fun of wokeness, but it’s also a game that revels in wokeness, that takes its worst excesses and runs with them. That might make it a game that pleases absolutely no one, but it’s one that thoroughly captured my imagination. And I’ll say for it, there is very little on the market like it.

    I’ve previously written up a playtesting version, but then I put it away to consider it. This week, I started writing up the basic rules from scratch again. So far, this is what I have. The next thing I need to work out is Miracles, the way that players can make things happen through sheer divine will rather than just superheroic action.

    CHARACTER CREATION

    When creating a character, first choose your Virtues. The four Virtues are Outrage (used for aggressive and forceful action and zeal), Nurture (used to care for and empathise with others), Elegance (used to perform nimble feats and eloquent rhetoric) and Self-Love (used to protect yourself and be mindful of your surroundings). You start with two of them at 1, a third at 2, and the last at 3.

    Choose your Identity:

    • Ganesha, a god of animals and the flesh. Increase any one Virtue by 1 and start with the Harmony of the Body.
    • Mimer, a god of thought and ideal. Increase Elegance by 1 and start with the Harmony of the Abstract.
    • Persephone, a god of plant life and mysticism. Increase Nurture by 1 and start with the Harmony of Growth.
    • Raiden, a god of natural forces. Increase Outrage by 1 and start with the Harmony of Forces.
    • Terra, a god of the inanimate. Increase Self-Love by 1 and start with the Harmony of the Inanimate.

    Choose your Calling:

    • Creatrix, a maker of beauty. Increase Elegance by 1.
    • Kindness, a gentle carer for those who suffer. Increase Nurture by 1.
    • Mourner, one of who remembers what has been lost. Increase Self-Love by 1.
    • Strident, a warrior for justice. Increase Outrage by 1.
    • Wisdom, an arbiter of disputes. Increase any Virtue by 1.

    TASK RESOLUTION

    When performing an action that might conceivably fail, a player must build a dice pool.

    1) The player picks up 5 Hope Dice (green).
    2) The player replaces as many Hope Dice with Faith Dice (yellow) as they have points in the relevant Virtue.
    3) For every established Fancy the player invokes by describing how it aids their action, they may replace a Hope Die with a Faith Die or a Faith Die with a Love Die (red).
    4) For every point of the relevant sort of Esteem the player spends on the roll, they may replace a Hope Die with a Faith Die or a Faith Die with a Love Die.
    5) For every established Fancy the Guide invokes by describing how it hinders the action, the Guide may replace one Love Die with a Faith Die or one Faith Die with a Hope Die.
    6) The player rolls the dice. Count one success for every Hope Die that shows a 6, one success for every Faith Die that shows a result of 4+, and one success for every Love Die that shows a result of 2+. The total number of successes is the Result.

    The Guide compares the Result with the task’s Difficulty. Difficulty is set as follows:

    • Difficulty 0: anything a regular human being could reasonably do. This does not even require a roll.
    • Difficulty 1: the absolute peak of mortal effort; a once-in-a-million achievement.
    • Difficulty 2: something that could be done by an animal of the right type (e.g., staying under water indefinitely, flying to the opposite side of a mountain).
    • Difficulty 3: something that could be accomplished by means of a handheld modern implement or tool.
    • Difficulty 4: something that could be accomplished by an advanced human civilisation. Note that this is rarely instantaneous.
    • Difficulty 5: something that absolutely couldn’t be done without magic or divine intervention; effectively, this allows the player to perform a Miracle without needing either to spend Esteem or to possess the right Harmonies.

    If the Result equals or exceeds the Difficulty, the action succeeds and the player gains Esteem of the appropriate form equal to the Difficulty. Acts of Outrage generate Righteousness Esteem, acts of Nurture generate Charity Esteem, acts of Elegance generate Beauty Esteem and acts of Self-Love generate Serenity Esteem.

    If the Result is lower than the Difficulty, the action fails, and there is some kind of consequence. The consequence is never simply that nothing happens, the situation always deteriorates in some way.

    When opposing another self-moving entity (another auturge, demiurge, sordite, Whim, Wicked, Urge, or Gloom) the Difficulty for the action is the entity’s relevant Virtue. Thus, taking cover from sordite’s laser beam is an Elegance roll against the sordite’s Outrage, seeing through the lies of a Gloom is a Nurture roll against the Gloom’s Elegance, and resisting an Urge’s poisonous bile is a Self-Love roll against the Urge’s Outrage.

    FANCIES

    Fancies are facts of the immediate situation that have been established. “The golden palace shines with a blinding light” is a Fancy, as is “we stand on rocks floating in the middle of an endless void,” and “the Crustacean Sultan is greatly wroth.” When a player attempts an action, both the player and the Guide may describe how some number of Fancies help (for the player) or hinder (for the Guide) the action. This is called invoking a Fancy. A Fancy can only be invoked once for a given action. This also means that if a player has invoked a Fancy to help the action, the Guide may not invoke the same Fancy to hinder the action.

    The Guide can introduce Fancies at any time by describing them, either as an introduction to a scene, because something changed in it, or just because the players noticed something for the first time. The Guide can also alter or remove Fancies at will, in accordance to what makes sense in terms of the changing situation. Fancies arise from what is happening within the game world, not the other way around.

    The players can create, alter or remove Fancies by taking actions that change the situation. The Difficulty is set as normal, depending on how difficult the Guide judges it to be. If the action is successful, the local Fancies change accordingly. Failing a roll may also affect Fancies, just not in the way that the player intended.

    Some Fancies are Passing Fancies, which disappear once they are invoked. Such Fancies usually describe some temporary advantage or setback that can easily change. For example, the Fancy “the Emerald Giant is distracted by Xia’s song” disappears once one of Xia’s friends invoke it to strike the Emerald Giant in the back – after that, yts attention is definitely no longer on Xia’s song! While the Guide can always create, remove or change a Fancy for any reason at all, declaring a Fancy to be a Passing one is mostly just a way to remind everyone not to get used to it. Fancies that aren’t Passing Fancies are Persistent Fancies, and can be invoked any number of times. If nothing else is mentioned, assume that a Fancy is a Persistent Fancy.

  • Mummy downtime

    Mummy downtime

    Okay. Okay. I admit it. I have to change the downtime rules in my Mummy: the Resurrection port. I still think the idea behind them is sound – they’re mechanics for when the party settles in for a few days to learn new spells, do surveillance, work on projects, whatever.

    The problem is that the PbtA gameplay loop makes it very hard to create a natural time to take a few days off. PbtA encourages you to keep throwing stuff at the players, to prevent those endless, boring moments when the plot can’t progress because the players are failing to do X, Y or Z that would lead to the next setpiece. In PbtA, if the players just sit around doing nothing, then the GM springs a GM move on them that forces them to take some kind of action. That’s a good thing – in fact, it’s a great thing. But it does mean that the action never really comes to a natural halt. The players never want to stop for several days, because there’s always something they need to deal with today.

    Still, I think most of this can be solved by making downtime represent, say, half an hour instead of several days; not enough time for the shit to really hit the fan for lack of player attention. While I’m at it, I might as well make it so that rituals must be cast as downtime moves; that ties the two paces of the game into the magic system neatly. It does mean that mummies now heal downright scarily fast, but fine, fine – they can literally reconstitute themselves from a single speck of ash when resurrecting, it isn’t too far-fetched that they heal pretty fast the rest of the time too, just not to the point of wounds closing instantly the way they do for werewolves.

    It still bugs me, though. Shouldn’t there be some way to make characters take breaks, even in PbtA? Dungeon World has “making camp” rules, I’m not sure why that works – yes, it’s an inherent part of standard fantasy, but urban fantasy (especially the sort that involves caster types) surely has “time to run to the library and look stuff up!” as an equally natural ingredient. So why do players never want to do that?

    Oh well.

    I’ve also started sketching on a Pendragon port. Which is also going to have downtime moves, because that’s a big part of the game. If I can’t figure out a way to get the players to return to their manors for the winter there, it may just be hopeless… Anyway, my starting point is to use the thirteen Trait pairs – Energetic/Lazy, Valorous/Cowardly, Trusting/Suspicious, etc – as the basis for all moves, making what sort of person you are matter more than your training (which will be more or less the same for all characters, after all – they’re all knights!). I’ll get back to you with any developments.