sgt-nerd

[sgt-nerd]

Time to Kill

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Instant-kill traps. Save-or-die effects. 1d6 investigators per round. There are lots of games that boast about how easily they churn through player characters. Many of them are from the dawn of RPGs, while others are trying to capture that old-school feel. But a lot of them miss the mark and spoil their own intentions in their quest to kill characters.

Let's get one thing out of the way: Killing characters is not clever. As a GM or a game designer, you can always go "Rocks fall, everyone dies," or "A thousand orcs are waiting in ambush." As GMs you control the game and the scenario. As a designer, you've made the rules. Being proud because you were able to kill your players is like being proud you could beat Stephen Hawking in a foot race. You haven't actually proven anything. You had all the cards. You decided what information was available. Clever is when the players figure out exactly what you wanted them to.

That said, lethal gameplay can be fun. It gives the game some real stakes, and it can make the whole thing feel tenser. However, to make it work, you need one of two things.

One is quick character creation and a sense of relatively disposable adventurers. Sir Bordil has died, but here comes his brother, Sir Cordil (soon to be followed by Sir Dordil et ad nauseum). This is good for dungeon crawls where the focus is less on storytelling and more on puzzle solving and risk taking. Having a character survive is an accomplishment, but the fun doesn't stop when they die. If you die, you're back in the game quick. The more players go through characters, the less attachment they're going to feel.

Another is have the lethal part of your system to be more rare in gameplay. This is, in theory, the default mode for Legend of Five Rings. Combat is brutal and lethal, but characters are expected to avoid it when they can. The official adventures often had trouble with that, but in theory the lethality of combat was balanced by its rarity. This approach creates a tension where players are encouraged to find other ways to deal with situations, and a sense of real danger when they can't.

When you don't have one of these two approaches, you end up with a game where way too much of your time is spent in character creation. If it takes an hour to build a character, and you die every session, you're not going to have a lot of time spent actually playing those characters. This becomes frustrating for everyone. As a GM, do you really like to sit around waiting for your players to make more characters after another wipe? They sure as hell don't. And if one character falls, it not only benches a player (who's potentially forced to watch everyone else having fun while he calculates skill bonuses and decides on feats), it means the party is a man down. This can create a cascade effect that turns into a total-party-kill. Again, killing players is not clever. A TPK is just as often a failure on the GM's part as the players'.

This is particularly bad when you're trying to tell a story or explore a setting. It's hard for your players' to care about what's going on when they can't keep a character involved for more than one-or-two sessions. A player's character is almost always going to be the core of their emotional investment in a game. If they lose characters too frequently, they're going to stop caring about their characters, and thus your scenario.

Use lethality when it's appropriate. If it's a dungeon crawler where players can quickly pop back in after a death, it's fine to kill them like flies. If they have plenty of tools to avoid the lethal parts of the system, that's fine too. But when the game expects them to spend hours making their characters, only to kill them in minutes, the battle's lost before it begins.

Nerd Company, fall out!

[sgt-nerd]

Skill and Bones

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I want to talk to you about specialization, how it can be an asset to your game, and how it can be a trap.

Now, it's traditional to have some characters specialized in certain things. Fighters fight. Thieves sneak around and steal. Hackers are good with computers.

Now, this has some benefits. It makes it easier to make sure that everyone gets a chance to shine. You just have to make sure there's a certain amount of fighting, sneaking, and getting grandma's e-mail to work, and everyone has something to do. It also gives players a clear idea of what they're supposed to be doing. If they see that their character is good at talking to people, they're going to be more likely to up and talk to people when it comes up in-game. If Verity knows her monk is good at jumping, she's going to look for chances to jump.

It's also another way for characters to be different from each other. Molly and Dave both play fighters, but Molly is stronger and better at wrestling jackasses, while Dave is quick and better at stabbing shitheads. This says certain things about their characters, as well as giving cues as to who takes lead when shitheads need stabbing or when jackasses need to be piledriven.

There can be issues with this, though. We've already talked about the Rogue Problem. That's when someone's specialization locks everyone else out of the game. It can happen more subtly too, though. Juan's playing a character who specializes in climbing. Gets really great at it, taking every opportunity to boost his climbing skill. Well, the GM wants to keep it a challenge for him, so he raises the target numbers. But sometimes Jane's character has to climb too. Her character is the pigomancer. She's had to put all of her points into pig magic to be effective. When the GM needs everyone to climb up a cliff, either Juan has no trouble, or Jane can't do it.

This isn't necessarily a problem when it's something a bit niche. It can be good for a character to have things he or she can do that no one else can, or to be so good at something they don't even need to roll anymore. But what if it's a central part of the game, like fighting in D&D? If one player is able to one-shot enemies the others can barely touch, you're going to have trouble challenging them both. Either the fighty character ends fights immediately, or the other characters are irrelevant.

3e D&D and its immediate derivatives have some big problems with this. For one thing, skills are usually all-or-nothing. Either you pass the skill roll, or nothing happens (or something bad happens). There's no "I did okay" vs. "I fuckin' nailed it." There are also a lot of skills, and there's no way you're going to be able to put points into everything, especially if you're a class that doens't get many skill points. Skill DCs often rise up as you gain in levels, meaning the system punishes people trying to spread their skill points around instead of focusing on a few skills.

If you weren't trained, you got your ability score bonus and that was pretty much it. On the other hand, if you specialized in that skill, you'd have 3+your level in skill points, skill synergies, possibly feats, or magic items. By level 10, it's pretty damned easy to have a +20 or better in a skill. That's on a d20, so you can see where that's a problem. At that point, even the low end of the numbers he can reach are impossible for someone not specializing in the skill.

Pathfinder has chase cards. In theory, these are a great way to have a non-combat encounter while using the skill system. However, it can run into problems. The skill system is based on 3rd edition D&D with a few tweaks. It runs into the same problem with skill bonuses getting bigger than the die you roll on. That means that you end up with a lot of obstacles that one character can't fail while another will almost never succeed.  Add into this that very few characters are going to be good at all of the skills needed, and the problem that you might not have anyone in the party who has that skill.

Compare this to how the later two editions handled things.

In 4th edition D&D, you got half your level to all your d20 rolls. This meant that you weren't so good as someone who specialized, but you were still getting better at hitting those higher DCs than you used to be. You had some baseline competence to fall back on. Sure, Elsa the Agile is better at jumpin' around than Biff the Bulky, but Biff can still give it a go.

5th edition goes with bounded accuracy. You have your ability score bonus, and you have your proficiency bonus, and not a whole lot else. I have a lot of issues with other parts of the game, but this part helps make sure that people who specialize in something are better at it, but not so much that no one else can try it.

In either case, you're making sure that the gulf between different players never gets too big. You're trying to keep it to where everyone in the party can roll at the same task and have some chance of fuckin' up and some chance of doing good. Some might have better or worse chances, but they're at least in the same ballpark.

You can also look at degrees of success. This lets you have everyone rolling for the same thing, but while one person is just seeing if they do okay, another person is seeing if they do awesome at it. Twoggle wants to see if he can tail a thief. Meanwhile, Spifflepunk is rolling to see if he can beat the thief back to his den and be there waiting (probably sipping tea with his feet on the table, because style).

So, start by identifying where you're okay with having a character outdo the others. Maybe it's okay that a character never has to roll dice in order to climb walls. Or maybe you're okay with an untrained character not being able to build nuclear reactors. Good, you don't need to worry about those.

Now think about which things you want everyone to be rolling for. Do you want everyone to be sneaking around? Be careful with stealth skills. Is combat a huge part of the game? Look at attack rolls and damage. Do you have plans for lots of social encounters? Look at your persuasion-type skills.

Figure out how you want your system to handle it. Bounded accuracy? Look where your characters can get bonuses to that skill or ability. How many places can they stack bonuses from? How many of them are necessary? If you have too many, start cutting them down. Do the Math. Degrees of success? Give lots of examples of how that works in play, with an eye to making the skill useful at all levels of success.

If you're already running games in a system that has this issue, plan out your adventures around it. Try to know roughly what your players' skills are. If one player is way above the other players' skills, either make sure it's not a problem if they don't have to roll, or else that they're the only one who passes. The party needs to jump across a pass. Joe's ninja is super good at jumping. You could accept that Joe's character is just gonna jump right over and watch while everyone else rolls, or you could have him lower a drawbridge or something so his ability feels important and doesn't leave everyone else behind.

Above all else, make sure the system supports the sort of stories you're trying to tell.

Nerd Company, fall out!

[sgt-nerd]

Cargo Culture

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Today we're going to talk about cargo cult game design.

First, terminology: After some people in Melanesia first encountered things like airplanes, they understandably didn't know how they worked. They knew the planes would bring in all sorts of goods and cargo after people built things like airstrips, landing fields, and so on. It was as though these people who'd arrived had discovered a way to summon damn near any sort of goods. To try and bring the goods for themselves, they would replicate what they'd seen the other people do. They'd go through the motions, but without fully understanding the reasons for it.

They weren't stupid, but they lacked critical elements of information. Similarly, a lot of times people will copy things they've seen working, but without knowing why.

We talked earlier about the figuring out the intentions behind your rules. If you're going to borrow rules from somewhere else, it's important to figure out why the hell they used those rules.

One of the biggest sources of cargo cult game design is Dungeons and Dragons. This ain't exactly a shocker, since D&D was the first real RPG on the market. Every RPG that exists owes some amount of debt to Gygax, even if they're designed as a reaction against D&D.

It's taken a long time for games to really start to move out of the shadow of D&D, and even today people design games in certain ways because that was how D&D did it (though which edition of D&D varies).

The thing is, original D&D was a designed around a very specific style of gameplay. Today a lot of people think of D&D as being generic fantasy, but while Gygax borrowed a lot of shit from different books and stories, he had a tight focus on what the game should do.

And it's right in the goddamned name. It's Dungeons and Dragons. You go into dungeons and fight monsters. You also haul out loot. The original game had you get most of your experience by hauling gold out of the dungeon.

The game revolved around resource management. You lasted as long as you had spells and hit points. Weight was tracked carefully. Thieves could only pick a given lock once. Random monster rolls pushed risk vs. reward gameplay.

But when you take those rules out of that context, when you toss 'em into another kind of game without thinking about it, they can fuck your game right up.

For example, let's look at those lockpick rules from older editions of D&D. Now, part of the reason you had lockpicking was because you had a lot of thieves in fantasy fiction. Bilbo, the Grey Mouser, L. Ron Hubbard... But it's used in a way that actually enforces the tone and other mechanics of the game. If you pick the lock on a chest, you get whatever treasure’s inside. But if you fail, you either have to lug it out of the dungeon (reducing the overall amount of loot you can carry), abandon it, or break the chest open (possibly wrecking the Magical Coffee Mug of Zandalur). Risk, reward, and resource management.

Under the influence of D&D, a lot of other games have lockpicking rules. This is partly to justify the existence of thieves/rogues. Jerry wants to play a rogue, so goddammit, the rogue has to have something to do. But the game designer thinks only getting one shot at the lock is unrealistic, or maybe he isn't as into resource management for his game. So, he lets the rogue try over and over again until he gets a lucky roll.

Well, now so long as the rogue can possibly make the check, he eventually will.

There are ways to make this interesting, of course. Time crunch is the easiest. Having interesting penalties for failure (you made some noise hammering at the lock, and someone’s coming!) But a lot of games don't bother with that. Published adventures for 3rd edition D&D often had locks that needed picking, but it was pretty rare for there to be any real penalty for failure. If you can't really fail, what the hell's the point of rolling? Either give the rogue a reason to want to get it first try, or don't bother having a roll.

Instead, ask why you needed lockpicking in the first place. What does it add to the game? What /can/ it add? How can it be used well? If it can't, then toss it. If it can, then change the rules around until it is. Make sure that your gamebook tells GMs when to use the skill and how to roll it into the game's fiction.

You also see cargo culting with World of Darkness. World of Darkness was one of the big rivals to D&D in the 90's, and a big departure from the D&D model in a lot of ways. So it's natural that a lot of games, especially urban fantasy ones, borrow from it. So you get dice pools, race/faction combos, and other bits lifted straight from Vampire or Werewolf without any thought to why it was used in the first place.

Sometimes a rule's just bad. 1st Edition D&D had special modifiers for women. That pretty much always leads to shitty sexism and junk science biotruths. The barbarian couldn't associate with magic users (Whoops, I guess Mary can't play with the rest of the party; she hates Jose's wizard). In 3.5, you have the no-fail lockpicking I mentioned earlier, and the rules for drowning straight up didn't work if you ran them as written. You had feats like Toughness that were literally designed to be bad so to trap people who didn't know the game so well.

But you still get people copying bad rules design because that's what D&D did, and that must be how roleplaying games are supposed to work.

Here's one that works in D&D's original rules space, but gets put into a lot of games where it doesn't fit: Combat is the majority of the game. It makes sense in D&D (where the rest of the game was mostly puzzle solving to get around traps or find cool ways to use magic items), but you see it even in games that are supposedly designed around social skills and roleplaying. If your game is supposed to be about diplomacy and political maneuvering, you probably don't need to devote three quarters of your rulebook on how to hit fightmans with sword. If most of your game is out of combat, devote your rules space to whatever the fuck the players are actually doing with their lives.

Again, look at what rules you're using that have been done before. Ask yourself why they were done. If you can't come up with a good reason, you might need to figure out if it's actually going to work in your game or not.

Nerd company, fall out!

[sgt-nerd]

For All Intents and Purposes

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Today, we're going to talk about your intentions in the rules.

A lot of the time, people make rules in their games without actually thinking about what those rules do. I've already talked about Doing the Math and making sure the rules actually work that way, but sometimes you have to ask why you even have a rule, or why you don't have a rule.

As an example, the game Extreme Vengeance talks a lot about how armor isn't cool, and how GMs should penalize players for wearing it, because it's not a good fit for the genre (80's/90's action movies). However, it still has armor rules to allow them to reduce damage. If you don't want players to use armor, do not give them rules for using armor. Just tell them armor won't help, or that heroes don't use armor, because that's the kind of story you're trying to tell.

It goes back to Setting Expectations. The rules you have available are a kind fo expectation the players have. If you have rules for armor, they expect they're supposed to be able to use armor. If you have rules for magic, they expect that they're supposed to be able to do magic. If you don't want players to be able to do these things, then don't put them in the player-facing rules.

Or maybe there are things you want players to be able to do. Maybe you want swashbuckling heroes who can swing on chandeliers and cut their initials in their opponent's shirts. But do your rules allow them to do it? Do they encourage them to do it? I talked about this a bit in GM May I, how rules that seem intuitive can end up making cool scenes impossible. It's okay if you have some high risks involved in doing cool things, but you need to also have cool rewards. If there's no benefit to sumersaulting off an ogre's back to cut down its master vs. just doing a standard attack, then players are less likely to try it.

Do you have attributes or ability scores? Things like Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wits, etc. that inform a bunch of other things players can do, like skills, saving throws, or attacks?

Why? Do they fit the game? Are all of the attributes or ability scores being used well? Is there a clear dump stat? Why? I'm not saying you can't use attributes or ability scores, but you don't need to. Just because other games did it doesn't mean yours need to. If you do use them, you don't need to use the familiar ones. What's actually appropriate for the genre you're emulating?

How many skills do you have? Are they all things you see players rolling over the course of a game?

Try this. Write out a sample adventure you see people playing in your system. See what skill rolls would be called for. Anything that doesn't come up, consider cutting. If it only comes up once or twice, consider cutting it as well. If you still have attributes, you can do it as a simple attribute roll. You can also rely on backgrounds, things like that. You don't need every conceivable skill a human could possess in your game.

In future columns, I'll talk about this in more detail, as well as about cargo cult game design. For now, I'll leave you with this.

Ask what your game is supposed to be doing, and make sure your rules support it. If they don't, you need to have a long hard look at those rules.

Nerd Company, fall out!

[sgt-nerd]

Lights, Camera, Action Points!

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In a lot of games, you have special points you can spend for things like bonuses and rerolls and the like. Used well, and it is a powerful weapon in your arsenal to control the pace and tone of your game. Used poorly and it can undermine everything you're trying to do. We'll call them cool stuff points, because the help encourage players to do cool stuff.

First, let's talk about what cool stuff points can do. As mentioned, sometimes they give bonuses. Spend a point and get an extra +2, or +1d6, or +10 to a roll, depending on your dice system. Sometimes this has to be declared before you roll, and sometimes you can do it after you roll. If you have to declare it, it makes it a lot more uncertain. Maybe you could have succeeded without the bonus. Maybe you fail anyway. But it makes it much more likely for the points to be wasted. That's not necessarily a bad thing—the chance of failure is why we have rolls, after all. But it can be frustrating, especially if the points are hard to come by. On the other hand, if you use the bonus after you roll, you're much less likely to waste it. You'd only use the bonus when you were pretty sure the bonus would bump it up to a success. This makes it a lot more predictable, but it does take some of the tension out of the decision. Either way, this can make it easier to do things that the players might otherwise have trouble doing, or even let them do things that would normally be impossible.

Sometimes cool stuff points give you rerolls. This can help make your players more likely to take risks. If they fail, they get a second shot at it. It can give some extra survivability when they can reroll saving throws or dodge rolls, and it can make it more likely for difficult rolls to succeed. It's similar to getting a bonus, though it doesn't make it possible to succeed beyond what they normally could.

Sometimes a point gives more direct survivability. In the Warhammer Fantasy RPG, Fate Points can be spent whenever someone's character would die. Instead of dying, the character suffers some other survivable fate. Maybe they're captured instead of kills, or they're left abandoned on the battlefield, but it leads to an interesting situation where they can keep going, instead of being out of the game. In Paranoia, the clones are effectively cool stuff points you use to bring your character right back into the game. In Savage Worlds, you can spend bennies to make soak rolls and cancel out incoming wounds. In games like these, the points are a direct barrier against death. So long as you have them, you're not out of the fight. When you run out, you're in dire straits and it makes the game much more tense.

In some games, you spend points to make cool stuff possible. Sometimes you have specific abilities that require one of these points in order to work, like a psionic blast or a super power. Sometimes it's more general, like being able to declare there's a rope and a chandelier for your swashbuckler to use, or that your childhood friend happens to be in the same bar you are. The characters can use their points to directly power their ability to do cool things beyond what the normal rules allow.

There is one final thing these points can do in some games. They can be used as experience points, being traded in at the end of a session. This is a terrible idea, and I will explain why.

In the first four cases, the points serve a very important purpose. They encourage the players to do things, generally the aforementioned cool stuff. Maybe it's because they know they can get a bonus or a reroll to make success more likely. Maybe it's because they know they have more chances at survival, thanks to either rerolling a bad roll or spending a point to avoid death. Maybe the point is exchanged directly for them to do cool stuff. When you let them trade them for experience, you are effectively penalizing players who use them for any other purpose. You are incentivizing them to hang back and avoid taking risks. At the end of the day, you want your players taking risks and doing cool stuff.

Think back to every fun story someone's told you about an RPG. I'll bet you that at least 90% of the time, it was a player taking a chance and having something cool happen. Or maybe something disastrous happen. But it started with players trying something out.

Encouraging them to hoard points is worse than not having the points at all, because it encourages them to avoid risk, to avoid doing anything interesting, to hang back and let other players take chances. It penalizes them for doing the cool stuff. You want them to do cool stuff, whatever that means in the context of your game. It might be fighting mobsters, it might be getting past traps, it might be political intrigue, but you want them to be active participants.

Of course, that doesn't mean just throw points into the game without thinking about how else you're using them, especially when they have multiple uses. You need to think about how many they have and how they can get them back.

You want to make sure that the different uses are all valuable enough that players want to spend them. Getting a bonus is good, but if the other use is "don't die" in a highly lethal game, your players will probably save them for the second use.

In this specific case, whether it's a probelm is going to depend a lot on how often they expect to die. In a game where players have good odds of survival, they might just keep a point in reserve, where one where every encounter ends with a player character going down is likely to see all points saved up to get them back on their feet.

Warhammer Fantasy RPG has an interesting way of dealing with this issue. I mentioned Fate Points earlier. You also have fortune points that are equal to your fate points. Fortune points get you rerolls and a few other benefits. However, spending a fortune point doesn't affect your fate points. They refresh every day. Losing a fate point, though, reduces your fortune points, and you don't get them back automatically. You have to earn them back, generally by doing big heroic things. It lets them have both types of point. Players are still encouraged to use their fortune points without needing to worry about not having fate points later on.

Speaking of giving them back, there are a few different ways to go about it. Some games have you get them back whenever you rest. Some have it based on the gaming session. When D&D 3.5 introduced action points, it had them come back when you leveled, which made them very scarce. As mentioned above, fate points in WFRPG never come back. You have to earn more through adventurning, and that happens fairly rarely in the game. In games like FATE or Savage Worlds, you can get cool stuff points for playing up your character's weakness in a way that makes the game more interesting, or by doing particularly cool and clever things.

The flow of cool stuff points will help direct the flow of action. When players are full up on cool stuff points, they'll be willing to try lots of things, to take risks, to be badasses. When they run low, they'll be more cautious. If they know they'll get their cool stuff points back the next day, they'll be more willing to spend them, where if they know it'll be a long while before they get more, they'll be more inclined to save them up.

If you want a game that's more constantly tense, then you want to use fewer points or make them harder to get back, or both. If you want a more action-packed game with the players taking lots of risks and swinging from chandeliers and the like, then give out more or make it easier to get them back.

And you don't need to have cool stuff points. They're a great tool, but it's perfectly possible to have a great game without that specific mechanic. Think about them in the context of the rest of your game's mechanics. Try them out, mix them up and see how they affect the flow of the game. Remember, there's no substitute for basic playtesting to see how everything fits together.

Nerd Company, fall out!

[sgt-nerd]

It’s the Action Economy, Stupid!

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Today, we are going to talk about actions, and how they're distributed.

In most games, you have a combat turn. I go, then you go, then the horrible monster with pink tentacles trying to murder you goes, Maude goes, and then it's back to you. Or maybe it's the players go, the GM goes, and so on back and forth.

Usually, you have a set number of things you can do. Maybe you can attack, or you can move, or do both. Maybe you cast a spell, or hack a computer. Maybe you dance the Charleston. The point is, you only get to do maybe one or two things before it gets to the next person.

This is usually one of the big balancing bits in the game. Sure, you maybe can kill the enemy with two shots, but that means they're gettin' at least one, maybe two tries on you before they go down. It makes sure that you face a little risk in the fight.

But what if you get a chance to get both of those hits at once? What if you can take your turn that much faster?

That's what a lot of games let you do. In D&D 3.0, haste gave you an extra partial action. In Vampire: The Masquerade, you could use the celerity power to get multiple extra actions.

Generally, no matter what game you play, getting more actions is always the way to go. It means getting more hits in. If you have an ability to buff yourself, it means getting that off at the same time as you attack. It could mean hitting them with two spells that completely lock them out of combat.

There are even games where you can spend your action to parry an enemy's attack. Obviously having the actions to parry all of their attacks and attack yourself is going to pretty much guarantee you win the fight.

This will tend to lead your players to usually favor builds that get those extra actions. This means their characters are going to look a lot alike, and the game becomes less interesting and less tactical. And as it goes on, enemies will be designed around those characters, meaning players who don't build around extra actions are going to have a much harder time getting anything done in a fight.

So if you're designing a system, think long and hard about allowing characters to get multiple actions. First, ask yourself what else they could be spending their resources to get. Is it anything like as good as multiple actions? Maybe test it out, especially against other combat options.

Now, this doesn't mean you can't ever give characters more actions, but if you are, you should limit how they can use those actions. Maybe at a certain point, they can make a feint and then make an attack without a penalty. Or make two regular attacks. So long as the other options they could pick are about as powerful, there's no problem. There's nothing wrong with players being able to do cool stuff. It's just, you have to make sure nothing is so fuck-awesome that there's no point in picking something else. And if doing something is awesome, odds are doing it twice is even more awesome.

Nerd Company, fall out!

[sgt-nerd]

I’m with you on the first part. Trivially solvable problems aren’t much fun aside from maybe a player feeling good that he remembered paper beats rock. 

The problem is, your solution ain’t really any better. It comes down to the players just trying their entire inventory until something happens.

That’s not interesting. There’s no “Okay, we figured this out!” It’s just “Okay, we threw things at it until something completely random happened to stick.” The players haven’t done anything clever, and there’s no real sense of achievement. Brute forcing the answer is the least interesting way to solve a puzzle.

If you want to make it a puzzle, then give them some clues. Maybe say the skeletons are covered in a weird fluid that protects them from fire. So they try some sort of cold magic to freeze it. Or they notice the skeletons are dry, with dust flaking off of them, so they try fire. Maybe they have symbols carved into their foreheads, and the fighter has to smash them in the face to make them stay down.

Sure, don’t make it completely obvious what the solution is. But give the players enough of a hint that they can come up with logical hypotheses to test.

Giving the players things they have to think about is great, but give them an opportunity to actually think the problem through. Don’t make the solution so baroque or unrelated that they have no option but to chuck random things at the problem.

Also, don’t be afraid to change up the solution. Maybe your players come up with an idea that’s way cooler than the one you had. Reward them when they’re creative. It’ll encourage them to try cool things in the next encounter too.

Design Diary 2

Damage types are a lazy design

Whenever game designers add a new rule to their games, they should ask themselves: Is this a fun mechanic to add or is it just weighing down the game?

In this Flashback design diary, we’ll examine the traditional RPG model of elemental damage and how we’re improving it in next-generation RPGs like Flashback.

Paper Tigers

Imagine that the players are confronted with a Scissors-type titan. One might naively think that this adds choice and variety to the encounter, and choices are fun, right? However, let’s examine all the options:

The players have Rock spells and deal extra/double damage. This is known as a dominant strategy in game theory, and it isn’t really a choice because it’s the only legitimate option. Worse, the encounter is now trivially easy and forgettable.

The players don’t have Rock spells, and instead have to use Scissors or Normal attacks. Now there is no element type system at work at all! You’ve encumbered your game with a bunch of rules that have no effect and this is just a regular encounter.

Your players have brain-damage and decide to attack it with Paper.

So what appears to be three options is actually no choice at all! The same can be said of damage types like slashing, piercing, bludgeoning, etc.

Hidden Knowledge

The problem is that the type matrix is Open Knowledge.

Everyone knows Fire beats Ice because you wrote a whole chapter in your rules about it! It’s also intuitively obvious: if the Frost Titan lives in the arctic - do you really expect your players to waste their stamina with cold-type attacks?

So why do so many games insist on including damage-type systems? The designer’s goal is to add variety by encouraging players to try different weapons and spells. 

Instead, what they get is one player who has the right kind of weapon doing all the work and everyone else having a bad time.

So how can we achieve the goal of getting the players to move outside their comfort zone and experiment with new abilities?

Hidden Knowledge is the game theory term for when some of the information is unknown to some of the players. If the goal of the designer is to encourage the players to experiment with all the different tools at their disposal, why not make it official?

Trials and Errors

Imagine if some kinds of undead (say skeletons) weren’t simply vulnerable to the obvious thing like holy damage, but would instead keep being reconstructed until a unique and specific event occurs, such as their remains being crushed into dust and then burnt.

The first time the players encountered these skeletons, they would just fight them in the boring way. The priest would try to turn them, the mage blasts them with lightning and the warrior thwacks away with her greatsword. Hardly an interesting or memorable encounter.

But then, one round later the skeletons just stand back up and resume their assault.

Now the players have to experiment, so the priest gets out her sling and starts flinging stones at them, even though she has pretty average agility. The mage tries disintegrating one, but it slowly reforms from the dust (although not as quickly this time, you’re careful to observe).

Again and again they rise, and now your players are starting to regret the lack of diversity in their toolkits. They are running low on resources and options (but at least they aren’t bored!). The priest hypothesizes that healing spells will harm undead, and even risks putting herself into melee range to perform a touch attack. The skeleton crumbles under the divine energy, but slowly begins to reassemble.

Out of desperation, the warrior remembers the potions of dragon’s breath she found in the last room (you did remember to give your players access to all the pieces of the puzzle, didn’t you?). The flames engulf the room, and the remains of the crushed skeleton ignite with a pop and vanish into nothing! 

Hopefully the players were paying attention to the results of their experiments as they performed them.

The Element of Surprise

You might be tempted to create an avenue for getting early access to this knowledge as a reward for role-playing or as part of a Flashback sequence. 

“Oh, I guess you have pretty good knowledge, so you remember reading that older Bronze Goliaths have bearings that seize up in arctic climates…”

Don’t do this! As soon as this weakness becomes known, the players lose all reason to experiment and try different attacks! Remember, if the players just know about the “off switch” the encounter would be over in the first round and nobody would have been pushed out of their comfort zone.

We want every encounter in Flashback to be a unique and memorable one, so be sure to check out the pre-release rules and join our playtest group!

[sgt-nerd]

Conservation of Detail

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In stories and in games, some details are there to move the story along, some are there to set the scene, and some are just there because they're fun and cool.

I've seen complaints that in a lot of adventures, most of the details are just story-based. There's some merit there. For one, that can make things pretty damned dry. For another, it makes it easier to metagame. If every detail is story-important, then your players will know to only pay attention to the things you describe.

If you mention the number of rubies on a statue, your players are going to take a real close look for traps, secret door triggers, or magic.

Putting in other details can break this up. Describe artwork. Talk about the locals. Use details to give an idea of what the setting is like. A street performer with a trained griffon says things about what kind of world you have. Cyborg beggars do as well.

You can add things that are just cool. Fun NPCs, weird wildlife, strange bits that your players find cool. Not, let me stress, things that you find cool and your players couldn't care less about. Pay attention to what they like and ask qeustions about after game.

On the other hand, you only have a limited amount of time to game. Most groups meet maybe once a week for two to four hours. You an only spend so much time on setting or cool bits before it starts keeping the game from going forward.

You're going to have to find a good balance for your game. This is going to depend on a lot of things. How much game time do you have? How focused are you and your group on moving the plot forward vs. exploration? A group that's very goal-oriented is going to want to keep detours to a minimum, where groups that want to explore more aren't going to mind and are gonna want more cool bits than plot bits.

Sometimes, your players might get fixated on something you tossed out as a setting or cool bit. You mention the weird control panel in the engineering room, or the old blind beggar in the alley. If they're convinced you've got plot hidden there, they can spend a lot of time trying to uncover it. This can lead to frustration for everyone when they learn it was just a red herring.

If you want to avoid wasted time in your game, there are two things you can do. One is to talk to them out of character. Let them know that they're chasing a false lead. This is easiest, and it's never a bad idea to talk to your players like adults. It does take them out of the story, though.

Harder on your end, but usually more fun for the players, is to change up your battle plan. Turn setting and fun details into plot details. If your players are fixated on something, that usually means there's at least something a little interesting to them. Maybe that control panel brings up a map to where Space Pirate Randy is hiding. Maybe the beggar isn't anyone special, but he saw the grand vizier being kidnapped by elves. Remember, your players don't know what's behind the screen. There's nothing wrong with making things a little more interesting.

Again, the right balance of details is always going to be different from one group to the next, and from one game to the next. Learn to read your players and talk to them after the game to see what sort of things they're enjoying.

Nerd Company, fall out!

[sgt-nerd]

Decision Points

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It's time to talk about decisions.

As a GM, you control a lot of the game. How much varies from system to system and group to group, but usually a GM controls most of the world outside of the PCs. You don't control everything, though. The players make choices, and in most systems you have dice or something to add in random chance.

As a GM or designer, part of your job is to look for where those decisions and chance events pop in and figure out what the hell to do with them. Of course, you can't identify every possible decision point in the game. What you can do is look for the likely ones, and be aware when you're putting them right in there.

Now, sometimes you'll want to handle this by encouraging a course of action to keep them from just ignoring the adventure. You can often do this by setting expectations with your players on what sort of adventure it is. If they know the game is about exploration, then they're more likely to stop at the derelict space station instead of passing by. If they know they're supposed to be heroic adventurers, they're probably going to save the lost prince. If they're not picking up anything you're laying down, sit down and talk to get everyone on the same page.

Sometimes, it's okay to just give them information to let them know where to go. Up and tell them the bandits that stole their shit are holed up in Batsack Caverns, and they'll probably take a hint to head in there.

Otherwise, you need to look for other obvious choices and cover what to do if they don't take the path you figured on. Okay, maybe you assume they'll follow the mysterious robed figure. But what if they decide it's a trap? Or maybe they're supposed to take a train to get to the mad scientist's lair. Instead, they leave the station and start walking, figuring it'll be a sneakier route. Or maybe they're supposed to fight the serial killer, but instead they call the cops. They kill the cultist who was trying to recruit them instead of investigating him, and now six pages of notes are toilet paper.

You'll always have blind spots, because you're going to have a solution already in mind. But stop and ask yourself, "Is this the only decision they can make here?" Once you've got the obvious choices, start coming up with what the hell happens if they go the other way.

A lot of the time, dice rolls are baked right into the adventure. You write up that they have to get such-and-such roll to find out where the bad guy is. But what if they don't make it? Do they just never find the bad guy? This gets into single points of failure. But even when it's not a point of failure per se, you need to think about what's going to happen when the dice go the other way. Remember that failure happens. Whenever you write, "the players must make a _____ check," ask yourself what happens if they fail (or if they succeed, if they were supposed to fail). If you don't want to leave it to chance, don't ask for a roll.

Finally, whatever choices you come up with, make sure they're interesting! Cool things should happen no matter what the players decide to do or how the dice roll. The story should move along. Don't punish the players because they didn't do what you wanted, and definitely don't punish them by making the game dull. Even if they make the wrong choice, it should go wrong in exciting ways.

And when you run a game, and a decision point pops up you weren't expecting, don't just force things back on track. Work it into the story. Move things around. They don't find the vampire, but now they've found its ghoul minions. They don't talk to the last guardian of Camelot, but they find Excalibur. They don't convince the chief of police to help them, but a sympathetic cop slips them a phone number as they leave. Maybe toss in a couple of floating scenes you can toss in if the players go an unexpected way. A mugger pops up. They’re attacked by goblin ninjas. Their rival demands they engage in a singing competition with them. Something that’s fun, but also gives you a little time to come up with a new plan of attack.

A game is a road with a lot of branching paths. Map out as much as you can, and plant plot seeds along the whole route.

Nerd Company, dismissed!

[sgt-nerd]

The Drider Houserules

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Today, we're going to talk about your polearm. It is your killer instinct which must be harnessed if you expect to survive in dungeon-crawling. The deadliest weapon in the world is an adventurer and his polearm. Your glaive-guisarme is only a tool. It is a hard heart that--Wait, my mistake. That's a different column.

Today, we're here to talk about houserules. When to use them, how to implement them, and how to present them to your players.

To begin, let's answer the question of why. You've got a perfectly good game you paid money for, why change it?

First, game designers aren't perfect, or my job would be a hell of a lot easier. Maybe they didn't think an ability through. Maybe they didn't Do the Math. Maybe they were way more into interplanetary economics and trade routes than any sane person would ever be.

Second, even good game designers can't think of everything. Maybe they didn't come up with rules for ships and cannons, but you want to do a pirate adventure. Maybe a player wants to play a druid, but the game doesn't have them. Hell, maybe you're in the group of nutballs wants to get way too into interplanetary economics and trade routes, and you want a system for that.

Sometimes, you just get an idea and you want to see how it works. Maybe you want to add in a new critical hit mechanic. Maybe you want to do away with critical hits. Maybe one of your players has an idea for a new class/edge/playbook/whatever.

Anyway, there are plenty of reasons to make up houserules. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't be smart about it!

Before anything else, Do the Math. Make sure your new mechanics make sense, and that the numbers involved do what you want them to do. Figure that out first and save yourself some ass-pain later on.

Next, when you start monkeying with houserules, always remember: Semper Gumby. Stay flexible. Figure out if the rule is working. If it isn't, try something else. Pick around at it, see how it works out. Maybe you'll end up going to the original rule, maybe you'll find a better way of doing things. Don't just engrave your new rule in stone, keep looking at how it's working, and how your players are responding to it.

When you make houserules, you have a duty to make sure your players understand them. The rules of the game are how your players interact with the story. If they don't know the rules, they're not going to be able to engage with things very well. Especially if they're new to the game, you need to make sure they have a good solid understanding of how you've changed it.

The rules are a sort of cause-and-effect. A player should have a rough idea that if they do X, Y happens. If you spring houserules on a player, it makes it harder for them to understand how their actions are going to affect the game. This has two effects. 1) it makes the game less engaging because you’re putting another layer of mechanics between them and their character, and 2) it frustrates them because they can’t touch the system in the ways they’re supposed to. 

Don't just lay out the rules. Explain why you've made the rule. If you've got a fair number of houserules, make a handout they can refer to.

Now, you don't want to overload on houserules unless you've got a group that understands your system and houserules extremely well. Even then, understand that that's going to make it harder on new players. If you slap down a fifty page 8-point font tome of houserules, expect most players to head to the hills. Not everyone, and some groups love having documents like that, but it's not for everyone, and it is going to make it harder to get new blood in. And honestly, at that point, there's a question of how much of the original system you even have left.

Finally, don't lose sight of what the rules are for. The rules are there to make the game happen. They exist to make fun happen. If they're slow and clunky, and don't make things more fun, they're probably not very good rules. If they make the game too hard or too easy, they need to be fixed or thrown out. This applies whether they're houserules or official. As a DM, your job is to make the game work for your players. Make sure your houserules accomplish that.

Now, your assignment! Tell me your favorite houserules, either from games you ran or played in. Explain why the change was made, and how it made the game more fun. Also tell me about houserules that didn't work; that you hated playing with or that had to be changed quickly.

Nerd Company, fall out!

EDIT: I’ve added in a bit on the connection between rules and cause-and-effect after recruit Tendales suggested it.

[sgt-nerd]

That One Guy and Missing Stairs

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Sometimes, you just get a player who turns everything into shit. They argue at every turn, make everyone else uncomfortable, and try to derail anything in the game that's not about them. Whatever the heck it is they're doing, it's making the game less fun for other people at the table. Maybe you, but maybe someone else.

This can be simple to deal with. Talking to the guy, or, if that won't work, kicking him out. But simple's not the same thing as easy.

Sometimes, this player  may be a friend to a lot of other people in the group. Maybe they're your best buddy from way back. I won't pretend that's not tough as hell to deal with. But if you're going to make yourself in charge of the game, you need to step the fuck up and take responsibility. If you never deal with a problem player, it just gets harder and harder. People like habit. They like normalcy. They hate confrontation.

When it goes long enough, you get a Missing Stair.

Go read that article. Now, it's talking about something pretty damned serious, but it has a lot of application even at lower levels. When people get too used to a problem person in their social circle, they tend to work around him instead of dealing with him. New people in the group are expected to do the same. It's more important to keep things calm than to deal with the problem.

This is unsat.

Don't get me wrong, sometimes there is going to be some amount of compromise. I'm not talking about small shit, like a player occasionally being late, or someone's kid brother tags along sometime and sometimes mouths off. But when someone does crap that keeps everyone else from having fun on a regular basis, you need to step in and put a stop to it.

One of the biggest things you need to do is make sure your players all know they can come to you if they feel there's a problem. You can't fix shit if you don't know it's broken to begin with. They need to know that you'll damn well listen if they have something to get off their chest. Don't blow them off.

Now, I have repeatedly stressed the importance of talking things out like goddamned adults on this blog. This is never more important than when you have a problem player. If there's still a chance that things can be worked out, don't talk down to them. Don't lecture. Explain what it is they're doing, why it bothers everyone else, and ask them to cut it out. Ideally, you'll be able to find some common ground and come up with a solution everyone's reasonably happy with. Or you might find out that they're just not a good fit for your group, either amicably, or possibly with a screaming match.

If it just doesn't work out because you can't find common ground, no harm, no foul. Maybe they just really hate your houserules, or maybe they aren't interested in the way the game ended up. Maybe keep them in mind next time you play something more their tastes. However, if it doesn't work out because they refuse to acknowledge that their behavior could be a problem, you should generally stay far away. They're being an asshole by putting their wants over everyone else's needs.

However it ends up, you should find your table a much friendlier place. Either they're taking care not to be an asshole, or they're not at your table.

Now, this all assumes that the problem isn't that severe. The stair just needed a new board in place, maybe. But sometimes, you need to skip straight to kicking them out. Sometimes it's tough to kick out someone who's been your friend for a long while, but there are some things you should not put up with, and you damn well better not be expecting other people to put up with.

Racism. It's even worse if it's directed at someone at the table, but even if it's not, you still shouldn't allow racists to sit at your table and shit up your games. Long term, you'll be doing society a favor by enforcing the fact that racism is not acceptable.

Sexism. Same damn thing. If they start going off about biotruths, the evils of feminism, or how female characters should have -2 Strength and +2 Comeliness, they're assholes, and you shouldn't expect any female players to put up with it.

Homophobia, religious bigotry, transphobia, basically anything that implies someone is less human or deserving of respect than someone else based on things that they can't help. The hobby has a real problem with this shit, and the more we can clean up our act, the better we'll all be.

Bullying. If someone is consistently bullying someone despite being told to knock it off, they need to get the hell out. Sure, there can be some harmless ribbing, and sometimes people like to joke with each other. But if someone is uncomfortable with being fucked with, then don't force them to put up with it. You're not in junior high, so make sure everyone acts like it.

Sexual remarks, unwanted touching, catcalls. I shouldn't have to explain why this is fucking unacceptable. I hope that all of you already know. But in case you don't, this is treating someone like an object. It makes them thnk you don't see them as anything but a source of sex. It's also very commonly a lead-up to sexual assault.

In most cases, rapists don't start off with rape. They escalate. They start with off-color jokes. If they get away with that, then they move on to making comments about specific people. Then they start touching. Then they start taking further liberties. And eventually they decide they can go all the way and take what they want.

It's not slippery slope. It's not "this leads to this, which will lead to this!" It's the fact that rapists test their boundaries. They want to see what they can get away with. If they're stopped, they typically pull back, because most rapists are cowards. When no one speaks up, they get bold.

As the GM, you're typically the one who organizes the group. Most of the time, you're the one who decides who gets to play. Don't just look at it as a bit of work to have your elfgame. Look at it as a responsibility to make sure everyone is able to have fun. Make sure they feel safe in the group.

Because if you're letting things go? If you leave the missing stair for people to fall through? You're part of the problem.

Nerd Company, fall out.

[sgt-nerd]

Atten-shun!

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Are your players bored? Are they checking their cell phones? Have they forgotten what it was their characters were doing? Do they even remember what in the Sam Hill they're playing?

When players are distracted, it slows down the game and makes it much harder for them to engage with the scenario or their characters. It makes things less fun for everyone else at the table.

Like most problems you face as a GM, it can best be attacked through the simple expedient of actually talking to your players like goddamn human beings. If it's just one player, talk to them privately. If it's everyone, talk it out as a group. Find out where the issue lies.

There's a lot of things that can distract players. The first thing to do is to narrow it down and look for an appropriate solution. Again, like genuine goddamn human beings.

Maybe they're addicted to some webgame or other. Ask them politely not to play it while they're at the table. I don't think it's necessary to ban phones from the table in most cases, but if they're having trouble paying attention, that's a problem.

Maybe it's a matter of too much chatter. Someone lets off a Monty Python quote, and suddenly the table is throwing around every geek reference they know to reassure themselves that here, at least, they fit in. Let your players know you need them to focus a bit. A little chatter's fine and fun, but you don't want it getting excessive. When you see shit go off topic, catch their attention and get them back on task. Don't be a jackass about it, just let them know it's time to play the game. Make sure you're keeping to the task at hand as well. If you're not paying attention to the game, why should they?

Maybe it's personal stress. Maybe someone's having a shitty day, or maybe they're going through some tough times. Find out what's going on. Listen close when they tell you. Maybe that's all they need to be back in fighting trim, or maybe they just need some understanding. Maybe they need to take a break from the game for a little while. Real life trumps funny games. It's more important to be their friend than it is to be their game master.

Now, those are all problems on the player side. But sometimes, it's a problem with the game, or the way you're running it. Ask your players what needs fixing.

Maybe they don't like the way the game's been heading. We'll assume you did a good job of setting expectations, but maybe it's not working so hot in practice. Ask what about it isn't working.

Maybe one of your players feels she doesn't have enough to do. See about finding more ways for her to get involved in the story, more things for her character to do. Remember, some players have no problem inserting themselves in nearly every scene. Some might need a little encouragement or help. Some might also like being in the background. This is why you talk to your players to find out what they want.

Make sure your NPCs aren't hogging all the action. NPCs should exist for the sole purpose of getting the adventure working for the players. That includes stepping aside so they get to be goddamned heroes.

Maybe they think something in the setting is a lot more interesting than you thought, and they're frustrated by not being able to do anything with it. See if you can't change direction ab it and bring it in. The cool spider people they like show up more often. They get sent on a mission to the abandoned city they're keen on. Give them a world they want to play in.

But remember, the first action in this kind of engagement is talking to your players, and listening. Your ears are for more than collecting wax, so use 'em.

Nerd Company, fall out!

[sgt-nerd]

GM May I

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Today, we're going to talk about DM May I.

Now, in most RPGs, the DM, GM, referee, or whatever the hell they call themselves when they're at home is in charge. Head honcho of heroism. The boss of battle. Commander of the Crawl. Them such as must be obeyed. You get the idea.

Of course, this is actually kind of bullshit. The game has rules. Some games go so far as to strictly limit what the GM can do. But even ones that nominally give all power to the GM, there's an expectation that the GM is going to play by the rules. If the rules say you can do something, you can generally do it. Unless the GM specifically intervenes, you can roll those dice, make things happen.

Sure, that's fine. But what about shit that isn't explicit? The musketeer can use acrobatics to get over difficult terrain, but can he use it to cut the rope to a chandelier and get pulled up to the second story?

Then you have to make a judgement call. Is this gonna be fun? Will there be problems if you let them do that? Is the game one that encourages swashbuckling, or a grim gritty game that should be kept serious?

Again, nothing inherently screwball with this. A little give and take and you can have a lot of fun.

But that's issue one. Give and take. You're a referee, you aren't the Lord God of the World and Gatekeeper of Fun. Work with your group and show some trust in your players. Work with them to figure out what works and what doesn't in the game. Its their game too. It should be less "GM May I" and more "Hey guys, do you think it'd be cool if..?"

Sometimes, you just have to say "Bill's gonna have a lot of fun riding the chandelier express to Beat Down City, population Chumpy McVillain."

Issue two is when one player has an easier time getting permission than another. Mary comes up with all sorts of ideas, but Dwayne gets stomped down hard everytime he suggests a hijink. Maybe Mary's a closer friend, and you trust her more. Maybe Mary's more convincing. Maybe Mary's just a faster talker than Dwayne. This can lead to a situation where it's the Mary Show, All Mary All the Time. Poor Dwayne's not gonna have much fun with that, now is he?

Make sure you're being fair. Hear Dwayne out. Give all of your players an opportunity to do cool stuff. Suggest cool stuff if they're not good at coming up with it themselves! Not every player wants to be center of attention, but most want at least some cool bits to be their own.

Which brings us to the final point, and this one gets out of the GM ring and into the game design arena.

Some things are going to be easier sells than others, especially if you design them that way. Look at magic vs. mundane abilities.

Magic just works. It's easy to imagine something happening by magic. Magic heals you, it makes fire, it makes you stronger. It's a lot harder to imagine a non-magical person doing things like that.

Now, a lot of people use things like chandelier-jockeying as a balance factor. Sure, the wizard can cast spells, but the fighter can do cool things like climbing up the dragon's side and stabbing it in the eye.

Or... can she? That's up to the GM, right? But it's kind of hard to imagine a fighter just walking up and doing that. Maybe she can... but she'll have to use her entire turn. And make a climb check. And then a strength check to hold on. And... and... and...

Each little obstacle you add in makes it less likely for her to succeed. Meanwhile, the wizard got to make the dragon punch itself unconscious, and he didn't even have to ask, just make a single die roll.

Because it's a lot easier to visualize magic doing something cool. It doesn't require a lot of imagination, and most spells are built with cool stuff already there. You have to work at it to come up with cool mundane solutions, and it's a lot more tempting to gate them in the name of "realism." Magic isn't realistic to begin with, so spells don't need to jump through those hoops.

You need to make sure you don't fall into that trap. Make it explicit that the mundane characters get to do cool stuff. Give concrete examples. It's hard to say no to the dragon-climbing fighter when that's the first example in the climbing skill. Set the assumptions appropriately. And if you don't intend to give those opportunities to the mundane types, make sure you're also limiting the opportunities of the mystic types.

Any game with a GM is always going to have a bit of "GM May I," but with some work, you can make it fair for all players.

[sgt-nerd]

Do the Math

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Mechanics.  Math.  To some people, these are the enemy.  However, to a smart game designer, these are the tools and weapons with which she, he or they engages the game itself.

There are a lot of game designers, GMs, and players who view math and mechanical analysis with suspicion.  "Metagaming," they mutter.  "Roll-playing instead of roleplaying."  What these snowflakes fail to realize is that the mechanics are how the players interact with the narrative.  If you don't have your mechanics locked down, then your precious storytelling, roleplaying, and adventure is going to suffer for it.

An example:  Let's say you're building a fantasy game where the players are supposed to be veteran soldiers and experts in their trades.  For your resolution mechanic, you decide to go with 2d10, rolled twice and multiply the results.  You figure that 170 is a pretty easy mark to hit.  After all, it's out of 400.

Actually, 170 is about a 21% chance of succeeding on 2d10*2d10.  The 50% mark is at around 112.  So if you make your game with the assumption that 170 is a pretty good chance of success, your big damn heroes are going to fail most of the time, which means they aren't going to be very convincing as veterans who know what the fuck they're doing, now are they?

On the other hand, maybe you want a grim, gritty system where every fight has the potential for horrible death.  But you fuck it up the other way, and now the PCs are nigh-on unkillable.  The game does not support the story you're trying to tell.

There are tools you can use to fix this.  One is playtesting, though god knows most game designers evidently have no time for that.  Another is basic goddamned math.  If you're just rolling d20+skill for soemthing, figure out what their skill should be, how hard it should be, and set the DC accordingly.  If it's hard to figure out what their skill modifier should be, your skill system probably needs work.

Another tool you can use is Anydice (http://anydice.com/).  That's how I found out 170 from 2d10*2d10 is a 21% chance (using output 2d10*2d10).  You can get a dice pool (we'll say d10s, success on 7 or higher) with output [count {7..10} in 10d10].  For most dice systems, you're going to want to go with the At Least option selected, which gives you the odds of getting any particular number or higher.  Play around with it.

Of course, the dice probability is just one piece of mechanics work.  I mentioned earlier about skill systems not working right.  This applies to basically any sort of modifiers you add to a skill, really.

If you don't keep a good handle on the modifiers a player can add to their skill, it makes it a lot harder to set reasonable target numbers.  You want there to be enough swing to make sure that a character who specializes in something is better than one who doesn't, but you don't usually want to have the modifiers go so high they never fail (or rather, if they never fail at that task, it should be because that's the kind of character you want in your game).  This can be accomplished by making sure you don't have too many stacking modifiers, and checking to make sure their bonuses don't go up too far as they increase in experience.

Sometimes, one mechanic might hamstring another.  Sais are traditionally used for disarming attackers, and they're extremely good at this in real life.  For this reason, they get a +2 to disarm in D&D 3.5.  All well and good, except that sais are light weapons, and that gives a -4 to the roll.  Even from the standpoint of realism it was a bad rule, because in real life, sais are a hell of a lot better than greatclubs at disarming people.

Check to see how different rules interact, and if something doesn't work the way it's supposed to, try to fix it.  You won't catch every weird rules interaction, but if something is supposed to be good at, say, stabbing people, look at your goddamned stabbing rules and make sure it works the way you intend.

One last bit with skills.  Skills, especially when they cost character creation resources (advances in Savage Worlds, skill points in Pathfinder/D&D) should all be things players are expected to do in a game, not just "well, this is a thing that people can do, I guess we should have a skill for it."  Skills are one of the main ways players interact with the game world.  Make your skill lists with an eye to what you expect players to actually do.  If it's not something that the system actually wants you to do (for the most part, craft and profession fall into this category in Pathfinder), then don't have a skill for that, or else don't have it pull from the same pool of resources as the skills you actually expect them to use.

Because if a player sees craft (armor) in the book, and he thinks playing a blacksmith is going to be rad, he's going to be pissed if the game never lets him make a craft roll that actually matters.

These are just a few ways that your mechanics shape the game narrative.  Every mechanic in the game is going to shape how the story goes in some form or another.  It's going to affect the mood of the game, the agency the players have, and how much the game actually matches up to your expectations.  Do the math.  Think out the rules.  And for the love of god, don't just assume shit's going to work.  At least toss some dice around, if not have someone else playtest the fucking game.

Nerd Company, fall out!

[sgt-nerd]

Follow-up

Recruit Moose was worried about the following bit from the last roll call: “"Let them know why it’s important to you...”  They feel that players might take this as a guilt trip, and promise to show up even if they can’t. Guilt tripping them would be bullshit, so always be clear that what’s important isn’t whether or not they can make it, but that you know if they can make it so you can plan accordingly. Tell them straight off you understand if they can’t. Your goal here isn’t to make them game whether they want to or not, but to find out when they can show so you can keep the game running smoothly. Be up front with them about it. Make sure they know they’re not in trouble, and that you’re not pissed off or disappointed. It is about having a problem and working together to fix it. 

Like grown-assed adults.

[sgt-nerd]

Attendance and Punctuality

Nerd Company, fall in!

Recruits, we need to talk about punctuality and attendance.

I’ve heard a lot of bullshit about punishing players for missing sessions. Penalties on their next session, docking XP (beyond what they miss that session), publicly shaming them. I’ve seen people stop being friends

I’ve got a question for you. Are you, or are you not, grown-ass men and women? If the answer is yes, then it’s time to act like it. If not, then act like it anyway, because your elders clearly need the good example.

So, let’s talk about the importance of your tabletop game. The last word is the most important. Game. It is a game. A pretendy fun-time game. An elf-game. Whatever you need to do to remember that it’s supposed to be your leisure activity.

Yes, it’s annoying when someone doesn’t show. It’s especially a pain-in-the-ass when they don’t tell you beforehand. I get that.

But it’s a goddamned game. It’s supposed to be something you do for fun, and there are a whole host of things much more important than finding out if the dice let you raid Gulmengorch’s Inner Sanctum unscathed this week. Work, family stuff, car trouble.

My point isn’t that your game shouldn’t be important to you, it’s that there are more important things out there. If someone’s work says they need to be there until eight on game night, then they have to be there until eight. If their kid is sick and needs them, that is far more important than rolling the dice.

Think of an RPG as being on the level of, say, a bowling league. Showing up is more important than, say, going to movie night, because missing the game hurts everyone. But it’s still just a game. If someone got upset because their buddy missed bowling night to take care of a sick kid, you’d say they were crazy. Same damned thing with pretendy fun-time games. Real life things are more important than elf things. Work, family, and big responsibilities. This is part of being an adult.

Now, if someone is just blowing off the game, then you need to talk to them. While it is just for funsies, they need to understand that them not showing can ruin the fun for other people. However, even then the solution is not to punish them in game, the solution is to sit your ass down and talk. Not as GM to player, but as friend to friend.

Let them know why it’s important to you, and see if they’re willing to be more diligent about showing up. Let them know if they can’t make it, that it’s important to let you know as soon as possible so you can plan around it. If you have to cancel, it’s a lot better to know before everyone shows up. If you need to rewrite the scenario, you want as much time as possible to do so.

If they simply can’t make it to game often enough, then respect that choice. Again, it’s a leisure activity. If they don’t want to play ball, you can’t force them.

Depending on the game you’re playing, this might mean they just don’t get to play anymore. They need to respect that, too. Make it clear that it isn’t to punish them, but is just to make sure the game goes smoothly for the other players.

Of course, it might be possible to keep them at least partly in the game. Maybe they’re a mercenary or ally who shows up every now and again. You can leave room for someone to show up occasionally and helps the players out without needing to plan for their character like you would someone who shows up every session. Some systems make this easier than others, letting you rebalance encounters to match the party quickly, while others might make this impractical. It’s only one plan of action, but it’s worth considering, since you presumably have them in the game in the first place because you like hanging out with them.

If you don’t… Well, that’s a topic for another day.

Nerd Company, fall out!

[sgt-nerd]

The Rogue Problem

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Today, we're going to talk about game design. Specifically, we're going to talk about the Rogue Problem.

The Rogue Problem is a game design feature that gives one player a mini-game to solve that locks out the rest of your players. In D&D, this is generally the rogue. In earlier editions, the rogue's job was trapfinding and lockpicking. In 3rd, they became the "skillmonkey," which meant they got lots of skills and a few special abilities to use with those skills.

The problem is that when the rogue is performing their mission, no one else is doing theirs. The fighter, wizard and cleric are sitting around with their thumbs up their asses waiting for the rogue to pass or fail his rolls so they can get on with the game.

We're going to ignore the history that led to this shit, though I might write about it later. The important part here is that by the time 3rd edition D&D rolled around, thieves (now rogues) were an iconic part of the game. The role they were given was to pick locks and find traps. To make sure they were still important, the designers made sure there were plenty of locks and traps in the game, meaning you basically had to have one in the party, at least in the dungeons as designed.

There are some glaring flaws in this design. One was that it led to a lot of Single Points of Failure. You remember me drilling into your pointy domes that those are to be avoided, right? The other malfunction here is that it's a point where only the rogue gets to participate in the game. If it's a check here and there, that's not too bad. But when you have long stretches of trap-filled dungeon, you're going to have other players checking their phones.

An even worse example of this crap is the Shadowrun Decker. The Decker is a hacker type who accesses what amounts to a cyberspace minigame that's only barely relevant to what other players are doing. This basically makes a mini-dungeon that only your decker player is going to be part of, but that you have to include because otherwise that role wouldn't exist in the game. What's more, they're only tangentially involved when the rest of the players are doing their thing.

Now that we have identified the weak spot in our strategy, it's time to shore it up.

Let me say that despite this, it's okay to have characters who are stronger in some areas than others. But you shouldn't have a part of the game that only one or two people can play at a time. Have your trapfinding, but come up with ways for other characters to help. The fighter makes a strength check to hold the panel open. The mage makes an arcana check to decipher the glowing runes for the rogue. These can be as simple as aid another checks mechanically, but they're ways to help bring other characters into the scene and give them a chance to come up with ways to use their abilities to help out.

For a hacker character like the decker, maybe have them work a bit more like Watchdogs. Forgettable game, but the basic concept was solid. Your hacker is in the scene with the other characters, making checks to turn off cameras, make distractions, change the lighting. It keeps them integrated in the game while still giving them a nice role that complements the rest of the group and gives them a feeling of agency and control.

Basically, look for ways to have all the characters doing cool stuff as often as possible. They don't have to be the big damn hero every scene, but they shouldn't feel like wallflowers either.

Nerd Company, fall out!