roadandruingame

[roadandruingame]

RAR Musings #32: Accumulated Success; Spectrum-based vs Successes-based Resolution

I can't stop as;ldfjasldfksa changing my system

I was reading through some other systems and reddit posts, and one stood out to me. The premise being, what if characters could inflict 'damage' in ways other than physical, and then the type of 'damage' would determine the outcome of the encounter, with damage types ranging from gore, rebuff/containment, holy purification, cultural, and political, or "faction-based" damage. It seems to have legs, though runs terrible risk of requiring

A) Documentation of different characters/scenarios and their strengths/weaknesses and resistances/vulnerabilities to each type of damage,

B) Recording of each kind of damage applied to a single character, in such a way that the impact of an encounter persists beyond the immediate application, and

C) Some kind of metric for determining exactly what happens when each kind of damage is applied.

If only the most excessive of damage types qualifies as the 'end result', "health pools" would need to be in uneven numbers, to prevent the case of a tie, but then there's the chance of conclusion with only one of each damage. If there's five damage types, it seems like the only size of "health pool" would have to be 6, so as to force doubling of a minimum of one damage type, but then that leads to the possibility of three of two different types of damage. You'd almost need to get a sixth damage type, and lock HP for each target at 7, to force the doubling and prevent a tie. Theoretically, 'emotional' damage could work here, having some overlap with others, but essentially using fear or empathy to defuse the situation.

As I thought about it more, I realized this could be compelling. If the SCENARIO is what records the damage, not individual targets, there's room for this to become a fascinating narrative story structure:

Rather than take individual turns, all combatants on each side declare their intended damage type.

Their resources for each type are totaled, and the biggest pool of resources goes first.

Any successes are logged as damage of that type on the scenario. Potentially, the check is resisted by the target's total resistance to that damage type, as well as modified by other situational modifiers.

Initiative order falls down sequentially through the largest of resource pools, regardless of team.

Once the scenario has logged enough successes to be considered complete, the Primary Outcome is determined by the resource that inflicted the most damage. A Secondary Outcome could also result, if another damage type inflicted more than 50% of the first. (HP 7, would mean Primary inflicts at least 4dmg, and a Secondary in this case would have to inflict at least 2dmg.)

Squad play would henceforth mean that there's value in contributing whatever way you can, though unless your whole squad piles in on the one specific target with the exact same intention, there's a high probability of the other team going first, and making more headway toward defeating you than you to them, though it would depend on the resistances at play. It gamifies initiative, damage, and narrative conclusion of potentially complex scenarios, even without a battlemap.

There's one issue I have though.

Accumulating successes.

______________________

Road and Ruin v001-alpha featured a game of heavy math and results averaged through addition of dice. I enjoyed it from a sandbox perspective, because if a challenge's difficulty is measured, and successes are gathered in excess of that difficulty, you could scale up or down those results infinitely in either direction; the difficulty Godzilla knocking over a building, or a fairy lifting a thimble above it's head.

Road and Ruin's Outcome system pivoted to focus more on the outcome itself. Using less math, it reasoned that with certain modifiers in play, it was essentially impossible to catastrophically fail at something you were generally good at, and worked to measure what degree of variance there was in what you were hoping to achieve. It works quite well for creatures who are similar across the board, as well as helps simplify the math so that you aren't rolling, modifying, and adding together ten or more ten-sided dice values for something simple, just to see if you happened to roll all 1s.

Where Outcome falls down is the accumulation of success. By focusing on the outcome itself, it becomes difficult to ascertain how MUCH you contributed to a goal that was, ultimately, not successful, but advanced, in a way that you could leave and be replaced with someone else. I can measure it by simply noting the value discrepancy between the "success threshold" and actual die value, I suppose. But that starts to feel a little funky in terms of recording what exactly you contributed, and how it stacks with other actors' contributions.

For instance, let's say that you're looking to repair a car. Some random number generation can determine that the ways the car is broken is measured as a total of 20 points.

(As an aside, imagining that this, as well as injuries, could be measured in stages; a Major Injury or Major Breakage could require either substantial time between rolls, or substantial amounts of material value, to eliminate entirely, whereas a Minor Injury could be something easily fixed. Partially repairing it could be an Improvised Fix, enough to hold together, but at the risk of falling apart, and incurring even worse damage as a result. Thoughts...)

But let's say you measure it as requiring 20 points of repair. If your d10 spectrum would have no modifiers, and you roll a 9, for a total of three points above 6, you effortlessly contribute three points of repair. If you somehow got a +10, and rolled that 9, you'd contribute 13 points of success with that 9. That would free that character up to go elsewhere, while someone else could try to finish the project up.

We could also factor in the Discovery scheme. Using a level of breakage measured as 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, or 20, 'successes' are used to drop the threshold of success. A 12-point breakage is worked on for those 3 successes, and then a d12 is rolled; if the result is anything higher than (13-3= 10), the job is considered fixed.

Alternatively, we could do a secondary Outcome roll, using the new value as a target threshold. So if something had 20 points of damage, you would roll to repair and get 3 successes, bringing the threshold down to 17. Rolling Outcome again, you get a 4, or a "success at the cost of 3". You would then be asked to pay up to three material or exertion resources to cement those gains, or else your repair is considered sloppy.

Given Road and Ruin's new-ish identity as a resource attrition game, I think I like the last one best. It does mean that crafting costs are essentially doubled, with first a "luck to see if it's an effortless fix", then "luck to see if your fix stuck", but that just means that crafters and quality materials are made all the more important.

I had also considered simply using the old "roll and add Xd10" system for anything considered slower or that needs to accumulate value. The system is slow, but so is anything that meaningfully accumulates value. Where it falls down is the same reason I switched to Outcome in the first place; adding numbers is just more numbers, without the system meaningfully communicating anything on it's face. It prompts the need for look-up tables and other charts, and I'd rather stay away from that.

It's definitely something I have to think about more and get comfortable with, but I think I developed some concepts here that are worth exploring.

[roadandruingame]

RAR Musings #31: A look in the mirror; Social Roleplay

In my time frequenting tabletop game spaces on reddit, I've seen a lot of trash. People jaded with DND who pivot to making their own game rather than explore other options (hey that was me), asking if anyone has any ideas about unique mechanics or certifying if their idea has ever been done before, and so, so many people asking for recommendations on systems that handle social mechanics. But lately I stumbled on a post asking for full review of their design PDF, and I was shocked, and in no small way dismayed, to see an incredible number of my own design philosophies and ideas reflected, some not quite there without some needed polish or refinement, but still others that gave me the notion that they were better than what I had.

Distraught, I had some back and forth with the designer, pointing out certain issues, but mostly focusing on his 'roleplay' system. It took some time, but I would eventually identify the line between his roleplay philosophy, and my own that stemmed from games like World of Darkness. It's not that his is wrong, but the idea there could be a wrong way to go about it is precisely where the line falls.

Road and Ruin fundamentally discourages that there is a binary morality. Every culture and tradition has beliefs they take for granted, that are seen as strange or appalling to others, held up by a spectrum of individuals who are each bastions of independence in their own right. World of Darkness itself once held that a character should regain their meta-currency, Willpower, in bites when the character affirms their virtues in a way that requires effort, up to once a session or chapter, but all WP when the character entertains a vice in a willfully self-destructive way that causes problems for the group, but in later editions equated the two, such that a virtuous person could sabotage with a flaw, while a flawed individual could sabotage with a virtue. This other person's system, after much digging, seems to hold the opposite; that players, and their characters, are either fundamentally virtuous, and so shy away from vice behavior, or, more often, there is simply no advantage to roleplaying sub-optimal behavior, and so they just simply... wouldn't. They wanted to encourage players to engage in this behavior (whereas I have to drag my players kicking and screaming off their vices, who believe getting to engage in this behavior with no lasting consequences is a power fantasy), and on it's own, that's a fine objective. The problem I had with the system was that for a character to benefit from their virtues AT ALL, they would have to activate their vice, sabotaging the setting more often than actually advancing through it, and benefitting from said virtue in tiny bites, compared to carpetbombing with their vices for maximum consequence, only rewarded at the discretion of the DM if it was "good enough".

At the very least, I developed a concept that designer didn't want, and I might choose to use for Road and Ruin's faith-based builds, but it still stuck out to me in an odd way. Their "rock paper scissors" combat initiative system is profound, using mechanics I had only barely conceived of myself a few months prior, in ways that felt like if only I were to steal them, I could leap ahead in design of my own game, but then casting to the side a roleplaying system they insist has succeeded with flying colours in their own playtest groups, while denying my very real, very lived experience with players who would shred his system to pieces due to gaping vulnerabilities. Granted, his system only needed to bridge the gap from combat to combat, as a combat-based simulation game, and not a storytelling one, but it very much feels like I passed my doppelganger on the street, or maybe a weird, better me from an alternate universe, only to see through the veneer and catch sight of a few critical flaws that undermined everything else I thought was important.

____________

For the sake of documentation and sharing:

Road and Ruin's 'morality' system, determined by Beliefs and measured in Conviction, is one component of a larger social system, alongside Reputation. A belief, defined by Law or Tenet, Tradition, Interpretation, and/or Compulsion, defines a character's instinctual response to any situation. They can fight it, pivoting to entertain a different belief, but depending on their success, there may be hesitation, or, often, a tell at the very least.

Even before RAR shifted toward a game of resource attrition, social play was measured in Spirit, spent to give commands to allies, emotionally express themselves and compel a change in others. It's also used in bargains and contracts with demons and spirits, and the initial idea was to treat it like a health bar that can drive far below zero, inflicting situational penalties for every span, waivable with spending even a single additional Spirit, in a death spiral of emotional exhaustion.

A Belief's Conviction score determines what advantage the character gets in situations where communicating that belief may have a positive influence, as well as their resistance to influence from others. It also determines the difficulty of acting against their true selves; a roll to act in opposition to their beliefs is subject to a penalty based on that Conviction score as well, and failing the roll results in hesitation in an initiative check, buying potentially several seconds of shock and fumbling important actions, or at the least reveals something about the character's true beliefs, unable to disguise their emotions and intent. Reputation plays a hand by connecting together faces, names, and actions, that the character in question may have strong feelings about, as well as allows you to wield influence you may otherwise not deserve, but that your target believes in. Conviction can also be damaged through repeated neglect, and broken to introduce a semi-persistent Doubt, and possibly even be made to produce and grow a new Belief altogether.

These mechanics are important to social play for several reasons. A warrior's beliefs may shield him from the effects of fear or surprise, while a merchant or noble with a bad poker face can send long-planned secrets up in smoke. A fervent zealot isn't likely to be convinced to betray their cult, but if you can sow a deception in their mind, that you are a new member of the cult, their zeal in faith may extend to even offering you assistance in your schemes. But above all, the morality-ambiguous nature of Beliefs means that there can be real social conflicts, between two groups who believe themselves to be in the right, and, from an outside perspective, both very may well be. It allows players to more clearly define their character's desires, as well as features a mechanical system for benefitting from those beliefs, whether you're a hero whose belief in doing no wrong conflicts with the horrors they've visited upon others, or a criminal whose dedication to self-interest leaves them questioning when they need to dive in to save the day.

So many stories become so much more interesting when characters are treated like living, breathing things, that can change and grow, and who have depth and nuance. While not an excusal of real-life atrocities, a virtual exploration of the horrors of belief can be a safe environment to gain perspective, in a guided experience toward doing what someone else might do, and thinking how someone else might think.

[roadandruingame]

RAR Musings #30: Character Sheet Simplification

I'm pushing for way, way too many different projects by the end of the month, but one is trying to get up a one-shot introductory game of Changeling: The Lost.

It's my favorite of the WOD/COD game lines, but also a game I rarely have the chance to host, and have never gotten the chance to actually be a player in. And when I do run it, it's typically for people who don't really grasp what it's about, or make any attempt to.

Modifying The Fear-Maker's Promise to be a little more halloween-y (and trim down on the more 'things that had shock value in 2007' elements), I can't help but feel that the story commits a lot of page space to explaining and describing things that only the storyteller gets to read, and has several pages committed to creating full character sheets for certain pivotal NPCs, while also introducing a few side-NPCs who can be boiled down to a single skill check.

It's kind of annoying.

After so long hosting games, I try to use prewritten games whenever possible, and this is a great opportunity to get some ideas on how to structure certain elements for prewritten Road and Ruin test adventures. But when a game demands that I have several pages of full-page printouts, and keep referring back to numbers from other pages I have to flip to go check, I get worn out.

Part of it reminds me of trying to corral uncooperative players, where I practically have to keep a copy of their character sheet in arm's reach so that I can check one of their numerous skills and stat values, in case they don't know what it is, or are straight up lying about their character stats. It's work for the host, and it makes me wonder why all the NPCs weren't reduced down to a single paragraph sorted into columns and rows on a single page.

I'd been considering this from Road and Ruin's standpoint as well. The game has a LOT of stats, and especially with the new perspective of "spend your resources to push the Outcome", a lot of stats don't actually get brought into regular play. Evaluating a character's personal ability in each of the 60+ different proficiencies, that were explicitly designed to have as much overlap as possible for OldAndRuin's "add up to two relevant proficiencies together" system, very quickly blows out by the Outcome system, which doesn't like to be heavily modified, the character sheet, which would need to be packed full of proficiency spots, and my patience.

But then I'd considered:

What is the point to having so many proficiencies in the first place?

To begin with, most characters in stories aren't a wealth of different skills, and when they are, "a wealth of different skills" suffices to describe them. Most characters are defined by two or three, possibly even just one single ability for which they're known to be competent. A character isn't described as having seven different types of training that explain their strength, they're simply labelled as "strong", and an intelligent character might have areas that fall outside their education, but are usually just labelled "smart". Likewise, said intelligent character is, stereotypically, either socially awkward or less physically fit, but if they aren't, then those exact numbers don't get called to attention.

Put another way: Is there any meaningful reason to document... average-ness?

If a game gauges stats like Dexterity on a scale of 1-10, with average in the middle, does a minotaur need to have that value written down, if it's never really used? Does a siren need to document it's Strength?

If character proficiency is only noted if it's [High], [Specialized], [Weak], or [Bane], and you're only expected to document what would actually be character-defining, character creation becomes a snap, amounting to determining an archetype, and picking out perhaps 3-6 major features. I loathe games that try to reduce the game's stats to 3-6 for 'simplicity', but what if they weren't the same 3-6 on every sheet?

The topic of heroes comes into play. Heroes are often inexplicably good at MOST things, but rather than individually mark each and every skill in a way that shows that, why not just slap a 'Heroic' trait on the character, to show that anything not notarized as a Weakness or Bane is considered to have a value of +1 instead of +0?

Done this way, characters boil down to a simple list of basic archetypes, where "if something could be used here, feel free to". Potentially still on basis of Attribute + Proficiency + Specialization + Gear still, but with a high likelyhood of dismissing one or more on the basis of that it's not significant enough to matter. With fewer resources to note, we actually transition back to a place where each proficiency is multi-purpose, giving you choices on when and how to use each one, without there being a singular, specific proficiency to use in each kind of situation, and making the choice to spend that resource matter a lot more.

[roadandruingame]

RAR Musings #29: The impact of math and RNG on game flow. Rules for designing a system.

It's been a minute. I've continued to dismantle both my game's mechanics and my preconceptions about the ttrpg medium that lead me to produce those mechanics, in a pursuit for a set of pen/paper/dice mechanics that are easy to learn, fast to resolve, fun to play, and with a depth that allows for interesting diversity without blowing out any of the previous three requirements.

Amidst it all, I still have a wistful longing for my original system. It wasn't easy to learn, fast to resolve, OR fun to play, but it did have a kind of elegance to it I can't seem to recapture with my new ideas.

But then, as I look into other systems and pre-made adventures printed over the last fifty years, I find a LOT of systems that don't fit those requirements. Am I holding myself to unrealistic expectations? Am I holding the average tabletop gamer to too low a standard? Do I think people are stupid? Can they be trusted?

I've begun documenting some of the rules I've tried to hold myself to from the last decade. Too often, in my redesigns, I've found myself tripping down the same overcomplicated, math-dependent rabbithole that I've designed, and redesigned my way out of, time and again.

STICKY RULES. Obvious to some, painfully argumentative to others, games need rules to distinguish them apart, ensure a predictably and consistently enjoyable experience. The game itself should never be the cause of a bad time, no matter how many "it depends" people throw out.

ONLY 1-2 VARIABLES. Three, on the outside. Any more than that and it becomes difficult to manage, any less and it feels like nothing has impact, because of a couple reasons:

PREDICTABLE MODIFIERS. The system should clearly communicate where the evaluation for different variables come from. If everything gives +1, be very clear what rare cases give a +2. Stay away from aimlessly broad (stats like 'Cool' or 'Moxie') or needlessly pedantic (mech games statting out individual mechanical components), unless you want to attract an incredibly niche audience, or have too vague a product that it infringes on Rule 1.

PLAYER AGENCY. Limiting the number of in-play modifiers and ensuring they're understandable empowers players to feel like they're in control of the outcome, and if they didn't like it, it's up to them to change the situation. Too random, and you get Snakes And Ladders, or inversely punishing players for not picking the only viable solution.

CONSTRAINED RANDOMNESS. Most systems use a randomized element, throwing dice or shuffling cards, but by modifying a randomized element using predictable situational modifiers, we help drive player agency, while avoiding the feeling that an outcome is absolutely certain, which makes the game become boring.

FRINGE RANDOMNESS. If possible, work into the system as naturally as possible the means for a totally unexpected result, without it completely overpowering any of the above rules. This shakes the game up, giving players the opportunity and emotional freedom to react. The more uncommon the fringe case, the more novel it seems. (Note: Nat20/1 is the most famous of this, but happens too often to have serious weight, and has an equal 5% chance across all numbers on the one die. By contrast, rolling doubles on 2d6 is both rarer than a Nat20, and feels like more of an event.)

NEVER ROLL DICE FOR ANYTHING WHERE FAILURE ISN'T INTERESTING. If you must define the results of failure using a specific ability, it should be notable. Too often failure is treated like a death sentence that ends the game, or completely trivial. The intersection of Success and Failure is a fork in the road, and driving forward either way, not a dead end or a Quantum Ogre or looparound. (I once had a DM make us roll to pick up a skull and place it in a socket without it crumbling to dust. In a room filled with infinite skulls. There was no time limit.)

DO THE MATH FIRST, RANDOMIZE LAST. If there are situational modifiers, and there is a random element, do your absolute best to resolve any equations first. Random elements are more exciting than predictable ones, and frontloading the exciting part of a check before the slow methodical part will have an adverse effect on player's momentum. Reward them with rolling the die, after they've done their homework. Similarly:

THE FASTER THE NARRATIVE, THE FASTER THE RESOLUTION. Too often, events like combat or a chase sequence congeals into a slog, juggling poorly-defined or unpredictable variables, buckling down and doing math, and spending minutes to confirm what happens over the course of seconds, which usually amounts to a bonk-fest game of Punch Face until somebody falls down. Compressed down, most grand, epic DND battles never take the 10 turns needed to have a spell's 1-minute duration actually matter, much less the 100 turns for a 10-minute spell. Not only is the per-hit resolution of battle slow, but the ENTIRE BATTLE is slow. Inversely, if there's an action you really want to drill down into, performing research for example, there should be a way to prolong the resolution mechanic so that it feels like it's more complicated or has more nuance than it actually does.

CHOICE IS MORE INTERESTING THAN DICE. Combining Rules 1-4 and 7, as an inverse of Rule 6, wherever possible, try to incorporate "insightful failure"/"success at a cost" opportunities for players. It keeps them in charge of their own experience, without forcing that responsibility onto the game host, and gets them to more often and more consistently evaluate the outcome of their own decisions, and own that outcome, rather than feeling as though they're powerless to change anything, the game is a random diceroll, the host is unfairly moderating the game, or that an outcome was totally and completely unexpected. If possible, remind players short on resources where those resources went, in earlier decisions, so that they understand their current situation is a result of their earlier choices.

And, that's the most of it. Each of these could be it's own video, honestly, and is subject to no small amount of personal preference, but it's what I've found to be the most moderate, collected outlook when it comes to designing a pen-and-paper tabletop roleplaying game. These rules flicker when it comes to computer rpgs or more traditional 'boardgames', but so long as my designs observe these rules, and be very, very careful when deciding to ignore them, they stand the best chance of producing a system that is easy to learn, fast to resolve, fun to play, and consistent in all of the above.

I still wistfully pine for my original system. It had an elegance to the predictability of outcome that I haven't managed to recreate with my newer system, but it was also not easy to learn, fast to resolve, or fun to play, so it had to go. I can still keep it around for slower, more methodical play; if someone wants to play a crafter, for example, the system works great for that. But quick and dirty action-adventuring needed a dramatic speed boost and simplification, such that even the players with the weakest math skills could blow through an adventure in an hour or less, approximately the length of a lunch break.

My next steps are probably going to be to repurpose a ton of old adventures from different game systems, but under my new mechanics, and get as many people to play a spectrum of content as much and as often as possible. I went without playtesting for too many years, and it had a very real and crippling impact on how much I've had to tear down and build back up.

[roadandruingame]

RAR Musings #28: Swords And Ladders, and when the fun begins

As I continue to lose my mind over dice mechanics, I struggle to quantify a simple question:

>At what point does using dice to gloss over the intricacies of a potentially infinite number of variables make sense?

And, the follow up,

>If a game is merely going through logic patterns and using dice to gloss over intricacies, at what point does the game simply become an infinite parade of randomly generated numbers? A Snakes and Ladders, where there is no meaningful input from the player themselves?

I recently theorized about exactly what people were looking for in class design. I'd realized many of my listed classes had overlap, not just with one, but sometimes two or three other classes, and debated having a "build a bearbarian" class system where players simply created the class features out of root traits, like Combat Trained or Politically Fluent, similar to my "build a bugbear" system for creating a unique monster. The idea was criticized by someone who wanted ready-made, easily recognizable fantasy archetypes, like Rangers and Wizards. While there's nothing stopping me from simply providing a set of ready-made classes, built using the Build A Bearbarian system for the sake of consistency, it did make me stop and wonder what exactly people get out of these recognizable archetypes.

It's not like I didn't understand it. I personally favor rangers, rogues, and warlock/necromancer types, (and elementalists, if I could find a game that did it right). But if I hadn't played the game yet, what pushed me to choose those character classes right out of the box? Simply that I find them cool?

Probably.

The way I see it, there are three major reasons why someone might pick a class archetype in a game:

Because it's cool. They enjoy the themes and imagery, and while they might find that THIS new version isn't actually cool, they're willing to give it a chance because of bias based on prior experience.

Because it's fun. This requires them to have actually taken the time to experience THIS version, and while some can be convinced that something is fun simply because they find it cool, whether something is actually fun is the true marker of how long they'll commit to doing this activity.

Because it's tactical. Meta-chasers will often mistake "doing it right" as having fun, and will continue to run treadmills and pick options they've long since soured on, if they ever truly found them enjoyable or cool at all, but for many, simply being 'the best' is cause enough to make a choice.

So when my friend demands that a ready-made, easily recognizable fantasy archetype like a ranger be available, it's because they find rangers cool. They may, in practice, discover that playing this variant of ranger isn't actually fun, but it'll give them a jumping off point to get into the game and harness their preconceptions of what they're supposed to do, and how they're supposed to do it.

Arguably, "building your own class" was what I was attempting to do by splitting off all the archetypal skills from DND's classes, so that you could purchase them by preference and create your own class, and classes were simply meant to be a lens through which to filter specific archetypal concepts. But what was I actually attempting to achieve by including classes? Was it just that DND had them? Or did I enjoy the concept of a class itself?

From the beginning, I'd wanted Road and Ruin to have classes, but that the benefits of each one would only be felt five levels at a time. A character would move through phases in their life, and have the opportunity to either continue to commit to their archetype, or be given the chance to evolve, and change. A soldier might find religion and become a paladin, and then later a cleric, or the reverse, a paladin becoming jaded and disillusioned, turning to darker powers with more immediate, faithless benefits. I still want the game to have this kind of storytelling component, so I think it's mostly just a question of how I present the option.

But back to the topic of dice.

It feels like every day, I see somebody new posting about how to handle social mechanics. "Social combat" is the generally-held attitude by many; that a conversation is something to be defeated, to be attacked and inflict damage, such that you finally get your way and 'win'. It's a laughable outlook, truly, and probably the main reason why social mechanics haven't been successful as an alternative to play in most ttrpgs.

But like actual combat, we find ourselves at Swords and Ladders: if the situation is resolvable by simply adding your character's modifiers and rolling a die, the same die every time, can the whole game not be foretold by generating an endless string of random numbers? What part of the game actually demands human interaction or intervention?

For many, social encounters are a way to flex their acting chops, the most widely acceptable form of meta-gaming in the hobby. "If you can make a good argument, and act it out, you get advantages toward winning". This, of course, shatters the 'immersion' when, despite this acting, a dice rolls a 1, and whatever vision you had of this conversation goes up in doritos-scented smoke. The same principle holds in combat, when players attempt to "roleplay" their victory pre-emptively to actually confirming it with dice, for much the same kind of results, but at the very least, attacks To Hit and taking damage represents a gradual loss or victory; "social combat" is often one-and-done with a single throw.

But back to dice: What exactly is attempted to be gained through using random number generation in these scenarios?

For one: the separation of player, from character. In order to prevent a player's foreknowledge, acting skill, or other such meta-benefits from influencing the game, dice are used to determine outcome instead. This goes both ways: if a character has been set up to be fluent in a particular skill, one that the player doesn't have themselves, the character, and game, will still be able to function. But, again, if the game and it's characters can simply play itself, through an endless string of random numbers, what exactly is the player's role in all this?

Two things occur to me:

If the game is not a challenge, a puzzle for the player to figure out and attempt to win, then perhaps the game is an experience; a rider has no influence on the operation of a rollercoaster, yet ride it they do, for the sake of the enjoyment the experience of doing so provides them.

If the game and it's story has the ability to go off the rails and crash, perhaps some mechanics are necessary to allow the players to force it back onto the tracks. They understand the concept of the consequences that'd occur if they failed, and can see it happen in real time, but are given the tools to, sometimes, if they're careful, make it right again.

These are difficult conversations. Part of the reason why dice are so antithetical to telling a good story, is because a good story follows reliable and predictable patterns, while a die, by nature, introduces the possibility of chaos. This all means that if you design a game for realism, realism says that in accordance with the odds, you will fail; when you design a game for storytelling, there has to be mechanics that turn those failures into successes, guaranteed. 'Balance' isn't simply modifying the realism components until they're unrealistic, but more fun to experience, it's about providing JUST enough get-out-of-jail-free cards that the players can spend them in pursuit of a good story, without having so many cards that it trivializes having to roll dice or the realism mechanics altogether.

But if the game is designed with difficult, crunchy realism as it's base, even if it's glossed over by narrative-driven, roleplay-enabling GOOJF cards (I need a better acronym...), there still begs the question of what degree of granularity is expected, or allowed for. If the system ALLOWS for the addition of small, granular advantages, then it either makes winning without them impossible, makes them so weak as to be not worth keeping track of in the first place, or limits the number of advantages applied to prevent blowout, thus making stacking of multiple advantages a waste of time.

As a ramble, what if advantages were spendable? I'd been operating on the idea of things like proficiency and specialization as being persistent advantages, with gear being a situational advantage, but things like spells physical actions costing magical and physical exertion if you didn't have ways to blow their statistics for failure out of the water were ways to "bridge the gap" and secure victory, but not in every situation, and not repeatedly and forever. Most would say the idea of spending proficiency or specialization on a per-day basis would be dumb, those are permanent and persistent advantages, but also: shut up, this is a game.

At that point, "spendable resource" at least challenges the player with admin authorization, "are you sure you want to spend this resource?" It enables the RPers to gloss over failures, to a limit, while also challenging the player to be aware of their available resources and not do anything stupid. But it also means that the capabilities of a team are dependent on how many characters, and thus how many resources, they have to spend. Bringing along an army of fresh-faced goons would mean infinite resources, so there'd need to be mechanics, such as 'fear of death' or 'waste of time' that discourages characters from joining such a venture.

The other possibility is tiers of difficulty, octaves where monstrous entities and characters with specialization can operate, with minor fluctuation that's glossable at cost, but that are so wildly unlikely that it'd prove unreasonable, perhaps even dangerous for someone of lesser aptitude to try it, but, importantly, not explicitly forbidding them from doing so. To make the odds so outrageous, and the consequences for the range of failure so severe, as to make most players dismiss it as a possibility and try to find a way around it. Potentially, by finding a specialist, or enlisting the help of a monstrous entity.

As another concept of spendable resources: What if proficiency, as a spendable resource, included the equipment needed to do it? That 'Medicine' as a proficiency, with 3 dots, meant that you not only had the skill to address three-dot injuries, but could spend those 3 dots to solve the 3-dot injuries, while also having the freedom to solve three 1-dot injuries? A location like a supply depot filled with medical supplies might be considered to have three, five, ten dots worth of Medical Supply, allowing you to spend those supplies instead of your resource dots. This handles the idea of micromanage-y supplies as well, by making the supplies needed to perform an action, the skill needed to do the action, and the physical, intellectual, and spiritual energy needed to fudge the results through improvisation or brute force, all operate on the same wavelength, while still being decidedly different variables.

If only some of these resources, like Medicine or Strength, recovered while resting, it would push players to decide what activities take priority, both rewarding and discouraging minmaxing, as effective characters can do the same action all day, but diverse characters can handle a wider array of tasks, switching from one to another as they become exhausted, over the course of sometimes days. Perhaps resting only rewards a number of points, and you choose which proficiencies you want to top up.

Finally, since story beats as a trope-powered predictable event are counter-intuitive to the notion of dice, why not make it a spendable resource too? That performing quests, looting items, making friends, earned you these GOOJF cards, these universal 'exertions' that brute-forced the story?

What if class mechanics also provided GOOJF cards, but only for mechanics that the character could have contributed to? "I wanted to move these boulders, but I don't have the strength," "Well I'm spending this Strength card to give you extra resources, because, you trained with me and the power of friendship." These cards would be spendable in a narratively-cohesive way, and only on allied actions, promoting teamwork, heroic moments, and, importantly, contributions from beyond the grave, if the player in question happened to die while still possessing influential cards.

The question still remains; is spending resources, and having to do bookkeeping for the remaining points you have left, actually fun to do? Perhaps. I'd hope so. It drags the player into the thick of things, deciding what's meaningful to do in the moment, and what's worth saving for later. It opens the door for different players to take the spotlight, for even activities that multiple characters are proficient in, and forces them to get creative regarding the use of their off-brand proficiencies. It helps define some limits on what a character can expect to do in a day, which should be a strong foundation in the development of a balance formula, which still carries with it the risk that a new player not understand when to push a roll and when to leave things be, but at least that consistency will make it easier to pick up than if everything was completely random.

It's definitely something I need to create a test case for. Determining the threshold of skill, in how it affects the likelyhood of a character having to exert themselves vs getting to perform certain actions for free, would be an important step, but also considering how character growth and skill purchase options could take a character into that territory is an important marker as well.

[roadandruingame]

RAR Musings #27: Reputation Mechanics

Starting to progressively lose my mind over dice mechanics, honestly.

Besides the fact that there is no perfect system that checks all the boxes of things I'd like a system to be able to do, spending some time to look into Forgotten Lands more than I already had has tacked the possibility of a "Roll a dice pool and count 6s" as a means to play Road and Ruin, one that's probably a lot better than the adding-based system I began with, but probably not as good as the Outcome Spectrum that I started to move to, but which handles Attribute + Proficiency + Gear activities better.

Forgotten Lands resembles the plans I have or at one point had for Road and Ruin so much for so many mechanics, that a smarter person might recommend that I simply move to play that game instead of continuing to spend almost a decade on a project that can't seem to decide exactly what it is.

I am not that smarter person.

But despite so many similarities, Forgotten Lands also has it's drawbacks. It's rulebook, for how punchy and impactful the page layout and lore fluff is, doesn't have very good chapter flow or lesson priority, and in the case of the actual rules themselves, there are several mechanics that make me frown and go "hm".

Social mechanics, for example. I was quite intrigued that Forgotten Lands would have classes such as Path of the Liar as a Peddler for a non-combatant class, but that it only goes one step further than DND, as "here are advantages you can add to your basic resolution mechanic" contested by "here are some penalties that impact your basic resolution mechanic", while having septuple the number of rules for combat options, means that it really doesn't go far enough in presenting social manipulation as a viable alternative to combat, even if the actual benefits in-game of doing so means it's strongly encouraged.

Take teamwork: having assistance from other characters grants only +1 to +3 in bonus die, with no statistic from the allies making an impact, means that there isn't any more advantage to doing a task with 50 or 100 people, and encourages small groups of adventurers, but it still makes me scowl to see that it isn't at least acknowledged, when later chapters describe making strongholds and filling it with able bodies. But even that is a sight better than the reputation system:

"If you have more Reputation than the current target, gain +1. If you have twice as much or more, gain +2 instead. Here are some examples of actions or activities that can increase your reputation. You have a higher starting reputation the older your character is."

The bit about age is cool, but like...

Is that it???

Granted, this is not a game about social engineering, it's an old-school brute-force RPG about clearing dungeons by any means necessary, and complex social mechanics isn't what it's going for.

But I was so irked by this and attempting to explain what I didn't like about it to others, that I ended up going ahead and just codifying what I wished reputation could do, as a Road and Ruin mechanic. _____________________

A good portion of this plugs into the BELIEFS system and philosophy; Reputation, and Influence as an extension, hinges heavily on exactly what the person becoming influenced actually allows themselves to be changed by it.

Reputation is only meaningful as a modifier if the person who's meant to be observing it feels that it's worth observing.

Strange women lyin' in ponds, distributing swords isn't a valid system of government, after all.

But not only is the actual attitude toward whatever heroic, barbaric, sinister, magical, or splendiferous claims to fame you feel are deserving of respect going to change from person to person, but the extent of the claim will be more believable or less depending on the claim, and that's all accounting for whether they've even heard of you at all.

For instance, simply because you were named the king's champion to fight in a tournament, doesn't mean that some distant rural farming community up in the mountains has caught wind of that. Even if someone had made it out that way, that kind of information, in a town like this, desperate for gossip and news, still may not have made the cut, may have been misremembered, or have been entirely forgotten about. Further, if your heroic deed of slaying a terrible monster in some dank cave somewhere went entirely unobserved, there's no reason why anybody would have found out about it, unless you 1) Told everyone, and 2) Had evidence to back up the claim.

If you don't have bards singing songs about you, there's every chance that nobody is going to give a fling about your wild claims of significance, same as how carrying a badge of office representational of a larger authority is going to depend on how believable that badge is (documents can be falsified), and how the target feels about that authority, by either respect or fear of consequence from disobeying that authority.

In an effort to try to summarize A) Renown, B) Separation from it's source, C) Familiarity, D) Outlook, and E) Current Mood in a sort of 'First Impressions' setter for social interactions going forward, I've set things up a bit like this:

Rolling a d20 under the character's Renown value indicates whether the target has heard of the character.

Add to the Renown value 1-10 based on your deeds having affected the target to a noticeable degree, or subtract 1-10 if the target is especially remote or removed from the center of your deeds.

The difference between the rolled result and the adjusted Renown value indicates how much the target has heard of your deeds.

An Outcome roll, determining +1, +2, +0, -1, or -2, can add even more granularity to this specific individual, as well as alter your Reputation: that is, what the character's Beliefs tell them about your deeds, and whether it flips a Positive Reputation to a Negative one, or vice versa.

A Positive Reputation means that characters feel good about your deeds and working with you, to give you what you want, and enhance efforts to Persuade. Comparatively, a Negative Reputation means that characters feel badly about your deeds, and will feel that working with you will be under duress or threat of consequence, enhancing efforts to Intimidate.

Negotiation can benefit from either positive or negative rep, by using a carrot/stick argument.

Deception, on the other hand, can attempt to enhance or minimize an existing reputation, or generate an entirely new reputation.

You can also borrow reputation, in the form of declarations or badges of office representing others of a greater authority, including using deception to fabricate such badges.

Your final reputation value acts as a gear-based modifier to social-based rolls going forward.

Having a herald or a bard can grant you a Renown bonus, as can boasting of your deeds while waving any evidence under people's noses, or intentionally letting a victim go, so that they may spread word of what transpired to them.

ALT: As an additional rule, one might order their reputational deeds in order of weakest as lowest, and most notable as highest, and everything above the value the target rolled in their "heard of you" roll is something that they've heard about. That is, someone who rolls a 1, has heard of every one of your deeds, no matter how obscure.

Put into practice, it might look something like this:

Gilderoy Goldenloins, Lord of the Golden Globes, is travelling with his party, and entered a remote mountain village. Far from the streets of the capitol, where he's been seen in parades and had his face plastered on posters on every street corner, this is far away, rendering a -6 Renown modifier on his otherwise-12 Renown. Rolling for First Impressions, the shopkeep Gilderoy has eagerly taken his place at the front of the party to negotiate prices with rolls a 3, for a "heard of you" of 3.

Gilderoy has somewhat of a gilded reputation. Savior of the people, knight of the king, and winner of the Tournament of Champions, his reputation is definitely a positive one. But, rolling for Beliefs, the shopkeep's eyes narrow.

"Weren't you that twig what swore allegiance to the king?" "Yes, that was me." "The guy what done fought as his champion in the Tournament of Fates?" "Yes, I was positively radiant, wasn't I?" "And killed the guy who placed against him in a dual of honor?"

"Well hold on," says Gilderoy, a little exasperated. "That was a whole thing, cultists had invaded the tournament, and the whole thing had been rigged so that-"

"I don't put stock in people what don't fight their own battles," the shopkeep scowls. "But I absolutely don't proffer wares with people who kill in an arena of honor. Now, get the fuck out of my store."

Rolling a Critical Failure in Reputation, Gilderoy's "heard of you" 3 is instead multiplied by x2, and flipped, for a -6. This shifts the Outcome spectrum from "success on a 7+, and an additional cost per value beneath 7" to "succeed on a 13+", back down to 10 thanks to Gilderoy's natural charisma and charm. Still, using 3d10 and discarding both the highest and lowest, Gilderoy needs to roll at least two nines for even marginal "success at a cost of 1."

Rolling a 2, 5, and 10, for a final of 5, he does not.

In fact, having 5 or more result below the target constitutes another critical failure. Gilderoy, laying on his charms to try to win over the shopkeep, instead only serves to make the situation worse. Not only are they kicked out of the store, but in the coming days, their reputation in the region will worsen, as the shopkeep complains to his neighbours in the street and pub about this rich kid silvertongued prettyboy who'll say anything to weasel out of his dishonorable actions. It'll take either establishing that the shopkeep is a grump, that nobody in the town takes seriously, to avoid this consequence, or several tasks of helping out the town to raise the locals' outlook on the party. But, given how this was merely a pit stop on the way out of the mountains, and the party wasn't intending on staying for long, chances are, this town will continue to harbor sour feelings about the party going forward.

________________

I'm still working on the ins and outs of this, and this is the 'advanced' rules for reputation. The goal is to get all this mathy stuff sorted out at the start of/between conversations, so that in-character roleplay isn't stuttering starts and stops to figure out game mechanics and advantages, but something like this is necessary if I want a socially-driven campaign to work.

In fact, each of Road and Ruin's nine 'pillars' of play needs to have the option for basic and advanced rulesets, so that players can come to agree on which pillars they'll be using for their game and story, and which ones will be off the table. Each of these pillars needs to be established enough that someone could run a game off of even a single pillar, even if the intention is that they wind up using multiple.

[roadandruingame]

RAR Musings #26: Shifting Perspectives

As I continue to strive for a "perfect system" that covers all the bases I would like for it to cover, while still being simple enough to be player-facing, and even not explicitly require a dungeon master, I've had to do a lot of philosophizing over what game mechanics are even meant to accomplish. This has lead me from an extremely crisp system that simulated results great, but wasn't fun to play or easy to communicate how to operate, to where I am now, with an explicit focus on easily communicated outcomes and variables, where I cleanly lay out the path for players to follow, and don't get all twisted if players choose to interpret the game differently than I necessarily would, but still operate it within suitable parameters.

But more than anything has been the difficulty in accepting input from people who fundamentally misunderstand what I'm trying to do here. Worse still, people who DO understand what I'm trying to do, but expressly, and sometimes venomously, try to tear me and the project down for it, having sometimes frightening outbursts about it.

Take dice, for instance. World of Darkness introduced me to using pools of d10 for gradiant outcome resolution, a breath of fresh air away from Dungeons and Dragons' use of a single d20 for literally everything, with no meaningful situational variables to speak of. I built Road and Ruin to use d10 pools, but for add-up, something I've since discarded for slowness and lack of fun. Still, I work d10s into the system where possible, feeling better about the "roundness" of 10% increments than d20's 5%, including d100s adding more granularity with a "nat100" on a 1%, something truly worthy of the miraculous outcomes gushed over by dnd greentexts and youtube shorts alike. And again, in the use of "3d10" has a certain roundness to it that "roll a d8, d10, and d12" lacks. But if, for whatever reason, you have a raging hatred of d10s and seek to bury them whenever the rules suggest to use them, even digitally, there's not really much more I can do for that person.

Or take the concept of digital dice itself. I'd handwaved away any real concerns about mechanical complexity early on in development, reasoning that ttrpgs would benefit from leaning on the digital pocketry that each and every player brings to the table, but now understand that many players desire, or even require, tactile response from paper, pencil, and dice to feel grounded at the table and improve their enjoyment and focus. That, and the release of Magic: The Gathering cards that would become increasingly suited to an online TCG platform and not to paper, would leave me frustrated with digital, and questioning whether they streamlined the product, or created an incentive program for the developers to add increasingly obtuse mechanics.

Player-facing plot patterns to follow to conclusion, Schrodinger's Secret Door, Exert/Exhaustion, Stable Attributes that don't grow in perpetuity till you're out there punching god, and Monstrous magnitudes that threaten extreme harm to anyone who ever felt good about going up to fight a dragon, have all been angrily shouted down by any number of people. Perhaps none so more than the suggestion of Behavioral Guidance, and making roleplay have mechanics. But a lot of that has had to do with a shift in perspective given player agency.

A good friend clarified to me in an unexpected way, paraphrasing for eloquence, "The amount of misfortune and consequence delivered to a player's character needs to be proportional to the number of mistakes that player made to get to that point. Otherwise, you rob them of agency." It was enough to get me to sidestep the usual cringe I experience at those blistering words, 'player agency'. The 'muh agency!!' crowd had been the most frustrating of debates, incapable of articulating why Perfect Control of their character was required to enjoy a game where you're regularly obstructed by movement speed, health points, or even sight, but it went a long way in explaining exactly where the line was drawn, and what it took to move it.

It's for the same reason that you can't really include a behavioral system putting a character on auto-pilot to 'follow their truth'. Which feels like a shame; people will insist that roleplaying their character need not have any mechanics, but time and again has proven to me that they can't be trusted with it, devolving into psychopaths as soon as you stop jangling the keys of bloody combat in their face for even a moment, Lawful Good alignment or no. But, true to form, players don't like having Muh Agency removed from them when they didn't do anything do deserve it. Including... you know. Having made the character have those traits in the first place.

When redesigning my dice system, I also had to shift perspective on what Normal is. I'd tried to make a Base 0 game, where "Normal" was somewhere up around the mark of 15, so that it could scale as high above that as I needed, but have since changed to a "Base Human" system, using +1 and -1 off baseline, and much more like DND, much to my chagrin. But this philosophy of "baseline", when applied to roleplaying, doesn't completely work. "Health" is a great example of baseline philosophy: you have HP, and then when you make mistakes, you take damage, proportional to the severity of the mistakes that you're making. When you run out, you fall unconscious, and lose agency, but only as a result of those choices.

Roleplaying, though, lacks a baseline that feels good. If I implement a 'sanity' mechanic, where choices that deviate from the character's "moral compass" impose an escalating weakness of conviction and confidence, a penalty on any check to influence others or resist being influence in a way that might shift your moral north, players are just as likely to protest the eventual brainwashing of their character after all their mucking about as they are if you were to subject them to an instant-death trap.

In Musings #24, I discuss the makings of ttrpgs, and I name Relationships as a pillar. Put another way: CONTINUITY, the tendency for the world, and consequences, to persist beyond the arena that they were born in. Dungeons and Dragons feels like it's at one time smelled the passing of the memory of someone who felt Continuity once, 80 years ago as a small child, what with all the healing spells and lack of reputation system and ability to recover literally your entire character sheet given you conk out for an 8hr snooze, but I really feel like Continuity might be the single biggest hurdle that players I've encountered have trouble mounting. This doesn't go for everyone, of course, my experiences are not universal, but Continuity in ttrpgs really feels to me to be the one thing that, if agreed on, could make or break a campaign or game table.

Continuity states that if your character has a belief, or a goal, or a compulsion, that those are simply things that character does. They're the ways that character acts. The player, despite all the promises in the world, can't simply be given the power to say "UH, NUH UH" and simply self-destruct in a moment of rapid-onset psychosis. The more upsetting and antithetical to nature, the more damage that character receives to their psyche. This can be represented as an immediate penalty that lasts for a scene, but accumulates, imparting a penalty based on the current number of stacks -1. Character beliefs, defined by an amount of Conviction value, are lessened by the penalty, and if another character ever works to convince the character of their perspective, and exceeds this lessened value, the character becomes shaken. With repeated working, this may permanently erode the character's Conviction, and even turn them to the side of whoever's convincing them.

Or, this is all a stupid idea! As the mechanic suggests, if players are actually playing to their character's traits, none of this should ever be necessary. The rules would simply not come into play. But, does this simply mean that a character not controlled by the players can NEVER convince their characters of anything the players do not wholeheartedly endorse? Do we not have speed limits and laws, for WHEN someone goes too fast, not IF? I'd love if players played to their character, but what if someone doesn't? Do they simply get kicked from the table for poor sportsmanship? Or does anyone even care?

The same people who scream and moan about 'muh immersion' and 'muh agency' tend to be the same people who tend to act like ttrpgs are a whimsical trip to Disneyworld, a perfect playground for them to run around knocking over trash cans and punching the mascots. Videos and guidebooks abound for recommendations on how to have a "safe table space", with X cards and Session Zeros and the like, but little seems to be done to protect the purity of the game experience itself, instead rigging safety rails and bandaid packs in case any of the players get a booboo while doing sick kickflips off the king's castle. It's not a perfect system, but so long as it exists, players are free to ignore it, or implement it. I, personally, would be really interested in the challenge presented by a campaign that fundamentally shifts the beliefs of my character, in a way that I didn't expect, and while I know not everyone will be, they're free to ignore the mechanic.

I got a bit more jaded with this post, by the end. Ultimately, I'm never going to create a product that will appeal to everyone, or create a rule or mechanic that everyone will use. I began Road and Ruin for me, but part of my shifting perspectives on these things came from realizing the hesitation I was having in wanting to play my own, solo-possible game. I do have more fun playing with friends, even idiots, but it really struck me that I seemed to be unwilling to put the work in to play what I was attempting to make as my own ideal game. I get frustrated aiming to get feedback from players who are patently disinterested in any gameline that isn't kickflipping off the Disney castle using DND's d20, but I hesitate to surround myself with yes-men who tell me my ideas are good. If nothing else, these detractors can act as my rubber duck, for me to bounce ideas off of, and for me to find kernals of my own personal preferences amidst the broken back-and-forths.

Next time, I want to try to brainstorm some more social mechanics. Figure out where that shifting line in the sand is, how much consequence is too much, how is conviction rated, and the like.

[roadandruingame]

RaR Musings #25: Re-trod Ground

In a perchance perusal of game sites and reddit threads, I saw a post asking about the risk of spiritual offense in using a tarot card deck in a mechanic. The comments assured OP that tarot wasn't even explicitly used spiritually, originally just a randomized deck of cards, no more spiritual than the gods influencing how dice might land, but one comment brought up the use of a couple games: The Hidden Isle, which uses existing tarot but with new rules, and Kult, which invents it's own tarot deck.

Given that I'd had the idea for Road and Ruin to have a tarot-esque deck for randomization elements several years ago, I try to keep an eye out for anything that might cleave a little too close to what I considered to be a good and unique idea, and that I might be accused of ripping off.

And so, I would become distraught and tormented by the realization that not only had Kult: Divinity Lost come up with a system that, at least at a distance, was entirely indistinguishable from what I had wanted to do, but that a 4thED remake was kickstarted in 2018, based on the original game, released in 1991, naught but a few years before I was even born.

TTRPG design spaces recommend doing your research on existing options, lest you discover that another game already does what you're looking for a game to do. I'd half-ignored the advise, letting myself be inspired by the gist of rules in other games rather than look too deep into them, but I'd tried to stay independent, convinced I could reason my way into good design first, and then look into other games later to see how to refine it, with examples done right.

I take a lot of pride in original ideas. It usually paints me as an idiot, one way or another. If anybody is like me, my best advise is to use a good idea, either your own or someone else's, as a foundation, but to let your skill in transforming that idea into a masterpiece of engineering speak for itself. Ideas are cheap, and a vessel of potential value, but it takes doing something about it to actually have that value realized.

In any case, after reading into it a bit further, I could see why I'd never heard of Kult before, not in the six years since it's kickstarter, and not in the 33 years since it was first released.

Kult makes a few brutal mistakes in their engineering of what is otherwise a pretty solid idea (if I do say so myself, given that I had the same). Between the insistence that they change all the tarot cards, but still use a 78 card deck of 22 major arcana and 4x suits of 14 cards, their rather esoteric (and sometimes downright opaque) meanings and applications of each card forcing players to check a guidebook for definitions, and their somber, "spiritually-guided" attitude in encouraging the GM to light a candle, play atmospheric-relevant music, create a mental space by clearing your mind, take deep breaths, let go of everyday stress, and focus your thoughts on the narrative, letting the question form in their mind, and open themselves to curiosity, empowerment, and manifestation, all because "a tarot reading can be much harder if not in the proper mood and moment", I would almost believe that doing a switcheroo between a standard tarot deck and the Kult tarot deck wasn't for marketing or merchandising, or for player ease of use or system adoption rate, so much as it was for easing the conscious of the designers, who might have felt using a "real tarot" in such a way bordered on sacrilegious.

Road and Ruin's card system didn't spring fully formed from my brow, either, and is the result of many years of incorporating cool ideas I'd seen, or interpreted, for my own purposes. As such, I can see exactly where such pitfalls could have been avoided, and why I'm actually more confident in my system than ever.

To begin with, I'd thought of keeping characters and campaigns organized using cards long ago. Rather than having endless scrawl on a character sheet, players could show up with cards that represent what making an attack, or casting a spell actually meant for them, and, Magic: The Gathering style, play their cards and resolve the stack in order of initiative, slow characters having to play first, with pre-emptive reactions occurring chronologically first. Enemies could have their info detailed on a card, which would offer players some kind of visual feedback, but the card could be stylized, to help inspire their imaginations, rather than show them verbatim what a ghoul looks like.

I'd played a game of DND's Curse of Strahd, where a fortune teller at the start of the campaign tells your future based on "drawing of cards", and these results influence the events you encounter later in the campaign, leading to unexpected stories and replayability. I thought it a great idea, given how fortune-telling "tells the future", especially for a GM-less game as I was trying to make, to have cards direct the players in a slightly more restricted way.

But I couldn't use tarot cards. Tarot meant purchasing some, and marking them up to reflect what I actually meant them to be, or having to refer to a lookup table for how they work, or learning to actually read them, an insane requirement obstacle for any game.

As a kid I'd watched Card Captors, and loved the idea of cards that represented powers or objects; I even own a deck, found at an anime convention. I'd wanted something a little bit more like that, but when showing some off, someone asked "how would this one be used?". I found I couldn't really say. It was a bad card, and so I needed to refine the system, so that it better guided the players in a more intuitive way. Less, "let me parse the heavens and the spirits for what your fortune reads" occultism, and more of a Rorschach test, "what does this make you think of?" Pop culture elements and personal experiences meant that there was no wrong answers, just tools to help guide the players, and dice to confirm whether the idea held water, or was just a good guess.

For the third inspiration, the map-making game A Quiet Year (that I still have yet to play) absolutely blew my mind with the realization that a standard deck of 52 cards split between 4 suits, could be used to correspond to a year of 52 weeks, with 4 seasons. Apparently it's just one of the most insane coincidences to happen in game design, as a standard deck derives it's 13 cards/suit, from tarot, with 14 cards/suit, with 22 major arcana, and people eventually just decided 13 cards was fine. At any rate, it got me to consider the role of suits, colors, and the cards within them differently, and so, rather than have 4 suits of 13 cards, Road and Ruin has 13 suits, of 4 cards. It's easier to come up with categories, and a small number of examples within them, than it is to come up with few categories, and a large number between them, and while the issue still stands of having to 'remember' what each number and suit combination means, this is solved by a visit to walmart and using a marker on a standard playing deck. I'd appreciate it if people purchased the deck that I made, with the art and such, but I didn't want this system to act as an obstacle in players adopting the system.

A couple years later, I would come up with the Story Roster, a tool for defining narrative flow in an emergent way, and confirm that cards could be added to the roster, their significance increasing if they were ever drawn again. Likewise, an Oracle class of sorts could preemptively draw cards, letting the players see what lies ahead, though not knowing the context until it actually occurred. If a monster was deemed "weak to fire", questing could be done until the reward for a task was a Fire-type card, or a Water-type sought to counter a Fire-type opponent, thus producing a "random, but eventual conclusion" mechanic. Of the Three Pillars mentioned in RAR Musings #24, 'continuity/story' would have a place through the use of a deck of cards, both randomized, yet permanent.

As a "tarot-adjacent" game, Road and Ruin understands that there are no wrong answers, and that everyone at the table contributes to an end experience that is wholly and uniquely their own, changed by the addition or removal of even a single individual. The game may be playable with no GM, such that the active host could not show and the game still go on, but I wanted everyone to feel the sting of a player not being present to continue to collaborate. Likewise, for a player who doesn't mesh with the group's ideals to be soothed into feeling like their time is better spent at a different, more like-minded group, than to feel like their ideas and interpretations are constantly getting voted down. Kult, as a "tarot-alternative" game, feels like it believes that players can make the wrong interpretation, but hopes that you'll get it right someday, the tarot reading a little game for the GM to play, but one that slams the brakes on every other player's engagement while the GM does the reading.

There is still work to do, however. Kult has given me insights into some ways that some cards are flawed, and will need to be updated, but in promoting "create a character/creature/item/location/cult/plot" mechanics that I disagree with, has given me pause to consider whether I'm doing enough to enable those mechanics in my own system. And, as always, the artistic mountain of having to design and paint 52 different cards (at least) sits ever on my backburner.

I should be doing some of those and posting them, somewhere. I should be advertising this and getting credit, somewhere. Ideas are cheap, engineer and refine and apply, ideas are cheap, engineer and refine and apply, ideas are cheap, engineer and refine and apply.

[roadandruingame]

RaR Musings #24: The Pillars, and Foundations

I wrote this like seven times and then a power failure killed it, so now I get to do it again! And keep it brief!

I watched a PointyHat youtube video on Why Travel Sucks in DND, where he outlines such issues as lack of creativity, excessive bookkeeping, random tables, and failing the non-combat pillars of DND, while he presents an alternative he'd worked on for two years and was quite happy with.

It sucks.

It's nothing against PointyHat, or his system, no; it's good that he has fun with it, and that it presents some better, stronger harder faster more reliable and predictable patterns to help structure campaigns that take place on the road.

It simply sucks, in that it is attempting to utilize the three 'pillars' of Dungeons and Dragons, being Combat, Roleplay, and Exploration, which has always been less of a triad, and more of a single, enormously looming single pillar that more resembles flipping the bird to the other two.

Dungeons and Dragons commits some >80% of it's rules and character-building options to combat. If you rolled a bunch of dice, to randomize combatants and equipment, initiative order, attack rolls and damage inflicted, you could still qualitatively read those numbers to determine who had won the combat, the human fighter with the axe, or the goblin with the shortsword. The "order" of the mechanics for combat allows this to occur. "Roleplay" and "Exploration", however, both cap out their rules at "roll a d20 and add your proficiency modifier, if whatever imaginary scenario we're pretending is happening calls for it, and if the number is high enough, You Win."

A system simplifying travel to "a number of events per distance" presents the same mechanics as what a hexgrid entails, just without the risk of player agency and going off-road, because, truthfully, the biggest threat to a good story is the players themselves. A DM might have spent hours, days, weeks, months, or even years curating a perfectly constructed narrative, but all it takes is for one wayward die roll or a player saying "nah, I'm not doing that", and the DM suddenly requires expect-level improv, comedy, literary novelist, and "know it all" expertise that rivals the likes of McGuiver himself to pull a satisfying narrative out of thin air. Preventing player choice from entering the matter of "what direction do we go" might lessen the load of the DM, but it puts the entire experience on rails, tourists at a fantasy-land theme park of the DM's creation, here to ride the rides, and then get out.

A system that neglects provisions and supplies renders those unusable as storytelling elements, when food, supplies, a bath, and good rest in a town are often what propels characters to those locations, on their way to a greater destination, and without them, there's no need to have towns at all. PointyHat himself uses clips from Avatar: The Last Airbender in his video, a series that spends more than half the runtime somewhere out on the road, complaining that they have no food, no money, need a bath, medicine, or some other side objective that requires them to make detours or stops along the way.

But, all of this did manage to pose an interesting question to me, even beyond "what mechanics SHOULD be used for Roleplay and Exploration":

What are the pillars of TTRPGS themselves? If a game has no combat, what replaces it? Is roleplay a universal element to ttrpgs? If PointyHat's system "recommends tying events between locations together with story", but otherwise has no mechanics for how to actually do that, then clearly that's an important element as well, but what defines Exploration? If there is combat, does defeat end in death, some other consequence, or no consequence at all, and if there are variable consequences, who decides what they are, and if there are no consequences, then what's even the point?

After thinking about it for a while, I decided that ttrpgs consist of three pillars, that I'm calling the Three R's:

RELATIONSHIPS - Rather than exclusively between people, Relationships can also be called Story; that is, anything that ties consequence and causality to the experience. Falling off a cliff, and taking damage from the fall, is a relationship, the same as failing to deliver a package and losing a merchant's trust is a relationship, or being able to translate runes, that leads you to a secret room that's filled with treasure. This element is singularly ignored by most tabletop RPGs, instead putting more work into a box of tools that you can use to Cause, or help bandage up after an Effect, but very little that actually ties one thing to another in a way that forms a story.

REALISM - Also called predictability and reliability, these are facets of the game that can be trusted to work the same way every time. Need one scrap of food per day, and travelling for seven days? That's seven pieces of food. Fire burns, water douses, grass grows, birds fly, sun shines, and fighters hurt people. This reliability is the bulk of 'eurogames', and heavily prioritize player skill over randomness like 'ameritrash' does. Predictability and consistency is necessary in a fantasy world especially, in order to communicate to the players what kind of moves are even possible to do, so that the fighter doesn't think they can 1v1 a five-tonne dragon. This is also the element of resources, where a resource spent or lost consistently has predictable consequences and effects: using a bandage stops bleeding, for example.

RANDOMNESS - Also called chance, and statistical probabilities, this element ends up bearing the brunt of most dice- or card-oriented games, though the extent of the randomness gives rise to manipulation of odds, without ever fully eliminating them. This 'gamble' means players who understand the odds, who can alter them with certain variables, and who understand and covet the value of success, however slim the chances, can take a plunge, and still be surprised at an outcome. This is also the element of excitement.

What's important about these pillars, and what makes them different from DND's, is that none of them exist independently. They are each of them intermingled and entwined with the other: a story that carries no risk of failure or too much reliability is boring, and a random dice throw with no promise of lasting, cascading consequences, or resource lost or gained, becomes a game of Snakes and Ladders, randomly generating values until someone is declared the winner.

And so, if you were to boil these three pillars down again, into a singular equation for what makes a ttrpg what it is? How do players engage with the game, that makes the activity different from, say, chess, or monopoly, or a game of snakes and ladders?

"A roleplaying game is about inventing theories, that are then proven, or disproven, by dice, that have their outcomes manipulated by previously-occurring characters and events."

This is it. This is all DND is, and all any other ttrpg will ever be.

Returning again for a moment to the title of this piece, there is one other element of ttrpgs that is, generally, indisputable: the role of a Game Master.

Granted, there are other GM-less games. But in every circumstance, there is someone who took the player's potential actions in mind, and constructed a hypothetical where that player's theorized action either succeeded, or failed, and effectively hallucinated a world into being that would be affected by said attempt. In the case of "choose your own adventure" games, players are presented with predetermined choices, that then lead to predetermined outcomes, written by a writer, who takes the role of the GM in such a case.

Where there are the Three Pillars of Relations, Realism, and Randomness, there is also the foundation of what holds those pillars up: the contributions of the players themselves, the willingness to contribute, and the acceptance of the result.

Time and again, I've seen ttrpg tables collapse into juvenile bickering, as a result of one of these four elements. That the story is weak, or the characters don't matter, or that the rolls are too random, or not random enough, that the GM fudges dice, that resource-tracking is boring, or that there's not enough consequences for those resources or the player's actions. And somehow, all of this responsibility tends to fall squarely on the GM's shoulders, the sole Atlas carrying the entire production on their back. If the GM falters, or fails to appear, there simply is no game. It's over. Some players help pick up the slack, take on responsibilities to lighten the load, but the load is always and forever the GM's.

We end up in situations like PointyHat's two-year experiment with travel mechanics, and while he cleaves closely to the three pillars above, he still defaults to the three DND pillars in the end. His usage document spews dozens of great storytelling-based examples for each of the Combat, Exploration, and Roleplay event types, and mixes of the two, but in the end, it's still JUST HIM coming up with these story narratives out of whole cloth. Remove him from the scenario, and you wind up with players who are incapable of playing the game on their own.

It's part of why, now more than ever, I feel like ttrpgs need to turn toward game mechanics that, at least in part, bring the players in to the responsibilities of running the game, and that can reliably produce certain results without some kind of dice-addled soothsayer reading the knucklebones like the portents of the gods in the hopes of producing an experience that players will reliably want to actually DO, over other entertainment alternatives like a videogame or movie. Or, indeed, any other medium that doesn't require them, the consumer, to contribute whatsoever to the betterment of their own experience, content to remain lax, and demand their personal dancing monkey for the evening pick up the pace and put a little more energy into it.

I'm personally pretty proud of Road and Ruin's Story Roster system; about as proud as PointyHat is about his, at any rate. But I'm proud of it as a system that aims to completely replace some GM responsibilities altogether, not just act as a series of instructions that ultimately ends in a need for GM creativity itself. I'm a ways away from it being done, and still hesitant about whether it should include example items and prebuilt characters for every single card in the Roundtable Deck, but at the very least, I feel like I've gotten closer to the core of what a ttrpg needs to be than in other products I've seen.

[roadandruingame]

[roadandruingame]

RaR Musings #23: Non-Euclidean Defenses

A reddit post recently asked about both the mechanical and narrative ways there might be a shield or armor that is more effective against high-damage attacks, than low-damage ones.

It's an interesting idea. The Holtzman shielding in Dune works this way, as a kind of non-euclidean barrier: the more potential energy entering the shield, the more the shield resists. The fact that lasers cause random-epicenter explosions aside, hard sword swings also failed to bypass the shield, but knives, moving slow enough, could pass under the velocity gate set up to ensure air could permeate the barrier and allow the person to breathe.

In games, there are sometimes a distinction of two styles of fighting: heavy, slow, high-impact attacks, that splinter shields and shatter bones, and smaller, light jabs and slashes, focusing on speed and the number of attacks, rather than the force. The latter of these get around evasion via overwhelming number of attacks, aiming to get in at least some hits, and often will have effects such as bleeds or poisons that apply on successful hits, but such attacks are usually ineffective against strong armor.

In Road and Ruin, Steadfast represents a kind of morale-based armor, designed explicitly to protect players from the first major blow in a battle, to allow them to reassess their investment, without protecting them fully from, say, jumping off a cliff or getting crushed by a boulder. Incoming damage is reduced down to the nearest multiple of remaining SF: therefore, if struck with 5-7 damage with 4SF remaining, you would instead simply take 4, and lose your remaining shield. 8-11 damage would take out your shield, and spill 4 points of damage to your health points, which can be lethal in some cases, but 1 damage would simply inflict 1dmg, reducing your remaining SF to 3. Thus, a flurry of weak attacks has their value retained, where as a single powerful attack can be (at least partially) absorbed by the Steadfast barrier. But I felt tempted to try to adopt the Dune barrier somehow.

I imagine a shield, that rolls a number of 6-sided die equal to the amount of damage the shield is receiving. On any 6, (perhaps a 5+?), the shield wholly and completely absorbs ALL the damage of the attack. A flurry of 1dmg attacks stands to get almost all of the damage through, whereas a single, powerful hit of 8dmg is almost certainly going to be absorbed, and simply bounce off.

While this system is definitely more in favor of Road and Ruin's lower damage values (1-8dmg on attacks, generally), it could possibly be adopted by a higher-damage game, by rolling 1d6 for every 2dmg.

As to what the point would be: introducing a new mechanic that explicitly limits one form of build, while benefitting another, helps to encourage a diversity of characters in a group, as well as helps to discourage minmaxing. This system could easily simply say "Attacks that deal more than 3dmg have no effect", but that's not especially exciting, and doesn't do anything to produce a sliding scale of effectiveness, rather than just a blunt binary threshold.

I'll probably find some way to sneak it in to some of Road and Ruin's robotic enemies, but it needs testing to see if it's an actually enjoyable or understandable mechanic.

[roadandruingame]

RaR Musings #22: Tested

I took the opportunity offered by a few friends to run a Road and Ruin playtest. It single-handedly renewed my loathing of ttrpgs: players are the single biggest vulnerability in a tabletop roleplaying game, and between forgetting what day it was, double booking their free time by mistake, double booking their free time ON PURPOSE, and lacking the energy, the creativity, or the enthusiasm to play for long, I was reminded why I wanted to make Road and Ruin capable of single-player play.

Such designs ended up working out for the better, though. Despite attempting to play pretend as three separate players (not characters; that would have been easy enough), I stripped the rules explanation down to the most bare bones needed to play the game. Surprising myself, that turned out to not include character creation, the play element I had spent the largest amount of time designing and reworking over the years. When all you need is the situational recognition of "a rogue, a paladin, and a washed-up oracle walk into a bar", it doesn't so much matter what all the stats of everyone are, and content-generation tools were predictable enough that they could be used to generate character stats when, and if, they ended up being relevant. Each character only had 1/9 attributes defined by the end of a rickety 40-minute intro session, made all the slower by me having to play the game essentially solo, but not in any way delayed by having to do character creation, or made more rocky by the fact character creation hadn't really occurred.

If I'd wanted to improv an entire on-rails fantasy themepark by myself for the amusement of people who'll blow off the event altogether, I'd have bit the bullet and DM'd a game of Dungeons and Dragons.

___________________

So, what else did we learn.

Firstly, that I should probably take my own [repeated] advice and simplify the character creation/progression elements of the game. If the game can run purely on generative elements, "It Does/Does Not" confirmation of theory, and extremely loose character definitions, then doing the legwork for attributes and subattributes, 60+ dual-proficiencies and skill specializations, and using xp to buy spells and abilities up a chain of ranks doesn't really seem as important.

Second, that despite how easily content could be hallucinated by random prompt and adjusted via +/- 1 of any stat, I really do need to get started on a catalogue of content that can be quickly and readily accessed by players who aren't as attuned to the game's themes and balancing.

Being able to easily grab hold of some example creatures, like a fox or an elephant, to +/- my way to a fantastical monster statblock, was part of what gave me the confidence to try to fly the story into that of a monster fight (even if it wasn't in the cards. Literally, the cards deconfirmed my theory). But characters of other races, or more specific class builds? Generating environments, like a cave network? A system for magic items, or artifacts of indeterminate narrative importance? Any amount I hesitated in coming up with random results for such things would be multiplied five, ten, a hundredfold for players unfamiliar with the system, or unfamiliar with ttrpgs or creativity in the first place. Granted, this "GM responsibility" is often handled by ttrpg players and game masters, but I wanted to smooth that out as much as possible.

______________

As an additional note to the above: I see a lot of ttrpg designers in forums and on reddit bandy about the notion of how martial classes are meant to be able to compete with spellcasters (spellcasters were never supposed to compete with martials, the fact they can is a design flaw), and how to make things feel more impactful, more rewarding tactically, and less prone to rng failure.

I'm feeling that when I go over the character creation/skills section of the game, that there needs to have more 'big' moments: that you have multiple expensive features to spend a limited resource on, but that said resource isn't so limited that you couldn't use it more than once. Players should feel rewarded and cool for spending those resources, but it shouldn't simply be "press button to win" type designs, either. It's something I'm going to have to think about some more.

[roadandruingame]

RaR Musings #21: The Crossroads of Simulation, Storytelling, and Fun

I'd had this one on a tab for a minute, because a lot of things happened and I've had a lot of time to think about things.

Exertion has done a lot to emblemize division between major game design philosophies.

On the one hand, a simulation-based game engine was necessary for a GM-less game, where creatures of theoretically infinite size difference could interact, in a way that everyone at the table can collectively intuit and agree on.

But, it did mean a lot more interaction with double-digit math, and 1m-wide tiles are far too granular to make the foundation of a "1 stamina = 1m movement, or swings 1 Size of weapon, for 1 damage" environment. Doing that math isn't fun, and held back use of storytelling as a driving force.

I transitioned to approximation-banding, and made only Tiring activities cost Exertion, shrinking the numbers so it was more about What Who was doing and Why, How, Where, and When it was supposed to happen if it wasn't Here. It meant you didn't actually even need a grid, or a map, instead keeping note of locations and settings by narrative impact, rather than how many spaces you had to move your little plastic man around the playmat.

But with the loss of specifics, questions about multiattack arise; how exhausting is it to attack more than once in a 3sec span? Anyone should be able to do it, and skill should have a positive impact, but how much does it change per weapon? It gets a little bit videogamey, in a completely different way than simulation is gamey, and in a way that has no mechanical consistency, leading to disagreements at the table.

More than that, are either of these systems even fun? While I have enjoy prompt-based creativity, and get a thrill when numbers come up in sub-1% statistical probabilities, that doesn't mean everybody will. And however it runs, it needs to be fun enough and easy enough to prevent players from suffering creative and emotional burnout, which leads them to becoming hesitant about sitting down for a session.

But I also, absolutely, abhor the recent trend of DND enthusiasts ignoring all the rules in favor of goofing off with friends. Having fun with your friends is good. Having fun with your friends while you play a game is great. Changing the rules of a game so that you have more fun playing it is fine. But dismissing the rules of a game wholesale to the point that they make zero impact on ANYTHING you can do? Why even pretend to play the game then?

Tabletop rpgs, unlike videogames, are work. Videogames don't progress unless you press buttons, but ttrpgs make you have to imagine the buttons and what they do, and require everyone present to agree on what the button actually does when you press it. Inventing these buttons has to be consistent, everyone should understand what happens when you press them, and everyone should enjoy the process of both making the buttons, and the fictional pressing of them.

You need to have fun, but simulation and storytelling are important for a game too.

___________________

I talked with two people of note lately.

The first was a prospective playtester, who (apparently, according to a third party) had no real interest in Road and Ruin, but still pursued me around multiple games of Warhammer 40k and ASOIAF to ask questions about it. And, as I so often do, I fell in love with my own game all over again. It's rapidly becoming my decade-long magnum opus, and everything it does is designed to excite me just as much as it is to entertain someone else. We ended up building him a Tatzl Plague Doctor, a plague-rat harpy unaffected by most diseases it carries, who travels the world transferring the diseases of others to himself, before bottling the diseases, and a Goblin Alchemist, part vampire, and pursuing science to one day rid themselves of the otherwise incurable disease. And, thanks to RAR's Story Roster, what is otherwise a nearly statistically-impossible task to discover at random, is given several boosts in probability, without guarantee, thanks to being a personal quest.

The second, was my dad. I owe my introduction to fantasy and sci-fi entertainment to him, and though he's never played a ttrpg, he's heard me complain about mechanics and players for years. His is the opinion that making a game that tries to do everything is senseless, and one should create a game to do one thing, specifically, and well. Many would agree with him. But his is also the opinion that if you force a player who enjoys Dungeons, to fight Dragons, that they'll absolutely hate it, and throw a tantrum over not getting to play the thing they joined the game for, and vice versa. A game that blends Dungeon players and Dragon fighters only stands to disappoint both parties, who will always end up playing something they don't want, eventually.

It's absurd, honestly.

Ttrpgs are a social fabric. Bringing the people who enjoy two different things together, to alternate their enjoyments, only strengthens the hobby, and ensures that it's easier to find people to play. By bringing this alchemist playtester into the fold, I get to see someone enjoying something they have an interest in, and work to make their quest come true. By joining with me, he gets to come along on my quest, and adding a little sprinkle of creativity that I'm not personally responsible for is just the kind of prompt I like in prompt-based creativity. The session becomes collaborative, between two or more people enjoying themselves, rather than confrontational, or one-sided legwork, which plagues the GM-dependent scene.

It's silly to disparage people on their preferences, but it's sillier to declare that other players couldn't possibly have something to improve your experience.

______________________

To that end, I think I have to lean heavier on variant rules.

Other games have them, but often, they're a little twist of math that alters the outcome slightly, or even devoid of mechanics at all.

No, I task myself with the rather silly task of creating a Simulation ruleset, and a Storytelling ruleset, based on the same variables and producing similar results. Players of simulation-like grid-based bookkeeping combat, as well as storytelling-focused, theater-of-the-mind, vague interactions, can come together and use the ruleset that they prefer, in order to get to play those Plague Doctor harpies and Vampire Alchemists.

As some say, the rules shouldn't get in the way of having a good time. But the rules should BE what someone USES to have a good time. And since my idea of a good time is different from someone else's, I should be just as welcoming of their preferences, as I ask that they are of mine.

The real risk is overcomplexity. Players already don't like having to learn one set of rules, much less variants of the same rules. There's every possibility that they balk when faced with the possibility of having to learn multiple types of rules for what amounts to the same game. But then, that's what the rules-lite version is for: the opportunity to completely ignore anything complex.

[roadandruingame]

RaR Musings #20.1: Reworking Proficiency

So, in the Add-Up-And-Divide system, you'd roll (attribute)d10 + (Proficiency1+Proficiency2)xSpecialization. The Xd10 represented high, but random, influence, whereas proficiency and specialization represented flat, and guaranteed influence. But, as we've covered before, that's a lot of math, and dice rolling, to do often, and ends up not being a lot of fun.

The new Outcome dice system says "Roll a d10, that's 50% Fail, 50% Win. Getting +/-1 from threshold makes it close, and gives you a bonus/additional cost, while getting +/-5 from threshold gives a significant failure, or significant success. Proficiency slides the threshold down, increasing the Win window, while situational penalties and requirements Increase The Difficulty, widening the Fail window."

The new Exertion system from Musings #20 also recovers an amount of points on every 10 spent whenever you take a moment to breathe and walk off the activity you were doing, based on your proficiency.

But, jackofal characters who have a ton of Proficiency1 skills only recover 2 points on the 10. It feels bad, and while it lets you make more tactical plays using the guaranteed numbers, it's too low to feel good, but high proficiency is too high to make sense too.

Since character attributes have shifted away from being a high-but-random influence, to "+/- 1 for every point your character's attribute exceeds/fails to meet the required amount" (aka, a flat but guaranteed influence), maybe proficiency should trade places with it, and become the high-but-random influence?

It sounds counterintuitive. Already, feedback is that proficiency should be a consistent and guaranteed reward, not random, but there are some things we can do about it.

Roll a die for your proficiency: Prof1 is a d4, Prof2 is a d6, Prof3 is a d8, Prof4 is a d10, Prof5 is a d12.

If two active proficiencies apply, roll for each, and take the higher.

If specialized, roll double for each die, and take the single higher.

This means that instead of Prof1 = 1, Prof1 = 1-4. Prof1+Prof1 = 2d4, take the highest, which is a 62% chance of a 3 or 4, instead of 2. Instead of Prof5+Prof5=10, it's 2d12.

If Prof1 has a 25% chance of earning a 1 and 2Prof1 has a 6.25% chance of earning a 1, that's a massive 75-93.75% buff to jackovals. Comparatively, 2Prof5 only has a 43.75% chance of getting a 10 or higher. That said, 2Prof5 only has a 1.38% chance of earning a 1, down from 8.3%, and even Prof5+Prof1 drops that 8.3% down to 2.08%. So, even though randomizing proficiency sounds worse, it's actually a massive increase for non-specialists.

__________

As a quick aside, a cursed idea: What if you rolled EVERY proficiency stage. Prof5 isn't just 1d12, it's also 1d10, 1d8, 1d6, and 1d4, and take the highest. It's actually very good for insulating you against poor rolls, and rolling two of every one of those for 2Prof5 is insane, but it significantly increases the likelihood that you actually collect a value representative of your skill.

Specialization would be even more insane, doubling all those dice again.

I'll try to playtest this with some groups, but I can't imagine that it'll be very popular.

But, when applied to the idea of the Exertion pool, it's actually not bad. Even 2Prof1 gives you a solid chance of 3-4 refund on Breather, up from 2, but I wonder if anything below 5 points refund is considered a waste.

It might also be the issue is how many Exertion points you actually get. 30 points means you can only Exert three times before you're out, and if you only refund 5 points each time, that's only 15 back. That's an exertion down to 5, Breather back to 10, and exert down to 0, and you're done for the next (checks watch) 36 hours. Jesus.

So maybe I double back? Maybe Exertion IS the sum of your Physical stats? Or maybe 30x your Endurance instead of 10?

This system was mostly meant to be the default state without any skills or other modifiers in play. What if, earning a Physical-based skill, gave you an additional +1x multiplier? So Endurance 3 x10 would be 30, but if you earn a Physical skill, that's x11, up to 33? Being a warrior who picks 5 Physical skills would be x15, so up to 45, and they would recover ~26 points resting per day instead of 21. Ten physical skills would be x20, so 60 Exertion. What would happen if it was Physical-Sum, having a baseline ~7, or 70 points? Five physical skills would be x15, or 105, ten physical skills would be 140. At minimum, Physical3, you're looking at 3x10, and at maximum, Physical15, you're looking at 15x10. But with those kinds of numbers, what do you even need to exert yourself for? Almost everything should be a cakewalk, being a dragon maybe? What value would rerolling the Outcome die even give you at that point? Would even moving be considered a tiring activity?

Rewind a little. What if, Endurance scaling, but +10x multiplier? Endurance 3x10 30 would become Endurance 3x20 60 with just one physical skill. Bad idea. What about a +5x multiplier? 3x10 30 would become 3x15, 45, with one physical skill. Five physical skills would be 3x35, 105, and ten physical skills would be 3x60, 180. That also sounds high, that's superhero shit.

So, work reverse: What number DOESN'T sound high? How many times should a normal person, and a hero, be able to exert themselves before a Breather is necessary, and what amount of effort is required before you're feeling the effects the next day?

Should negative amounts of exertion be possible? Spirit Points work that way, for now, where a character can have 3SP, 0, -3, -6, -9, -12, and -15, with a penalty at each stage. It suffers from the same issue as what the exertion system used to do, where having a permanent penalty isn't really fun, but SP recovers quickly and can only dip into negatives via supernatural means, so it's probably fine.

Rewind again. What if repeated exertion cost escalating amounts? 10 first, but then 20, and 30, etc, until you stop? It helps chew through resources faster, that's for sure, and is another layer of why a non-martial character can't hold a candle to a true athlete. The bigger the pool gets though, the more numbers you have to add up when taking a breather. If a breather is meant to take a round though, it gives you something to do? Your turn isn't 'wasted', you're doing something, even if it's book keeping.

If that's the case, maybe a +2x multiplier. 3x10 30 becomes x12 36, x14 42, x16 48, whereas 2x10 is 20, x12 24, x14 28. Actually, that sounds low, I don't think I was accounting for how explosive having higher Endurance actually is. Maybe a physical skill just, gives you +10 exertion pool? Gain a skill, earn the resource to cast the skill an extra time, learn more skills to cast any of those skills an extra time. Mana and Spirit could probably benefit from this too. Even if you're not planning on using that skill, it represents bonus stats.

But maybe +10 is too high. A lvl 5 martial character can know 5-10 skills, that'd be 5-10 extra exertions, which feels like a lot. Getting +5 per skill means you have to actually pursue physical skills for the extra exertion. Alongside class features that can grant bonus exertion, that might be more reasonable. It's gonna rely heavily on how much you get back from proficiency during a breather, though. See the randomizer statisics.

As per usual, I'm gonna have to test it in action. It's... not easier, exactly, but it is a positive system rather than a negative one, so that makes it easier to remember and more fun to engage with. We'll have to see.

[roadandruingame]

RaR Musings #20: Exertion Sucks

It does!

It's not that it doesn't work, it does, but it's simply not much fun as a game.

It commits two cardinal sins of game design, especially for ttrpgs. First, it's a lot of bookkeeping. A resource tool that you dip into every turn, and can recoup based on proficiency in the action you were doing, recover passively each span of time, and inflicts penalties based on threshold, is a rollercoaster of up-and-down values to write and erase on your little scrap of paper. It'd be fine for a videogame, but NOT for a pen and paper game.

Secondly, as a negative penalty, players might dip below the first threshold, "uh oh! You have a penalty for being worn out, tee hee, but rest and you can be okay again!" But then over time, they don't be okay again. In fact, they dip below the next threshold, and the next, and the next, as they get progressively more exhausted. Again, this sounds great, and does exactly what I want it to (that is, wearing a character out over the course of a day, in such a way that they retreat to recover or commit to great risk, and feel sore the next day even). But when there's a penalty in play more often than there isn't, it doesn't feel good. Players notoriously "forget" any mechanic that doesn't benefit them in some way, and the more fun they're having, the less mechanics they'll remember, as they get swept up in the whirl of make-believe, and the time between "I think of a thing" and "I say the thing" gets shorter and shorter. Reminding them about this penalty they have to add on kills the mood.

These two things also have the added benefit of punishing players later on for mistakes they made earlier, making it difficult for them to correlate the Cause and Effect of their mistakes, failure being the result of Death By A Thousand Cuts. A new player might blow all their resources in the first ten seconds, only to be told they need to suck for the rest of the game; Gloomhaven showed me that in real time, as more than half the intros I ran had players fail to realize the game wasn't just the one room, but a second room, and even a third. Almost all of those games, and even my own intro to the game, resulted in they, and I, becoming exhausted before the dungeon was over, and when you're out, you're out, wait for the other players to finish cleaning up.

______________

I recall what I'd said in Musings #11, about the stress mechanic that progressively inhibits player agency over time, flipping into a bravery/enablement system. Players would be commended for their bravery if they took a chance and lost, and celebrated if they took a chance and won. I figure I should take my own advice, and consider how to design a decay system in such a way that feels natural to play, even if it means inhibiting action somehow.

But like I say there, I'm fiercely against the attitude of Killing Your Darlings. If a system sounds cool, but isn't, chances are it was just implemented wrong, rather than the idea itself being unsalvageable.

Exertion, as a system, should observe a few important factors.

This is the resource that heroes, athletes, and acrobats use. Whatever it ends up being, wizards and wordsmiths shouldn't benefit the same way, or as much.

Proficiency should have some kind of interaction with recovery. Characters doing what they're good at should be able to do it essentially all day, but with a range of 0-10 potential proficiency points, and specialization stacks on top of that, what value is there for jack of all trades?

Excessive exertion should carry to the next day, especially for those weak or unused to hard labor. Just because you fight a dragon today, doesn't mean you can fight one every day in a row.

Character should run the risk of getting tired mid-combat, creating a vulnerability to strike at, and rewarding cautious play.

I considered a dice pool system, where you commit bonus dice from a resource pool in a bid to roll higher numbers. I hate dice pool/count highest systems, because they're slow, but mostly because they're inconsistent. This system might have worked for the Xd10, add-up-and-divide system from before, but doesn't really work for the 1d10 Outcome system I'm pivoting to. It's also Death By A Thousand Cuts, as the math and value of an extra die doesn't mean a whole lot to a player not aware of the statistics. World of Darkness uses a system like this, with their Willpower resource pool, where spending a point of Willpower gives you three extra dice; with a 30% of a "success" per die, three die essentially equates to one extra success, +/- 1. But because the dice are rolled in isolation, not sequence, that just means 30%, three times, not 90%. The system is meant to evoke the feeling of slowly losing morale, but more often than not, players forget they even have the resource at all, since most of their dice rolls succeed, even without some extra help. There's also no penalty for low or no Willpower remaining, or a consistent way to lose Willpower outside of spending it, but lots of methods for gaining some or even all of it back, so at the end of the day, it doesn't really feel particularly impactful.

I could make Exerting a numerical bonus, but even that's inconsistent. The d10 Outcome system already benefits enormously from proficiency and specialization, and there isn't a lot of room for bonus numbers, flat or randomly generated. Maybe that's a difficulty with proficiency, and I should revisit that, but no: simply adding numbers isn't a memorable mechanc.

I could rejig all the math of the game, so that you outright suck if you DON'T exert yourself. 'Exhausted' could be the default state, and you spend Exertion dice to not suck, thus becoming 'exhausted' if you ever run out. But I also don't look forward to the notion of blanket-applying a "you suck" modifier to the entire game's math just to justify it. Players won't understand why the numbers seem so low, even if you tell them it's to make Exertion make the numbers high. But do I really want Exertion to be the deciding factor for a skill's success, not proficiency? And would I have to split the math, so that it only applies to Physical actions, or would Mental and Social be under the same you-suck blanket, and have to rely on a Physical resource? That sounds even worse.

So, let's break this down a little. Players should be capable of three, not necessarily separate states:

Normal. With only proficiency and specialization to influence their odds.

Exerting. Using up a limited resource, in order to amplify or increase their odds.

Exhausted. Something should happen if they run out of Exertion, or are asked to spend some and no longer have any.

Resting. I lied, there are four states. Not exerting yourself, but in a state of rest that allows you to recover faster, or at all.

Based on that, maybe we use a +/0/- binary state. Neutral, exertion +, tiring -.

_________

After thinking about it a lot, I think this is probably the best play.

Characters get an Exertion pool based on either their physical Endurance attribute, or the sum of three physical attributes, as before. The pool is 10x the value, so if human Endurance is 2-3, we're looking at 20-30.

"Exerting" is a purchase state: you spend 10 points, and are allowed to roll a physical-based die roll again, taking the higher value, as a positive state.

This means that "exhausted" is a neutral state, where you have no more Exertion left to spend.

Inversely, a "tiring" action is anything that should wear you out, especially being done repetitively or with great strain. This forces a second roll, taking the lower value of the two, with a +5 Difficulty penalty. If an action only becomes tiring when done for a long time, this can come into play the second round the action is active. Exerting yourself neutralizes both the dice roll and the extra difficulty.

This means that performing a tiring action is a negative state. While there's nothing forcing a character to spend Exertion, the positive state, to neutralize the negative state, it does SUBSTANTIALLY reduce the likelihood of success while proficient, and makes it just about impossible without skill.

When you take one round to do nothing but recover, a Breather, you recover points equal to your proficiency for each die you spent over the span. If you had Proficiency3+Proficiency5, you would recover 8 points on every 10 you spent.

I want to have some kind of At Rest state, where you recover faster than the passive recovery over time, but it creates this kind of inverse math that I don't like. Like, if you recover 1pt/4hr Span, but can roll one Endurance die per span resting, then an END1 character recovers 6+1d10 per day, whereas an END3 character recovers 6+3d10 per day. On paper, that looks like recovering more for having a higher endurance, but it's actually proportionally less than the END1 character, who recovers 100% most of the time, but can only exert themselves once per day; the END3 character only statistically recovers a little over half per day resting, and while that means they get more exertions back than the other character, it doesn't FEEL like you do.

_________________

Making another post about that proficiency junk.

[roadandruingame]

RaR Musings #19.2: Market Saturation

There are WAY more ttrpgs out there than anybody realizes. I don't think it's possible to not be surprised by the knowledge that itch.io has 40 000 ttrpgs listed, 75% of which are available for free. But I would hazard to guess that most of them fall into one of three categories, all of which contribute to bloat for different reasons:

One Page Rules. There's nothing inherently wrong with this game format, but the speed of development and shallowness of play mean that it very rapidly blows out the listings. Too many options only bewilders people looking for something to play, and while they might pick one at random, learn it, and play it, and have fun, all in the span of an afternoon, they all start to blur together, until it's this insurmountable wall of products that really don't contribute anything meaningful to the medium.

Reinventing The Wheel. Arguably Road and Ruin can fall into this category, but a lot of them are simply making a game for the sake of it. They aren't really game designers, and they bombard rpg boards and forums with questions like "does this dice system make sense?", "I have an idea, does anyone know if it's been done before", and so on. Generic Medieval Fantasy RPG #23,489 is hardly going to make much of an impact on things, and due to either an overfamiliarity with a single product, never having played another product, or possibly only ever having played a single game session, they end up applying a lot of their resources toward reinventing things that have already been made a hundred times over, believing themselves to be some remarkable visionary.

D20 Reskins. This is a little like reinventing the wheel, but I personally loathe this more than the other two. The D20 system that originated in Dungeons and Dragons isn't a bad system, and it's had some 40-50 years and dozens of designers and hundreds of thousands of players to refine it into a game that is just complicated enough and just easy enough to learn and play that it still dominates the market. But for the love of god, stop reskinning DND. It's infuriating that there is still so much fanatic loyalty to a game system that is, often, and often intentionally, underdeveloped and pushed out for a quick buck, and prospective designers who take that disappointment and direct it toward a new DND, one with new classes (they're the same), new enemies (they're the same), new places, items, spells, or mechanics. The world of D20 reskins and DND homebrew is a massive wasteland, players relying on influencers and streamers to tell them how to play and sifting through the ashes for the occasional nugget of good game design, that just gets lost in the noise of everyone cannibalizing a broken and underdeveloped product for whatever scrap of attention and ad revenue that they can get. A couple decades of "don't worry, YOU make the game!" will do that to you.

Any of the above that are successful are rarely the result of good design. OPRs like Goblin With A Fat Ass are more about shock value, getting a giggle out of entertainment junkies who flit from one novelty to the next, desperate for anything that can be sensationalized for even a microsecond. I've heard of maybe 8 "Avatar the Last Airbender" ttrpg projects in the last couple of years, and that's just since I started reading places that they're posted in, and half of any "brand new ttrpg" based on a recognized license is just a D20 reskin, hastily cobbling together any mechanics like guns or driving that aren't readily available in DND.

No, the ones that are successful are the result of clout. DNDtubers and streamers who command an audience of thousands are a great source of recurring ad revenue and product pushing for anything anyone wants to pay them to sell, and the hit-the-ground-running success of rpgs created by prominent streamers in the wake of the WOTC implosion are solely due to that clout. They might not be good designers, they might not be able to do much beyond fix DND, and they might never have built a game before, but that doesn't matter, here's four million dollars.

I sound bitter about this. In a way, I am. Despite making Road and Ruin for fun, I can't deny that I haven't fantasized once or twice about the project getting fans. Even a hundred, even fifty, even twenty, ten, FIVE people who look at what I've done, and genuinely like it, who'd be excited for new developments as I continue to expand on options for probably the rest of my life.

I think about what would have happened if I'd released Road and Ruin a couple years ago, before the "fracturing of the fanbase", or even during it, amidst the clamor of streamers all announcing their own projects. What would happen if I released it now, or what would happen if I waited a couple years for the market of non-DND games to grow a little, as more people accept that DND isn't the only game in town. Is there an opportunity anywhere? Was there, and I missed it?

Then I remember that I'm making this game for me, for fun, and that's all it should be. I already hold myself to a lofty standard, but one of quality, not one of fame and fortune or popularity. I shouldn't anticipate any success, but if I want others to like the game, I should continue considering what other people want, what other people feel. I shouldn't ever put anything in my life on hold, using the project as an excuse, or prioritize it over anything important. It won't be going anywhere, and neither will I.

[roadandruingame]

RaR Musings #19.1: Reading

I'm gonna break this up into a few different posts, for a few different subjects.

A lot of ttrpgs biggest obstacle is reading, but reading is more ideal than a game that's too shallow to allow meaningful choice; One-Page Rules are an interesting exercise in keeping game designs streamlined and easily communicated, but are in no way a worthy successor of what ttrpgs can and should be, whereas DND 5e launching with three 300-page books for rules, and adding more over the years, goes a long way to explain why nobody reads the rules for DND 5e.

I play a lot of games that have component rewards; MMOs are rife with materials and items that have various uses and recipes, roguelikes have sometimes hundreds of randomly-spawned items that may be crucial for a build, and soulslikes, like Remnant 2, have oodles of lore and mechanical advantages hidden behind items scattered in the landscape.

Indeed, when I want to know more about something in these kinds of games, I don't look in an instruction manual, or go ask NPCs; half the time the information I'm looking for isn't even player-facing. No, instead, I google the game and the item or place, and read a wiki curated by other players, who have done the work to consolidate the information in a format that is simultaneously expansive, but also easily digestible.

When doing another pass on abilities and mechanics, to rebalance for the new Outcome die system, I realized a lot of things needed tuneup or replacement. I thought back to some work I did trying to figure out the math for Elementalist in Guild Wars 2, to better understand what the game's apples-to-oranges trait options even meant, and how having some kind of database that could read and query other parcels of data would be great for balancing a game that's heavily reliant on keywords.

Over time and experimentation with databases, I realized I actually wanted a wiki, not a database per say. I wanted a visualization matrix for how different pieces of data connected with each other, and how far you could trace the influence of an ability. It'd make it easier for players to gain an ability, and figure out what it even impacts; if you lean heavily on swords, why not follow all these abilities that are tied to swords? If one of those is serrated edges, which links to bleeding, you could go to carnivorous wildshapes, vampires, and blood magic, or, it could link to weapon modifications, which links to weaponmastery, crafting, and customizing equipment on the fly.

So, I'm building a repository using Obsidian that I hope I can eventually offer as a public-facing wiki. It'd be a boon for playtesters, and it'd help me in the design and balance stages, to make sure I'm not overcomplicating things more than I need to. Hopefully, prospective players will be more willing to read 30 paragraphs relevant to how they want to play the game, rather than ignore the majority of 300 pages of a single book. I'll still format it all in book form eventually, but for now, being broken up into smaller, but still linked pieces has already been much easier on me.