Category: RPG Design

  • The competing priorities of combat in RPGs.

    The competing priorities of combat in RPGs.

    I just finished reading an incredible blog post at Knight at the Opera that attempts to aggregate “all” the different ways that games handle initiative and turn order. It’s a seriously fascinating read that I’d highly reccomend. Reading through it helped me sort out my mixed opinions about combat in RPGs. Simulating combat in an RPG means having to balance 3 competing priorities. Namely keeping the game moving, emulating a fight, and emulating “speed”.

    Of the three I’ve listed, I think keeping the game moving is honestly the most important. A brilliant combat system is useless if it takes forever to execute. Over time I’ve increasingly come to believe that any combat system should handle player input in clockwise order around a table (or around the thumbnails of a video call). I used to hate this because it was “unrealistic”, but I’ve come to understand just how valuable it is to keep up the pace in a fight scene. Different games have different answers to this problem, but I think it’s absolutely key that you keep the game moving.

    The second issue is actually emulating a fight, and stands in direct opposition to keeping the game moving. The more you work to make a fight “accurate” the more you have to bog down everything in minutia. A simple example of this is “to hit” rolls in D&D. They bog the game down and force players to simply miss a turn, all in the name of “accuracy” to how a fight can actually happen.

    The final problem is the matter of “speed”. This isn’t universally addressed in RPGs. Some of them do it, others don’t, but many games try to figure out how to differentiate “fast” characters or actions from “Slow” characters or actions. This connects heavily to the question of emulating the fight. The more granular you get about fast/slow characters/actions, the more crunchy and emulate-y the combat becomes.

    All of these exist on competing poles and work as part of a kind of tug-of-war. Pulling on one priority means taking valuable rope away from the others. I don’t have some miraculous solution to this problem, but realizing that these three things are fighting each other offers a clarity I’d previously lacked.

  • Ruminations on using Tarot Cards for RPG Resolution Mechanics

    Ruminations on using Tarot Cards for RPG Resolution Mechanics

    I’m in the very early stages of developing an RPG around a core concept that leans on divination as a storytelling mechanic. As part of this I’m thinking about using a Tarot deck to resolve basic actions.

    This is a tricky area that a number of games have tried to tackle over the years. Often the Tarot is suggested, but the problem is often that you need someone who actually understands the tarot to adjudicate results. Someone who’s not familiar with the meanings of the 78 cards in a Tarot Deck won’t be able to GM such a game, and asking a GM to train up on something that deep is a bit much.

    I initially wrote some thoughts on this down in the RPG.NET forums… where it got basically no traction, so I’m reproducing my posts (from 15 SODDING YEARS AGO) here, on a site I own and control. I’ll likely revisit these basic ideas as I sharpen the concept.

    Prior art
    Of course, I’m hardly the first person to think of using cards for an RPG. Everway, Dragonlance 5th Age, Deadlands, Dragonstorm, Pathfinder (and I’m sure quite a few others) have all toyed with the concept or accepted it whole. Indeed, even the use of Tarot cards is non-unique. White Wolf created an entire Ryder-Waite variant deck for Mage: The Ascension, and included rules for using the cards as character generation tools, adventure hooks, or random encounter elements.

    None of the systems I’ve looked at have given me quite the result I’m looking for. They all have quirks that make them not-quite-right. 5th Age, for example, seems interesting but insists on tying too many game mechanics to the cards. Your hand size is your level! Your cards are your health! Etc.

    Other systems tend to be too fuzzy for my liking. Most tarot or tarot-like decks are designed as inspiration and idea-seeds instead of actual rules. The leading questions on Everway cards, for example. Or the nearly rule-less Mage Tarot. Pathfinder’s Harrowing deck does a better job of offering solid rules for a Tarot-like system, but it’s a lot more about making the fortune-telling “come true” in the game, instead of using them as an active action-to-action mechanical element.

    My concept
    My plan is to devise a game with most of the usual d20ish trappings. Maps, minis, character sheets, etc. I’m not trying for some “grand unification theory” where every element is replaced by cards. I just want to replace the dice. You can certainly do a lot more with cards, and I want to toy with some of the differences, but not to the exclusion of everything else.

    I intend to use them with a difficulty check system. A card is drawn or revealed, relevant modifiers from stats and skills are added or subtracted, and the result is compared to a target difficulty to determine success/failure. At it’s most simplistic, a tarot deck is basically a D14. However, things get statistically interesting when you add in the Major Arcana.

    Structure of a tarot deck
    A tarot deck contains 78 cards:
    – 22 Major Arcana, numbered from 0 to 21
    – 56 Minor Arcana in four suits
    – Each suit consists of an Ace, numbered cards from 2-10, and four face cards, for a total of 14 cards per suit.

    Starting rules
    I started with a few ground rules. First, I’m assuming Aces are high, not low, as most games (and tarot readings) treat aces as a good thing, treating them as a fumble seemed counter-intuitive. Second, I decided to treat the Major Arcana as a 5th suit instead of a completely different kind of card. This means you can normally draw a card valued between 2 and 15, or a card up to 21 if you draw a Major Arcana.

    Odds of Success
    With the structure of the tarot, and my starting assumptions, we get the following statistical breakdown:

    Difficulty — Odds of success
    Greater than 21 — Impossible without bonuses
    21 — 1%
    20 — 2-3%
    19 — 4%
    18 — 5-6%
    17 — 7%
    16 — 8%
    15 — 15%
    14 — 22%
    13 — 27%
    12 — 33%
    11 — 40%
    10 — 46%
    9 — 52-53%
    8 — 59%
    7 — 65%
    6 — 72%
    5 — 78%
    4 — 85%
    3 — 91%
    2 — 97%

    I’ve rounded all odds to the nearest percent (or split the difference when it’s close to the middle of a percent). Really, that’s close enough for my purposes. If anyone’s really obsessed, I can post the odds to two significant digits. Yes, they actually go a lot further than that, but even two decimal places is pretty intense overkill in my opinion.

    With a statistical spread like this, the real range of available difficulties is basically 2 to 18. Your odds of drawing 18 or better are about equivalent to rolling a natural 20.

    The clever twist
    A traditional Tarot deck assigns a meaning to every card. These meanings can be distilled/converted to RPG actions with a little work. Bluff, for example, a reflex roll, an attack roll, a wisdom check, etc.

    I figure I can assign four such distilled tasks to each card. If a given card is played for it’s appropriate action, then the card “crits”. The player then draws the top card from the deck and adds the value of the two cards together. This makes the visual content of a card very interesting/important to a player, while still giving a solid rule base for GMs to easily and consistently track.

    The Major Arcana
    If a Major Arcana crits, it counts as an automatic success, akin to a natural 20. This keeps with the tarot tradition of Major Arcana cards being more potent without making them all-powerful. They only crit on their assigned tasks, and count as normal rolls at all other times. Of course, their numbers go higher, so they’re also slightly more powerful than the other suits even on a normal draw. This also reinforces the idea that they’re more “potent” than the Minor Arcana.

    Questions I haven’t answered

    Here’s some of the questions I haven’t answered:

    What about The Fool and The Mage?
    If aces are high, then we wind up with two oddball cards, the fool and the mage. The Fool is numbered 0 in a tarot deck. The Mage is numbered 1. Normally, that’d group the mage with the Aces, but with aces high, they’re actually 15, which makes them equal in value to The Devil from the Major Arcana. I don’t know what I’m doing with these cards.

    Hand or no hand?

    If a player draws a card from the deck for every roll and plays it immediately, then the deck functions as a very complex die capable of rolls between 2 and 21. A hand gives the player a lot more control over the outcomes of their actions, plus it gives me a chance to add mechanics for hand-size, discard, and draw. However, it also eliminates some of the tension, making a game less random and more strategic (is that really a disadvantage?)

    No way to roll a 1?
    The odds of drawing a specific rank of card is about 7%. With aces high, the odds of drawing the Mage (the only card numbered 1) is about 1%. So there isn’t a statistically reasonable fumble card.

    Fumbles through reversals?
    In tarot readings, there’s a tradition of reading a reversed (upside down) card as the opposite of its intended message. This idea can apply to an RPG. I mentioned using simplified card-meanings as a way of determining crits; this same tactic can be used for fumbles. If a card is revealed upside down, then it fumbles for it’s defined tasks. A second card is then drawn and subtracted from the first. A player dodges the bullet if he’s drawing the card for a task not defined on the card. As with crits, it just counts as a normal draw if it’s not what the card is meant for.

    Fumbles with hands?
    The reversal idea for fumbles works fine, unless players are using hands. If a player is using a hand, they’ll never play a card in a fumble position. You could have them flip a coin to determine right-side up or upside-down, but I think this’d just lead to frustration. Players would deliberately avoid the 50-50 risk of a crit/fumble by playing cards that never align to their task, which would erode the whole feel of using a Tarot deck to begin with.

    The big advantage of hands is allowing players to choose their fate. It’s a lot more fun for a player to play the right card on the right task, getting a deliberate crit and establishing a feel of fateful cards for fateful acts. If I have a mechanic for using hands of cards, I need some other way of defining those oft-hilarious “oh crap” moments.

    That’s everything I came up with all those years ago, and I already see several things that my latter experience has refined/changed. We’ll see how I do on round 2 of considering these mechanics.

  • Blades in the Dark – So edgy we put knives in the title

    Blades in the Dark – So edgy we put knives in the title

    Old man yells at cloud time. Except the clouds are missing and everything’s dead and the last cities are protected by lightning barriers fueled by the blood of demonic whales. And you’re a gang of cutthroats looking to get as much coin as you can at the end of the world. You’ll probably wind up dead along the way, but hey that’s what happens when your life is

    Blades in the Dark

    Sounds pretty metal, right? Because of the blades? See what I did there? Unfortunately, Blades in the Dark is a brilliant RPG mired in a few (sadly fatal) flaws.

    First the good: Blades is a study in focused design. It isn’t everything to everyone. No. It’s one very specific thing and if you don’t like that thing it will cut you. It’s peaky blinders in a mashup of Fallen London and Dishonored.

    The setting is a rich tapestry of horrible people all being horrible to each other. It’s a pressure cooker of opposing factions. It’s rife with potential for drama, conflict, and adventure. Sorry, did I say adventure? Crime. I meant crime.

    This focus is most of it’s brilliance. Every page of the rules feeds into telling this exact story. Do you want to play cutthroats in a dark enchanted London at the end of the world? This is the perfect game for that. However, it’s the perfect game ONLY for that. If you’re not looking to tell a bleak, ugly, and gritty tale about the slow decline of a gang of thugs as they try to better themselves through crime, you’re not looking to play Blades in the dark.

    It is also, sadly, mired by one of the worst resolution mechanics I’ve seen in an RPG. Let’s break it down:

    • Dice pool – Cool, I’m with you.
    • Succeed on a 4, 5, or 6, but a 6 is a big success – Fine by me
    • You only ever need 1 success – Hey, this sounds pretty easy to read at the table!
    • Now let’s talk about your position and effect – My what now?
    • Are you in a Safe, Risky, or Desperate position? Please see literally every chapter of the rulebook for how this gets modified by like a dozen interconnected systems – Umm…
    • And your effect, is it limited, standard, or greater? Here’s an index of all the rules which can impact that. – Now, hold on…
    • Oh and are you taking a Devil’s Bargain! They’re a great rule where you get an extra die by screwing yourself over. Not a success, mind you, just a die. – Are we doing this with every roll?

    Every action feels like taking a law exam. I loathe it. There’s too many knobs to turn. How big is your dice pool (there’s rules for that) and what’s your position (there’s rules for that), and your effect (check these other rules for how that gets impacted)…. Every. bloody. action. needs to be adjudicated like we’re negotiating a lease.

    These mechanics slow the game to an absolute crawl as you try to adjudicate all the different elements of the dice pool and the potential outcomes. You don’t roll as often in Blades as you might in another RPG, but somehow it feels like half the game is taken up by these negotiations.

    I think Harper (the game’s designer) backed himself into a corner on this. Harper wanted to simplify the resolution mechanic (an admirable goal!) but accidentally turned it into a convoluted mess as he added more and more factors which could impact dice pool size, Position, and Effect.

    But hey, it’s all D6’s and the target number never changes!

    The result is a massive tome (308 PAGES of rules and lore) that has magically gained a reputation as a “simple” RPG. Blades is an incredibly clean RPG, but it’s not a simple one. All the rules feed into each other, the subsystems all click, and that tickles the brains of a certain category of RPG fan. They conflate that synergy with simplicity. They might call it “elegant”. I wouldn’t, but I get where they’re coming from.

    At the end of the day, the thing that ultimately turned me away from Blades in the Dark is the story it wants to tell. Blades isn’t a hopeful game. It’s not a game about beating the odds or carving out some kindness from an uncaring world. It’s a game where you “drive your character like a stolen car”. The goal is to get into a spectacular wreck so you can watch the flames.

    Some folks find that fun. Me? I prefer a bit more escapism in my games. “Try all you want, the system is going to grind you down” is a bit too real for my tastes.

  • What turns me away from a new RPG?

    A few things:

    • Generic setting or no setting – I already have enough game engines. I don’t need another “universal” ruleset that isn’t really universal, and I don’ t need another directionless “Fantasy” setting with no real hook to it.
    • AI Art/Text – Nope. I’m not paying you to write prompts for a theft engine.
    • Not escapist enough – I have immense respect for various PbtA flavors (Masks, Monsterhearts, etc.) that want to examine deep relationships… I’m also tired from a long day at work and want to blow something up or punch a fascist in the nose. The moral dilemmas I want from a Superhero game are how to avoid collateral damage, not whether or not Sempai will ever notice me.
    • Our 5E is different! – If I want to play superheroic high fantasy skirmish, I’ll play 5E. If you want to sell me on generic fantasy settings/systems, you need to get far enough away from 5E to actually be doing your own thing.
    • Too much crunch – Sorry, but that ship has sailed. I already have too much DnD floating around my skull. You’ve got to build something simpler and cleaner if you want my attention. I’m too busy to memorize 100+ pages of new rules.
    • High Fatality – Both highly-fatal OSR games, and anything remotely “call-of-X”. I like some danger in my games, but PCs dropping like flies isn’t fun for me.
    • Overly opinionated design – “We have found the Only Correct Way To Play RPGs and will now save you from all the things you’ve been doing wrong!” Yeeeah, no. I’m looking at you, Dungeon World. You and your friend Blades in the Dark can go find another table.
    • Grimdark – “This is a world where only the STRONG and VICIOUS survive.” Cool. Glad that’s fun for you. Me? I’ve got zero interest in sociopathy simulators.

    So what constitutes a good game then, since I seem to hate so much stuff?

    • An interesting setting or premise – Settings like Spelljammer, Numenera, UVG, or Vaults of Vaarn are very much my jam. Often I have to swap out the ruleset to get something playable though.
    • Good play-at-the-table support – Can I picture actually USING your content? Hot Springs Island, Trilemma Adventures, Gardens of Ynn.
    • Clean (or at least interesting) rules – A bunch of PbtA stuff, Knave, Crown and Skull, big swaths of the OSR (tempered heavily by my gripes above).