Rpgs

Previously on Oddscrawl…

Two Truths and a Lycanthrope is a hastily thrown-together one-page system I made from a friend’s pun. I didn’t spend too much time on the system, not thinking it’d go anywhere.

Thing was, the idea stuck in my head.

Things do that, sometimes. It’s like getting musical earworms, but about thoughts instead of music. I turn ideas around and around in my head, sometimes repeating the same phrase over and over again. Cognition has its own rhythms, melodies, and syncopations. The system we had made came from a joke, but the /rest of the conversation…well…

We had talked about White Wolf a bit, my friend and I. We discussed how Vampires grab the spotlight in American culture, somehow, while werewolves are generally overlooked. I thought about Vampire: the Masquerade and Werewolf: the Apocalypse, and how there are a lot of Vampire games out there right now, but not a whole lot of werewolf games. I wondered if there was space for a game like Fanged, but for Werewolf instead of Vampire.

So I started working on one.

This is going to be a fluffy post, because my brain decided to ask a question that I needed to answer: Is it possible to do a different Powered by the Apocalypse die-roll system that has similar results?

The standard PbtA roll is 2d6 plus a bonus, such as a skill or stat. If the total of these dice and bonus is 7 to 9, you’ve rolled 1 hit. If the total is 10 or greater, you’ve rolled 2 hits. Moves have different results depending on how many hits you score, if any.

Ironsworn is a PbtA game that uses a different method of figuring out how many hits you score. Instead of having three “levels” of hits (2-6, 7-9, and 10+, for 0, 1, and 2 hits, respectively), you roll 2d10 and 1d6. You add your skill or stat bonus to the d6, and you gain 0, 1, or 2 hits depending on whether your result is greater than 0, 1, or 2 of the d10s.

Leveling Up is an important part of RPGs. Really, it’s an important part of gaming in general; whether increasing your character’s options, adding troops to your army, or personally getting better at “the game.” While I certainly appreciate the latter form of improvement, I do want to add a more concrete mechanical form of “leveling up.”

In the 0.1 version of the ruleset, this was handled with the total of a Manifestation’s Tier and Bond. A “first level” Manifestation would only have 1 Tier and 1 Bond, while a higher level Manifestation might have 3 Tier and 2 Bond.

In the 0.2 version of the ruleset, the Tier/Bond system has been replaced with a single Emotional-stat mechanic, with Tier representing a Manifestation’s “Level.” This is much simpler and easier to manage, but what does a higher Tier actually do?

Originally, Tier was a kind of “level” mechanic. It evolved into a counterbalance to Bond, so that you could either have a controlled, stable, and crafty Manifestation, or a high-Tier rampaging monster, uncontrolled and high-damaging. It was a nod to the basic trope of “strong or smart.”

That’s been simplified with the single-number stat mechanic we have now, so what use is Tier? Well, “level” wasn’t the only way all the monster-collector games ranked their different mons. A lot of them also had “evolutions.”

Time to bring that back, I think.

One of the big questions raised by this restructuring is: how to handle LP?

Hit points drastically effect how a game plays: how abundant they are, how easy they are to lose or regain, and any other uses for them all have a significant impact on an RPG. Are Manifestations fragile or robust? How many turns, on average, will it take for a Manifestation to kill another Manifestation of the same Tier? A higher Tier? Lower?

Can LP be used for other purposes? Are some special abilities fueled by LP? Can any Manifestation spend LP to boost their POWER or CONTROL, or only ones with a specific passive? Can Manifestations heal their own LP? Other’s LP? Is it only the Agent’s job?

I can answer that last one: for Manifest v0.2, I want to keep healing as an exclusive Agent ability. I also want Manifestations to be fragiler than not, thereby giving weight to the decision of healing a Manifestation vs re-summoning it later. I also don’t want the game to drag, and fragile units can help speed things up. None of that gives solid numbers, though — a 100 HP wizard is pretty fragile if a dagger does 500 damage — so how do I decide how much LP to give Manifestations?

Let me start by saying, I am not a “fan” of Warhammer 40k.

I know nothing about the different editions, which codexes worked and which ones didn’t, I don’t know the meta of the game, nor the many myriad social and political intricacies that go into being a devoted fan. I don’t want to come in here like “I spent a few months reading the comment section in Tabletop Tactics videos, so now let me tell you something about Warhammer.”

But I do want to comment on Warhammer 40k, because I have seen a few interesting aspects in “the discourse.” I can’t comment how important or significant any of this discourse is, but it does relate to RPGs — specifically the hobby aspect of it — so I’d like to discuss.

Specifically, I’d like to discuss the Space Marines.

Last time I went over some issues regarding the die-pool, namely its size and where it came from. I looked at a few sizes and found myself torn between an average die-pool size of 5 or 10.

Thankfully, an easy solution has presented itself — doubly easy because it will be simple to change if I need to.

Die-Pools are built by totaling an Agent’s emotional stats and dividing by two. Human average is 2 apiece, and I’m currently playing with Agents having a 10 to 14 stat-point limit, so that naturally puts the die-pool in the 5 to 7 range. If I decide to switch to 10, then I drop the dividing-by-two bit. No fuss!

Oh, also I came up with a better name for Sync. Now, ability rolls will be divided into POWER and CONTROL.

I’ve been getting into miniature wargaming, recently.

Well, “getting into” might require some qualification. I haven’t been purchasing and painting miniatures or anything, but I am recognizing that my love of RPGs is bleeding into the wargaming sphere in a surprising manner. I decided to explore this phenomenon and came up with several interesting points. After all, I’ve talked at length about the influence of Miniature Wargaming on the hobby, but there is a case to be made that I’ve ignored Miniature Wargaming as a kind of RPG.

As I’ve discussed before, it’s hard to separate the two completely; combat can be a story and story can inform combat both in some very real ways. Ignoring that fact, even just brushing past it, can leave our understanding of the RPG Medium underdeveloped.

Last time, I went through what I learned from the first playtest of Manifest v0.1, and made a quick-and-dirty skeleton for moving forward. This time, I’d like to…well, start moving forward.

First and foremost, I’d like to take a harder look at the basic Stat-Investment Power Roll, and see if I can’t find ways to smooth it out, both ludo-narratively and statistically.

So, let’s go to Anydice!

I was originally planning on doing a few different playtests before commenting, but the first playtest was pretty definitive, and I feel good about its results.

Thanks to the efforts of “P,” “C,” “S,” and “W,” (Names obviously hidden to respect privacy) I have decided which die-roll mechanic to use going forward. The winner is the third option, Pooled-Single-Number.

I’ll come up with a better name by the end of this post.