RPG Errata: Errant, and Procedure

Errant, published by Kill Jester, is a, quote: “rules light, procedure heavy, classic fantasy role-playing game in the vein of the first few editions of that role-playing game and its many imitators and descendants.”

Another one?

Not to complain, but the RPG medium is rife with OSR D&D-likes. Rife, I say. What is there to be gained with breaking down yet another one, when we could be talking about interesting games like Rosewood Abbey, LORDSWORN, Pine Shallows, Lumen Ryder Core, Edelweiss, The Long Shift, or All the While?

What is to be gained, I think, is purely an excuse to talk about that first line in the description: Rules-light, Procedure-heavy.

What are Procedures?

A fairly simple framework to view rules and procedures through is: A procedure is a game-loop made up of rules. Short and sweet, and defines both Rules and Procedures in relation to each other. Sure, we could get philosophical about it and make a “universal definition” of a rule or a procedure, but that’s not immediately helpful to the discussion, is it? We know what a “rule” is, even if we don’t have a definition that would keep Socrates’s mouth shut.

Procedures in RPGs are immediately recognizable. Combat is a big one, full of turns, rounds, attack rolls, and damage dice. Chase or clock-based scenes are usually procedures as well, requiring multiple skill-checks to reach the end.

Errant goes whole hog into procedure. Almost everything is resolved by rolling a d20, and hoping it lands between two target numbers. Most everything else is resolved with a 2d6 roll compared to a bespoke chart for the action. That certainly sounds rules-light, but the rulebook is over 200 pages long. Is it actually rules-light?

Most of the book’s length comes from, frankly, large font. This isn’t a two-column-per-page tome like old World Of Darkness books. But even accounting for its large margins and lettering, there is a lot of detail in the ruleset. Sure, there are sections about diplomacy, exploring dungeons, combat, and magic; but there are also sections detailing what to do if your PCs want to invest in a business, have to take part in a legal trial, hiring henchfolk, settling debts, and wasting money on frivolities.

What Errant really requires is a change in worldview. In most RPGs, there is a focus on — for at least a portion of the game — “free play.” That is; the players are largely free from concrete rules, and are able to talk, discuss, and dialogue with the GM to advance the story. These are the in-town post-delve moments, when a player can spend their gold, research spells, hunt for jobs/rumors, or generally play in the narrative.

This is in contrast to the rule-focused aspects of play, usually combat. While there is still opportunity for free-play during fights, generally nothing “happens” until the dice are rolled.

Errant turns the free-play of other RPGs into a regimented system similar to combat, and it does this through “turns.”

Each turn unfolds similarly, depending on the type of turn it is. “Travel turns,” for example, take place while the players are journeying through unexplored or long-distance lands. “Exploration turns” are the turns that happen when players are in an unfamiliar location, such as a lost temple or barren ghost-town. “Initiative turns” are the turns that involve immediate actions, such as chases, combats, and similarly tense situations.

Each of these turns unfolds in a repetitive cycle. Travel turns require the players to select an action — such as exploring, orienting, foraging, or pushing forward — followed by the rolling of the Event Die, which injects a random and unexpected occurrence into the journey. Time passing is marked, and the next turn occurs.

What this does is turn long-travel into a kind of combat; a cycle of team actions and world actions as the players get closer and closer to the end of the journey. Exploration turns are handled the same way as the team and environment cycle gambits and discoveries until the area is explored. Downtime turns are complex but richly detailed with factions, rumors, and events worthy of a month-long span of time.

Rather than focusing on events, like the local festival or the chase through the marketplace, Errant focuses on time. Downtime takes a month, Travel takes hours, Exploration takes minutes, Initiative takes seconds. The focus isn’t on what happens around a bespoke event, but what the players do in the time they have.

And all the actions play off of each other. In Travel turns, setting your pace or food rationing affects how likely you are to get lost or how tired you become. There are specific jobs that need to be filled, namely the Scout and Pathfinder. What mounts and vehicles you have adjust your speed, encumbrance, and what terrain you can comfortably travel on. It’s not just a procedure, it’s a process.

You could look at Errant as a collection of minigames, but there is a difference between Errant and minigame RPGs like Noblesse Goblige and For the Honor. The latter games are largely narrative, urging the players to focus on the story created by the minigames, rather than the mechanics inherent to each. These minigames are self-contained, comprising a single episode or event.

If you remember, some time ago I discussed how games usually focus their complexity on combat. Characters take turns deciding how to swing their axes and who to target with their arrows, miniatures are moved across a battlemap, and eventually one side defeats the other. Many rulebooks devote whole chapters to combat rules, and a sizable combat can last a whole four-hour gaming session, if not longer.

I ruminated on how singular events like meeting a Monarch or healing a downed ally are handled with just a die-roll. Success in combat is decided over multiple rolls, creating an ebb and flow of action, whereas diplomacy or medicine — complex skills that require just as much experience and training as combat, if not more — are decided with a single die-roll.

Errant is working against that structure. While Diplomacy is mostly to be handled with roleplay, and medicine is likewise an instant-cure effect similar to a healing potion, the everyday actions of the players are rolled into clear and distinct patterns of behavior. None of this “let’s just explore down this road” hand-waving, you have to play the travel, the exploration, and the resting.

You could call this simulation roleplay; different mounts, equipment, and decisions all affect the numbers you have to roll, which then dictate success and failure. It’s easy to shrug and just say Errant has decided to take a page out of GURPS’s book before simplifying it to a more rules-light system, but I think we can go in the other direction. Looked at in this way, You could make the case that it’s procedures all the way down.

RPGs are a procedure of a kind: you start with all the little rituals your table has established, ordering the pizza or hashing out downtime character beats. Usually there is a “last episode” recap, highlighting the salient points and cool PC moments. Gameplay starts, and the players fall into their habits. jokes are made, strategies are discussed, actions are taken, and the story unfolds. Then the game ends, and schedules are brought out to plan for next time.

Drill down even further, and we could call rules overly simple procedures. the act of rolling a die is given weight only because of the rules, and rules require procedures to implement. Even rolling-to-hit requires calling up the target’s AC, calculating stat-bonuses, and discussing circumstantial conditions.

But there’s one fly in the ointment, and that’s the idea of Errant being “rules-light.” Going off of my page-number metric, Errant has about 240 pages. That’s hardly rules-light, is it? Well, to be fair, Errant does call itself “procedure-heavy,” might that account for the difference?

I’d say no. As I also said about rules, there’s the issue of cognitive load. If rolling a die requires flipping to three different charts to figure out what happened, that’s less light than a simple over-under success-failure roll.

And there is some complexity in Errant’s rules. Bonuses and penalties can come from different places, and there are more than just a few things to pay attention to. I wouldn’t necessarily call the game rules-heavy, but I can’t honestly put it in the same category as Lasers and Feelings. Frankly, one-pager RPGs wreck the curve — I mean it is a lighter ruleset than Shattered, Gubat Bunwa, or Call of Cthulhu; but it is also certainly more simulation than abstract RPG.

That’s a designation I’ve glossed over before; Simulation vs Abstract RPGs. What actually is the difference?

Next time, we’ll take a quick look, and then dive deeper, like I usually do.