RPG Errata: Strike!, and Reskinning

Strike! is a tactical wargame SRD, without much in the way of world to justify its system. It’s the same combat used in the marvelous Tailfeathers RPG, full of interesting tactical choices and clever little tricks that keep it fresh, fun, and fast.

It also clearly and proudly supports reskinning.

“Re-what?”

Reskinning. This hobby is full of creative people, and one of the major selling points of roleplay is the ability to exert your will on the gamespace in a way rarely supported in other mediums; naturally, players often want to change things to suit them.

Reskinning is the process whereby a single “item” is given a different “skin” such that it looks different, but is fundamentally the same in practical terms. For example, if you want to play a Duergar in D&D, but don’t have a supplement to detail their racial bonuses, you could just take all the Dwarf bonuses, and just call it a Duergar.

Indeed, one of the most famous characters in D&D exists only because of reskinning. “All Drow are Evil,” says the book. “Except this one,” says the player. “Wizards are educated at magical universities,” says the book. “But mine was self-taught,” says the player. “Dragonborn can breathe fire,” says the book. “Ooh,” says the player, “I have a great idea for a character: their parents are a human and a dragon, and there was this ancient ritual performed by the dragon that messed with their heritage, so I’d like to be a Dragonborn Sorcerer that looks exactly like a human.”

Perhaps the ur-example of reskinning is Champions, one of the first Super-hero RPGs out there. In Champions, your superhero’s abilities were defined by how they effected the system, not influenced the story. An attack ability worked the same, no matter if it was an optic-blast, a freeze ray, a poisonous spray, or a magical spell. The system dealt with numbers; you decided what the attack looked like.

After that, the story took over. If your attack was a magic spell, it wouldn’t work on people immune to magic. If it was fire-based, it wouldn’t work underwater. If it was an optic blast, the bad-guys could cover your eyes to stop it working. All of this is reskinning.

Strike! has classes of a kind, but names them more as descriptors than as proscriptions. There is no wizard class, for example, but there is no reason why any of the classes couldn’t be reskinned into a wizard class. The actions and abilities are all there, we just say it’s magic, instead of swords or bullets.

The system encourages this. The Monk class has stances which can provide lasting bonuses, but that could also describe a pirate-y swashbuckler, or a mode-shifting robot, or a Shang Tsung style necromancer who possess the souls of powerful warriors. The Warlord can be a noble carried around on their sedan chair, or a mechanic ever-tinkering with their gadgets, or a mighty paladin with hammer held high. The Bombardier can be a mutton-chopped chappie with a blunderbuss, a psychic with lethal mind-powers, or a wizard lobbing fireballs.

Interestingly enough, GURPS has a kind of reskinning awareness as well. For such a mathematically heavy game, it might seem odd that reskinning is necessary, but it certainly has its uses. Collections of advantages and disadvantages can be combined into a single bucket: Vampirism, for example, is a combination of increased strength, fear of holy objects, damage from the sun, a need for blood to survive, and several other traits, each with their own point cost. Damage Resistance can be thick skin, armor plating, magical runes, or anything that fits with your character’s backstory.

At the same time, GURPS encourages characters to look or act how they like, so long as it doesn’t effect the dice. If your hero has a snake-tongue; but can’t smell with it, no one is weirded out by it, and doesn’t otherwise effect gameplay, then it doesn’t matter. Reskinning affects the story, not the system, so it’s fine.

What I find interesting about this is how clean and clear the differentiation is between system and story. Reskinning is the system tacitly accepting that so long as it doesn’t directly impact the system, the story can do whatever it wants. If the attack roll hits and does X damage, the system doesn’t care if it was a glancing bullet, a brutal gut punch, or a psychic assault.

It is more or less the same way of looking at systems as “fiction-first” games do, but in reverse. In fiction-first games, the system only exists to support the story, and so long as the story itself isn’t improperly influenced, then the system can be used whenever and in whatever manner the players wish.

So…can we say that “Every RPG is a Hack” both with the system and the story? That certainly makes sense, and leads to a particularly interesting mechanic: when systems codify this story-hacking directly into the ruleset. There are lots of different ways this happens, but there is one system in particular I’d like to talk about.

So I’ll talk about it next time.