Rpgs

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.

I’ve avoided writing this post for some time. Ever since my first post on the X-card.

Immersion, as I said in my last few posts, is fragile. I blew past several opportunities to discuss how immersion is affected by safety tools, but I always thought it was too big a subject to just slot in. The few times I even tried, it always came across like I was suggesting Safety Tools weren’t mandatory, and should be weighed against the corresponding loss in immersion.

That’s nonsense. You should always feel safe.

But I can’t avoid it any longer; safety tools are necessary, but they’re not inert. Adding safety tools to your game affects it, and we need to explore how. Much like Patriarchy and Toxic Masculinity, we only make our job harder if we do not understand precisely what we are asking others to sacrifice, even if it appears ridiculous to us.

You may have noticed, either while reading Manyfold or my posts, that it starts to get a little clumsy talking about these individual types of fun and distinct methods of support. It’s hard to separate Improvisation from Performance; they seem to fit quite well together. Rules, Achievement, and Risk are all of a kind too, as they all relate to the game itself, rather than the narrative.

Levi realized that talking about agon or kenosis is all well and good in an academic theory kind of way, but it’s not that helpful when trying to figure out what your friends want to actually play. So, they created Playstyle Clusters, a “body of mechanics and techniques a group uses to pursue a particular bundle of good things.” Does your table constantly do the voices? Do they spend hours talking over strategy and character builds? Do they love coming up with plot twists and dramatic arcs? That’s their playstyle.

Levi notes that playstyles are unique to each group, can change over time, and can even by dysfunctional, if trying to serve multiple and contradictory types of fun. This is the moment when the player who really wanted to win the game gets dirty looks from their fellow players because “your character wouldn’t do that.”

In the last couple posts, we explored some different terms for different kinds of fun people can have with RPGs, and the different mindsets they can engage with while playing.

So what?

Sure, we can have an interesting conversation using the same terminology, but the rubber has to meet the road sometime, right? Being a Better Socrates is all about using new frameworks to become better RPGers.

This is where the third section of Manyfold comes in. The Designed Support section goes through the first list of types-of-enjoyment and discusses different ways of supporting these types in games, and I’d like to take a look at them now.

The second section of Manyfold is geared towards providing a glossary of terms players can use to describe “how they play.” It does this through “Stances,” a term first formulated by Kevin Hardwick and Sarah Kahn on the rec.games.frp.advocacy group on USEnet, around 1996. Levi then builds off their work to come up with five different stances that a player might change between during a single RPG session.

What exactly is a “stance?” Manyfold defines it as “The attitude of the player towards play at any given moment.” The easiest shorthand to consider might be combat: at any given time in your average combat focused RPG, one player is taking their turn, one player is GMing, and the other players are watching. These are three different stances, as the player whose turn it is engages with the game differently than the player who’s waiting for their turn, and both engage differently than the GM, who is playing the monsters.