RPG Errata: Another Game System

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,¹ but for Werewolf instead of Vampire.

So I started working on one.

Making a more substantial werewolf game was an interesting exercise. Setting is the most important aspect of a Monster RPG: even the simplest modern Vampire RPGs at least vacation in the rich valley of the World of Darkness. A lot of systems are adapted for other detailed settings, but a lot of cliches and established concepts began in the Masquerade.

I won’t go into all my thoughts on the setting, at least not in this post, but some interesting things popped up when I considered Werewolf: Apocalypse. Specifically, how it changes the idea of lycanthropy. In Werewolf, the shift was not a curse, it was a natural part of the character. This is in stark contrast to the horror monsters of yesteryear; think Jekyll & Hyde, the Invisible Man, the Fly, all sorts of body and cosmic horrors…the werewolf has always tapped into that part of humanity that fears something internal.

Werewolf: Apocalypse is about shape-shifting protectors of the planet, which puts them more of a kin with Power Rangers and other superheroes, instead of Vampires or Ghosts.

Go back to the early mythologies on the subject and there’s a lot to sort through. What leaps out to me, however, is the direct connection between the Wolf and the Wild. Werewolves are always violent, bloodthirsty, and dangerous. The European legend is directly connected to the witch-panics of the time, and in a world where the nighttime forest held threat to life and limb, the idea that the wild was fighting back against civilization wasn’t too absurd.

From Victorian England to the anti-hippie sentiment of the 80s, we like to think of ourselves as civilized. We’re not violent or monstrous species, we’re a kind and gentle folk. If violence must be enacted, it is done after careful thought and analysis. Nature is chaotic and unpredictable, it is a daily struggle with uncertainty, and death the price for failure. It’s frightening. Better to cut ourselves off from the natural world; hide safe and comfortable in our air conditioning and insect-free houses, eating food we didn’t hunt for, drinking beer we did not brew, and sleeping in safety we did not earn.

But we are not civilized. We are animals with blood pounding in our ears. We feel and touch and breathe the wild air as deeply as any beast of the forest. In fact, we are more cruel and violent than the red-lipped wolves of the wild, as we hunt for sport and are cruel for fun. No wolf would ever be so callous.

The wolf is powerful, monstrous, and will eat away at you like a disease. The worst part of it…it’s alluring. This so-called-civilized world is full of rules, social-contracts, and petty irritations. How much better would it be to actually be truly free? To take all those frustrations and problems and tear them apart?

I’ve made no secret of my interest in the work of Levi Kornelsen. In their first list of RPG mechanics, they detail a temptation mechanic that I think it fits well ludo-narratively with the idea of a werewolf.

But what of the other two dice in Levi’s system? How do they fit in? Well, Powered by the Apocalypse uses two dice to guide its three-result mechanic. You roll 2d6 and compare to two breakpoints, 7 and 10, to see if you have a weak or strong hit. Succumbing to your werewolf involves swapping or possibly adding the third d6 to your roll.

But that’s not really Werewolf-y, is it? that’s just adding Levi’s system to a PbtA game. Not inherently bad, but I wanted to see if there were other options. We have two dice, right? In Ironsworn we compare 1 die to 2 others: if our die is larger than one of them, it’s a weak hit, larger than both and its a strong hit. We have two dice…what if we compared them to 1 number?

Hey, isn’t that the White Wolf system in a nutshell? The system I’m taking tonal inspiration from?

What would happen if the die-roll mechanic was this: you roll 3d10, one of which is a different colored “wild die.” You count how many of your 2 same-colored dice are higher than, say, 8. If one die is equal-or-greater than 8, that’s a weak hit. If both are equal-or-greater than 8, that’s a strong hit. If you want, you can use your wild die but that’s succumbing to your werewolf nature, tapping into the monstrous beast within you and corrupting yourself in exchange for power. There’ll be narrative consequences for that…

Okay, but what about stats? PbtA systems add a bonus to the result to increase your chances of getting a hit. FitD systems add dice. How do we make it easier to succeed in this system? By reducing the target number, of course. Say the target number is 8, and for every stat point, asset, or what have you that improves your roll, you subtract one.

Here’s the Anydice for that system:

function: newroll ROLL:s GOAL:n {
 if 1@ROLL>=GOAL {result: 1 + (2@ROLL>=GOAL)}
 result: 0
}

BONUS: 0
output [newroll 3d10 (8-BONUS)] named "New Roll"

Look familiar? No? Here, maybe this will help:

function: pbta ROLL:s B:n{
 TOTAL: 1@ROLL+2@ROLL+B
 if TOTAL > 6 {
  result: 1 + (TOTAL > 9)
 }
 result: 0
}

function: newroll ROLL:s GOAL:n {
 if 1@ROLL>=GOAL {result: 1 + (2@ROLL>=GOAL)}
 result: 0
}

BONUS: 0
output [pbta 2d6 BONUS] named "PbtA"
output [newroll 3d10 (8-BONUS)] named "New Roll"

I spent a whole day, almost a day and a half, playing around with complex systems involving multiple dice, different die sizes, and exotic rolling methods…when I had accidentally created a system that mapped almost perfectly onto the PbtA ratios already. Go ahead and mess around with the system and see what comes of it. I like the mechanic, and may ultimately do something with it later.

Who knows, I might develop the setting and make another full-fledged RPG…