Savage Worlds: Three Good Things
Posted by Joshua on Sep 25, 2008
Since Savage Worlds is my current favorite system, I thought I’d post about things that I like about the specifics of the SW rules. After all, there are lots of generic systems, lots of relatively simple systems (not actually “rules light”, but still on the simple end of things), lots of systems with good support and an active fan-base…so why Savage Worlds in particular? There are lots of little bits I like, so I arbitrarily decided to talk about just my three favorites:
- The Wounds System
- Tricks and Tests of Will
- The Shaken Mechanic
The Wounds System
SW’s handling of damage is based on the simple idea of replacing frequent small steps with rarer larger ones. When you take damage that exceeds your Toughness by 4, or you take damage that at least matches your Toughness and you’re already Shaken, you take a Wound. PCs and significant NPCs can take 3 Wounds before they’re incapacitated, non-significant NPCs can take 1.
It’s far from the first system to go that route, but to my mind it’s one of the simplest and most elegant. While there’s a downside in that players can feel that they’re not “making progress” against a difficult (hard to hit or hard to damage) opponent, there’s a huge upside in reducing book-keeping and making combat feel less like an exercise in accounting. Plus, the nuances of the combat system give the players strong tactical options to directly deal with the part of hurting the opponent they’re having difficulty with, which I find much more interesting to play out than a straight attrition race.
Tricks and Tests of Will
Tricks are opposed Agility or Smarts rolls to impose a -2 Parry on an opponent, Tests of Will are a Intimidate or Taunt skill roll against Spirit or Smarts to gain a +2 on your next action against that opponent; all require that you describe in RP terms what you’re doing that justifies the test. Because of the nuances of the system, the two aren’t completely equivalent; in particular Tricks are much better when you want to help somebody else against that opponent.
I really like how these give non-combat optimized characters a chance to make significant contributions in combat. Yes, regardless of the system the GM can always allow players to come up with ad hoc ways of doing that, but I think the point of a system is to streamline and regularize things to reduce the need for multiple ad hoc rulings every combat. With Tricks and Tests of Will SW has two simple, flexible, yet significant ways non-combatants can aid in combat through role-play, not just dispensing buffs or healing.
The Shaken Mechanic
Shaken is a morale-related status-effect that occurs when you’ve taken damage, but not enough to wound you, or your focus is lost because of something like fear, intimidation, taunting, or being tricked. When you’re shaken you’re easier to wound, and you can’t take any action except to move and try to get your composure back. Frankly, I think this is brilliant. It does have the downside of having the flavor of a compulsory personality mechanic, and some players just can’t stand those, but the SW gives you a number of different ways to beef your character up against being Shaken or to recover more quickly if your character conception is that you’re unflappable, with nerves of steel and ice-water in your veins. Also, it doesn’t completely remove the character from your control; it just limits your options. The upside is that not only is it both more realistic (fighting to the death is really rare in the real-world, even in warfare) and more true to most adventure genres (where heroes do dive for cover when bullets fly, or get temporarily dazed by a good punch or nearby explosion) while opening the possibility for things to be more creepy when they are relentless murder machines instead of having that be the norm (SW has various ways of representing that, depending on whether they are merely immune to fear but can be shaken by damage, whether being shaken doesn’t make them easier to wound, if they recover faster, etc.) but it makes for a much more tactically interesting battle. A lot of SW tactics revolve around trying to shake opponents or take advantage of their shaken condition, or preventing opponents from taking advantage of your being shaken until you recover. It’s also nice and simple, not requiring the GM to litter the battle mat or his notes with sticky notes and annotations about what status effects are on which characters and what round they’ll wear off. For a small extra complication it gives a lot of bang for the buck.
There’s lots more to like about Savage Worlds, but those three are the things that stand out enough that I’d probably steal them to apply to my home-brew if I (or my players) get tired of Savage Worlds.
Posted in Systems || 5 Comments »
Challenge-Based Gaming: Kicking The Dungeon Door Old School
Posted by Joshua on Sep 24, 2008
Perhaps I should clarify what I mean by “Challenge-Based Gaming.” After all, nearly anybody who plays an RPG can legitimately claim to be after some sort of challenge, whether it’s to cooperate with the other narrators to construct a satisfying story, to most accurately portray or experience the inner thoughts of their character, or just to carve through enough identical bags of hit-points with different skins to qualify for a level-up. That’s not what I mean, though. A challenge has to be something that can be failed. Many, perhaps most, styles of RPG don’t and shouldn’t allow failure to accomplish the goal of the game as a real possibility; e.g. if you’re playing to construct a satisfying story then it’s a real problem if the game system will allow months of play to wind up in an unsatisfying story, and if the system is constructed to challenge you to complete a story despite it something is very wrong.
But Challenge-Based Games do exactly that: they are constructed to challenge you to accomplish your goal despite the system working against you. This isn’t particularly uncommon for board games; Reiner Knizia’s Lord of the Rings game is a nice example, pitting the players cooperatively against the rules of the game, which will give Sauron the victory if they don’t destroy the ring before he corrupts the Ring-Bearer.
So when I talk about Challenge-Based Gaming, I’m talking about games where the Challenge of winning against the game is the whole (or at least biggest) point. I’m talking about a style of gaming that pits the players against the game environment, with the GM acting as referee. (As a historical aside, my crowd actually called the DM or GM “The Referee” for at least the first few years we were playing.) The characters are tools that the players use to try to beat the scenario (almost always a dungeon, at least initially); the environment is a tool that the scenario-designer uses to try to beat the players; the GM is the scrupulously neutral referee between them. There can be a bit of confusion here, because many GMs are their own scenario designers, but there really are two hats here: Referee and Designer. When running the game the Referee is not supposed to be altering the environment or rules on the fly to thwart the players. Even if the players would put up with it, it’s just too easy. On the other hand, the Designer is absolutely supposed to be creating an environment that’s going to be hard, but possible, for the players to defeat. Again, even if the players would put up with it, making it impossible is too easy. In a game system like D&D that has “save or die” as one of the central mechanics, TPK is never more than a few badly designed rooms away.
In fact, even perfectly fair fights (where fair is defined as 50-50 whether the PCs or the NPCs win) will inevitably crush the players as they’re repeated; that’s just the law of large numbers. So the Designer’s real problem is to make PC victory both possible and the result of good play rather than chance. It’s trivial to make challenges that the PCs could survive that are equivalent to spinning a roulette wheel; you can even control precisely how likely they are to “win.”
On the other hand, Challenge-Based games require the possibility that the players will lose. In old school D&D it’s often said that there are no winners and losers, and that’s true in a sense. Players can never lose the entire game–they can always roll up another character and have another go at it–but they can fail at a particular attempt and lose a character. It’s a crucial part of Challenge-Based games that this is possible. You could add a house rule to RK’s Lord of the Rings so that if Sauron ever overtakes the Ring Bearer on the corruption track, the players win, but would anyone ever want to play that?
There has been a fairly steady move away from Challenge-Based play in RPGs, for a lot of good reasons and some not-so-good ones, almost from the get-go. I’m not sure that it’s even possible to reach the full potential of the RP part of an RPG in a Challenge-Based game; the challenge is perforce directed at the player, rather than the character…rolling to see if your 17 INT wizard solves the riddle just isn’t the same kind of experience as trying to solve the riddle yourself. And a challenge-based game can’t reasonably demand that players firewall their knowledge from their character’s knowledge; it would be insane to expect players to get any enjoyment out of having character after character fall victim to the same trap just because the character can’t have any way of knowing it’s there.
But I do know that just because it’s rare and not the current fashion doesn’t make it an illegitimate approach to gaming. The “problem” that players of RK’s Lord of the Rings have that Sauron sometimes wins if they don’t play well can’t be solved by having a discussion around the table so they can drop the Watcher in the Water and replace it with something “fun.”
The Dire Rust Monster
Posted by Joshua on Sep 24, 2008
In the comments on my Rust Monsters: Not For the Wuss of Heart post, several people claimed that they disliked Rust Monsters because they didn’t represent any real challenge: once you knew the trick of dealing with them, it was just a tedious process of beating them to death with non-metal weapons. I think that betrays a lack of imagination on where and when they might meet Rust Monsters, but for them I have created:
Dire Rust Monster
Armor Class: 2
Hit Dice: 5*
Move: 120′ (40′)
Attacks: 2 Claws/1 Club Tail/1 pair antenna
Damage: 1-8/1-8/1-8/special
No. Appearing: 1-4 (1-4)
Save As: Fighter: 3
Morale: 7
Treasure Type: Nil
Alignment: Neutral
XP Value: 400
Looking more like an ankylosaur with antenna than an armadillo, the Dire Rust Monster share with its lesser cousin a voracious appetite for metal.
The special antenna attack is the same as a Rust Monster: non-magical metal armor or weapons crumble to dust; magical metal armor or weapons lose a plus (10% per plus chance of resisting the effect), once it loses all its pluses the next hit crumbles it. A successful hit on the monster with any type of weapon means the body was hit, and there is no ill-effect on the weapon.
Now it’s just as challenging as an Owl Bear (since it’s statted like an Owl Bear, except for its AC, a lower Morale and a different special ability, and a whopping XP bonus) and those who were bored by the original Rust Monster should be all eager to go up against it, right?
Rust Monsters: Not for the Wuss of Heart
Posted by Joshua on Sep 23, 2008
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Some people are really pissed that Wizards of the Coast cut the Rust Monster from the new 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. This creature was one of the original, classic creepy creatures from the old school pre-AD&D days.
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While we’re on the subject of Fear in RPGs, the Rust Monster represents a particularly pure instance of Challenge Fear. The only threat that the Rust Monster represents is to your character’s efficacy. An encounter with a Rust Monster challenges you to avoid or defeat it without risking your precious equipment, or to face subsequent encounters at less than full strength.
Players who think that isn’t fun are wusses. Or, to put it slightly less pejoratively, are either seeking the illusion of challenge without the actual possibility of significant set-backs or shouldn’t be playing a challenge-based game. Players who are interested in interacting with the world will roll with the punches: if that’s what the setting says happens, that’s what happens. Players who are interested in creating an exciting story might actually seek those situations out: if John McClane has to run through broken glass in his bare feet, putting him at a disadvantage for the rest of the story-line, that’s great, it ups the tension. Players who are genuinely interested in challenge might curse their luck, or their lack of foresight, but those are the breaks that make the game worth playing. But players who complain that it’ll leave them at less than their recommended wealth-and-equipment amounts for characters of their level, throwing off the challenge ratings for level-appropriate encounters until the GM throws in enough loot to restore the balance…. well, I can’t help feeling that they’re playing not just the wrong system, but the wrong kind of system.
There are plenty of systems out there that are explicitly built around the notion that the PCs will triumph and kick ass, and play is about giving them the mechanics to describe how they kick ass in really cool and awesome ways (Feng Shui and Exalted come to mind, or in a different vein something like Amber). Taking a system that in its essence is about all kinds of ways that PCs can fail (poisoned, turned to stone, level-drained, killed, polymorphed, etc.) and putting foam padding on all the dangerous bits is…lame. Go too far in that direction and even sword wounds will just seal themselves right up after a few moments… oh, wait, that’s 4e Healing Surges.
Really, I can understand and enjoy styles of gaming where the only setbacks are player imposed or player veto-able. But if players want that, they shouldn’t fool themselves about what they’re doing. If losing your +2 Flaming Broadsword is going to ruin the campaign for you, getting rid of the Rust Monster isn’t nearly enough–the GM’ll have to get rid of thieves, Dispell Magic, really any kind of situation where you could be knocked unconscious and stripped of your possessions… You’d all be much better off with a system where having that flaming broadsword is part of your character schtick, with explicit script immunity.
Fear in RPGs
Posted by Joshua on Sep 17, 2008
As I see it, there are three kinds of fear in RPGs. I’ll call them Visceral Fear, Challenge Fear, and Character Fear. Visceral Fear is fear that the players actually feel; Challenge Fear is fear that players experience for the character’s safety and well-being; and Character Fear is fear that the characters experience but the players do not. The names are a little clunkier than I’d like, but I’m trying to get at something I think is an important distinction between fear felt by the player as a human being, and fear felt by the player as a player of a game, both of which could reasonably be labeled “player fear.”
Visceral Fear
Visceral Fear is fear that the players sitting around the table actually experience in their own body; it’s not actual fear for their own safety (or it had better not be) but it’s the kind of fear that you might experience while watching a horror movie or reading a book. It’s fear that’s caused by empathy with the character, but the physical reactions–goosebumps, chills, startlement, disgust–are your own. Visceral Fear is regarded by some gamers as the ne plus ultra of fear reactions possible in RPGs, even the whole point of running a horror scenario. But visceral fear is very hard to achieve in a table-top role-playing game, which is much less immersive than a movie or a first-person computer game, and is something that a lot of people really object to experiencing even in horror scenarios. By definition, it’s not a pleasant experience as it’s happening, though in retrospect you might be quite pleased that it occurred.
Generally, the way to achieve Visceral Fear is to up the level of immersion in the game. Some GMs will resort to music, dimming the lights or replacing them with candles, sound-effects recordings, props and the like; sometimes this works, but sometimes it just comes across as cheesy. A lot can be done by increasing the amount and vividness of the descriptions you give. Many GMs neglect senses other than sight and sound in their descriptions, so making sure to include smells, heat and cold, touch and so forth will make everything easier to imagine. Another piece of advice is that imagination is much stronger than description, so less is more. No detailed description you’re likely to come up with of a tentacled horror is going to be half as scary as as what the players picture if you describe their fingers groping in the dark brushing against cold rubbery flesh that pulses and slithers away. You want small concrete details, not paragraphs of purple prose that make them giggle or gives them time to let their minds wander. Also, describe things, don’t label them. “You see three Zombies” isn’t viscerally frightening.
Another piece of advice is try to pay careful attention to the level of tension. You want to ratchet it up higher and higher as the scenario progresses, but people generally can’t take a lot of unremitting tension. They need breaks from the tension, and if you don’t provide them, they’ll provide their own by breaking character and cracking jokes. You are aiming for an ebb and flow of tension, with each successive crest higher and scarier than the last, until you reach the climax which is hopefully the scariest part of the scenario. The climax of an adventure game will often be a big, bloody battle, which tends to ruin the mood as far as Visceral Fear goes; that’s ok…it’s time for Fight instead of Flight, and this is the players’ pay-off for letting you scare them all this time. It’s pretty much impossible for them to stay creeped out when the dice are flying. The ending may turn out to be entirely down-beat, with all the PCs mad or dead and gibbering horror unloosed upon the world, but in the moments leading up to that where the players are making the decisions that will or won’t lead to that outcome they are not going to be feeling the horror–the mental modes required are incompatible.
Challenge Fear
Challenge Fear is the fear that players have for the well-being of their characters, or their ability to achieve the victory conditions (which may be quite nebulous or personal when it comes to RPGs). It’s fear in the same sense that a chess player might fear losing his Queen. It may be completely cold-blooded and rational, based on their objective assessment of the characters’ chances of emerging unscathed; it may be as silly as feeling that the dice have been against them all night, so they had better avoid combat. But it’s completely separate from any Visceral Fear the player might have because of the imagery or the horror aspects of the scenario. The person who is playing might experience a lot of Visceral Fear even when as a player he experiences none at all for his character’s ultimate success, such as in a story-oriented game with complete script immunity for his character. (In fact, that may be the raison d’être of horror scenarios in story-oriented games.) Or a player might experience a high degree of Challenge Fear in a completely prosaic dungeon crawl where no attempt whatever is made to convey any atmosphere and the character is not directly threatened with any physical harm, such as a Fighter with a cool magic sword and armor confronted with a lowly Rust Monster.
Challenge Fear is probably the most common and useful kind of fear in an RPG. Visceral Fear is something that a lot of people just don’t want to experience in their games. Challenge Fear is something that the majority of RPG players want, or at least claim to want, at least to some degree. Even the worst munchkins would hesitate to admit that they want the rules to be reduced to “whatever you attempt, you succeed” and the GMs job to just describing stuff for them to succeed at.
So why do I even call it Fear, and not merely Challenge? It has to do with what I mentioned in my previous post on Scary Scary Monsters, with what I called “having skin in the game.” Something can be very challenging, in the sense of being unlikely to occur or hard to pull off, but still have trivial consequences if you fail; if they’re trivial enough, then success can be robbed of any interest or triumph. If you get a basket from more than half the court away when you were just standing there hucking balls at the backboard all afternoon, you might be amused, but hardly jubilant. If you sink one from the free-throw line with $500,000 on the line, you’d be inhuman if all you had to say was, “well, isn’t that nice.” And even if you have an 80+% free throw rate, if you had $500,000 at stake you might very well choke just because of that. Having something at stake changes the game, and makes you fearful of losing.
Now, I’d say being fearful of losing is a good thing. Too much fear can rob you of the fun, so even if you succeed you feel nothing more than relief and anticipatory dread of having to do something similar again later. Nobody is going to want to play an RPG like that. But too little fear can make playing tedious, and I think that’s a lot more common. I think a lot of players are used to games where the stakes are too low; when the loss is purely imaginary, it seems to me that you ought to be willing to risk a lot more to make it more interesting. “Ho hum, another gibbering tentacled horror from beyond the stars” is not something you want the players to be thinking, even in a game of Grand Adventure with steely-eyed, square-jawed heroes who never flinch in the face of danger. The character might think that, but you never want the player to be ho-hum about anything. Even in games where you have script immunity from death (and I admit that a lot of the games I GM are like that in practice, even if in theory the system allows for you to die), you can increase the tension and make the players more invested in the outcome by putting things that are important to the players about the characters and the setting at risk. Note that it’s not enough, IMO, to have the risk be something that is theoretically important to the character; for a lot of players, losing that is just gaining a story opportunity and spotlight time. There’s nothing wrong with players getting story opportunities and spotlight time, but if that’s the biggest downside, it’ll make them more indifferent to the outcome. Ideally you want them to care, a tad short of desperately, how the events in the game unfold. You want them to fear the bad and rejoice in the good. You want the challenges that they face to have distinct permanent (or nearly so) outcomes, good or bad, so that they remember damn well forever after whether they met that challenge or not. If an encounter with a wandering monster isn’t going to give them more than a few wounds they can magic away or a few xp and a sword to sell at the next town, then you’re wasting everybody’s time and an opportunity to have something memorable happen (unless you’re running a sandbox game and you and they regard this kind of thing as time well-spent in establishing the texture of the world–and even then you might ask yourself whether it’s actually worth playing out rather than jumping to the inevitable end of the encounter).
Character Fear
Finally, there is character fear: the fear that the character experiences that isn’t shared by the player personally or the player qua player. This might be caused by failing a Guts check when confronted with some rotting horror, by the Fear spell of an enemy Necromancer, by a character phobia, or even perhaps by the player deciding that in the given situation it would be in-character for the character to be frightened.
I don’t have a lot to say about Character Fear. Some systems use it more than others, some genres call for it more than others. Many players regard it as a complete nuisance, and act as much as possible to minimize its scope and effect. Even if completely player instigated, it will usually greatly reduce the player’s scope of action; when system instigated depending on how it’s handled it can remove a player from play just as completely as if the character were knocked unconscious.
I guess I would generally prefer that Character Fear be more or less congruent with player fear, so that if the character acts afraid it’s because the player is experiencing a moment of Visceral Fear or has correctly assessed that given the stakes and the likely outcomes there’s good reason to be afraid of something genuinely regrettable happening, but I wouldn’t want to make any rule about that–even a rule of thumb–because I recognize that there’s a lot of chewy roleplaying goodness to be had when the characters are afraid.
Also, there’s a fairly strong tendency in RPGs for characters to be irrationally, even suicidally brave. PCs will often fight to the death, not only disregarding the likely outcomes in the setting and system, but the likely motivations of the characters and even the biology of human beings. Sometimes that’s why people play these games. That’s fine, but occasionally things that will at least remind them of what sane creatures would likely be feeling at that point can be valuable for the verisimilitude of the setting and genre and the survival of the characters.
Posted in theory || 4 Comments »