Karma Points, or Payback is a Botch
Posted by Joshua on Jun 18, 2009
There’s a discussion over at Robertson Games about using Luck points or the like to reduce the impact of a series of bad rolls resulting in character death. I’m not a big fan of them, preferring explicit script immunity if the game isn’t going to just let the dice fall where they may. I totally get why not every game needs to challenge the players and have character death or significant defeat be a live option, or at least give the players veto power to avoid stupid or anticlimactic deaths, but I think that Luck Points in the sense of a small finite resource than can be spent to reroll or force a roll to a certain outcome aren’t an adequate response. On the one hand, they’re too little: they don’t actually guarantee that unacceptable outcomes never occur. Eventually the party runs out of do-overs, and then they’re stuck even if another unacceptable outcome occurs. On the other hand, they do too much, since the players will almost certainly come to consider their presence (or absence if they’re running low) when evaluating their options. If you don’t want a TPK when the party foolishly attacks a sleeping dragon they happen across while on some unrelated quest, giving them Luck Points may actually encourage them to attack it; in effect Luck Points subsidize them making game-mechanically foolish choices.
Generally I prefer that the GM and players either agree in advance that they have script immunity, or they take up situations where a run of bad luck has derailed the game or killed a character on a case-by-case basis, deciding whether to live with the outcome or retcon it as an extraordinary measure. I’ve long felt it to be a mistake to roll for something if you’re not willing to abide by the roll; if I really don’t want characters to die as a result of bad rolls in combat, I take the option off the table, for instance by making less than 0 HP mean incapacitated, fate to be determined. It occurs to me, though, that it might be possible to craft a mechanic that answers my objections.
Suppose instead of a pre-figured supply of Luck Points which could be used to overrule or reroll a bad situation, you had an unlimited supply…but each time you invoked the rule you gained one Karma Point. The GM could then spend one Karma Point to overrule or force a reroll some time down the line, negating some good result you had rolled. That clearly solves the problem of a finite supply just kicking the can of reckoning down the road, giving the players a form of script immunity when it was just notably bad luck that screwed them over. It might also address the problem of the players counting on their immunity to let them try dumb things, since they would know it would cause them potentially serious trouble down the line. Yes, they could know in advance that whatever happens they can survive the dragon’s first breath attack…but at the risk of turning an otherwise easy situation later on into a fiasco. It wouldn’t anwer for players who really need script immunity so their fun isn’t all bashed out of shape by random die rolls, but it might do for players who were generally interested/willing to subject their character’s fate to the dice but wanted some measure of veto power over extremely inopportune rolls.
Unlucky 13
Posted by Joshua on May 17, 2009
I generally like the idea of fumbles in games, being both true to life and literature, although they can be a problem if they’re too frequent or severe. A fair number of published systems would have a tenth or more of an army incapacitating themselves over the course of a battle. Another thing that I think is a problem, albeit a minor one, is that most systems tie fumbles into failure, so it’s impossible to both succeed at a task but have something go awry.
Here’s the system I’m currently using in my D&D-esque game: whenever rolling a d20, a roll of a 13 means something unlucky potentially happened. Roll a Luck save (luck is a Stat in this system, but you could substitute some other sort of save). Success means nothing happened, failure means something bad but relatively minor or recoverable (weapon twists in your grip and you can’t attack next turn, sun gets in your eyes, etc.). A second roll of 13 means something quite unfortunate happened, such as dropping your weapon or falling down. Roll again and keep rolling if 13 keeps coming up, making the result more severe the more 13′s you get.
Obviously you can adjust just how bad it is to taste; I feel that dropping a weapon one in 400 times is probably bad enough, but you might prefer that to be the result of failing the luck save, and have the roll of a second 13 be more spectacular, such as a broken weapon. You could also make it more severe, so that e.g. a weapon breaks on a failed save after the initial 13, if you want things to be more chaotic; I lean against that, in part because in most RPGs that sort of thing can really make the PCs seem like klutzes. During a campaign players tend to make many times more roles than any individual NPC they encounter, so a 1 in 20 or 1 in 40 shot may well turn up for each character at least once a night; if the failures are particularly memorable that can be a problem. 1 in 400 is more like once a session or less for some PC or NPC…enough to add flavor without being overwhelming.
I like this because it’s an easy mnemonic, which can be important for something relatively rare. It’s a pain to have to, say, check each roll to see if it missed by more than X if it’s only going to really matter 1 in 400 times. I also like it because it makes it possible to both succeed (if 13 was good enough) and still have something untoward happen, such as hitting a target but having your weapon stick.
D&D Alignment
Posted by Joshua on Apr 12, 2009
Advanced Gaming & Theory: Pet Peeve: Detect Alignment
I THINK THAT EVERY body has a “pet-peeve” or something that bugs them about a game system itself. For me, that pet-peeve was largely spells used for detecting alignment. Now, this stems from playing the game incorrectly when our group was still learning, and not detecting our error, thus never fixing it. But this spell still bugs me to this day. It just seems like one of those things which was put into the game to make the Dungeon Masters life miserable.
Tim Ripper goes on to talk about how he deals with alignment, basically by neutering it. NPCs and PCs don’t actually know their own alignment, good characters can do bad things and vice-versa, the Detect Alignment spell is basically useless: easily fooled, obvious when it’s cast, considered a hostile act or even a prelude to an attack, and so forth.
But I have to ask, why have alignments in your game, then? What’s the point if they’re secret even from the players, you have to nerf certain spells to keep them that way, and even the GM can’t use them as a guide to behavior? I think it’s far simpler to just remove it from the game, which is pretty much what we did back in the day. Trying to keep alignment in the game without making it actually useful or having noticeable game-world consequences strikes me as more trouble than it’s worth.
Generally, there seem to me to be two and a half standard fruitful approaches to really using D&D alignment as part of the game world without running into the problems of having players run around casting Detect Alignment and short-circuiting any kind of real moral reasoning or thinking about the motives of the NPCs.
Approach 1 is that Alignments are sides in a cosmic war. Your alignment says which side you are on in the war, and nothing more. There can be honorable, maybe even admirable people and creatures on the Chaotic side, though perhaps few and far between, just as there can be complete rat-bastards on the Lawful side. Your alignment in particular says nothing about how you treat people in petty day-to-day things, whether you lie, cheat, give to charity, keep your word, and so forth. Alignment detection spells detect which side’s uniform you’re wearing, as it were. This was easier to pull off without confusing modern sensibilities when the alignments are just Chaos and Law, instead of the two-axis AD&D Law vs. Chaos and Good vs. Evil, but is still possible.
A subset of approach 1 (the “and a half”) is that humans and most other creatures don’t even really count in the cosmic war. Only supernatural entities and magic actually have concrete alignment, and that’s what spells detect. Ordinary mortals might have tendencies, but they’re really weak stuff compared to the real thing, and don’t register even when they’re conscious allegiances.
Approach 2 is that alignments are the Gods’ eye-view score card of your behavior: how the Gods view your actions according to their moral lights. This makes Alignment, though perfectly concrete and detectable, more like having a prison record or past citations and medals for good works. “Past record is no guarantee of future performance.” Still, you’d have to be willfully stupid to ignore the evidence that alignment offers when deciding whether to put someone in a position of trust. None of this namby-pamby alignment detections exists, but there are social taboos against using it guff. You want a position of trust, you submit to the alignment check, just as today you submit to a background check in any kind of sensitive position.
What you don’t want to do, in my opinion, is make alignment exist, but be useless. Either figure out the ways it plays out in the game world and deal with it (perhaps just giving up the cliche of the vizier “secretly” being evil), or strike it from the books and say that in your game world people steer by whatever their own personal moral compass is… different religions and philosophies advocate different things but there is no one universal measure, magical or otherwise, that can be applied. Keeping it but figuring out all kinds of reasons that nobody does or should do the obvious things given its existence just magnifies its flaws.
RPG Rules and the Direction of Causality
Posted by Joshua on Mar 16, 2009
There are two ways you can view causality flowing in terms of RPG rules: from the game-world to the rules, or from the rules to the game world. Either game rules attempt to describe a game-world, or they define the game-world.
In the first view, game-world effects have game-world causes, and the rules are just a model or approximation of the factors and chain of events from cause to effect within the game-world. They’re there to make adjudication more consistent, predictable, or speedier, but they’re intended to be sacrificed whenever they don’t accomplish those goals. It’s taken for granted that the rules are only approximations, and they need not be consulted if the results are obvious to all the players (or perhaps just obvious to the GM), and they need to be overruled whenever they yield a result that doesn’t make sense in terms of the game world.
In the second view, the rules are in effect the physics of the game-world, and it’s impossible for them to yield a result that doesn’t “make sense” in the game-world. If there’s any flaw, it’s in the players’ improper grasp of the way the game-world operates and their invalid attempt to apply ordinary ideas of cause and effect or probability imported from our world into the game. The rules are there to tell the players what is and is not possible in the game-world.
The choice is a matter of taste, but the two views are mutually exclusive. Even if you switched back and forth from one view to the other, or used one view for certain rules and the other view for different rules, you can’t simultaneously hold both views of a single ruling. If they are temporarily congruent you might not be able to tell which you were using, but when they conflict you have to come down on one side or the other: conform to the rule despite the apparent illogic, or conform to the logic overriding the rule. (You might subsequently adjust the rule to try and make clashes less frequent, but at that moment, you came down on the side that the game-world trumps the rules.)
Game systems tend to favor one view over the other, even if they don’t make it explicit or apply it consistently across all decisions. Even the same rule often can be viewed one way or the other by different gaming groups. In original D&D, for instance, the game explicitly took the view that the rules were approximations but in every case the referee was the final arbiter; nevertheless there were rules such as Magic Users being forbidden to wear armor which weren’t explained in terms of game-world logic, leaving different groups on their own to either come up with explanations to justify the rule so that causality still flowed from the game-world to the rules (e.g. “armor is too restrictive, MUs can wear it but any attempt to cast spells will fail”), or to reverse the direction for that rule and say “Magic users can’t wear armor because that’s the rule. There is no why.” (Or perhaps by an appeal to a meta-game consideration, such as “MUs can’t wear armor because that would be unbalanced.”) Note that if the group followed the first tack, there would be further in-game consequences that flow from it, such as MUs having their companions carry armor around so that when they ran out of spells they could armor up. If the group took the latter tack, there’s often an awareness that the world is operating in strange and arbitrary ways. Much gaming humor (such as in Order of the Stick) comes from making the characters as aware of the flow of causality from the rules to their world as the players are.
Some games simply make no sense in terms of the first view: you cannot really regard the rules as an abstraction of game-world causality without it becoming a gonzo humor game. For instance, in the PDQ (Prose Descriptive Quality) system used by games such as Truth & Justice, when a character takes damage in a fight, the damage can be applied to a trait such as Accounting. So Spider-Guy getting hit by a truck thrown by the Blue Boar makes it more likely that some time later in the campaign, some complication will crop up having to do with his Accounting, such as being audited by the IRS. But even the most pronounced rules-first, game-world as a result system such as Truth & Justice, Dogs in the Vineyard, or D&D 4th Edition will have fairly large areas of the game that can be decided not by interactions of the rules, but consultation with the logic of the game-world, such as ordinary conversation between the PCs and NPCs (at least where the PCs aren’t trying to “win” a conflict with the NPCs or gain information that the NPCs do not wish to divulge).
On the other hand, unless you’re running system-less, there are probably no “rules as model” games where the rules never yield a somewhat implausible result that’s nonetheless taken as the actual game-world result, if for no other reason than to speed the game along and not make each ruling a source of debate.
Nevertheless, there is a clear distinction between games which aspire to the view of game-world causality as primary and those that take the opposite approach, and not understanding which approach the game is taking can lead to debates, frustration, and anger. Players and GMs may be seen as trying to twist or undermine the rules or even cheat in a group that expects causality to flow from the rules when they reason from game-world causes to game-world effects; in the opposite situation they may be seen as stifling creativity, being rigid, or power-gaming when they reason from rules causes to game-world effect regardless of game-world logic (another common form of gamer humor, as epitomized by The Knights of the Dinner Table, particularly Brian).
When you GM and when you play you should try to remain aware of which direction causality is supposed to flow in the game you’re playing, so that you can keep it clear whether the rules are the alpha and omega, or are they, as it were just guidelines…suggestions, really.
Multi-Classing
Posted by Joshua on Mar 13, 2009
The Valley of the Blue Snails, a really interesting blog mostly about an unusual setting that Canecorpus has created, has a post about Multi-Classing in his D&D setting:
Valley of Blue Snails: Multi-Classes Revisited
I will be changing a few of the multi-class titles though I’m a bit mixed on what direction to take it. The titles are similar to normal class titles (Veteran, Cutpurse, Wizard, etc) in that they are mostly for fluff with perhaps a minor ability to adhere the two classes better. I’m deciding on wither to make it very setting specific or use more intuitive titles.
Example, a Fighter-Cleric would be a Paladin. Pretty intuitive. Setting specific would be something like a Dwarven Fighter-Cleric would be a Whitebeard. Not so intuitive but perhaps a better choice since this sort of multi-class fluff is well outside of the realm of B/X anyhow. The main problem is the setting specifics titles would indeed be rather specific, slanting towards race with specific classes.
I did something similar for a (for now abandoned) retro game I was working on, which I might as well share in case somebody finds it interesting:
| Primary/Secondary | Fighter | Mage | Priest | Thief | Actor | Ranger |
| Fighter | Warrior | Magic Knight | Paladin | Brigand | Swashbuckler | Barbarian |
| Mage | Wizard | Mage | Seer | Warlock | Witch | Hermit |
| Priest | Monk | Thaumaturge | Priest | Charlatan | Oracle | Druid |
| Thief | Rogue | Mountebank | Fraud | Thief | Spy | Outlaw |
| Actor | Bard | Conjurer | Idol | Jester | Actor | Minstrel |
| Ranger | Scout | Shaman | Pilgrim | Vagabond | Emissary | Ranger |
Basically, there are six primary classes (one for each of the six standard stats) and they combine into 36 different classes, with differing emphasis depending on whether a particular class is primary or secondary. Somebody who’s primarily a Thief but uses magic to steal and con is a Mountebank, while somebody who is primarily a Mage, but uses stealth and deception to accomplish his ends and impress people with his power is a Charlatan, etc. You mostly got the armor restrictions of your primary class, and the weapon restrictions of your secondary class, with most other abilities splitting the difference. Spell user progressed as in their primary as if they were one level lower, and their secondary two levels lower. And so forth.
I actually think it’s pretty workable, but it’s not something my main face-to-face play group would be interested in, and I have too much on my plate right now to pursue it further. If I start a play-by-forum or play-by-post campaign, I’ll probably use Tunnels & Trolls instead of trying to sell people on and play-test some wacky homebrew.