In Pursuit of Fiction-First

It's been a few months since I last posted here, but I'm hoping to revive the blog. Since releasing the PowerFrame Core Rulebook I've been working on-and-off on a couple of new RPGs, and I'd like to keep a record of my progress and thoughts.

The first new game is Thunder Hunters, which I've mentioned here a couple of times – a naturalistic game of primitive tribes living alongside dinosaurs. I've made some good progress, but I need to put some time into playtesting the basic mechanics before I develop the rest of the game.

The second new game is one I've just thought up recently, so my brain's currently buzzing with ideas – Blade Bind, a hyper-drama game of Chosen wielding giant supernatural swords, inspired by Shinobigami, Eternal Contenders, and Wield. I've got some idea of the overall shape and content of the game, and I'm just starting to develop a card-based duelling mechanic, which prompted today's post.

Pursuing Fiction-First

I find it really easy to come up with RPG rules that are Mechanics => Fiction (like a D&D tactical map battle, or a board game), but I find it harder to come up with systems that are Fiction => Mechanics => Fiction (like Apocalypse World or Cortex Plus).

This isn't necessarily a problem, but it's harder to get evocative descriptions out of players when you can play part of the game like a card or board game: the mechanics generate plenty of fictional output, but they don't respond at all to fictional input. You can describe your actions however you like, but the bottom line is they don't affect your mechanical options.

I hate to pick on Eternal Contenders, because it's a great (although sometimes frustrating) game, but it's one place where I really notice this phenomenon. The card-based duels tend to take a while to resolve, but although the game exhorts you to be descriptive there really is no link between your description and the outcome of the mechanics. After a few rounds, duels tend to turn into almost pure card-games, with the players reading the fictional outcomes but not offering a lot of description unless strongly prompted.

I also experienced this phenomenon when working on Neon Burn. I came up with a wonderful dice game for antigrav racing, where the way you played your dice expressed the way you were racing (conservatively, reckless, blocking others), and the mechanics provided fictional outcomes (progress, current positions, damage). But as above, the mechanics didn't really respond to fictional input – instead, your mechanical choices dictated fictional outcomes. You could play the whole race just by referring to the dice, and check at the end to see who won.

Designing for Fiction-First

I really like the effect you get when a character's approach or intent shapes the way the mechanics work. That way, there's no bypassing the description. I've experienced at least a couple of games that manage to achieve this.

The first is Apocalypse World (and its kin). The mechanical Moves only trigger when you do certain things, so you have to actually describe how you're going about it. If you don't, and just try to jump straight to a Move you assume is going to be the right one, you risk rolling for the wrong thing. I've seen this with players who assume that Seize by Force or Hack and Slash are the "Attack" Moves, and roll for them before I can point out that their opponent isn't in a position to fight back.

The second is Cortex Plus, of which I've played the Smallville and Firefly variants. In these games, the dice you roll are tied to your approach. It's more than just picking the appropriate skill to roll, though – depending on the variant, you may need to pick and justify appropriate Values, Attributes or Roles; Relationships or Skills; Distinctions, Assets, and possibly other stuff. In effect, building your dice pool tells a little story about how you're trying to overcome a particular challenge.

I've worked pretty hard to come up with a fiction-first system for Thunder Hunters, and I think I've done an OK job. You choose how to respond to the current situation each turn, which interacts somewhat with your opponent's actions to create a set of outcomes. Your intent determines which Stat applies, but you also get to choose where to assign your tool bonuses: Are you setting your spear to stab a charging foe, or using it to fend them off, or throwing it? Fictional positioning is also important to help minimise the natural "tools" that dinosaurs can bring to bear against you.

In a (Blade) Bind?

So the card-based sword-fighting system I've come up with for Blade Bind is currently pretty mechanics-first. Your choice of cards to play is representative of your approach to the fight (aggressive, cautious, desperate, cunning), but you can totally play out a duel without describing any fictional choices or positioning.

I'm not sure if it's a major issue though. I want the fights to be pretty fast, so the amount of time spent auguring cards to get fictional output should be fairly low. I also want the game to be pretty grim, where the only real way you have to alter the situation is through duelling, so cutting down on fictional options seems reasonable. Hopefully brief and thematic fights will encourage some enthusiastic description in any case.

I also have some ideas to tie extra mechanics to the cards; perhaps special powers can only trigger on a face or an ace, or I can tie particular manoeuvres to certain suits. I'll certainly be looking for ways to help tell a story and bring fictional positioning to the table as I continue development.

September Status

Sorry for the lack of posts lately; I've been working on a lot of stuff lately, and haven't found the time to write about it!

It looks like I've pretty much lost the impetus to write detailed Actual Plays - and most of the time if I try to write a brief AP it turns into a long one. I think, if anything, I'm more likely to write about impressions, thoughts, and problems with games, rather than detailed accounts of the sessions themselves.

After its successful Kickstarter, I've been working on various things for Fear the Living. I've made up a couple of record sheets and gone through two editing passes of the game document. I'm currently working on the layout so we can move on to the final pre-production stage. It's only taken a month to get to this stage, so hopefully it might be completed in another month or so? We're also waiting on art though, so I guess that might slow things down a bit.

I've been slowly plugging away at the art for PowerFrame, although not as much as I should. There are still a lot of art-worthy gaps to fill, and a few outstanding essential pieces (chapter heading-bars, and the cover). I'm thinking I'll concentrate on those and a couple of other pieces to fill large annoying gaps in the layout, and release it on DriveThruRPG. Since it's currently aimed at PDF-only, I can always update the file if I get the chance to add more art later.

I'm also about to do another round of art for the Strays RPG, though, so I guess that will eat up most of my art production time for the next little while...

In the meantime, since I've been working on art and editing, my game-mechanical brain has been chewing over a couple of new projects: Thunder Hunters, which I discussed part of previously, and a currently unnamed tile and card based wargame.

Oh! I also ran my first session of Dungeon World a couple of nights ago! It went pretty well although we only had two players. The Cleric and Paladin formed a low-ranking Inquisitorial unit, investigating a skeleton-infested floating tomb.

Thunder Hunters

I haven't done too much more on Thunder Hunters, since +Annette keeps dutifully reminding me to work on PowerFrame instead.

I have pretty much decided to go with the option of combining stats so you only roll one dice pool against your opponent's target number (also made from two combined stats). So to stab something, you add Hit+Might and roll that many d6 against your opponent's Agile+Vigour. Rather than reducing hit points, Successes indicate what sort of effect you have on the target - anything from missing and overextending yourself, to manoeuvring, inflicting minor wounds (in the form of stat penalties), and finally lethal or defeating blows.

One interesting thing I've come up with, is to have larger creatures use larger dice. So people use d6, but Allosaurs use d8, and Tyrannosaurs use d10. This makes larger things scarier, and also provides a tactile sense of struggling against a larger creature.

Another thing I've been mulling over has been the idea of Spirit Points. The original idea was that killing creatures releases Evil Spirits that plague the tribe or allow the GM to develop the ecosystem to introduce new threats; however, I need to make sure the economy isn't set up to necessarily de-incentivise fighting dinosaurs, which is part of the appeal of the game. I do want to reflect what happens when you upset the balance of nature, but the balance can also tip too far against the tribe and threaten to overwhelm them if the wild isn't fought back to some extent. I'm still thinking over ways to implement that, although I'm not actively thinking about it right now.

Tile Wargame

I've had the idea for this sort of wargame for a while - you use tiles for terrain to create a variable battlefield, and cards to represent units. It's set at a medieval tech level, since I want the basics of infantry, archers, and cavalry. However, there's nothing which would prevent the representation of early firearms and cannons as well.

The main mantra is "No Modifiers", although what that really means is "the players don't have to remember to add any modifiers during play." All of a unit's melee and ranged defence scores are listed on the card, with different ratings for each of the six types of terrain they might be standing in. Attack scores are generally fixed, although some units may have alternative attack scores against different types of enemy units, or against units in specific terrain.

I've based the terrain on the types described in The Art of War - Open (plains, fields), Entangling (forests), Temporising (swamps, bogs), Precipitous (hills, elevations), Narrow Passes (canyons, bridges, streets), and Fortifications (castles, towers, walls). Each terrain tile has a movement cost for the three forms of movement - foot, hoof, or wheel.

Units don't track hit points or anything like that - I want to keep the bookkeeping to a minimum. Instead, we abstract the unit's condition. They start in Solid formation, and if they take a certain strength of attack they become Broken - you flip the card over, which describes the unit operating at reduced capacity. A Broken unit that suffers harm Falls Back and gives up its space; if it takes more damage after that, it's Routed and removed from play.

I've been slowly putting together a playtest set, although as my printer's out of ink I've been hand-writing blank unit cards on ivory-board. The entire game exists on a sea of floating modifiers, so I want to be able to erase and rewrite the details if I decide something needs to be changed. It's taken me a while since each unit has a lot on its card, but I just about have three small armies ready to do some local playtests.

Attacking and Defending

There's a stylistic divide between combat styles that I usually like to see represented - the difference between a light, nimble, agile warrior, and the heavy, slow, strong warrior. Since I'm currently thinking about a game called Thunder Hunters where you get to hunt dinosaurs, it's a topic that's been on my mind.

This is me talking through my current design problem, so it's going to get a little long and technical.

In my PowerFrame RPG, characters have Attack, Avoid, Damage, and Toughness ratings. Attack opposes Avoid to score a hit, and Damage opposes Toughness to figure out the severity of the hit. In PowerFrame, the attacker and defender make opposed rolls, so there's a total of four checks for a successful attack. For Thunder Hunters, I'd like to try and cut that down a bit.

I'm also currently working with a d6 dice pool system. Stats would be rated from 1 to 6, which represents the number of dice you roll. Your opponent's stat is the target number you need for success.

For example, with an Attack of 4 against Agility of 5, you'd roll 4d6 and count one Success for each die that rolls 5 or more.

Two Rolls

To capture the fast vs tough divide, my initial thought was to have four stats that determine basic combat performance:

• Attack, from a skill you can develop.
• Damage, probably defined more by the weapon than the wielder.
• Agile, representing mobility.
• Robust, representing resistance to damage.

That's pretty much the same setup as PowerFrame, but the system works a bit differently. The defensive Agile/Robust are static target numbers, so that halves the required number of rolls.

• The attacker rolls Attack, counting Successes against their opponent's Agile.
• If they score at least one Success, the Attacker adds the Successes to their Damage and rolls that many dice against their opponent's Robust.
• Successes against Robust allow you to create advantages or wear down your opponent. Enough Successes allow you to inflict a Kill result.

Advantages

• It's possible to model things that are hard to hit and accurate but weak and fragile, and at the other extreme model things that are easy to hit and dodge but strong and tough. It's also possible to model things that are other mixtures (accurate and damaging, but slow and vulnerable), or even good or bad in all categories.
• It's easy to use different stats to deal with different attack types (for example, you dodge both a strike or a grapple with Agile, but use different stats to resist their effects).
• This spread of stats provides more dials that can be fiddled with in combat, potentially resulting in a richer simulation.

Disadvantages

• You still have to roll two dice pools.
• Two rolls to resolve an attack might not be consistent with the rest of the system, reducing things outside of combat to a simple single roll.
• With only 1 Success needed to result in a damaging attack, the chances of dodging outright quickly become very slim.
• Perhaps in the end, making two rolls is just a longer way to arrive at a singular probability?

One Roll

I am also experimenting with a different approach. The only two stats are Attack and Defence, with Successes on a single Attack roll resulting in combat advantage.

Weapons, armour, and other equipment would let you modify your Attack pool or reduce that of your opponent.

Advantages

• You only need to make one roll, so resolving an attack is fast.
• It's consistent with other single-roll non-combat skill usage.

Disadvantages

• You need different resistance stats to deal with different types of attack (wound, grapple etc). Since you need these stats in the two-roll system anyway, I'm not sure if it's a disadvantage. However, something irks me about having a bunch of monolithic defence stats rather than being able to see the separate components (Strike Defence and Grapple Defence would both contain a measure of agility).
• You lose the fast/accurate/strong/tough divisions. There's only dangerous/tenacious. While I think this could work very well for a game where the expected opposition is similar in capability to the PCs, I think in a game where people hunt dinosaurs it may not offer enough scope to describe the capabilities of different creatures.

At first blush it seems like a reasonable approach to have small Theropods be low Danger and low Tenacity, and larger ones such as Tyrannosaurus be high Danger and high Tenacity. It seems fine to be able to kill smaller raptors more easily and struggle to overcome a T-Rex. However, something was bugging me.

Then I thought a bit about traps. Imagine a spiked log swinging through the jungle. It scatters a pack of raptors; if it hits them it'll kill them, but they are small and agile and have time to get out of its way. Now imagine it swinging towards a T-Rex. It probably doesn't have time to get out of the way, but the wounds inflicted may not be fatal.

Ideally, this is how I view combat: against small, fast opponents there should be a low chance of hitting for a lot of damage. Against larger, slower opponents there should be a high chance of hitting for a little damage.

Where the single roll falls down is that against small enemies a dangerous attack has a high chance of doing a lot of damage, and against larger enemies it has a low chance of doing a little damage. The accuracy probabilities are out of whack. If we consider it in relation to the log trap example, it'll probably work almost as well against the T-Rex, but it will obliterate the pack of raptors.

In the end, using one roll won't replicate the probability of the two-roll method if we care about the effects of accuracy and damage, agility and toughness. That said, in many cases even a high Agility won't allow you to evade an attack altogether. If you're either going to get 1 Attack Success + 4 Damage against Robust 3 (average 3 Wounds), or 3 Attack Successes + 4 Damage against Robust 5 (average 2 Wounds), it's almost worth reducing it to one roll for simplicity's sake anyway.

Options

I'm still mulling over the pros and cons, looking for options I might have missed.

It might be possible to apply damage and toughness as set numbers on top of the initial Attack roll, or based on it somehow. This would cut back on one of the rolls, but I'd have to make sure the numbers work and it's not too dull.

I might be able to define defensive stats by combining two other stats: Against strikes, use Agile + Robust. Against grapples, use Agile + Might. It would require me to rethink the way I'm setting up the stats, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

There's this weird thing where I imagine an attack from a raptor and a T-Rex. The raptor is smaller and faster, but the T-Rex has much greater reach and a huge attack zone. Even disregarding the lethality of the hit, I can't see it being any easier to dodge the bite of a T-Rex than to avoid a man-sized raptor. So, it seems like Attack rating may actually go up with size, rather than down.

That also plays into my current Action Point system - I want to make being chased by a T-Rex daunting, by having it cost more to dodge its attacks. This sort of feeds into the feeling that I could reduce things to a single roll. If I reduce accuracy with size, it would be easier to dance around a T-Rex for days. If I reduce its attack rating, I'd have to come up with some other mechanism to drain AP.

Things are all up in the air at the moment, and I really need to get some stuff down on paper and see what happens. I think I'm probably going to work on the two roll system, but I'll keep an eye on it and see if I could somehow collapse the necessary stats to use the one roll method.