Category Archives: Gaming Stuff

AWW: Allies As Your Allies

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

The ideas in the last post spiraled out of thoughts about handling things like character pets, beast companions, et cetera, that I’d also like to take the time to thresh out in blog format.

One of the things I really liked in D&D 4E was the way familiars worked. Specifically, the fact that instead of being limited to a very small range of very small animals, they ran with the idea that a familiar is not *quite* an animal to begin with and defined it as basically a meta class of creature that fits a certain size and has certain limitations in interacting with the environment, but can be just about anything, then defined exception-based templates for many different types, with an invitation to flesh out your specific familiar’s “fluff” in ways that fit your character (crackling elemental energy auras, metallic skin, demonic or fey appearance, etc.)

The original choices were mostly limited to the familiar animal fare, but the expanded offerings included everything from pet slimes to gear-driven automata to disembodied eyes and hands.

The basic problem with such an embarrassment of wealth when it comes to choices, though, is that you have to either define everything you can think of (the 4E approach), or you have to give players a reasonably balanced set of tools to build their own definitions (the GURPS approach), and both approaches tend towards bloat over time.

Jack in particular liked the idea of a roguish character with a disembodied hand as his accomplice, so making sure this is an option has been added to my General System Benchmarking Standards along with “can do all the character archetypes D&D players would look for”. Not in the sense that any system I design would have disembodied hands added to it in order to please Jack, but in the sense that “Can it handle a player who wants to do this?” is a pretty good question given that it’s reasonably specific, reasonably limited, and interesting.

The last major draft of AWW tried to do a compact point based approach to building companion figures, and I don’t think was terrible but was out of place next to the define-by-archetypes system for player characters. Figuring out how to work them out under the Strong Points/Qualities system I’m working with now helped me refine my understanding of exactly what the system is and how it works, which is why I’m going to use the idea of animal companions and similar abilities as an example of how it all hangs together.

Your character’s major features are sketched out by choosing a number of Qualities. Each Quality has its own level. These are the only “levels” in the game. Your character does not go up a level, except within the scope of a Quality.

Your level in a Quality basically means your ability to Get Stuff Done using it. What stuff? Whatever stuff that Quality applies to. All Qualities work on the same level scale, which when applied to Qualities representing a personal attribute like strength or speed or a particular skill set looks something like this:

  1. Would be considered outstanding in a small village.
  2. Outstanding in a good-sized town.
  3. Outstanding in a large city.
  4. Outstanding in a kingdom.
  5. Outstanding in a vast land.
  6. Outstanding in the world.
  7. Outstanding in history.

This is “outstanding” in the sense of “tending to stand out”. Only outstanding abilities register as Qualities; they are the things about you that people tell stories about.

All Qualities have the same basic effect: they give you better results when you try to do something, and shift the upper bound of what you can do. Again, the “something” varies from Quality to Quality. This is referred to as the Quality’s scope, and while some will have definite exceptions, what is part of the Quality’s scope is a matter of interpretation and negotiation.

Personal Qualities like Strength, Speed, Influence, or Perception have a fairly obvious scope.  Archetypal Qualities like Alchemist and Thief, slightly less so. What about Companion Qualities, though? What does it mean to have a Level 1 Wolf, Cat, Horse, or Raven? Or a Disembodied Hand? Or Slime? Or Bottle Imp? Or Gear Thing?

Well, your level of a Quality determines how reliably you can do the things that Quality does, and how impressive the things you can do with it are. So if you have a Level 1 Raven, you can do anything you could reasonably (with dramatically flexible definitions of “reasonable”, as this is heroic fantasy fiction) expect a hero’s raven companion to do, with the same facility as if you were using Level 1 in your own abilities. Same thing with a Level 1 Wolf, or Cat, or Hand.

“So basically,” some people reading this will be saying, “you should put everything into animal companions, because a level in your companion is the same thing as a level of everything.”

Not so!

Your raven is still a raven. It’s scope is defined as things that the person across from the table hears and says, “I could see a raven doing that.” That person also gets to decide how easily a raven could do that. Having more levels of raven cancels out the added difficulty of things the person across the table thinks are kind of a stretch, but your raven remains a raven.

It’s also an autonomous creature with a will outside your own, even if we’re constructing our character in a way that suggests a mystical bond, which means anything more complicated than having your companion follow you or perform a simple trick may call for a draw, which means possible complications. Even stuff that is automatic when you do it yourself involves an element of chance when you send your monkey or imp to do it, because it’s not you doing it.

“Allowing players to define the scope by the type of creature would be seriously unbalanced, because obviously a panther is more useful than a house cat.”

It’s not obvious to me. I’d rather have a panther who was attuned to my wishes in a tactical wargame, but in terms of actual problem solving the domestic feline seems to bring a lot more versatility to the table. I mean, in real life, I would rather have the cat familiar than the panther ranger companion simply because the cat would be more of a pure bonus whereas living (to say nothing of traveling) with a panther complicates things.

Once you get your head around the idea that the Quality itself suggests a scope of things that can be done/problems that can be addressed and the level determines how often you succeed at that, I think the possibilities for creativity become apparent. Balance can be addressed on the fly.

“So why can’t players define a deity as their companion? Level 1, scope: everything.”

Actually, being a character who benefits from direct divine intervention can basically work this way. You just have to add in some limiting assumptions that puts it down to a similar level of usefulness. I mean, it’s easier to imagine a character having access to the full resources and entire attention of a dog than of a god.

While the system would encourage players to define their own Qualities, I am planning on having a list of several specific animal companion/familiar types and a few off-the-wall ones with their scope sketched out, to give people a starting point and an idea of how to keep things on a more or less even keel. As a holdover from the previous version, specific capabilities (full combat, mount, flight, articulated hands, et cetera) are mechanically limited in a way separate from scope, so you can have a Wolf (combat!), Horse (mount!), Raven (flying!), or Monkey (hands!) more easily than you can have a Warhorse or Flying Monkey, and a simple animal familiar with none of the above more easily than them.

That disembodied hand? It would be a companion with the “handy” feature (letting it do anything a human hand could do). Its scope would be “anything you can do with your hand without exerting a lot of leverage by moving your arm” (because it doesn’t have any), with some wiggle room to represent the fact that the “handy” trait normally would give you two hands. So it could work thieves’ tools in a lock, even though that’s normally a two-hand job and it only has/is one hand.

Fairly easy to define, fairly limited in scope, but useful and cool.

To sum up: the scope of a Quality is not an exhaustive list of what special abilities you have under a Quality, but a general understanding of what it can be used for. When it comes to Personal Qualities, these are basically attributes. For Magic Qualities, they’re the type of magic you can wield. For Companion Qualities, it’s, “What kind of things could I see this critter doing in a story?”

AWW: Magic As Your Ally

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

A lot of roleplaying games have rules that allow for characters to have a companion character who is in some ways an extension of the player character. They take up resources you would otherwise use for your character’s own abilities (points, slots, build choices) but more or less belong to you and act more or less at your direction, though sometimes they are under the game runner’s control.

The approach I’m taking to defining broad character qualities in A Wilder World encourages you to think of your character’s main defining qualities as a bit like a Green Lantern power ring to begin with. You still have to figure out which of your qualities best addresses the problem, and figure out how it addresses the problem, but the limits are the intersection of your imagination and the skepticism of the Storyweaver or group at large.

Magic takes that up a notch, in that there’s much less of a clearly defined line where “Okay, that’s just impossible.” Whether or not it’s possible to acrobat so hard you break down a reinforced stone wall is a matter of the game’s tone; if it’s at all realistic, then no, you can’t. Whether or not it’s possible to grow and animate plants with plant magic to take it down is more a matter of opinion, since “realism” and “verisimilitude” aren’t concepts that apply to high fantasy magic.

So magic needs to find its limitations elsewhere. I was talking about this back in June, and while I like the ideas I came up with there for different “magical prices”, I feel like they’re way overly mechanical in the way I imagined them being applied.

But while thinking about how to refine the idea of “low control” magic made me think of a general approach that I really like, and that is: treat magic the way you would treat an “ally” ability, one ultimately under the control of the Storyteller:

It shows up when the player character calls it, mostly.

It does what the player directs it to, mostly.

It does only what the player asks it to, mostly.

It’s the “mostlies” that matter, that make it interesting and that serve as a limitation. And the thing is, they all hinge on the idea that the magic use is successful.

Under this model, the use of magic would consist of three acts, which we might call summoning, directing, and dispersing. Each of them would have a chance for success or failure. If you fail to summon magic, nothing happens, or nothing significant. You might get a rustle of leaves when you wanted a gale of wind. You might get a brief patch of discolored air where you tried to form an illusion. You’re not left with any more problems than you started with, though.

When you direct the magic, you tell it what to do. Success means it does more or less that, but with the possibility of “wild” results built into the result mechanism. Failure would generally mean it does not do what you want it to do, with any significant negative downsides also coming from the play of cards.

You could continue to direct the magic as long as you maintain concentration on it, without having to draw or disperse it in between. This would be the normal state of affairs when a wizard is dueling or doing battle, or using magic to accomplish a large task that is actually many smaller ones.

When you’re done, though, you’d have to attempt to disperse the magic. Success signifies a clean ending. Failure would not mean your magic lasts forever, just that the magical forces you unleashed linger a bit longer and do some damage on their way out the door.

Even when magic is operating under your control, though, it would be like a charmed minion or a familiar or beast companion or cohort or point-bought ally, in the sense that you can tell the Storyteller “I have my magic do this”, but the Storyteller can interject, or interpret things a little differently according to the nature of the forces involved.

Making the equivalent of three checks to do anything with magic might be a little excessive. The concept of “trivial magic” (cantrips, roleplaying special effects, “I’m a wizard” demonstration) still exists. It’s only when you’re trying to achieve something that magic accumulates risk and price. Character gimmicks that take the form of specialized spells your character has mastered removes the need to summon magic before and disperse it after for that single very specific application, leaving only the control roll.

All this doesn’t completely supplant the idea of different “magic prices” I described back in June, but I think it makes for a better baseline approach. As always, my central idea when it comes to magic is to create an experience more like how powerful magic works in fiction than how it works in roleplaying games.

 

AWW: The Almighty DORC

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

Okay, let me tell you about the Almighty DORC, which is the system that’s going to put the desired degree of wildness into A Wilder World without having cumbersome dice schemes.

The Almighty DORC is the Deck of Result Cards.

This replaces die rolls for purposes of checks (which are now called “result draws”, to clarify that you’re being told to draw cards). It can itself be replaced by a random number generator and a chart, but the point of using cards is to offer more nuanced results without having to translate arbitrary numbers to results.

The cards come in three basic flavors: normal, wild, and critical. Normal cards are split right down the middle between success and failure. In the default deck build, there is one normal card for every wild card. Wild cards aren’t wild in the usual sense of “wild cards”; they just have wilder results.

Many of them start with, “You fail, and suffer an embarrassment in the process.” or “You succeed, but suffer a complication,” but some offer you a choice, or things that are harder to quantify.

That Was A Thing That Just Happened is a wild success that reads, “You failed, but through coincidental means, more or less the exact thing you were trying to achieve came to pass. Your arrow misses, but the target is taken out by friendly fire, or trips and is knocked out. You broke a pick in the lock, then discovered the door was just a little stuck in the frame. That was a thing that just happened.”

Its opposite counterpart, That Was A Hell Of A Thing, reads, “You succeeded, but coincidental means render your success moot. You knocked out the guard, just in time for the shift change. You picked the lock on the door, then discovered it’s barred from the other side. Whatever you were trying to do, you did it… for all the good it did you. That was a hell of a thing.”

The terms “embarrassment”, “complication”, and “injury”—the three most common meta-consequences—are roughly defined in the rules. An embarrassment is something that makes you look foolish or silly. It can spoil an attempt to impress or charm someone, or an attempt at subterfuge, but otherwise, it’s just fun (as long as you can laugh at yourself). A complication is something that makes your life harder or the situation you’re in worse. It can directly relate to what you’re doing, or be a coincidence. An injury means you take a wound, which in AWW can be either an HP loss, or the placing of one of the Qualities that defines your character into an injured state. Usually but not always such an injury will be to the Quality most applicable to the situation (pulled a muscle!)

The thing is, beyond the guidance for what constitutes an embarrassment, injury, or complication, the card leaves it up in the air. The Storyteller works it out from the situation, possibly with input from the player. Some groups may find it more fun to have players propose their own consequences. A rule variant called Parliament of Rooks means the player always proposes, and the whole group votes on it.

Critical cards actually have two parts: a card that says “Critical Failure” or “Critical Success” that gets shuffled into the Almighty DORC, and a corresponding deck of Critical Failures and Critical Successes. This allows there to be more different types of criticals, without skewing the odds in their favor.

Critical Failures include such hits as I Wanted The Opposite Of That, where you didn’t only fail, you achieved the exact opposite of what you were going for, with examples including things like spreading a fire you were trying to put out, injuring a person you were trying to heal, enraging someone you were trying to subdue, and so on. Critical Successes include things like Bank Shot, where you not only pull off exactly what you wanted, but you can accomplish another, roughly equivalent goal.

In cases where it’s hard to figure out an application for the extra consequences, the usual advice is for the Storyweaver to “bank” a stroke of good or bad luck to be dropped on your head later, though really a lot of the fun is in figuring out what it means to achieve the opposite of something.

The default DORC has 50 cards: 12 normal successes, 12 wild successes, 1 critical success, 12 normal failures, 12 wild failures, and 1 critical failure. A few of the wilds are repeats, as some are meant to be more common than others. One of the signature features of the game, though, is that you can adjust the “wildness” of the game up and down by adding or removing some vanilla success/failure cards from the deck (in equal numbers, obviously) or putting more critical success/failure cards in the deck.

Obviously, taking cards out of a deck each time you draw one changes the odds. Since there’s an equal chance for any card from a fresh deck to be good or bad, it ~*should*~ tend to stay fairly even, more or less, though players who keep a plus or minus count of good or bad cards used up might have a slight tactical edge.

The default rules call for the DORC to be reshuffled following any draw that results in a critical. The Vegas Rules variant has it keep going until the deck is exhausted. The Even Odds variant has all cards re-shuffled each time, which is likely to be cumbersome if you’re not using a virtual deck, but is the default assumption when you’re using a random number generator or dice chart.

Now, you might be wondering how this success/failure mechanism accounts for varying levels of user ability, and varying task difficulty.

Normally you draw one card and use it as your result. If you have advantage (total positive modifiers) for the draw, you take one extra card for each point you have, and then pick the one you want to use. If you have disadvantage (total negative modifiers), you take one extra card for each negative point, and the Storyteller selects the one to afflict you with.

Difficulty is just a threshold you have to reach in advantage in order to have your full points. If the difficulty is higher than your bonus, you lose one point for every point of difference. Most bog standard adventury tasks are difficulty 0, unless you’re going up against someone, then it’s based on their score (or what the Storyteller imagines it would be, if they haven’t bothered to define stats for the character). Sneaking past a sentry with +1 perception, the average person would have net disadvantage -1 (because their score of 0 is 1 shy of the sentry’s), while someone with +1 to stealth could use their one point unimpeded.

Note that result draws are always made from the point of view of player characters as the actors. The player draws to sneak past the enemy, or to spot the enemy sneaking past them. The player draws to hit an enemy, or to avoid an enemy’s attack. This keeps the player invested in what’s happening.

Now, this makes it so that each point difference effectively means you get to “try again” on a draw and use the better result. Any time you’re trying again at a thing with a set chance, you’re halving the chance of failure. So ignoring the complication that cards that come out of the deck are not immediately replaced, you’ve got a 50% of success with advantage 0, a 75% chance with advantage 1, an 87.5% chance with advantage 2, and so on.

While that’s a nice, significant difference for even one point—something that is a design goal—it does have the drawback that your odds of success change by less with each successive shift. But I feel like once you’re past the 75% mark, you’ve got a nice, reliable ability. Points on top of that are useful for helping you overcome difficulty. Plus, the fact that while the odds of success are 50% to begin with, the odds of success without hurting or embarrassing yourself are somewhat lower means that there’s always a benefit to having more points. Higher advantage not only means you succeed more often, but with fewer side effects and more control of the circumstances.

I feel like this resolution system, stacked with what I was talking about this morning in terms of how you define your character and how you describe your actions, puts the game into a flavorful, story-driven realm without succumbing to the typical “narrativist” tropes of “string together seven adjectives and three childhood traumas to decide how many fistfuls of dice you roll to win this gunfight”.

AWW: A Wilder Approach

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

So, those who’ve followed this blog and its predecessors for a long time know that I’ve spent a lot of time over the years on a roleplaying game project called A Wilder World. It’s had several iterations, none of which made it to completion. The closest one was very close. I had a rules build, I had a rich and deep character creation system, but it had a few problems. In retrospect, it was not a good system. It was three or four great ideas for systems, some of them contradictory, jammed together. I think I’ve said before on this blog that the attribute system and the archetype system both were pretty good on their own, but together it was like making the same character twice in different game systems.

I’ve been talking to fellow game and game design enthusiast Shweta Narayan about what I’m looking for and my obstacles, at various intervals. This is useful because we have close enough tastes and goals to understand each other, but different enough gaming experience to offer different insights.

After talks with Shweta in the winter and spring, I’ve been developing a less archetype-heavy version of A Wilder World. I started with the idea of what I thought of as “The Good Points” system, which would be: take a piece of paper. Write your character’s good points on a line, only mentioning the things that would stand out about them as a hero; e.g., it doesn’t matter who is stronger among Paul and Mary, unless one of them is the person who gets stories told about them for being strong. The game would have some guidelines for what constitutes a strong point, and rules for codifying/generalizing them.

The problem with that approach is that by the time you get done streamlining what random things people write down into, “Okay, that’s basically the example trait the rules describe here”, you’re left wondering why you don’t give people the traits to use as LEGO blocks.

But it got me back to thinking about defining characters primarily in terms of “what are you good at, what are you known for?” The example I used in my talks with Shweta was: if your character is an acrobat, if you are the acrobat in the party, if this is the story of you, the heroic acrobat, then the rules must allow you to acrobat, and acrobat consistently, and acrobat well.

The problem I kept running into was finding simple enough rules to allow for reasonably quick and dirty play that allow you to define acrobating well, merchanting well, alchemisting well, et cetera, in ways that are comparable but account for the difference between being good at tight ropes or being good at beakers of acid.

One breakthrough I came to on my own is that the reasons my combat systems don’t ever really *work* for me is that I’m hewing way too close to things like D&D, GURPS, and (heaven help me) Palladium when the model in my head isn’t “d00dz with sw0rds hacking 0rcz for l00t” but the cartoonier, more clever-idea-focused violence of fantasy cartoons like the D&D cartoon, the He-Man and She-Ra cartoons, the Avatar cartoons, and stuff like that. Not exclusively animated fare. You can throw the Classical Raimiverse in there, and probably a bunch of other stuff I’m overlooking.

(And just, as a pre-emptive thing, since I mentioned cartoons: I am aware that Toon exists. But it’s for emulating a very specific type of cartoon. Fantasy adventure cartoons have slightly more rubber physics than your typical D&D world, but only slightly.)

I shared with this Shweta last night, who pointed out that in a TV show, the writers and animators spend a lot of time pre-arranging the clever solutions, whereas in a roleplaying game, players have to think on the fly but definitely want those moments that make them feel clever and cool.

Shweta told me about a couple of card-based games I was only passingly familiar with, and the practice of using a card that gives a situation or move or weapon and then you have to sell the table on how it addresses the problem in front of you. This eventually led to a terrific idea for a conflict/check resolution mechanism that I’m going to talk about in a later post as it shapes up better. But it also led to a shift in philosophy.

See, it made me realize something: the one part of A Wilder World that has remained more or less the same through every iteration, is the magic system, and it basically operates on that principle (sans the cards). If you’re a green mage, you got plants. To solve a problem with green magic, you have to explain how plants are going to solve it. If you’re a necromancer, you got skulls and spirits. To solve a problem with necromancy, you have to explain how skulls and spirits are going to solve it.

And the Green Mage archetype would come with five or six detailed, rule-based special abilities to represent how plant magic is fundamentally different from skull magic (which is fundamentally different from fire magic), the core mechanic of “casting a spell” still depends on the notion that players and the Storyteller can work out between themselves what the limits of plant magic are, and how they differ from skull magic’s scope and features.

And hearing Shweta talk about combat based on “Okay, this is what I got. This is what I’m doing with it.” made me realize that this, the one thing that I have really liked from start to finish, this is the core mechanic. This is how I resolve the problem of a game that lets you be things as absurdly specific as an Elven Merchant/Acrobat or Automaton Noble/Pyromancer from level one without having you remember dozens of special abilities and all the ways they affect the rules is to define “Merchant” and “Acrobat” and “Automaton” and all the other things not in terms of 5 or 6 specific special abilities, but with a broad description of what it means to be such a thing, what such people are good at, and a few examples of applications.

And then when it’s your time to shine, you wield the special ability of Being A Merchant or Being An Automaton in much the same way you would wield the ability of Being A Green Mage: you explain how it comes to bear.

And yeah, maybe it’s easier to figure out how Having A Giant Sword And Knowing How To Use It applies to the problem of the 0rcz and their l00t than it is to figure out how Being A Noble applies to that situation. But not everybody looks for the same sort of challenge from a roleplaying game. And not every campaign offers the same challenges, especially when the rules aren’t centered with laser-like precision around whittling all the HP from 0rcz so you can absorb the precious XP spilled with their blood. And the fact that nobody is just one thing means you can take an interesting thing like Merchant or Noble alongside something that is bog-standard adventure ready.

To be clear, while this will result in a more narrative-driven gameplay experience, I’m not changing from my stance on narrative game mechanics that amount to “string together adjectives and traumatic childhood memories you just made up in order to get a bigger dice pool” as being a very game-y device very game-y games and not at all what I’m looking for. The narrative component is, “This is what you’ve got. What are you doing with it?” The Storyteller rates whether it’s definitely something you can do (basically automatic), something you could probably do (easy chance), something you could do (medium chance), or something you stand a chance of doing. (hard chance). Individual groups/Storytellers might want to reward more interesting and entertaining things with better odds, but the rules don’t dictate to what extent that is part of the game… so the game is only as silly as the group.

Of course, the other advantage to defining archetypes/broad abilities in terms of “here is what being/having this thing is all about” rather than “here are the five or six specific things that this thing lets you do in exact game mechanical terms” is that it makes it easier and less intimidating for players to define their own. They just have to come up with a scope that the Storyteller and larger group agree is not overly broad, like a Good At Everything trait. The fact that the exact scope of an ability can be negotiated through use provides for a little bit of elasticity on traits that might seem either too narrow to be useful or too broad to be fair… they can be basically refined through play.

I have a really good feeling about this direction, because my core gameplay goal with A Wilder World is a quick and simple, easy to learn system that allows you to do all the clever, exciting, wacky, zany, and/or daring stuff that people think about when they imagine a fantasy adventure, but I’ve been going about it by trying to make a quicker, more streamlined version of Dungeons and Dragons and then graft all the exciting bits on as extensions and exceptions.

Also, I’m one of the many people for whom the core of a game is really the chargen system. It’s a lot easier for me to design a kick-awesome character creation system that inspires people to make amazing characters and imagine their fantastic adventures than it is to build a detailed engine to support those ideas.

Well, my advice to writers is always to play to your strengths: if you’re great at dialogue, use dialogue to tell the story. If you’re great at detail and atmosphere, use that. Lean on what you’re great at, use everything else as needed.

So here’s an idea for a system that leans on character definition to deliver the goods. And frankly, there’s an element of “Your character should be good at this and this sounds awesome, it’s the sort of thing you’d totally be able to pull off if this were a story, so even though realistically this is a million to one shot and the rules don’t even provide for a way to adjudicate the odds, let’s roll for it.” to the way I GM most games, and that’s the style of play I most enjoy. This just canonizes it.

I’ll make more posts talking about the specifics as they develop, but I just wanted to get this out there.

 

AWW: New Approach, Part II (Magic)

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

This is part two of the post giving an overview of my new approach to my RPG project, A Wilder World. This post will deal with magic.

I’m going to recap how magic was conceived in the previous version of the game, since not a lot has changed but a lot of different people are reading my blog. The big points are this:

While a given working of magic might be thought of as a spell, A Wilder World does not have a spell system as such. Magic is treated as a force that wizards and other magic-users can control rather than a list of menu selections to choose from. Being a pyromancer (for instance) is like having another set of muscles which, when flexed, make fire do things.

Magic comes in three sizes: trivial, ordinary, and extraordinary.

Something that could very easily be accomplished without magic or that has little lasting impact on the world is trivial magic. Stirring your drink with a lazy wave of your hand, fetching a book off a shelf that a person could have gone and picked up, making a harmless shower of sparks to announce “Why yes, I am a wizard.”… these things are trivial magic. Merely having magic allows you to do these things, which are similar in scope and intent to D&D’s “cantrips”. They are the special effects and roleplaying flourishes of being a wizard. No roll necessary, no cost normally.

Anything that would have required real effort and a die roll to accomplish by other means is ordinary magic. Fetching a key from a peg on the wall outside the locked cell you’re in, using a book to hurl itself at someone’s head or using a shower sparks to injure, blind, or distract would all be ordinary magic. Ordinary magic always requires a roll, a roll that is noticeably more difficult than it would have been to do the same thing by mundane means.

“The same thing by mundane means” does not refer to the summoning the key or creating a shower of sparks, but the end result of the magic. If you try to circumvent a locked door, whether by magically causing the lock to open or disintegrating the door or blasting it to cinders or teleporting just past it or turning into mist and pouring through the keyhole, the net result is still that you have defeated the obstacle posed by the door.

Extraordinary magic is the stuff that is clearly impossible to achieve without magic: traversing miles in the blink of an eye, opening or closing a portal to another realm, et cetera. Extraordinary magic is bounded by laws not subject to mortal knowledge or approval; e.g., it’s either built into the story or approved in a desperate moment by Storyteller fiat. The daring wizard who manages a long-range teleportation feat in AWW has not added a new trick to their repertoire, but has more witnessed a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence that few mortals who traffic with magic will even see.

The categories of trivial and ordinary magic can be expanded by having the right sets of abilities; e.g., talking to the dead should by definition be extraordinary magic, but it may be trivial for necromancers, and there may be wizards or magical beings out there who specialize in site-to-site transportation. These abilities do sketch out the limits of what is trivially and ordinarily possible for those “flavors” of magic.

In the previous version of AWW, the use of magic was governed by an attribute called Magic that would basically “sub in” for any check attempted through magic. You just had to explain what you were doing and how. The “flavors of magic” abilities would define specific bonuses for magic uses that fell within their purview, with instructions that Storytellers be flexible and generous, but reasonably firm about things like “I make a key out of fire and use it to pick the lock” or “I make a fiery hand reach out to pick up the book.” It was also possible to make a character who could only use magic when that fell within their designated “flavors”.

In addition to the checks being harder, I originally intended for Magic to cost more than other attributes (because it can stand in for any of them) and using magic to accomplish something was assumed to be slow, risky, and obvious (loud/bright) compared to the mundane approach.

So here’s what has changed:

First, there is no Magic attribute equivalent among the abilities you can pick. Abilities that allow you to use magic in the fashion described above fall under the heading of “Wizardry” (to distinguish this kind of ad-hoc spellcasting from other, more specific abilities that might also be magical), and each flavor of Wizardry is its own thing: Necromancy, Illusion, Green (plant) Magic, et cetera.

Now, you might be thinking this means there’s no non-specialist wizards in the game, especially if you weren’t following the previous development cycle. Some flavors, though, are more about the method of casting spells than the way the magic manifests: ritual, song, et cetera.

Each level of a Wizardry form you have gives you one die to roll when making checks using it. You don’t start out with one die as you do with normal checks, because an ordinary person has no recourse to magic at all. It’s all extra.

You can get more dice by combining a method of Wizardry (Circle Magic, Ritual Magic, Song Magic) with an aspect of Wizardry (Illusion, Necromancy, Pyromancy) if you decide when you take them that they are bound together, meaning you always have to use them together. You can have multiple such bindings affecting the same ability; only one needs to be satisfied (and can be taken advantage of) for a given casting. So a bard seeking power and flexiblity could have multiple aspects of Wizardry bound to Song Magic; the level(s) of Song Magic would increase the power of whatever the bard does, at the cost of their magic always having a conspicuous musical component.

Under the system of archetypes-as-ability-packages that the previous version used, each flavor of magic came with a set of side abilities that in some cases where what players really wanted; e.g., people looking to play a Batman-style adventurer/gadgeteer who always has the right item tucked away taking Conjuration for the ability to get new gear on the fly. These side abilities are now separate abilities, so they can be taken without being tied to the Wizardry system and properly defined as non-magical if they’re meant to be a non-supernatural innate ability or a “meta” thing (in the sense of storytelling, rather than superpowers).

Now, the other change is more of a refinement. Magic before was risky in the sense that it had an immediate failure rule that didn’t apply to most other checks (as AWW allows you to do a preliminary check as a sort of “cautious consideration” before you try things like jumping over a canyon) and limited in the sense that failure could wound you and/or accumulate Magic Burn, which would impair future magic use. It effectively “burned out” a portion of the character’s magical ability.

But the Magic Burn mechanism, if it were a meaningful limitation, would create the sort of curve for magic where it would tend to get less useful as it was used over the course of adventure, meaning that wizards would either tend to hoard their magic use until the end, or they would be more dramatically useful at the outset, when things are easier anyway.

And what we might call the “committed risk factor” would sharply limit the willingness of people to try wizardry in some of the cases where it would be most exciting and high-flying, the things that maybe nobody else in the party was prepared to deal with.

So I’ve re-imagined the limiting factor of magic into a less one-size-fits-all form.

Like the rest of Wizardry—and indeed the game as a whole—this can require some good-faith negotiation between the player and the Storyteller, but the basic idea is that old saying that magic always has a price. But not all magic is the same, and so the price isn’t always the same.

When you make a character who has Wizardry or similar magical abilities, you basically choose a payment plan. Available choices include (but may not be limited to):

  • Control: Choosing this as your limit means that your magic always works, it just doesn’t always do what you intended. If you fail a check using Wizardry, the Storyteller rolls a die and decides what happens, ranging from random happy coincidence on a 6 (not what you wanted, but something beneficial) to something fairly benign on a 4 or 5, and then increasing levels of bad turn for 3, 2, or 1. As usual, the dice and rules don’t tell the story, just provide a general result. A Pyromancer with control issues is likely to have wild gouts of flame, where a summoner of some sort is likely to have the spirits/creatures show up and simply not respond to their commands. As an additional limiting factor, there is a small but cumulative chance each time you succeed on a magic check that there will also be a side effect.
  • Balance: If you choose this as your limit, then the universe or some force within it exacts a price in the form of bad luck every time you use your magic. It might be something so small you don’t notice it, it might happen right away or somewhere down the line, but every successful magic use results in a roll similar to the failure cost of Control. If a drawback or disaster is indicated, this is not always a direct, immediate side effect of the magic use (unless the Storyteller sees an opportunity for some creative irony), and in particular it’s not directly related to the magical energy/effect.
  • Favor: Favor means that your character, rather than controlling magic directly, is a thaumaturge; you are in contact with some higher (or lower, or other) being or beings who will do magic for you. Making this your cost, though, effectively makes each use of magic a round of negotiation between you and the force you work with. It might be an easy, routine negotiation if you’re doing the being’s bidding, but you might have to pay an actual agreed-upon price or agree to a contract or code of conduct to be able to use magic for your own purposes.
  • Self: Each time you use Wizardry, you risk taking on an increasingly more inhuman (or inelven, or whatever) aspect, usually in a way defined when you create your character (like becoming increasingly demonic), though it can also be related to the form your magic takes with each specific application. This not only affects how people react to you, but how you react to people and things, again in a way defined on a per-character basis; a pyromancer might become increasingly obsessed with creating fire for its own sake, a diabolist might become increasingly venal and selfish, a druid-like character might become increasingly animalistic or withdrawn from the world. Skilled roleplayers can play out this limitation all on their own, but there is a mechanical aspect for those who need more guidance; essentially, once you reach a certain tipping point, the Storyteller can roll a die when you try to do something 1) helpful and 2) not involving more of your magic use and tell you, “You can’t bring yourself to do that.” Additionally, as you accumulate lack of self, you start to run into a version of the Control issue described above, except it only strikes when your magic works… so you can succeed on a check, but fail to do what you set out to do because you were too distracted by how awesome your power is, or how pretty the fire is, or whatever. Lost “self” is regained over time.
  • Blood: If you want to do magic, first someone has to bleed (or the equivalent for their biological makeup). It can be you, a willing ally, or an enemy (provided you have the ability to hurt them). This is one of the most predictable and easiest to control prices, but also one of the grimmest and most implacable. The ones above it basically give you the chance to get off for free, where the blood price is always paid. But you also know what it is.
  • Life: Life works similarly to blood, but it’s purely internal. You are always the one who pays the price, but on the plus side, you don’t have to be able to cut someone.
  • Effort: Your magic is “free”, but it takes intensive effort (mental or physical, your choice) to pull off. You are never considered to be at rest when doing magic. This also translates to magic being more time-consuming; any kind of instant magic will be mentally or physically exhausting. This is common for ritual mages who are already not counting on quick turnaround for mystical labor.

Any of the costs can be mitigated somewhat by spending more time on an individual magical working: the more time you put into a spell, the less likely it is to run wild or take a serious toll on you; the more time you spend flattering or praising your otherworldly contact, the more likely they are to dispense a supernatural gift; the longer you spend drawing out the blood, the more mystical energy you coax from it with the least pain, et cetera.

Trivial magic is still trivial, and so its price; a mere pinprick, a short prayer or word of flattery, random butterfly fluttering level occurrences, et cetera. You can also take levels of an ability called Arcane Reserves to give you “freebie” uses of ordinary magic in a day without the price/risk.

Some magical abilities that aren’t Wizardry also fall under the cost mechanic. Using these abilities and using ordinary magic are treated as equivalent for purposes of incremental effects.

Note that the assumption is that all your magic comes from one source and thus has the same price, but you can define a character in a more complicated fashion. A character might have most of their magic bound up in Favor but one particular “gift” that comes with a cost of self, for instance.

…

So, the short version is that there are no discrete “spells” to be learned in A Wilder World, but you instead define your character’s magical abilities using a combination of archetypal methods and aspects, and the price you pay when you use your magic. The goal here is to create a system that is flexible but limited, with magic-users whose abilities more closely map the way these things play out in stories and folklore than in typical “gamey” systems.

AWW: The new approach to things at a glance, part I.

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

 

This is Part I of a three part post delving into my thoughts on a new iteration of A Wilder World. Parts II and III will deal with magic and combat. This part deals with the basics of the die resolution system and character creation.

First, the attribute system is basically just… out. Having twenty different axes of numerical customization right alongside the “take two or three concepts and smush them together” character creation thing, it was like having two pretty strong but unrelated bases of character generation in the same game.

While I liked the idea that you could make your Acrobat/Assassin more or less acrobatic than someone else with the same build and then choose how to spend whatever points were left over, it also meant you could make an Acrobat/Assassin who utterly failed as an Acrobat/Assassin. You can’t stop players from making borked characters if they want to, but in a “plug and play” character creation system you shouldn’t need a guide to tell you how to spend your points.

Without attributes, all we care about is notable abilities, notable differences from the norm. To use an example from D&D spin-off novels, we’ll take the Icewind Dale characters by R.A. Salvatore. Wulfgar the human barbarian has what we might call legendary strength, especially when fueled by his rage. At one point he arm-wrestled a balor (which is a balrog with the serial numbers filed off), and at another juncture he took the edges of a dimensional portal and bent them shut. I mean, it was a magical device with an actual edge so he wasn’t literally grabbing space and time and folding them, but still.

So, legendary strength.

His adoptive father, Bruenor, is a dwarven warrior, so we’ll say he has notable strength. We would expect him to win a tug-of-war with the average human more often than not, but lose to Wulfgar.

Bruenor’s other adoptive child, Catti-Brie, is a human swordswoman and archer. As a reasonably fit hero, maybe she’s a bit stronger than the average adult human even in a time and place when the average adult human is a laborer, but her physical strength is not the thing that people remember her for. If she’s the one trying to shift a heavy rock, it’s only because neither Bruenor nor Wulfgar is around and her magical piledriver bow and magical stonecutting sword are both missing… all of which is to say that it’s not terribly important for us to know exactly how strong she is because she doesn’t solve problems with brute strength. Her solutions are often Gordian in nature, but she doesn’t need as much raw strength as either her foster brother or her father to back them up.

Their friend Regis, the pampered halfling confidence artist, deals with heavy rocks by persuading very strong people to move them for him. In a team of what is basically fantasy superheroes, the fact that he’s there at all is an indication of the fact that his superpower is charm: he is friends with all the most powerful people. It is probably worth noting that strength is even more affirmatively not his area than Catti-Brie, but having noted that, it is not necessary to quantify in exacting detail exactly how not strong he is. We just know he’s not strong.

Now, we could use words to describe these levels of ability, and back around maybe January or so I was toying with a color-coded system, where average would be green, yellow and red would be one and two levels below, and then we’d use the shiny metal colors for higher levels of ability: like copper, silver, gold, platinum, mithril.

That’s a lot of levels for a system that by design doesn’t need or want to be very granular, and it also has the disadvantage of not being visually intuitive. There would be a period in the learning curve where you’d still have to look up what “copper” means, and there’s no reason to suspect right off the bat that “copper” beats “green”.

So let’s stick with numbers. We’ll call where Catti-Brie is 0. She’s probably a bit stronger than average, but not so much that the game cares to mark it, and it’s not her particular area of expertise. In most situations, she’s going to have better things to do than apply elbow grease, and allies who are better suited to those problems where only raw muscle will suffice.

Bruenor we’ll say is +1. Wulfgar we’ll call +2, with another +1 when he’s enraged. Regis is -1.

This gives us a way of referring to differing levels of ability in a way that the difference is obvious at a glance, but we also need a way of meaningfully translating it into game terms. There isn’t really a combination of die rolls where straight up adding +2 for Wulfgar’s Strength as compared to -1 for Regis’s would really capture the difference between a relatively sedentary halfling and a legendary human warrior.

So let’s borrow a page from D&D 5E’s rather elegant replacement for a lot of “stack ’em to the heavens” modifiers, their concept of advantage/disadvantage: rolling extra dice and then taking the better roll or, in the case of disadvantage, the worse.

We’ll stick with the conceit of only using 6 sided dice for A Wilder World, for reasons of simplicity, predictability, and accessibility. If we define checks or rolls by a Difficulty number that is the minimum number needed to succeed, we can have tasks defined from Difficulty 2 to 6, with odds of success ranging from 87.5% to 12.5% for the average character.

If you have a score of -1, you have to roll twice and use the worse result. If your score is positive, you can roll extra dice and use the highest one. Each additional die halves your chances of failure, without ever dropping the odds to 0.

So say that a non-raging Wulfgar is trying to kick in a wooden door. We’ll define this as a Difficulty 5 task; the average person would have a 1/3 chance of managing it. He rolls two extra dice, and if even one of them is 5 or higher he succeeds. That’s pretty close to a 70% success rate, compared to Catti-Brie’s 33% success rate. Note that I’m doing the math here, but it’s not at all necessary for players to do the math, just understand that more pluses = dice = more chances to succeed. You can roll your three dice and glance at them and if anything is 4 or higher, you know you made it.

Meanwhile, Regis has an 11% success rate. Which might seem high, and some people are doing the math in their head to figure out how many tries it would take him before his success was basically guaranteed… but the thing is, AWW goes with the philosophy that a check is not “Does it work this time?” but “Does this thing I’m trying to do work?” The random factor abstracts away all the different innumerable variables that would be in play in real life. So it’s not that Regis can try to knock down the door nine times and he’s bound to succeed once. It’s that 11% of the time, when Regis encounters a door like this, he’s able to take it down.

It still might seem odd that any door that Wulfgar can take down is theoretically within Regis’s reach, which is why there’s another wrinkle to difficulty levels. For now, let’s call it magnitude. It’s the “you must be at least this awesome to ride” filter on doing stuff. Magnitude is noted as a minus after the difficulty. Imagine a reinforced security door that is Difficulty 5-1.

What’s the minus do? It shifts your effective score, and if you’re left with lower than -1, you can’t even try.

So when faced with the reinforced door, non-raging Wulfgar has Strength +1, Bruenor has Strength 0, Catti-Brie has -1, and Regis has -2, meaning he’s out of the running.

There is a thing called Heroic Effort where you get to use your whole dice pool for check you’re awesome enough to attempt, but it’s a resource-tracking thing. It’s not too limited, because part of the idea here is that each level of ability is a whole order of awesomeness above the next plus down, but it’s also not automatic.

Now, I’ve been talking about Strength as a concept here, which seems like a stand-in for an attribute even though I’m saying that the system is attribute-less. This is why I also used Rage as an example of something that could conditionally stack with the Strength bonus, to ease into the next concept I’m bringing up.

As much as I like the smushing-together-two-archetypes system… it really contributed a lot to the problems I described in my last post. It’s a great idea, for something that functions more like D&D, but with a focus on gonzo character customization—kind of like D&D 4E’s Gamma World spin-off, or D&D 4E’s hybrid system—and with D&D 5E style “grow into your complexity” system.

It’s not great for a system like A Wilder World where part of the idea is that characters can be relatively “feature complete” at level one, or where the idea is to keep conflict resolution/risk management on a quick and easy basis.

So here’s my new basic concept for character creation: you make a list of stuff your character has going for them. Each of the things you list are considered Abilities. Most abilities are 1 Character Point, though some might wind up being 2 or 3, and some (many) of them will be available at different levels; Strength +1 is one point, Strength +2 is two points. The Storyteller can cap how high an ability can be at character generation depending on the intended power level of the campaign, and also sets how many points are available.

Me, with my taste for high-flying action-adventure at level one, a sort of cinematic fantasy feel, I’d go with something like 10 or 12 points, but it’s possible to play with a pool of 4 or 5 points.

A secondary list of the same length follows the first. These are things called Perks, which are smaller than Abilities. Knowing a language is a Perk, while being a skilled linguist who can find a basis for communication in any language is an Ability. Possessing a musical instrument and knowing how to play it is a Perk, while having an alchemist’s kit and knowing how to use it is an Ability. Having a small side weapon or light armor is a Perk, while having a full-sized weapon or metal armor is an Ability.

While Abilities and Perks can be roughly sub-divided into different categories like gear, followers, skills, advantages (advantages specifically describing things most people can do naturally but you can do better, i.e., things that would otherwise be attributes), there are only these two steps in character creation: spend points, pick perks.

The Abilities would be a lot more roughly sketched than any special abilities listed in the previous iteration. Many of them—particularly the pseudo-attribute Advantages—will basically just consist of describing the areas of endeavor they cover, as well as some rough guidelines for figuring out the fringe benefits (like being strong = can carry heavier burdens for longer). Some of them will have specified mechanical effects, including bonus perks. Points in Linguist = extra languages, for instance.

The archetypes I spent so much time lovingly devising will be included as basically packages of suggested abilities: these are good things for merchants, these are good things for nobles, these are good things for assassins, et cetera. While this makes the plug and play element a little more involved, I feel it makes character creation as a whole simpler, and also more flexible and consistent.

Under the previous version, multiple archetypes essentially had “knows special contacts” as a special ability but the handling for each one was different. Same thing with archetypes that had flexible item allotments, or the ability to summon helpers.

Of course, with attributes and archetypes gone, magic is going to work a little bit differently, though the basic structure of it will be familiar to those who read the old system. The basic ideas of “magic comes in different flavors, magic can do anything that could be done without magic plus a few extra things depending on the flavor, and magic pays for its flexibility by being costly, difficult, slow, and loud compared to the mundane way” are all there, though the whole cost of magic thing is being refined in a way that I think will be more interesting.

A Wilder Return

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

I don’t know if green tea with mint is my personal miracle elixir for creativity, or if the taste and smell of it is just a memory trigger for certain times in my life, or I am just feeling the euphoric effects of being well-rested after a couple of weeks of being anything, or what, but yesterday afternoon, and then again last night, and then when I woke up this morning, I was having a lot of thoughts about A Wilder World, the roleplaying game system I’ve managed to bring almost to a point of completion multiple times over the years.

I haven’t talked about it in public much lately, but I have had a few private conversations about it, particularly with Shweta Narayan, that helped crystallize what wasn’t gelling in the recent, most close to complete iterations.

As I see it, there are three basic problems with the system I devised.

I: It basically starts with high level play.

The idea of hybrid characters who are “complete” at level 1 instead of having to multiclass/dumpster dive over a series of levels to get the exact combination of abilities you want is important to me. If you want to be a rogue with an animal companion or a wizard who fights with two swords, you shouldn’t have to spend half your adventuring career assembling your schtick and winding up less competent overall than your peers. That’s key. That’s the whole kernel of the idea.

The problem is that my solution gave you characters with something like 12 to 16 distinct special abilities at level one. For a player like me who is experienced with high level play in other systems, this is not a big deal. I’m used to the juggling of multiple resource pools and keeping track of multiple moving parts. I thrive on that. But not all players do, and newer players can be turned away or overwhelmed by that kind of complexity.

Even a lot of the people who were excited by AWW were more excited about it as a character generation system than an actual game to play. Which, you know, I get that. But it should be a game people can actually play.

5th Edition D&D manages to both impress me on a design level and frustrate me as a player with its approach to this, in that most classes at level 1 aren’t much more complicated than a level 1 character in some flavors of OD&D and then grow into customization and complexity over the course of the next two levels, blossoming into a character that falls somewhere between 3rd and 4th edition. I’m particularly impressed with the fact that nearly every character class can have spellcasting abilities by level 3, if they desire that path, without any feats or multiclassing.

In terms of learning curve it really seems well thought out, and is similar to what I had intended in my more D&D-flavored side project Adventure Song. But that kind of solution doesn’t work for A Wilder World, where the idea is that if you’re a magic-using thief or warrior you can have that at level one.

II: Because nearly every ability is “exception based” and abilities come in packages, thing stack weirdly…

…a problem that is compounded by an overly-specific attribute system that allowed you to achieve things like being a skilled warrior or master attribute either by stat points or by picking appropriate archetypes.

So if you wanted a character who was scary, you could put all your points in Coercion, or you could take an archetype like Intimidating or Brute, or you could buy gear that makes you look imposing, or you could put all your points in Coercion and take archetypes like Intimidating and Brute and buy gear that makes you look imposing. All of these things would make your character scary, sometimes in different yet overlapping ways.

Some balance might be retained by dint of there being a point of diminishing returns and the saying about “putting all of one’s eggs in a basket”, but when there are so many different complementary roads going up the same peak it’s hard from a design standpoint to figure out what all the ramifications of combining them are, to say nothing of doing it from a player’s standpoint.

This is part of why I kept running into problems with the math. The result of the system was that edge cases weren’t actually edge cases.

III: The numbers were never quite as transparent or intuitive as I had hoped/thought/intended.

My goal was always to keep A Wilder World fairly light on math so that it would be approachable and fast paced.

Now, math is not my particular forte, by which I mean I’m a lot better with words than numbers. But I’m good enough with words that there’s a pretty wide territory for my number skill to dwell in, and so I’ve learned over the course of my game design hobby that I tend to underestimate how my abilities to do arithmetic quickly in my head stacks up against the average person’s. I’m also better at remembering something I myself wrote than other people are, because I wrote it.

These two facts add up to me routinely failing to realize how complicated the number schemes I was using could get. Even when the rules were clear, the results were less intuitive than I’d believed.

When I was talking with Shweta earlier this year about shifting to a system that is less dependent on math to resolve conflicts and more reliant on the idea that each character has certain areas of expertise/ability, the system I came up with for codifying that grew pretty complicated pretty quickly.

These are all serious problems that become apparent whenever I step back and look at what I amassed in my aborted test draft of A Wilder World, to the point where I don’t think it is viable as anything except an experiment in mash-up character design. And I do think it is a good example of that. But what I want is something that is both playable and as easy to pick up and fast-paced as I intended it to be.

And I’ve hit on a new approach for that. I was going to say that I think I’ve hit on the right approach, but the thing is, I’ve thought that before. And been wrong.

And the other thing is, wrong or not, it was still worthwhile.

I mean, this is one of the big advantages of game design approached as a hobby rather than a multi-million dollar industry. I can spin my wheels and try things out and learn from the experience.

I’ll be blogging about the new approach in more detail, but just as I started my blogging about A Wilder World by laying out the basic principles I was aiming for, I wanted to start this new round by talking about what I need to avoid.