End of Day Three (Patreon)

Folks Need To See It

MCDM is almost 5 years old (!) and so far, we have been an explicitly design-driven company. Matt’s a game designer, so that makes sense, but also the company’s projects focus on new optional rules for 5E, and new custom classes for 5E. So the art team tends to end up illustrating the things the designers are talking about, rather than inventing new stuff.

But making our own game means we can use our own world. And that can and should belong to everyone at MCDM. At least a couple of our artists come from video games and video games tend to be more coequal. Depending on the game, obviously.

In fact it’s usually the artists who help get a game greenlit. Publishers don’t love reading design-docs, even an actual working prototype doesn’t always move the needle because prototypes tend to feature just gameplay. Gameplay without any finished art. Publishers nod politely and maybe make a half-hearted attempt to press some buttons on a controller, but mostly their reaction is /shrug.

Because even though it works and you can play it, which was probably a TON of work, without final art they can’t see it.

So, the art team helps them see it. Concept art is one of the big things that convinces the publisher to sign the game. Spend $60 million dollars, $80 million. More. Because ultimately…the publisher wants to be excited too. They want to be inspired. If they’re gonna spend a stupid amount of money on a game, they want to get excited about that game.

And the art is what gets everyone excited.

We started Day Three with an All Hands meeting that brought the art and production teams in, for Worldbuilding Day. Really it was “Matt debriefs everyone on what Orden and the Timescape are and how they work and why.” Because this is the beginning of that transition away from “Illustrate this design” and toward “invent this world and characters.”

We want to create a world (or worlds) where the artists are free to create and invent new stuff. Previously if the artists had a really cool idea but it would make the thing we’re illustrating look unrecognizable to a customer expecting, for instance, A Manticore, well the art team had to toss out their heterodox idea and conform to expectations, at least a little.

Since many of our artists come from video games, they’re used to being the authors of the visuals and co-authors of the game itself. A lot of the world of a game, the characters, the gear, the enemies, the look and feel, come from the artists. This is different from team to team, project to project, but our artists are used to having a greater authorial voice over the games they work on than they have thusfar had at MCDM.

But now that we’re working on our own game, no longer beholden to “make it conform” they are much more free to invent. They could invent an entirely new ancestry never before seen in any RPG and as long as, when the designers see it, they think “yeah we can make that work,” then it goes into the game.

So not only will we meet the MCDM Elves and Dwarves and Polder and hopefully the Memonek and Proteans, we could meet new species no one at MCDM has ever heard of.

That’s a pretty good way to sell new players on your TTRPG. New players don’t tend to get excited by stuff like rules and dice mechanics. As long as it works, as long as the rules don’t get in the way then it’s fine. But the people designing a game tend to get real excited about their cool new mechanics and so that’s what they talk about when trying to promote the game.

The danger there is it ends up sounding like “look how clever we are!” And how dice and stats work is not exciting for most new players. Some players, sure! But most of them? Is that the reason you pick one RPG over another? Which dice you roll?

What really hooks new players is when you show them “look what you can BE! Look what you can DO!” Art sells this. The player is hooked and imagines how these species and classes might work.

Then it’s the design team’s job to deliver on that fantasy! Which we are pretty confident we can do.

So! No art got made today, and probably won’t for quite a while. We got a monster book to finish! But now everyone has a basic understanding of what the MCDM Legendarium is. What Orden and the Timescape are, and why humans have so many gods. 😀

Drama Through Opposition

But we also need a core die mechanic! That’s mostly what we’re trying to figure out this week. Stuff like “how does character creation work?” “How does advancement work?” We can figure that out remotely using Discord, probably.

But figuring out the core mechanic that drives the entire game? Much easier to debate and experiment in person. So while Hannah and James are in town, we’ve been focusing on that.

We’ve had a TON of ideas. Many of which would make great games. There’s always a desire to come up with something neat. Something clever, or flashy. But really, it just needs to work. It needs to be fun, easy to figure out, and then it needs to get out of the way so we can start designing things like ancestries and classes and magic and monsters.

Because that’s where the flash should lie. Come up with a task resolution system that serves your game, not one that’s clever just to be clever, and then move on to the hard work of inventing peoples and classes and magic and monsters etc….

We played Descent yesterday and while it is not an RPG, it is a fantasy adventure game about fighting monsters. It uses an opposed roll. That wasn’t really why we were trying it, it was more about which dice do THEY use and what are the symbols on the facings?

We didn’t really take opposed rolls for combat resolution seriously before this. It seemed like it would just bog everything down? BOTH the player AND the GM roll? For every attack??

But after we played Descent we all said…hey. That was fun! Opposed rolls didn’t really slow things down or get in the way. It felt good. It felt…dramatic. My Roll VERSES Your Roll!

This is probably because your attack roll IS your damage roll. So, unlike 5E, there isn’t one roll, which requires a check against your target’s defense, and THEN a damage roll. You don’t stop in the middle of your turn to ask “what’s your AC?”

You just roll. And your result is the result. Compare it to your target’s result. If mine is higher, I hit, and you take damage equal to the difference.

Now certainly attacking being an opposed roll COULD get tedious if you have to do a LOT of it every fight. But that’s ultimately down to tuning, and how much progress you make on your turn. And we believe we can dial it in to make sure it doesn’t get tedious.

It Would Be Nice If It Made Sense

Bad rules need to be explained. “Why does it work this way??” One of the FIRST house rules to D&D was “armor should not make you harder to hit, it should absorb damage.” Try explaining to someone why plate mail makes you harder to hit. You can do it! But it’s…it’s a lot of explaining and frankly your core mechanic shouldn’t have to be explained like that.

But if I have a stat called Might that I use to swing my sword, and you have a stat called Agility you use to get out of the way…and I add my Might Dice to my roll and you add your Agility Dice to your roll (these aren’t actually different dice, they’re both Attribute Dice) and I hit you because I got more successes on attacking then you did on avoiding? That makes sense. Damage is just the difference between my total and yours.

It makes literal sense. I hit you because, in that moment, in the heat of battle, my Might was greater than your Agility. I don’t have to explain to anyone why it works this way. It’s obvious. If I’m rolling three attribute dice? That means I’m much better at this than someone who's only rolling one die.

So the opposed roll starts to feel really good. Sure, some effects will just have a difficulty. Make a Reason Test to see if you can figure out how this device works. That’s just a roll vs a static target number. The device doesn’t get to roll back. (Unless…)

Alright so an opposed roll, attribute vs attribute, and you both count successes. Easy! Fun! Dramatic!

You Should Usually Hit

Something it seems like we’ve learned over the years: the sweet spot of hitting and “missing” is about 65%. And we still like the idea that there’s no Null Result, if you don’t hit, something happens. “What?” is still being discussed. We got a lot of options.

But if attacking is just an opposed roll, attribute vs attribute, then that means all things being equal you’re gonna miss 50% of the time. That sucks. 65% (really 2/3rds, 65% comes from a d20 which does not divide evenly into three) is the sweet spot. So where does that extra 15% for the attacker come from?

Well, we just have an Attack Die. Bosh! It’s different from the other dice (a d6, while attribute dice are a d8 maybe?) and it has enough successes (probably between 1-3 depending on what you roll, with 3 and 1 being rarer) to get that extra 15% depending on what you roll.

We also got other ideas like, it has a “Crit!” symbol on it somewhere that grants you an extra action? That sounds super fun, and feels like the kind of bonus a crit should grant. We’ll try it, see how it feels.

But What If You Have No Idea What You’re Doing?

We don’t even know this game needs to worry about stuff like Proficiency. Measuring “are you trained in this?” But, if we DO (and we probably do) then it turns out we already got a solution:

You don’t roll the attack die. Simple. In fact, maybe it’s not called the attack die? It’s the Proficiency die. The “I’m Good At This” die. Then we can deploy it in or out of combat.

If we have dice for Proficiency and dice for your Attribute, now we have a way to model your skill going up and your attributes going up. Hm…it might work!

“Arioch! Aid me!!”

So far this all sounds pretty straightforward. But it would be cool if, in addition to all this, there was something special. Some other die, some other symbol that comes up that represents the fact that you are a character in a fantasy world where supernatural forces are real and sometimes take an interest in mortal affairs. Fate. Destiny. The Gods taking a hand in things. The COSMOS.

What if, in addition to the Proficiency Die and your Attribute dice, there was this…other die. That you could roll whenever you wanted (within reason) that caused Extraordinary Things to happen. Just…you’re not exactly in control of whether they’re extraordinary for you or your enemy.

In other words, what if you could, in a moment of desperation, call out to your patron, the Gods, fate, destiny, your ancestors, and roll…THE COSMIC DIE?

It doesn’t have Successes on it. No Crit symbol. It has LAW and CHAOS symbols. And maybe even both on one or more facings?

Then different characters including the bad guys could have weird, unique abilities that use those symbols. And you can roll this die any time you want on your turn, it’s not an action. You can roll it after you miss! But you probably can’t roll it every turn, that would be ridiculous.

You roll the Cosmic Die only in desperation because the bad guys can use the results too! Sure, maybe you have a cool ability that uses the LAW symbol, but the bad guys have abilities that use the Chaos symbol. If you roll Chaos…they get to do their cool thing!

Barbarians (if we even have a Barbarian. We’ll have something like one I’m sure) might have an ability that fires off the CHAOS symbol. Paladins (Censors probably) have an ability that requires LAW. And the villains do too! The Black Iron Pact favors LAW, the Voiceless Talkers? Chaos? Maybe there are characters who favor balance? So their ability only works if you get both symbols? Maybe there’s a balance symbol? Maybe it’s more rare, but balance abilities are more powerful? We don’t know, we’re still collating.

Probably most monsters can’t roll the Cosmic Die. But Count Rhodar von Glauer can! Ajax can! Villains can, in other words. And of course, they also don’t know what they’re gonna get. It’s an act of desperation for them as well. Could very easily result in something that helps the heroes.

And it seems easy to flavor in different ways depending on the game you’re running and the character you're playing. Elric literally calls out to the Lords of Chaos when he’s desperate, but lots of characters call upon their ancestors, Isildur, their god, their saint. People call out in desperation all the time, no gods required.

Then you can get some real interesting design. Places, like a Wode, where there’s always a chaos symbol available when someone rolls the Cosmic Die. +1 Chaos! Or an altar, or a weapon that is attuned to the cosmic forces.

This may, perhaps, be too flavorful. Figuring out which symbols are on the Cosmic Die, who gets to use them after you roll? There might not be an easy way to make this work, but it feels right. Probably what will make the Cosmic Die work is restricting how often you can roll it. You can probably imagine how often it should work, just by thinking about it. How often should “calling to the heavens for aid” actually work? Once per encounter? Probably too often. Once per adventure? Mmm, maybe! Depends on the adventure though. But you can see how this could be dialed in to make it meaningful, dramatic, and flavorful, without dominating the proceedings.

That’s how a lot of design and balance works. “How often SHOULD this work?” You start just by imagining it. Feeling it out.

Will It Work?

Will it be fun? We don’t know. How does “getting better” work? As you level up, as you adventure, what is increasing exactly? UNKNOWN. First we see if this feels good in play, then we talk about how it could be used to represent advancement. It may be this is a dead-end, maybe we have to take it apart and put it back together again so advancement also makes sense and feels good.

That’s the process. Dead-ends aren’t a problem, in fact they’re a necessary side-effect of building something new and trying different things.

So, Thursday, Day Four, we’ll try another combat. We ran one Monday when we had much more primitive ideas about how our dice worked, and watching that combat caused us to take a step back and think about how and why you should roll. How can or should failing work?

We believe in rapid prototyping. Yeah, there’s a LOT to do, but let’s see if we can design only what we need for a 1st level Tactician (the base MCDM Martial Class) to fight Some Goblins. No character creation, no advancement, no customization, no magic items, etc… Just some die rolls and cool abilities. Go!

If we can get that feeling good, fun, then we’re on to something. The rest we can figure out.

Should be interesting to see what tomorrow’s post will be. 😀 “Eureka!”? Or “Back to the Drawing Board!” Or something in between?