End of the Fourth Day (Patreon)

What If It Just Worked?

Armed with a dice mechanic and some newly minted Goblins, a Tactician and a Beastheart with their pet Fungus Dude (Mot!) we played a combat.

It went ok. We learned a lot. Basically, we learned we didn’t like it. 😀 Well we liked some of it! Every test, we keep some things from the previous test. But we also discover issues with the new design.

The first problem we ran headlong to is the CLASSIC problem which is; how is armor supposed to work? We want to make a game that we would like to play within the Heroic Fantasy genre and when folks, even folks who’ve only ever played WoW or whatever, show up at your table to give your game a try, they have certain expectations. They can imagine Fantasy Heroes in their minds, and they are going to have some expectation that A: some of them wear armor, B: there are different kinds of armor and C: heavier armor does a better job of protecting you than light armor.

We have no desire to thwart that expectation. Kinda our whole thing is; the design supports the fantasy. And this is a well-established fantasy.

We talked about different ways armor could work in this Opposed Roll system. In a system where my warrior uses their might to attack your thief, and your thief uses their agility to try and get out of the way (so far so good!), and the damage your thief takes is equal to the difference in those two numbers (assuming I succeed) then how should armor work?

It seemed obvious that armor, in this context, should absorb or negate damage. There are a couple of ways this can work, but all the ones we thought of boiled down to “armor is basically making you harder to hit.”

Christ are we just reinventing D&D? At least one person in the room said.

Well, you know, maybe! That’s on the table. If you’re going to start from first principles and take the job of making a fantasy RPG ruleset seriously, you have to allow yourself to end up at the same place Some Other Game already arrived at. Otherwise you’re saying “it can work however we think is best but not THAT way!” Which is not a healthy way to create something.

So we tried “armor absorbs incoming damage” which made literal sense and is certainly easy to explain to a new player. Light armor absorbs 1 damage, heavy armor 3 damage.

But this lead to many instances where “nothing happened.” One player successfully attacks (Might > Agility) but the excess (Might - Agility) was 1 or 2 and the goblin was wearing light or medium armor and the excess was absorbed. So…no damage. Nothing happens. Same as a miss. Armor just made you harder to “hit.” Mathematically identical to having higher agility.

Now, we could talk ourselves into this if we had to. “Shouldn’t my ability to inflict damage on you be based on some combination of your agility and armor?” Sure, that’s how Armor Class works!

Then James pointed out that he’d considered this before the playtest and he thought the problem could be solved by just making your weapon do damage as a multiple of your successes.

Hm. Yeah that could work. Let’s try it! So we did and, yeah, it sort of works. If my weapon is Damage: 2, that means every success I get over your roll does 2 damage. If I roll 5 might vs your 3 agility, I have two successes and I multiply them by 2 for 4 damage.

Now armor still reduces incoming damage, just usually not enough to entirely negate incoming damage. Except in some edge cases we could probably live with. It seemed to be working?

Then Hannah pointed out that this was a thoroughly miserable experience. :D The rest of the team was inclined to agree. Your attack test was now a pretty complicated equation. Subtract your Agility dice successes from my Might dice successes, then multiply the result by some other number? Then subtract your Armor? Yeesh.

How exactly is this an improvement, or even a valid alternative, to the game we’re all already playing?

Cinematic

This caused us to all take a step back and sort of survey the week we’ve had and everything we’ve talked about thus far. Put the current design down, and think about how we got here. Never worked as a designer on any game where this didn’t happen several times in development.

Something we keep coming back to. Why are we rolling at all? If “I miss, next” is such an awful experience (it is, spontaneously confirmed without prompting by our guests that night for Movie Night at MCDM) why do we bother with it?

Well, there are lots of reasons, die rolling represents the uncertain future. Okay, makes sense, but should everything you do in a Fighting Monsters game be uncertain? Do cinematic heroes always worry about missing?

Maybe there are some abilities you have that you can rely on. They just work. No roll necessary. Thinking back to decades of action movies, kung fu movies, superhero movies, there tends to be a certain pacing to fight scenes. There’s a…flurry of blows in which not much happens but it looks cool, followed up by some Big Maneuver. Rinse, repeat. Games like Hong Kong Action Theater! and Feng Shui came up. Nothing we’re talking about is actually new. 50 years of RPG design, probably not gonna come up with something literally no one has ever thought of before. :D

What Kinds Of Things Do You Do In A Fantasy RPG?

Something sort of started to coalesce out of the fog. Really, there are certain categories of things you tend to do in a Fantasy RPG in which you Fight Monsters.

There are the Meat & Potatoes things each class tends to rely on. These tend to be single-target attacks that do damage and maybe have an additional effect.

Then you get stuff like Area Effect abilities that target many people and tend to do damage where “getting out of the way” is part of the idea. They don’t all do damage, but they all do something which you would like to avoid. Basically “this is going to happen, it can’t literally fail, the only question is how well do your targets avoid the result?”

Then you get abilities or powers that you try to resist. You’re not trying to dodge, the Voiceless Talking is trying to Mind Control you, and you fight back with the strength of your mind. The ogre tries to grapple you and you fight back with your actual physical strength.

These are artificial distinctions but broadly applicable and, it seemed, useful. We imagined a system built on these principles.

Your character has a few things they can do on every round, you never run out of them, and they just work. They don’t have a BIG effect on the battle, but it can add up. These are the things you tend to rely on early in the battle.

Then you have some abilities that require a roll, but not a “roll to hit,” just a roll to generate the effect. Fireball! Roll damage! And everyone you’re targeting makes a roll to see how much of it they can avoid.

THEN you have some abilities that are contested. Literally my might vs your might. And, if I succeed, you suffer ALL the effect. Either I Mind Control you, or I don’t. Either I grapple you, or I don’t.

Does that sound like a game? Can you picture how it would work in your headmeats? It seems like it would work! We started to get excited. Which is good because we’re all also game masters and players. We need to want to play it. Not just be happy with how much sense it seems to make.

Will it work? Well, we’ll find out today! We’ve redesigned the Goblins and our two classes based on this model. Next update should reveal whether we’re on to something? Or whether we’re base, common, and popular.