Decisions and Revisions Which a Minute Will Reverse (Patreon)

Another playtest and a whole new set of problems and ideas! But first, a story…

I was working on a video game years ago and the artist I was sitting next to suggested we should implement a very complicated new feature.

We’d been working on this game for years at this point and I pointed out, we had tried that, we had half the team working on that exact idea for six months and they couldn’t make it work.

“Well, I can imagine it working,” he said, and then went on to suggest that maybe they hadn’t been given enough time.

Now, this was someone who was good at his job, smart, professional, he’d shipped games before, this wasn’t his first rodeo. But he wasn’t a designer.

He’d worked on lots of games, but he’d never been responsible for the design, and so had no real idea how design works. If I’d had the presence of mind, I would have said “well, I can imagine a Ford Taurus in my mind, so I should be able to draw one right?”

Any feature you want to implement starts with some degree of inspiration. That inspiration might come from some other game you’ve played that had some cool feature, or it might just come out of nowhere and you don’t even know “did I just think of this, or was this in something I’ve played before?”

And that initial inspiration, which happens in your imagination, is what propels you forward. “I can imagine it working.” Well, good! Because if you can’t, there’s not really any point in moving on to the next step! 😀

But there IS a next step and regardless of whether you’re a designer in video games or tabletop (or any of the dozens of genres of games contained within each) the next step is usually some version of Writing It Down.

You write it down for a couple of reasons. First, and most directly, you’re probably not working alone. Other people on the team need to understand how your new feature works if they’re going to help implement it. Writing it down, in this case, is called making a Design Doc and every designer on every video game does this, even though they know no one will ever read it and they’ll just walk up to your desk and ask you how it works. You may get annoyed that they didn’t read the design doc, but that’s ok, your idea has changed quite a lot since you wrote it down, so the doc is out of date anyway. 😀

If you are working alone, you’re probably in tabletop but you still expect other people will at some point try to play the game and in this case writing it down is called making a Rulebook.

But there’s another reason you write it down and that is; we do not tend to imagine new ideas in the most rigorous fashion. The inspiration tends to focus on a specific implementation of an idea, or really, a moment. You imagine this moment in the game where something cool happens because of this new feature.

But that moment doesn’t exist in a vacuum, whatever feature you’re imagining is probably dependent on other features, and there are probably lots of ways your new feature COULD be used that you haven’t thought of.

The act of writing it down is the act of taking this vaguely formed but exciting idea, and supporting it with a rigorous explanation that imagines all the inputs and outputs to the new feature. Does this new feature require some resource? What is it? How do you get it? While Player One is using this cool new feature, what are the other players doing?

Example: Hacking Data Terminals

If you were a designer in an Open World Video Game set in some kind of Sci-Fi world, you might invent the idea that the world has Data Terminals the player can run up to and hack. And you’ve got this really cool idea for a Data Terminal Hacking mechanic, maybe a whole little minigame and you can imagine it and what you’re imagining excites you. It’s that excitement that motivates you to push forward with it.

This is the first of three hurdles. Because it’s possible that even at this early stage you realize “nah this isn’t gonna work.” This becomes more likely the more games you work on. You develop muscles that are good for imagining all the different ways your cool new idea might interact with the rest of the game and as you’re turning it around in your mind you remember some other feature the game relies on that would break your cool new Data Terminal Hacking mechanic.

It’s nice that our example is an Open World Game because there’s usually about a million ways to break any new feature in games where the players can go anywhere and do anything. Especially if it’s multiplayer!

Now this is not a perfectly cut and dry thing. You might imagine ways in which it could be unbalanced and broken, but you’re not sure so you figure “why not try it and see?” This is a reasonable idea.

But let’s imagine you get past hurdle one; you’ve imagined your new Data Terminal Hacking Mechanic and it’s super cool and you think it’ll work. So you start writing it down. This is a MUCH more rigorous process than just imagining it. You need to imagine all the ways in which this data terminal could be used, what it can do. How other players in the world might interact with it. Is it free? What happens if you need to hack it to unlock something, but you fail the minigame. Are there other ways to make progress? Or did you just lock the player out of something they need to progress in the game?

This is the second hurdle. Many new ideas die on the vine here because you’re a professional game designer and this is basically your job. You’re sitting down and writing a design document and just the process of using language to express the idea you had in your imagination gives the idea structure. Rigor.

And as you explain how this will work, you might run into a problem. “Hang on. What if someone starts shooting me while I’m using this data terminal? Can I disengage from the terminal in the middle of the minigame? Should that happen automatically? What if the player is almost done and is willing to take the damage in order to finish the minigame? Should you be able to DECIDE to disengage from the Data Terminal? Well, that would be nice because then the player can decide to keep hacking and take damage, or break off and return fire.

But that means we need a Disengage From The Data Terminal UI. We don’t have that right now, obviously, and I dunno if the UI team has time for this (spoiler, they don’t).

Will it save my progress? SHOULD it save my progress? What about my character’s animation? My new idea is going to require new Using A Data Terminal animations, but we’re ALSO going to need I Just Got Shot While Using A Data Terminal animation. So you go talk to the Lead Animator.

The Lead Animator, who you just interrupted from her work, patiently explains that the technology to do what you’re suggesting doesn’t exist in the engine, and that’s why everyone agreed at the beginning of the project to put any interactive feature like that inside “safe rooms” where the designers can be certain there’s no one else in there to interact with you. “Put your Data Terminal in a Safe Room and it’ll work.”

Well that’s disappointing, the whole point of your idea was that you could put these data terminals in the world, in interesting or dangerous places. You already knew you could do all this in a safe room, that’s not very exciting.

But let’s imagine none of that happens, the engine, animations, UI will all support this and in a few hours you have a completed design doc. Hurrah!

Now you move on to the third hurdle; implementation. Someone actually has to make it work, build it, or even just set up a playtest and try it. Tons of ideas die at this stage! Because this is where you discover all the shit you never thought of! Yeah and it’s a LOT. If you’ve worked on a few games, you may be disappointed that it doesn’t work, but you probably won’t be surprised. You’re a pro, you’ve already thought of ways it could fail, but none of the scenarios you imagined were guaranteed to play out at the table, or once you have the controller in your hand.

But even at this late stage, there is a fourth hurdle. A sort of hidden hurdle.

Is It Fun?

Because it turns out a lot of ideas that might get you excited to try, once you actually implement it…it’s just tedious. It’s like…yeah, it works, but does anyone enjoy doing it. Or did you just invent a new way to annoy your players?

This is one of the hardest things to model back in the beginning when this was just a cool idea you had. It’s what my artist friend had never done, and so did not know. From his point of view, if it worked in his head it would work in the game!

But actually implementing an idea means changing it, often a lot, from what you imagined so it plays nice with all the other features in the game. Your idea can leap effortlessly over all the previous hurdles and then fall flat on its face right here at the finish line.

I can’t tell you how many players I’ve seen online who behave as though any idea they have MUST be possible! They can imagine it working! Surely game engines come with a dropdown menu with a “make it fun” button? Right??

Nope! It doesn’t matter how clever or elegant your idea is, if it’s not fun the players won’t use it and it will get cut.

Every game I’ve worked on had ideas that made it all the way to implementation, and then got cut. Just normal game development. In fact, one of the reasons we use Rapid Prototyping (i.e. hack it in quick & dirty just to test how it feels) is because it helps us discover whether a new feature is fun and usable before we do all the work to make it real.

At this point you might be thinking “well that’s video games, surely TTRPGs are different!” Ah, not really!! At least, not in my experience. I’ve worked on card games, wargames, RPGs, three AAA video games, a couple of phone games, VR games. The process is the same. Of course, this is only my experience. Other designers might tell a different story.

Debuffs and Saving Throws

All this leads us to what we learned from our last playtest. We learned a lot! This is probably the last test for a while as we got deadlines looming for both Flee, Mortals! and ARCADIA. But once those deadlines are passed, it’s all hands on deck for this project and things are really going to start moving.

For this test, we deliberately used the same players, playing the same characters, with James directing. The goal here is to reduce the number of things that are changing from session to session as much as possible, so we’re not ALSO trying to learn new classes or teach the game to new players. This is a critical part of testing.

We picked up where we left off with the Kobold Adventure so that was fun. There was negotiation and some cool lore James made up and eventually our party was on the way to stop a kobold necromancer from resurrecting a dead Storm Giant and using her giant thrall to wreak havoc on the humans who killed her people.

But along the way we are ambushed by an Ankheg! It was a cool battle, but I want to skip to two things that happened which kinda caused us to pull our entire dice system apart and put it back together again. 😀

Debuffs

If you’ve been following development you know the game does not use attack rolls for your basic stuff, aka your Signature Actions. They just work, and you’re rolling to see how well they work. There are other rolls that have to be resisted or opposed, but for this issue we’re focusing just on your Signature Attacks which do some damage (assuming your opponent’s defense doesn’t absorb it all thereby triggering a counter-attack) and often apply a debuff. 4E vets will recognize this design.

Well, currently you can use your action to Recover (instead of attacking) and automatically get rid of one debuff.

You might be able to see the problem. Lars’ Conduit debuffed the Ankheg, and the Ankheg used its action to Recover. Sure, it had to spend a resource, but from Lars’ point of view, it was very anticlimactic. No roll to hit to apply the debuff, no roll required to get rid of it. Hmm!

In the session, all that happened was Lars said “huh,” but we all noted how weird and unsatisfying this felt. 4E’s system for this is, in my opinion, very elegant. Attacks can apply a debuff, but you have to hit. So it’s not automatic.

Then the debuff lasts all of the target’s next turn at which point they have a chance to save. The save is a straight, unmodified d20 roll and you’re trying to get a 10 or higher. It’s almost like flipping a coin.

This is great because A: the debuff came off an attack roll, so the target feels like you had to succeed at something in order to apply the debuff, B: it automatically lasts all of the target’s next turn so the person who applied the debuff has the satisfaction of seeing their debuff affect the battle somehow and then C: getting rid of the debuff is pretty easy and predictable. The designers know any given debuff will last, on average 1.5 rounds. It MIGHT last longer, but that’s an outlier. And very dramatic!

Well, that’s not how debuffs work in this game. But we’d like a solution that is as elegant. So after the playtest we started thinking about how debuffs should work and this led to some really interesting ideas, but as I was thinking about it I started to detect a larger problem with our dice system.

As of last Friday, the system used three basic dice.

The proficiency die. Very low standard deviation (aka ‘high reliability’), only Successes and The Crit. Rolled if you are proficient with whatever you’re doing.

Attribute dice: Medium reliability. Has successes and surges. Whenever you do something, you roll a number of these equal to your attribute rating. “Reason 2” means anytime you do something using reason, you roll 2 attribute dice.

Impact Dice. Low reliability, only has successes. The only die with a Blank result and also the die with the highest number of successes on one facing. Used to “power up” certain abilities. Also I think we were using it for Advantage?

Currently, we pick the two stats important to your character (say Might and Reason for the Tactician) and grant you proficiency any time you use those stats. That’s not how the real game will work, the real game will probably have weapon proficiencies and skills, but for now it gets the job done.

But thinking about how debuffs worked I realized something alarming.

IF you are making a save (or whatever) with something you’re proficient in, you’re adding the Prof. Die AND your two attribute dice! That’s three dice.

If you’re making a save with any other attribute? One die.

In other words, our system was pretty binary. Pass/Fail. You’re either making a check with three dice and generating a lot of successes, or only one die and very few successes.

This triggered, basically, an overhaul of our entire dice system. At one point I said “I’m not sure your stats is where Randomness should live.” I suggested making proficiency and attributes flat bonuses. But James made the point that, right now, the proficiency die is where the Crit lives and did we want to put all symbols on one die? Well, we thought about that! But we like breaking out the Crit and surges.

So James pitched something else; he pitched keeping the Proficiency die in its current form, making attributes flat bonuses like weapons, and instead of rolling a number of “attribute dice” equal to your attribute score, we have an “action die.” It has successes and surges on it, you roll it any time you’re doing something that uses your action (as opposed to your maneuver) and it functions basically like a damage die except not as swingy as a normal numbered die.

Your signature actions probably use one action die for determining damage, the abilities you use that take a few of your Class Resource (like ferocity for the Beastheart) do two action dice of damage use two action dice, and abilities that take a LOT of your Class Resource would do three action dice of damage. (“Why not just call it the Damage Die?” Because you also use this die for everything else, from grappling to mind controlling. Any action.)

Well that seems pretty straightforward. Let’s try it! But this didn’t exactly solve our debuff problem! How does one “save” against a debuff in this system?

Clearing Debuffs

I had this idea, which seemed cool but the more I think about it, the more I think I’m overthinking it. But we’re gonna try it.

What if debuffs had a strength? Or a rating? Like if someone cast slow on you and it said “slow (6).” Slow is an effect, it’s always the same (whatever it is!) like maybe your movement is reduced to 2.

Then, at the beginning of your turn, you make a Resistance Roll based on whatever stat slow targeted. Maybe Might? See if you can ‘break’ out of it? Or maybe resisting magical debuffs is always Insight (formerly Intuition)?

In any event, you make a resistance roll, generate some successes, and that reduces the strength of the debuff. If you roll 6 successes or more, you reduce the debuff to 0 and you clear it. If you roll, say, 4 successes, you reduce the debuff to 2 (6-4=2) and you have to live with the debuff another round at which point you’ll get another chance to clear it.

“6” would be a number we mathed out, but it would probably be standardized. So at 1st level, most if not all debuffs were strength 6. If you get a stronger debuff, it’s probably from a higher-level enemy.

This idea appealed to me for a couple of reasons. It’s relatively straightforward to understand, it means we can have debuffs with different ‘strength’ which gives us more ways to make characters and abilities different, especially at different levels.

But also it gives you and other characters more interesting opportunities to interact with debuffs. A Censor might have an aura where everyone around them automatically clears some of their debuffs equal to their Insight. Leader-characters like the Tactician might be able to use a maneuver to point at someone, shout at them, and let them clear some of their debuffs. “Shake it off!!”

This would mean tracking more stuff, but I’m not allergic to that. “More” is not automatically “too much,” it’s just something to try and actually I tend to think of “how many things am I tracking?” is a UI problem. Something a good character sheet could solve.

But there are other problems I can see. These problems aren’t automatically dealbreakers, but still concerning. Like: does this mean our game is now about Debuffs? That is certainly not our goal.

I like making the roll at the beginning of your turn, so the first thing you do is Make Progress. This makes sense especially if a Signature Action can debuff you. Signature Actions just happen, you can’t do anything to stop them, so it would maybe not be awesome to spend your turn slowed and you never made a save and they didn’t need to roll to hit.

A properly mathed system would allow a character to clear a debuff before it even affected them, but that would require a really good roll. So the player who debuffed you doesn’t feel cheated, they feel like you got lucky, or rolled well, or used some resource to boost your roll. You earned it, in other words.

It may sound like I’m describing a competitive game, and our RPG is not competitive. But it needs to be fun for the players and the Director. So when I say “the player who debuffed you,” that could mean a monster debuffing a PC, or a PC debuffing a monster. Both are controlled by players. Game has to be fun for all players.

I pitched this “what if debuffs had hit points” idea to James and Hannah and they were interested enough to try it. But like I said, I can see problems with it. I just don’t know if they’re major or minor. In the end, there’s no point trying to solve a problem like this in your head, just try it and see.

So we’re gonna try it and see!

Situational Bonuses

Something else that’s come up a few times is how the game handles situational bonuses. What would, in another edition, have been a +1 or +2 bonus, or advantage/disadvantage. How does our game handle this?

Well, up until now you’d use an Impact die, but that only worked for bonuses, not penalties, and the impact die was a LOT (that was its intention) and so was a poor tool for a minor, temporary, situational bonus or penalty.

James suggested using a new die! Why not, we just cut the Impact die and morphed the Attribute Dice into the Action Die. He suggested we have a Boon dice and a Bane die, which is basically how all dice work in FUDGE, but also something from Shadow of the Demon Lord, a really well-designed modern RPG. So two new dice! Except presumably these are the same kind of die, just the Boon has successes and the Bane has some new symbol? A skull! Or something, we’re just using emoticons now, the art team may have oPiNiOnS about what these symbols should look like. 😀

We have no desire to go overboard with symbols, we’re only inventing those we think we need. But I also have no aversion to More Cool Dice or even new symbols that do cool stuff, as long as they’re filling a need.

The Director can award boons or banes (or whatever we end up calling them) depending on the situation, And they cancel out so if you’ve got 3 boons and 2 banes, you roll 1 boon die.

How will this new dice system work? How many successes? Skulls? We have no idea! Already this new design is causing ripple effects in how your Defense (the amount of incoming damage you ignore) works. I’m sure there are more hurdles to overcome.

Speaking of which….

The Fall of the Cosmic Die

At one point in the last playtest, the Ankheg grabbed Matt O’Driscoll’s Tactician and basically ate him. 😂 This caused me to suggest I take my turn next (the initiative system is still intact) because if I roll the Cosmic Die and get Law, I have an ability that might save the day.

Of course, if I got Chaos, the Ankheg would get to use some equally cool ability and we might all enjoy spending the rest of the playtest as guests in the Ankheg’s stomach.

But! I rolled LAW and so grabbed the Ankheg with my MIND and hurled it off the edge of the cliff we were on. “I never got to use my third villain action!” we heard it cry as it fell to its death. 😀

Ok so that was cool, but thinking about it afterwards, it felt very anticlimactic. It didn’t really feel like I did anything, I just rolled the Cosmic Die and got lucky. James had already come to the same conclusion. “It’s cool if that moment happens because of the resources you’ve built up, it’s not cool if it’s just the Universe’s Randomness swinging in your favor.” I agreed.

So I sat and thought about the Cosmic Die and what it’s for. If you’ve read all the posts so far you already know this, but the whole point of the Cosmic Die was to give our game some generalized mechanic (meaning all players could dip into it, regardless of class or ancestry) that reinforced the fact that this game is set in a fantasy universe. A world where Magic and the Gods are real. Where, if someone calls out to their ancestors in a moment of desperation their ancestors might answer.

In other words, a wizard can cast spells, ok. But that is not a generalized mechanic. If you had a team of all Tacticians and Furies and Operators, could you tell this party lived in a magical world? Or would it just be the 13th Warrior with a Mech Driver? 😀

As I thought about this, I realized we already had that mechanic. Surges. It’s the whole point of surges. Crits represent a moment of skill. If you don’t have proficiency? You can’t crit. But you can get a surge any time you use the action die!

Surges grant extra movement (busts of speed, or new maneuvers) or power up your magic, or your magic items, or your weapon. For a brief second, suddenly your character is in The Matrix, and surges let you break the normal rules of physics and do something heroic that a character bound by gravity could not do.

So maybe we don’t need the cosmic die? Yeah, let’s make sure surges provide robust options, and we just ditch the cosmic die for now. If we discover some future need? Well, we’ve got this Cosmic Die mechanic we could bust out again.

Charts?

While we were chewing on this in our discord, Hannah raised her metaphorical hand and said “hello yes, I would like to be able to roll on random charts. How do I do that please?”

Ah. Hm…yeah. That…that is a good point, how DO you do that in a system where the dice just say “three successes?” I…I don’t know!

Talking about this on twitch, folks in chat mentioned that the Fantasy Flight Star Wars RPG (which uses very funky dice, much funkier than ours) includes percentile dice (very much NOT funky…although they are the only non-platonic solids in the regular set of polyhedral dice, so a little funky. Herbie Hancock funky, not Parliament funky.

So, maybe we need some regular polyhedrals for rolling on charts? Charts and random events are useful for a lot of reasons. Hannah actually said “or we could have a spinner!” I’m not sure she was being entirely serious, but…I like spinners! No one doesn’t like using the spinner. Nuclear War comes with dice and charts but no one ever uses ‘em. They always use the spinner.

Spinners may seem gimmicky but I’m not sure why that should be, it’s just a random result generator implemented in a slightly more fun way than rolling a die. I don’t think we’re seriously considering a spinner but A: we need some way to roll on charts and our current dice don’t work that way, B: spinners can be interesting because you can map multiple outcomes onto the same spinner. Like you can put the numbers 1-20 around the edge, but ALSO have 5 bands of colors. So one roll could give you 5% increment results, or 20% depending on what kind of roll you’re making.

We’ll see where we end up, my gut says we’re gonna end up pressing the d20 into service for this, but I don’t really care. Any solution is just there to give us a good range of random results for any charts we need.

That's it folks! A lot is happening with the RPG. New dice to try! The Stamina idea seems to be a hit, but lots more testing needed to determine if using one resource for both damage mitigation, and maneuver options is balanced, but that's just normal testing.

Again, we may not do any playtesting for several weeks, maybe not until next month as we push Flee, Mortals! across the finish like and continue developing ARCADIA but I think we'll find some other fun stuff to talk about before then. :DPeace, out!