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Road and Ruin
Development blog for the generative storytelling ttrpg, Road and Ruin
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RaR Musings #18: Constructing a Recognizable Narrative
This both being something I've been filling out recently and that I've never touched on publicly, I thought it a good opportunity to talk about how Road and Ruin handles campaign generation.
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TALES
This is probably the biggest overarching component of a game. People are generally aware already of what makes up a tale; we can call them genres if we want, but essentially, they're predictable patterns that we come to expect in storytelling.
These patterns both allow us to find satisfaction and comfort when experiencing something familiar, as well as offer a foundation for writers to introduce twists and subvert audience expectations.
If Road and Ruin is going to have the capacity to be played with no one singular dungeon master, Tales need to be able to produce both expected results, and unexpected results, simultaneously.
It's a big ask.
There's a couple different ways we can do this, but perhaps it's best represented with an example:
MYSTERY TALES: "A tale of discovery, that revolves around the Hook of The Unknown. Characters may be highly specialized toward elements of the specific mystery, or have accidentally stumbled into something unusual, and push it out of curiosity or in response to a threat, and connect the dots of collected clues and gathered evidence to unravel the mystery.
THE HOOK: Define an unknown, such as Who Dun It, What Happened, Where, How, Why, and To Who.
GATHER CLUES: Move to locations or between characters, in a bid to pursue information or insights not already held by the party. As mentioned in Musings #4, RAR's card system allows for True/False, thematic-matching discovery, where a lead could lead to nothing, or something strange be discovered when least expected. Once all available information has been gathered and arranged, it may present a narrative, most commonly defined as a Motive.
THE TWIST: Satisfied that the mystery is solved and wrongs righted, one final stumbling block appears: "Something that was assumed to be true, is discovered to be false," ideally by way of the cards system. But this falsehood is, itself, a new clue, and points to the new truth when followed.
MYSTERY SOLVED: Having pursued the twist to it's conclusion, the case is closed. Criminals are behind bars, victims are avenged, a device activated, or a puzzle solved."
While "a twist happens" is, technically expected, the exact nature of the twist changes relative to the cards and the scenario, and since the twist stage can only occur once a narrative is "complete", an actual narrative has to be produced, and not left intentionally unsolved. Some might say that it's distasteful to solve your own mystery, or to expect a twist, but this is how it goes.
In this way, there can be "formulas" for Action Tales, Intrigue Tales, Dark Lord Tales, and so on, using all the same tropes that people come to expect and enjoy from those genres.
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ROLES
Roles make up the secondary type of campaign generation, but in a way, have much larger contributions to a campaign than a Tale, which can consist of just a single chapter or quest.
Nine different Roles describe the major activities that can be done DURING play, and that can, in turn, define a character's contribution to the plot.
EXPLORER: Travel oriented, survival skills, some basic world history and geography skills, with some passing social skill and quality appraisal. Very catch-all.
DUNGEONEER: Puzzle solver and fighter when need be, benefits squad play with an assortment of specialists covering everything from traps to history.
WIZARD: A researcher, who's interests revolve around the pursuit of intellectual, scientific, or magical advancement.
WARRIOR: A combat specialist, in situations where violence IS the answer.
CRAFTER: Using the right tool for the job and getting enhancements out of higher quality materials, lots of permanence.
SNEAKRETS: Achieving goals having made as little a ripple as possible, such as theft or assassination.
SOCIALITE: A deep dive into what makes people tick, and using a vast social network to both create and solve problems.
COMMANDER: Being a leader, allocating large-scale resources, and relying on followers to successfully complete tasks.
RITUALIST: Dealings with gods, devils, spirits, and fae, to wield powers granted to you by association.
Balance and challenge is determined by counting up the Roles each character is comprised of, and to what level, and if everyone can agree on which Roles they prefer the most, it provides a framework for players to pursue specific story beats, and use the rules and mechanics that best support those. It's especially true when players don't recognize what their preferences are offhandedly, and are able to pick and choose from the list.
Let's use Dungeoneer as a framework:
The premise of a dungeon game is resource management, and reward vs risk assessment. This place is dangerous, or mysterious, or at the very least brand new; if not for these, the place would have been cleared out long ago.
While rewards can be Resource Types from Musings #15, like Coin, Food/Water/Shelter, Favor, or Materials, they can also be something like Information, Magic Items, or Glory.
Progression through the dungeon is rife with choices. Effectively mapping rooms and documenting the solutions to puzzles nets you exponentially more pay when you come back, but encountering a room or puzzle NOT documented confers a penalty. If your team dies, anything they experienced, but didn't report and get paid for, is just as hard for the next team, who weren't forewarned about such threats. Players may metagame, taking "problem solvers" right to the pain point due to their metaknowledge of it's existence, but even that comes at a choice: Do they work to solve the problems that they know, and risk falling short of problems later on? Do they spend their resources easily clearing early challenges, or do they increase the danger and threat of failure in order to push on, push further, get better rewards, and net better pay?
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PUTTING THEM TOGETHER
Let's say that we decide we're going to play a Dungeon campaign, and that it's a Tale of Mystery.
HOOK: Our cards The Dream, Freedom, and The Many. "A local shaman proclaims, that they have had a vision: Beneath the earth, through a hidden tunnel in the mountains, lies an ancient kingdom, and the desperate souls of it's residents have visited him with a plea for help. They are trapped there, unable to move on, and should anyone be able to free them from their curse, the riches of the underground nation will be theirs."
Makes you want to cook a meal, almost.
GATHER CLUES: By moving from region to region within the kingdom, each room rewards some basic items, and a Clue card. By assembling the cards (a number determined based on the preferred length of the adventure), a story unfolds:
Gold, Spirit of The Voice, The Mask. The party begins at a noble's chateau, where a ghost speaks, who will teach them about the secret of the vault if its identity in life can be uncovered. A Spirit of The Egg. The gold in the vault was to be for the god of this kingdom, a nascent godling of birth and renewal.
The Mixture, Gold, The End. The party goes to the local temple, to investigate this godling, and finds it full of alchemical designs for the creation of gold. Terrain Inverted, The Flow Inverted, says that an underground river aided the process, but the river has long since gone dry.
The Hearth, The Omen Inverted, The Many Inverted. The omen is of The Void. The party investigates the kingdom's town, and while there is evidence of civilians packing to leave, there are no bodies, or signs of struggle or violence. Altars suggest worship of the Spirit of The Egg, but such a spirit would not have people become ghosts, they would be consigned to nothingness on death.
Inverted Order, The Villain, The Lineage. Further investigation suggests that spirits related to The Egg brought about the chaos here.
Recur The Shaman, Recur The Spirit of The Egg, Recur Gold. The theory is that the shaman, who gave the quest, received the vision as a result of treasure that was taken from the kingdom. Returning the shaman, as much as he objects, should break the curse.
And that could be the end of the adventure. If only but for...
THE TWIST. Something has gone wrong. Evidence 4, result 3: The Lineage. Chaos was indeed brought about by other spirits, but they were not related to The Egg; this is no act of vengeance, or protection.
Recur Evidence 5. The Guardian. An Element, of Inverted Air. Recur the Inverted Omen of the Void. The Hunger, Inverted.
The shaman, in fact, has some connection to the Spirit of the Egg, perhaps contained within his treasure, or even is the shaman himself. Either way, bringing it back here was a grave error. The creatures who destroyed this kingdom return, and vanish the shaman into a realm of negative space. The party will have to find a way to banish the monsters and rescue the spirit, or else they shall bring about the same destruction in many more places.
And, that's the campaign. Throughout, spending time and resources to investigate ruins, decrypt language and secrets, fight creatures that occupied the ruins, and be rewarded in the form of (apparently cursed) treasure has the party guessing at where to go, but marry recurring elements together to form a narrative. And, if they fail to stop the monsters, establishing the legend for a new campaign, one that revolves around Demons of Stagnant Air that now haunt the lands around that one lonely mountain.
Is it a great story? Probably not. But is it a story that I had any clue I was going to tell, when I started drawing cards and rolling dice? Absolutely not. And because of that, I could realistically have been a player in this campaign, and not the dungeonmaster; in fact, I AM the player here.
And that's pretty neat.
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IN CONCLUSION
By being able to recognize what makes a dungeon a dungeon, and a mystery a mystery, we're able to mix and blend those elements together in a way that rewards dungeoneering skills, while satisfying the demands of a mystery story, in a way that doesn't require one player to be holding all the cards ahead of time: just multiple players to be drawing them.
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RaR Musings #17: Simulation in Games
I got into it lately on the merits of game design, and definitions of mechanical tropes like roguelike and roguelite, and whether rpg, jrpg, RP game, and roleplaying game all had different feels, and if a game like Alan Wake counts as an rpg or not. (To be clear: If a game has you play as a character, who makes decisions as a cross reference between that character's identity and the environment and challenges at hand, in a way that defines the character or changes them in some way, it's a roleplaying game. This means that just about every product people recognize as a 'game' released in the last 30 years is, likely, a roleplaying game, in some way, because it turns out, people like when you attach narratives to things.)
Roguelikes have existed for years, but really came into their own in the last decade, because the promise of an enjoyable, if difficult, gameplay loop that rewards player skill and requires significantly less brute-force design work by the developer. It means you can have a lot MORE game, with a lot more playtime, for less, relative to a game where every dungeon is hand-crafted and every enemy and item intentionally placed. But, because the game throws the entire catalogue at you from the get-go, there's an enormous learning curve, and without a sense of progression, many get bored or frustrated. Rogue-lites took the idea of the roguelike, and made it more consumer friendly, enabling progression over time, but still with major losses from death in randomly-generated environments.
Tabletop games follow these concepts as well. In a ttrpg, a host player meticulously crafts a dungeon, placing enemies and items; an enormous amount of work, and without a library of pre-built campaigns, one that leads to DM burnout sooner or later. Some games provide randomly generated tables, but having to reference tables and subtables doesn't feel very fun; that's computer work. Other games try for a mix of the two, with a host that helps ensure content is distributed smoothly, but the game is mostly running by itself, and so there's less work on the host's shoulders.
In each of these cases, there's different degrees of Simulation: a natural follow-through, where Action A, produces Result B, but that in turn, leads to Result C, and so on, but sometimes, a host is responsible for deciding what the Result is, forcing Action themselves or by presenting a scenario to another player, or stopping the Result chain for narrative or balance reasons. Often, a computer is designated the host, and it's ability to make these determinations are a simulation in itself, based on random number generation, weighted by the designers of the game. It's the main reason why a game like Baldur's Gate 3 can have up to four players, and none of them are actively causing the game to function, or even just one player, who controls multiple characters, but still doesn't cause the game to exist.
But tabletop roleplaying game enthusiasts are shy of this. They want to feel immersed, that their game and world and characters are real; they don't want to know that it's random, or that the DM just decided something arbitrarily, or made it up. They don't want to see how the sausage is made, because somehow it's less impressive if it's the result of hard work, and not effortlessly conjured to your dinner plate. It's also this distinction that spooks most players out of ever evolving into a dungeon master themselves: they worry that they need to have somehow ascended to become brain-kin with the fantasy world and master all it's mechanics and intricacies, to memorize statblocks and enemy and item locations, maps and lore and and And and. The revelation that a lot of the time it was made up on the spot disgusts them, because it threatens the immersion.
I muse about this because I'd set out to make Road and Ruin explicitly playable with no dungeon master. Host responsibility is shared around the table, either together, or passed to the next. A certain amount of simulation is required, then, to make sure the game actually functions, but the notion that each player would be responsible for taking turns coming up with what happens next disgusts and horrifies people. They want to feel immersed, not be taken out of it, and they want to guess what happens next and be proven right, not make up what happens next and then it just does. But in all the "the DM is a player too! :)" arguments I've ever seen, never have I ever heard anyone acknowledge that these benefits of immersion and not knowing what happens next extend exclusively to the adventurers, and never to the DM themselves. Sure, players can do things that the DM didn't anticipate, but that means work rather than discovery, as the DM scrambles to make up what happens next, not merely just guessing and being proven right.
Road and Ruin has been described as (read: accused of) being a game that only dungeon masters can play, because only dungeon masters are versed in the techniques being employed here. Which is a really interesting argument, because, like... why do games like DND build their entire functionality around the existence of these supposedly rare people? While it's true that not everyone is an artist or designer, or versed in fantasy or storytelling tropes, why is it the only concrete way for players like this to get to PLAY a game is to rely on a computer to take the reins from them? That a DM can be a player, but that a player can't be a DM?
If nothing else, I'd want Road and Ruin to have enough simulation elements that I, myself, could be a player in the game, WHILE being the host. That I could generate the story as I go, and be proven WRONG, make mistakes, and die, not just spend tens of hours lovingly crafting a narrative and building a world, only for everyone to trample it and litter, climbing aboard the magical mystery tour, expecting to be trucked from one narrative moment to the next. That I could show, by example, how exciting it is to come up with plans, and the twist of being proven wrong, and that other players might be emboldened by it to the point of wanting to try it for themselves. And finding, it's not actually so different from how they were playing before.
I still struggle with reducing the amount of math baked into the simulation, and make it more about player choice, but I also have to have systems where Something Happens, regardless of where the players are and if they're doing anything to provoke it. Realizing you've dropped your wallet somewhere after you've been travelling for hours, making the choice to look for it, meeting someone who found it, and getting to learn about who they are and what they're doing there, or finding a hidden cache of treasure, but it's too much for you to carry by yourself, certainly without notice, are both things I made up on the spot based on the same [GOLD] card, out of a deck of 52 cards, but with a diceroll determining the event was "Bad, but resolved", and "Good, but at a cost". If the game needs someone like me to be able to come up with those conclusions as the game master, then by all means, I'll do it, but as a player, I had no idea those events were going to occur, and I'll be just as capable of making decisions about what to do about them as everyone else at the table.
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RaR Musings #16: Ability Definitions
Wanted to brainstorm a bit of the mechanics outlined in Musings 11, because as I work on converting old work to the new system, it's a good idea to assess whether my feelings about it are the result of nostalgia and affection, or genuine design sensibilities telling me I'm making a mistake.
To reiterate:
The goal of the old system was revolving the game around "Earn 1 Success to achieve something your character can do easily, and without severe consequence, as an adult human." Rolling [attribute 1-5]d10 + ([proficiency 1, 0-5]+[proficiency2, 0-5])x[specialization 0-5] meant it was relatively easy to produce the 10, /10 = 1 Success, but that as high as 100 (or 10 successes) was possible, with proficiency5, proficiency5, specialization 5, and attribute 5, rolling a 10 on all five dice. "Monstrous Strength" multiplied the Strength attribute's d10 roll result, leading to reliably higher, but not guaranteed, success rolls, and values above 100.
The pros of this meant you could reliably skirt the need of a diceroll if 'skill' allowed, but the cons of this meant adding results of 1-10 multiple times per diceroll, often. I miss it's "extended roll", where you could keep rolling dice, generating successes, until the successes exceeded the necessary threshold, like 15 successes to repair a device, with skilled engineers netting 3-4 successes per roll, and the untrained landing 1 at best, and less than 0, breaking it, at worst.
The new system sees 'success' as a threshold, with some fuzziness around the edges: results of Fail And (1), Fail (2-4), Fail But (5), Win But (6), Win (7-9), and Win And (10) meant some randomness, but not a binary. Excess attribute, proficiency, specialization, and gear all "decrease the difficulty" by one-point increments, while Monstrous adds +5 per increment. Contests aren't the result of two pools of results being added up and compared, but of applying the difference of the two positives, and applying the resulting bonus, or penalty, to the 1d10 roll. You can also use a d100, if 10-point/1% granularity is more preferential to 1-point/10% granularity, with Exceptional Successes being on a 100, reduced by (proficiency x specialization) amount.
The pros of this means you can roll only one die, knowing well beforehand your chances of success or failure, and the math is all adding numbers >5 ahead of time, for a system that allows a visible success range on a sliding table. The cons, is that this is less additive; there's not as much granularity as on "extended rolls", because you can't generate more than 1-2 'successes' per increment.
To solve this, "Success Thresholds" of 5-point increments above "Win And" are probably necessary, essentially rolling 15, 20, 25, 30 on a d10. If 5-10 is 1 Success, 11-15 is 2 successes, 16-20 is 3, and so on. This should PROBABLY mean that specialization adds more than a single point of value, but +5 per point, effectively thrusting your result ahead a guaranteed success threshold, feels like a lot. If I do that, I'll have to be more careful about adding specializations, or use the design that specializations can each only be used as a Who, What, When, Where, Why, or How, up to a total of 5 spec. Alternatively, since +5-per-spec is more or less the same as +5-per-Monstrous, specialization lets you fight monsters with skill rather than just raw power.
(Late notes, this also means a benefit to 'assists'; using multiple people to hold up a rock, means you add everyone's dicerolls, and divide by 5 to figure out what "Success Tier" you're in, letting enough people simulate the effects of one creature with Monstrous Strength).
So, as a result of this, our standard deviation for success thresholds is 10 points, or 5 in either direction, but also retain the ability to add values together, theoretically infinitely. Por que no los dos.
Having to add 10< sums together shouldn't be regular, but instead for things that might last a while, or that bring the whole table together for a single task. Otherwise, it ends up being obnoxious. The bigger risk now is, with two different ways to read what is objectively the exact same number, if players will get confused or not.
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When I set out to make Road and Ruin, I new that I definitely wanted to have better ability cohesion, teamwork mechanics, extended actions, specialization for task, and material components than a game like Dungeons and Dragons. World of Darkness accounted for a lot of that, but it lacked the kind of, je ne sais quoi that medieval fantasy wargaming possesses. What it did have was lore. SO much lore, and so wonderfully interwoven into the very abilities that players would get to choose and cast.
Road and Ruin uses "skill trees", but I bristle at the accusation. When I think of skill trees, I think of these massive, sprawling spiderwebs of nonsense, +1s everywhere, where it's impossible to get a feel for what pushing in any given direction is actually meant to do.
Instead, RAR groups abilities not just by theme, but by aesthetic, and while you have to purchase up through ranks of abilities to get to stronger skills, those skills are much more specialized to those themes, and the 'weaker' skills are nothing to sneeze at either: they lay the foundation for what the stronger skills can do, but they're much more versatile, and can fit into just about any build. To represent this, we call these 'dip', and represent crossclassing almost in themselves; when you gain an ability in RAR from a rank of a skill you didn't previously have ranks in, you gain a level, and with only so many levels in the game, dipping for a spell here or a technique there means that you level up quickly, but as a jack of all trades, rather than a committed specialist with powerful skills.
Magic the Gathering is another inspiration for this mindset: each color is coded with a variety of overlapping themes, and dual-color or tri-color are even more pure explorations of those themes, easier to predict, but slower to get going. Keywords form a basis for entire decks, and when a card effect names two different keywords, you start to gain really interesting synergies and ideas. The downside of this, is a vertical learning curve; player skill is heavily measured in player awareness of skill synergies, and even of the existence of specific cards, more than just familiarity with the cards in your own deck and when to play them. Monte Cook calls this Ivory Tower game design, where "rules are collectable", and players are expected to figure out which abilities are good, useable, bad, and objectively a trap.
Rather than come up with a million different ways to accomplish the same goal, where more than half are designed to entrap you and punish newcomers to the game, my goals for Road and Ruin are that every ability should be good, but at WHAT is the question. There will be different ways to accomplish the same task; shooting a goblin can be done with an arrow launched from a bow, or launched via mana, but it's expensive to land only 1dmg per 1MP. This might be construed as a trap, but the ability to move things with magic has enormously more applications than the ability to shoot an arrow. Plus, if it is pursued as offensive magic, the spell can grow, and be customized, rewarding dedicated magic players, without necessarily stepping on the toes of archers.
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Each ability should, I think, be quantified by different features:
Proficiency. Given some 60-70 proficiencies, to a maximum of 5 each, a diversity of proficiencies is warranted. Granting a range of proficiencies helps with theming and letting people have what they want, but runs the risk of making it too easy to max out a proficiency. Consider implementing a hard cap rule of "maximum proficiency based on level", as an option.
Specialization. Should follow at least two of Who, What, When, Where, Why, or How. Overly niche specializations can be at low levels, while broader ones can be handed out at higher levels.
EFFECT. What does it do?
AREA. How far away can it be applied? How many targets?
TIME. How quickly does it cast? How long does it last?
COST. What prevents repeated use?
RETURN. Does it give you a resource?
SCALING. Can it be amplified, and how? By cost, or by stats?
Mythology. What story does this ability tell? Is it associated with a fixture in the lore? Can you build a campaign or a character around it?
As an example case, the skill list Fortress Guard has rank1 dip called Wyrd Ward, a basic magical barrier. As 'spell dip', you only unlock the actual spell component if you climb to rank2, unless you're a spellcaster class, who bypasses this limitation in the name of collecting as many spells as possible. At rank1 though, you have to get something.
At rank 1, the skill grants proficiency in one weight of shield of choice, or Weaving magic, for conjuration. This means even a non-wizard stands to gain from purchasing the skill.
At rank 2, "A mystical barrier lessens the impact of one incoming attack, from a single direction, granting +1 temp hp, +1 per mental saving throw success, against the attack. Costs 1MP, and can be positioned up to 1m away (NEAR range).
With Intention, and a mana cluster, the barrier has a starting base health equal to mana spent, +1 per concentration success, and can be moved up to your WITS attribute in meters. Value can be allocated to adjacent spaces.
This is... a lot. The old system would have you roll (FOCUS)d10, add them together, adding your proficiency, and find a range around 10-30, or +1 to +3 successes, for 2-4hp. Concentrating would ask that you start low, and ramp, and the mana cluster would add 2-5 to the max health of the shield, and be able to move 1-5m around, based on your Wits. This blocks 4-9 arrows, or 1-2 sword attacks, or 0-1 heavy weapon swings, on average. Not the best example of an emergency, reactive spell.
A simple fix would be that it IS a shield. Reactively, it's a smalls shield, which promotes parrying, and different costs/concentration gives a medium or large shield, better for absorbing blows.
But what if we ALREADY have a shield? Does it stack? And what if the threat isn't an attack, and we need to deflect a falling rock or something? Can it stop a wall of water?
And what about the mythology? What is the spell actually doing? Does air density increase, slowing blades and arrows? Does it apply a gravitational force? Is it a mass pulled from another dimension, or made of mana itself? And can it create a bubble, or be used offensively? Clearly there's a lot to consider here.
Fortress Guard unifies themes of gravity, durability, and equipment, largely from a standing, immovable state. "The battlefield heeds those who bury themselves beneath layers of iron and steel, a walking tank who fears no arrows and shies no blade, for where they go and where they stand receives the blessing of their protection." But how this skill is meant to interact with other skill lists is also something that needs consideration. Condensing the air into a solid would have wide applications, and factor in to the later skill, Formless Fortress, but the gravitational theme could also be used offensively. Summoning it from elsewhere is one thing, and weaving it from mana itself is quite another.
Wyrd Ward, then, should be able to observe multiple builds.
Wyrd Ward expels a cloud of mana, which has weak gravitational properties. Forces passing through the Ward is slowed and reduced by 1 damage.
Each additional 1MP expels more mana, to either cover a wider area, increase the density and protection in the area, or increase the cloud's duration. So, 1MP +(0 +2 density +1 round), is 3 protection, for 2 rounds, for 4MP. Which is, very expensive, but very strong.
Augments for this spell include: increase the gravitational repulsion, prevent humanoids from entering the barrier, launch the cloud as a bolt, apply as a coating to shields, apply as a passive armor to conjure and summon spells.
When combined with features outside of Fortress Guard, you'd get Repelling Bolt, Conjure Shield, Force Wave, Mirror Shield, Graviton Sword, Shield Shatter, Fallen Down/SkyFall, Solid Air, Meteor, Binding Rope, Hand Parry, Telekinetic Throw, Wall Walk, or Reverse Gravity.
The actual scaling is still in question. I think that it's better if it's a spell, but there should still be something for halfcasters or muscle wizards.
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RaR Musings #15: Resource Types
Like I mentioned in Musings #14, Spheres, Road and Ruin has a lot of resource types. This can cause a problem, as the design space balloons out and it becomes harder for players to recognize what their options are, but it is necessary if there are going to be games-within-the-game, where a purely Social experience carries just as much value and flavor as a purely Combat game, that can take place in the same universe with the same characters.
FAVOR. This is probably my favorite one. Favor is a power bestowed by one entity, to another, and it doesn't even have to be alive. Warriors can favor a specific sword over any other sword, clerics and warlocks vie for the favor of their patrons, and spirits bestow blessings and abilities over those they favor. Abilities might cost points of favor, which then have to be replenished by earning the being's trust, or may passively scale with the maximum amount of favor, or the amount you currently have. You may have the favor of a single animal spirit, or animals in general, or a single god, or an entire pantheon.
REPUTATION. This also has multiple sub-types, based on what you represent to different factions. A high reputation with Elves might help grant you audience with their king, and "Friend to Elves" might buy you some respect with the human village on the outskirts of the forest, but it might also earn you their ire, while "Slayer of Elves" might grant you a bonus to intimidation checks. Like favor, you can trade in reputation, staking your reputation on a promise, that if delivered, will increase your reputation, but if failed, will cost a greater amount.
MANA. The catch-all magical resource, most living creatures have a mana capacity based on their mental aptitude. Mana is energy that is used to facilitate alterations and transmutations of natural laws, greasing the wheels of an otherwise very scientific methodology. Mana can be condensed, forming packets that enable the delivery of more energy within a single moment than 'liquid' mana, and some spells include processes that require these, as they're too unstable to be cast slowly over time. Mana also has essence, a kind of flavoring that denotes where it came from; it can be elementally attuned, or to a living creature from where it came, and this allows for sympathetic magical practices, such as locating a son by reading the magical essence of the father, or having stronger pyromancy by using mana reaped from a blaze.
SPIRIT POINTS. Another kind of internal energy, but one associated with the soul, and so noticeably absent from undead and machines, but abundant in spirits, which can be used to animate such creatures. SP can be spent to amplify the exertion of will on other creatures, or to bolster yourself against outside influences. However, SP can be spent in excess, causing a kind of "spiritual hollowing" that causes the creature to less assertive and more vulnerable to outside influence, but that can be recovered over time, but below a certain threshold, "soulless" confers maximum penalties, without the chance to recover naturally.
COIN. A basic resource in any society, the value of this currency is based largely on the willingness of others to recognize it. Because of this, articles such as gems may be traded in place of coin, and different nations may mint different currency to use within their borders. Coin as a mechanic can be overly simplified for the sake of a smoother game, using just one currency the world over, or expanded out for use in games that involve trade, international relations, or currencies that mean more to secret societies.
FOOD/WATER. Basic resources, but still important nonetheless. This is usually waived in many games, but if the game takes place over long journeys, or involve securing resources for a community, there are many gameplay systems that revolve around them.
MATERIALS. Effectively, any item that is processed, is consumed, or is used in some way to increase the value of another material. This might mean components for a ritual, ingredients for a meal, metals for smithing, or chemicals for mixing. This section requires an entire post of it's own, but Material Cost can also be waived by any playtable that doesn't feel like micromanaging such things. It does represent a non-gold, non-reputation reward for exploration though.
BATTERY. Also called Energy, this is a storage house that grants power to electrical devices. This is more for Road and Ruin's sci-fi elements, but it's important to note that Batteries, Mana, and Spirit Points aren't ordinarily convertible between each other. A Generator might create an amount of Energy over a period of time, while different devices use different amounts of energy for different predetermined uses.
EXERTION. Also called Stamina, this represents the physical limits a body can be pushed within spans of time. Drawing from an Exertion Pool grants the stamina needed to sprint distances farther and faster, move heavy weights, and perform combat maneuvers, but dipping below Exertion thresholds imparts Exhaustion, a penalty to reaction speed and Exertion regeneration. Performing activities a character is proficient in refunds more Exertion points once they finish the task, but never 100%, so all characters must take a seat and rest eventually.
Favor has a lot of overlap with Reputation, and of course Mana/SP/Battery all have energy overlaps. Battery can be used as a Material in crafting, and both SP and Exertion both represent a kind of exhaustion mechanic.
Nine different resources is a lot, especially considering that Favor/Rep/Mana/SP/Coin/Materials/Battery can all have different stylings or sub-types. But Reputation needn't make an impact in a dungeon campaign, and Coin and Materials can be completely ignored if players don't feel like it improves their system. Inversely, a campaign playing as a pacifist travelling merchant requires all three of those things to have real gameplay decisions, buying and selling materials of different quality in different regions for different amounts of coin, and building a reputation.
The hope is, playing with what you WANT to play with, rather than being stuck behind a lack of system at all, will allow more different kinds of players to be able to tell the kind of story they're looking for.
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RaR Musings #14: Spheres
As I continue to try to build out my extensive list of possible ability influences in Road and Ruin, certain spheres begin to emerge, which helps to recognize what might need a sub-resource.
In the first place, Road and Ruin operates on associations. Where other games ask that you make up the circumstances, twists, or even whole setting out of whole cloth, the aim, at least, is for Road and Ruin to appeal to each player's personal experience of popular culture, in a part-tarot, part-rorschach test. The pros of this is that mechanics will assist in players getting to experience what they've come to expect of a story from their genre, with some twists along the way, as well as fulfill any genre. The cons, of course, are if people aren't already familiar with a genre, or have any desire to recreate the tropes from one, then they won't be learning about them here except from other players.
Because Road and Ruin operates on associations, there needs to be certain tropes and recognizable themes in play. The sphere of [ANIMALS] might mean a pet dog, birds, or a tiger, or hunting; in fantasy, it might mean speaking to animals, gaining their powers, or transforming into one, or omens, and in sci-fi, it can mean alien creatures. The sphere of [ELEMENTS] means a lot more to a fantasy player than to sci-fi or the unfamiliar, but likewise, [TECHNOLOGY] can be an entire sci-fi story with very little fantasy applications.
The sphere of [COMBAT] having sub-categories, [FIREARMS], [SWORDPLAY], [MARTIAL ARTS], and [TACTICS] mean a wider variety of playstyles for players who are interested in those, but overly fixating on that sphere means an equal drop in features that don't involve combat in some way. But, if non-combat can lean on what's quickly ballooned out to 60+ proficiencies and counting, for a system where skill checks use up to two in combination, then perhaps combat does need the lion's share of "I use this special ability".
Spheres of [CRAFTING] are both unlikely to be widely used, while also extremely popular for a small niche of players who actually like that sort of thing. Such action can mean anything from specific crafting stations, to sourcing and processing high-quality materials, applying techniques, repair and upkeep, having a catalogue, and simply being able to avoid the service costs of having someone else do it, or making sure it's done right the first time. This sphere relies heavily on the 'associations' of people interested in such things already; rather than have unique recipes for everything that ever has, does, or could ever or never exist, we reduce components and projects down to properties. We don't need specific instructions on how to craft rope, just that if we need something long, flexible, and strong, we need something with the [[Strands]] property, of a certain durability. [Twining] as an action involves weaving things together, to increase durability. People can figure it out from there, twining hemp, vines, even the hair of giants or spiderweb to make ropes. It doesn't matter if it's possible or makes sense, all that matters is the players understand how to come to those conclusions.
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I run into the issue of cost.
I run into a very tilted problem where another, 'better' game might have universal 'Special Points', that you can use on any ability. Fireball? 1SP. Fist Flurry? 1SP. It'd allow players to pivot from their otherwise heavily-invested build, as well as be only a single resource for new players to learn, but it comes at a price.
Having multiple difference resources helps to keep divisions between spheres in a way that simply learning new abilities doesn't breach, but it also makes it harder to learn. The connective tissue between different kinds of resources is vast and sprawling, such that a player might not understand what their options actually are, but it also indicates visible connections that are easily searchable with CTRL+F. Not having universal points means the existence of a Battery to power electrical devices, without worrying about a packet of SP being sucked up by a monk looking to punch an extra ten times. In fact, those "what if" scenarios give me the benefit of design space, where "what if a monk COULD absorb the energy from a battery? That's something out of 40k or something" actually becomes a fun and unique ability combo.
I feel like I can use the mentality of a universal ability currency, and have conversions between skills, without actually having a universal currency. Such an 'apples to apples' conversion chart is a little unfortunate, because I have to make sure that there isn't a feedback loop where someone can spend 1MP to earn 3SP and 2SP to earn 1MP, but I think that's something I can chart out early and then balance for account.
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RaR Musings #13: I Don't Hate DND
Considering how much slander I sling at Dungeons and Dragons, a lot of people conclude that I must hate the game, 5e especially. The issue is, I LOVE Dungeons and Dragons; I love what it can do, but I also love things that it can't do, and that prevents me from devoting myself to the single product like so many people seem to do.
Getting to talk to people who played Baldur's Gate 3 and nerd out about different elements of the lore has been fun. Talking about getting teleported to Chult and ambushed by dinosaurs brings up the Tomb of Annihilation campaign module, and reading it inspires and gets me excited over the idea of a journey through an oppressive jungle, fighting undead and snakes and dinosaurs, with side quests and magic items that seem really cool and exciting to experience.
However, not only does DND have any real core rules for wilderness survival (goodberry renders foraging null, not that there's much to that mechanically in the first place, and Rangers and the Outlander background are basically bandaids that help you skip the wilderness altogether), but getting to actually PLAY would mean having to find a group, with a DM, who are willing to host, and host this campaign specifically, gleefully experiencing permadeath, for up to 11 player levels, in a campaign that'd likely take months or even years of sporadic and short meetups.
The alternative is that I have to be the one to be the DM, which means I don't actually get to experience any of the struggles that I WANT to experience, and my struggles are defined by how to give the other players the best experience instead.
It gets really frustrating that DND is how it is, because what I'm looking to have happen has so many social and mechanical barriers in place that it can sometimes be next to impossible in today's modern ttrpg landscape.
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It's all part of why I designed Road and Ruin with the parameters that I did. Not requiring a single dungeon master, sessions that both begin and end satisfactorily, puzzles that have generative answers rather than having the DM hold all the cards. I COULD convert Tomb of Annihilation, but that would require converting the puzzle answers into generative ones, and spoiling various plot points for myself along the way of building a sort of 'choose your own adventure' with predetermined options for situation outcome.
Road and Ruin doesn't magically transform you into a professional writer or game designer, but it does it's best to try to bridge the gaps in experience and help carry the game if any one player (like the DM) is too tired or fried to. It doesn't replace well-written campaigns, like Tomb of Annihilation, but it does help make sure that people who want a Tomb of Annihilation actually get one if they want one.
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RAR Musings #12: Weapon Specials
Since I mentioned them in Musings 11, I wanted to touch on weapon effects.
Since the beginning, I wanted RAR to have better choices when using different weapons for different reasons. DND has damage vulnerabilities and resistances, but for the most part, there's little you can do to actually change your playstyle WHILE fighting an enemy: you're unlikely to thrust your torch at enemies with a vulnerability to fire, and you're far less likely to purchase acid vials on the off chance you find an enemy vulnerable to acid. This puts combat versatility squarely in the hands of spellcasters, while martials Hit With The Sword Again, which often gets reduced down to whether the creature's physical resistances can be cut through with magic weapons, and whether your character has the proficiency to equip their magic weapon of choice.
Road and Ruin instead grants different strike styles to each weapon:
Piercing, or accuracy-based attacks with force applied in a straight line; rolling a d4
Slashing, or edged-based attacks, slicing or scraping with wide or prolonged surface contact; rolling a d8
Bashing, or contact-based attacks, where no particular care to accuracy is necessary; rolling a d12
Armor reduces the result of each die by the armor's value in that method of defense, though they are mostly equal, so it's much harder to stab through armor than it is to simply cave it in.
Solid Blows, or above half on the die, deal the full damage on the weapon's profile, while below half, or Glancing Blows, deal half damage, rounded down. A 1 and lower is a miss.
When rolling the die achieves a Solid Blow, a second die of the same is rolled, and the results totaled: for every 50% threshold above 100% the combined value achieves, a stage of Special is granted. For example, a Piercing attack gains special on a 6, 8, 10, 12 and so on. Different weapon types have different Special effects, though critical damage is the most common one.
Longbows achieving Special add +1 to their damage and roll again, until Special isn't achieved. This describes arrows cutting through armor and into helm gaps, sometimes finding lethal purchase, although rarely.
Poisoned or serrated daggers inflict their poison or bleeds on a Piercing or Slashing special after armor is calculated, while others increase the critical damage multiplier, or reduce the impact of armor as it finds gaps or cracks it open.
Medium-sized or Heavy weapons that land Bashing specials can damage armor or shatter shields. Strength can be added to Bashing special rolls, helping a landed hit follow through.
Chopping, or d10 attacks, can dismember and sever limbs.
Certain enchantments may activate on a weapon special, granting enhanced speed or power, or igniting the blade with fire.
Or; none of these things. Weapon Special is an optional system, for players who want more of a gear grind, or for their progression to be measured by the size and diversity of their arsenal. Monster-slaying adventures especially would benefit here, but for players who don't want the micromanagement, the system can safely be snipped out in favor of more narrative combats.
A question I still have is whether or not there should be more than one special per weapon, and whether they should both apply, or just one apply, and if the player should have the choice of which. More than one runs the risk of someone just, bathing a knife in two dozen different chemicals, and it's like. You could do that. I'm not sure what that does. I assume it's worse than just one, but I don't know if it's worse than a dozen, or better than three dozen.
Another aspect of weapons I'm proud of is a comprehensive system for determining how much damage is supposed to be on the weapon's baseline. This is through variables like Size, Shape, Weighting, and Material, but it essentially allows you to definitively quantify what a goblin shortspear actually is, and why as a human, there's not much value in looting it unless your own weapon has been damaged.
Speaking of: Improvised weapons. Like improvised materials in the newly revised skill check system, landing a blow (or, using the item) with an improvised or damaged item prompts a secondary roll, to see if the breakage extends, and whether the baseline damage drops. Given how arrows only have 1dmg in the first place, any amount of damage, or even firing them at all, is enough for them to call it quits, but it can mean extra ammo in an emergency.
Crafting of weapons, also mentioned in the revised skill check system, can also produce masterworks. This is sort of like improvised, except that there's an additional stat bonus in some way; bonus damage, or a resistance to breaking. Specialists can work at improving an item over time, with the right materials and hours, to slowly, but surely, craft a masterwork, but it might take them days, or weeks, or months, or years to finish one. Meanwhile, a legendary blacksmith might have a 1 in 2 shot of crafting a masterwork of a common item.
Another system involving weapons is Favor. I'm still juggling the name, since it overlaps with Favor from a godly or spiritual angle, but essentially, beyond proficiency with a weapon type, beyond specialization with a particular kind of weapon, there's favoring a single, individual item. Something about the way it holds, or it's shape, or that it belonged to your family, inspires you, and no other weapon is quite the same. Favor is a kind of gith system, a spellsword, where power comes not from the wielder, nor from the weapon, but from the union of the two. Favored weapons can gain special abilities that only trigger while in your hands, and they become a badge representing your renown in the region. You may brandish it to inspire fear in your enemies who know you, or keep it polished so that it's edge never rusts and it's shine never dulls. But basically, martials will have the option to pick and keep a specific weapon close, so that they aren't incentivized to hop around, but that being a tavern brawler who uses anything at hand is an equally valid playstyle.
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RAR Musings #11: Rebuilding A System
I engaged in a reddit thread discussing "killing your darlings" lately, where they wanted their game to be "simple and approachable", "narratively driven", and "introduce elements of mech games that enthusiasts enjoy, but to people who aren't enthusiasts."
"Killing Your Darlings" has blown up as a game design buzzphrase people use to appear more experienced and wise than they actually are. Often, it's a bid to appear better read, or "oh woe is me, who must relinquish my idea to the void. Good thing I'm above all that, professional designer that I am, that I can sacrifice my preferences and ideals for the greater good," but for a single tear rolling down the cheek, but in this case, it was a genuine argument about whether something would contribute to the final product well or not.
I don't personally define a game with equipment heat, energy costs, and random lookup tables for an assortment of weapons in a catalogue to be "simple and approachable" for non-mech enthusiasts, nor particularly necessary for a "narratively driven" game, but I'm more upset about "narrative game" getting slapped on a lot of different products that don't actually have mechanics for driving a narrative. The 'stress' mechanic that they were dropping would actually give definition to the characters of the game, if the game's narrative was about said characters, but by removing it in favor of player agency, it's just... it's just a game. Not a story.
I fought about it, and offered some alternatives. Rather than a negative mechanic that removes player agency, why not a Brave mechanic, granting extra rewards for engaging in risk? Why have all these different mech parts, why not just have Parts, if non-mech enthusiasts weren't going to care? Why not come up with mechanics that actually DO tell a narrative, rather than just relying on DND-make believe?
The more I thought about it, the more mad I got, not just at the designer, but at myself, and Road and Ruin.
I don't like the phrase, Killing Your Darlings, to begin with. It implies that your idea is so specific, so inherent to the engine you're designing for, that there's absolutely no salvaging it. A new species, that winks in and out of existence, a twinkle, before you snuff it out, never to be seen again. Why not figure out a way for it to be used! Or if it doesn't fit or overworks the product, shelve it! Use it on a different project! Don't let your dreams be memes! You're a designer, not a farmer with a lame horse!
But I had invested so much time, so much design work, and been so pleased with the elegance of Road and Ruin's core resolution mechanic, that after coming to terms with the fact that it was bulky, time-consuming, involved adding too many numbers, and ultimately wasn't actually very fun, I resisted any notion of changing it. Even later, when I DID change proficiency from affecting the minimum dice value of the d10s, into being a flat value added to the d10s, the system still involved adding anywhere from 2-5 random values between 1 and 10, and then the proficiency value besides.
So why was I so willing to tear into this objectively decent mech game, and do so much design work trying to come up with ways to simplify it, when I wasn't willing to entertain simplifying Road and Ruin for a more enjoyable experience and a wider audience?
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I woke up the other day with a sudden idea.
Road and Ruin's core skill resolution system might involve too much math hinging on too many variables, but what about the combat system?
It was another system I'd done some major work on over time, but unlike skill checks, only really involved one dice roll, and no math after. I started to think how I might actually make the combat system the core skill check system, thus unifying the game under one mechanic, and being a lot faster, and more fun besides.
The gist of it is, that when making an attack in combat, you'd roll a d4 (Piercing/Accurate), d8 (Slash/Scrape, edged contact), or d12 (Bashing/Touch, only contact is necessary), subtracting the target's armor, and +/- an amount based on who had the edge in weapon skill. A 1 or less is a miss, and above half is full damage, based on a flat value determined by the weapon's weight, minus any lacking Strength needed to swing it. Anything in between is a Glancing Blow for half damage. There's also the Special system as well, but I'll leave that for another post; the point was, I wanted combat to come away having inflicted SOME damage each attack, rather than none, but for there to be a real fear of both heavily armored units, as well as expert swordsmen.
But what if that was how skill checks worked? Currently, the system assumes an average 2d10, up to 5d10, adding (proficiency/10 x specialization/5), and looks for multiples of 10; that is, 10+ is 1 success, 20+ is 2 successes, 30+ is 3, with successes being measures of what a creature can easily, with training, and with specialization do, relative to a creature of it's size and shape. An adult human can toss paper into a can with a 1; a wolf might be able to open a latched door with a 2-3, or 25. Blessings/Curses and gear could modify this in multiple ways, such as preventing rolls below or above a certain threshold, or allowing the reroll of one or more die.
If skill checks were instead a sliding scale, using a single d10, difficulty could be calculated before the roll was even made, like the impact of 2 points of armor on an attack roll. By sliding the scale of success, even physically using a sliderule, results of (1 Fail/And, 234 Fail, 5 Fail/But, 6 Succeed/But, 789 Success, and 10 Success/And) are moved left and right, and the die is left with the final say. Specializations can reduce the threshold of Succeed/And, while greater consequences for failure move up the threshold of Fail/And.
If 10% increments are too much, (especially for disciplines where the likelyhood of crafting a masterwork item should be less than 10%), a d100 still offers a "one dice" solution, but on 1% increments. In that case, the threshold for masterwork can be "specialization x proficiencies", and anyone with even one specialization can make repeat attempts, so long as they have the time and resources, to continue chiseling away until they've finished their magnum opus, gaining +1% chance of masterwork each roll, whereas a legendary master completes such works on a 50% basis.
In terms of gear, supportive equipment can either reduce the Success/And threshold, the regular success threshold, or allow for a reroll 'save' when rolling a failure, such as in the case of climbing rope stopping a fall. But, in each case that the support is used, it suffers a level of damage, and the Fail/And threshold of the follow-up save increases. Past a certain point, using intact, but damaged rope ends up being more risky than it's worth, without it explicitly preventing use.
In the case of blessings and curses, they can allow rerolls, or just flat +1/-1 effects. What I'm really warming up to with this idea is how just about everything boils down to using the single die, but in a way that's still got a lot of tools to play with.
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Now some cons. I'd done a LOT of work on the earlier system, and designed lots of spells, such as the Revision magic, Lethologica, a spell that allows the reroll of any one die in proximity, both supportively or debilitatingly. This was a lot more balanced when you were rolling 2-5 dice per throw, but a single die? Massively overpowered. I'd rather not upgrade the cost of what was essentially a cantrip to a fifth-level spell, so I'm going to have to figure out how I'd get to keep it and make it work still. One solution might be forcing the use of the d100, and having Lethologica alter the result by a number of points in either direction, being used to help sway results, but not effortlessly overturn them. It allows for spell scaling, with more mana converting to a greater degree of sway, and still allows sway in either direction, helping to save near-failures and fail near-saves.
Another issue is the case of Monstrous/Mini. When I changed RAR from being a 10-scale attribute system to a 5-scale, I was bothered by how I'd account for three-story giants, pixies, and small-world scenarios. I'd developed Monstrous and Mini, x5 and /5 multipliers for stats that helped to massively scale up or down the effects of 1-5 of any given attribute. So, a creature with Monstrous Strength 3 would multiply the results of their 3d10 roll by 2. Monstrous 2 Strength 4 would get (4d10 x 3). Boss monsters could still get trash rolls (2+3+1 x 2 is just 12, doable on 2d10) but still get high effects on average. Miniscule, on the other hand, reduces the character's Size by a stage, having them struggle to pick up thimbles and defend against ants. This complete overhaul of the core skill check resolution system doesn't have "10 = 1 success" anymore, so multiplying the results doesn't really work; not that it did, because it was slow, and unfun.
A solution for this is... a lookup table. Kind of. The actual value of each of the stats, 1-5, are actually still quite valid for establishing standards. If a creature has reasonable stats to do what they're looking to do, they should roll, no problem. If their stat is lacking, they suffer a -1 for every stage they're missing, and if they exceed, +1 for every stage they're over. But for Monstrous/Mini, like... maybe it's +/- 5 in each direction? And if Fail would get pushed off the board, it stays at 1, causing a chance for failure of 10%? I mean, engaging in a mental mindclash with an illithid SHOULD be next to impossible with their Monstrous Intelligence, but just the chance that they roll a 1 is probably more fun than "you literally just can't do it".
The question here is, if players who are generating their own creatures have a solid understanding of what Monstrous/Miniscule creatures are actually DO, without getting to experience them in action first. And, since the game actually IS narrative in nature, I don't see an issue with placing impossible monsters in front of players that they're not actually supposed to defeat, really. But it feels weird to not be multiplying the outcome of dice anymore.
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at this point I shouldn't be so surprised when I look for guidance and/or critique for what is attempting to be groundbreaking design work and people who have either no interest in the subject or are very, very invested in things being the way they are aren't any help at all
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RaR Musings #10: Schrodinger's Healer
While clerics and paladins have healed in DND for years, for many, it took videogames to cement the idea of the healer as an active role in the consciousness of the average fantasy enthusiast. It doesn't really matter what game I play or host, SOMEONE will want to be the "party healer", and while this is acceptable sometimes, even encouraged, other times, I have to warn that healing isn't what's expected in this game, or sometimes, even possible.
Loosely defined, healing is an erasure of events. It either completely eliminates the consequences of risk, or at the very least lessens them, prolonging the time before their effects make an impact.
Healers make balancing a headache, because whether a healer is available, the healer even shows, the party even takes damage, the healer even heals the party, and how easy the fight is supposed to be all have an impact on the expectation of the designers. It doesn't matter if that designer is a game host putting together a session literally days before the event, or a writer, composing a pre-written campaign, to be played by people they will never meet.
A) There IS a healer in the party, the party DOES take damage, the healer DOES heal the party, and this WAS EXPECTED, so the encounter is FAIR.
B) There IS a healer in the party, the party DOES take damage, the healer DOES heal the party, but this WASN'T expected, so the encounter is EASY.
C) There IS a healer in the party, the party DOES take damage, the healer DOESN'T heal the party, and this WAS expected, so the encounter is FAIR, and the healer is BORED.
D) There IS a healer in the party, the party DOES take damage, the healer DOESN'T heal the party, and this WASN'T expected, so the encounter is HARD, and the healer is BORED.
E) There IS a healer in the party, the party DOESN'T take damage, and this WASN'T expected, so the healer is BORED.
F) There ISN'T a healer in the party, the party DOES take damage, this WAS expected, and is either FAIR or HARD.
G) There ISN'T a healer in the party, the party DOESN'T take damage, this WAS or WASN'T expected, and so could be FAIR, but healing is MEANINGLESS.
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COST
If damage is defined as the consequences for risk, healing represents an erasure of those consequences, lessening their impact, and it ceases to be a warning, punishment, or cost. If health is defined as a spendable resource, a limit to what a character is capable of before they must retreat or die, healing needs to also be a spendable resource, or else result in an endless cycle.
If healers heal EVERYONE, at NO COST, healing becomes boring, with no variation, and if every fight begins at full strength, there can be no lasting consequences of risk, mistakes, or failure.
If healers heal SOMEONE, at NO COST, they get to be engaged by picking and choosing each turn, and there are still no consequences, just at a slower speed. Time becomes the resource.
If healers heal ANYONE, at SOME COST, healers can't heal every turn, and do nothing in the meantime, becoming bored, as in examples C), D), and E), and waiting for their moment.
Road and Ruin takes a stab at this by having the playtable control the entire party, rather than individual characters. By having a healer along, they can do healing tasks, without having to have a single player in the driver's seat at all times. This does begin to beg the question whether players won't just have an "HM Slave" along for the ride, because it's cheap free and easy, but I think that's more up to the players at the table than me, but I can attack that from other angles.
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AMOUNT
The impact of healing as free each turn has three possibilities:
Healing is 1:1 the same number of points of healing as an attack is points of damage. It completely erases the impact and consequence of an incoming attack. In a 1v1, this creates a stalemate, in a 2v2, it reduces the fight to a 1v1, unless the healer is attacked.
Healing is stronger than damage. So long as you cycle out the injured, you will get them back to above the level of the other injured, and if the ratio is skewed enough toward healing, no one ever actually gets defeated.
Damage is stronger than healing. This begs the question what the point of healing is, since the healer's player could just inflict damage instead, and increase the chances that you kill the opponent before healing ever becomes necessary. This rapid-style burst-damage is represented by option G), and with enough fighters, healing will never be required.
If healing isn't free, and spend the same resource as damage-inflicting spells, the ratio needs to be around 1:1 to feel like it's a fair compensation of resources. Why heal for 10, if you can fireball for 20?
The alternative is, that healing costs a completely different resource than what is used for damaging spells. This starts to grate with certain players, who don't like having different resources for different things, but they can't share the same root resource if they're going to be balanced independently against each other.
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STYLES
In Road and Ruin, there are multiple methods of healing, for the two different kinds of health. Regular "hit points", or HP, reflect lasting bodily harm, and result in unconsciousness or death when dropped below 0. Steadfast Health Points, or SF, represents a kind of morale or adrenaline that allows characters to reduce incoming damage, but not evade lethal injuries. If a character runs out of SF, it represents a kind of soft-'defeat' status, where the character doesn't want to continue fighting, and characters suffer 1SF damage every turn that they COULD have been struck, if they weren't, and this helps keep fighters distinct from non-fighters, who have low SF.
RECOVERY: As characters rest over time, they replenish health points, but the more severe the injury, the longer recovery takes, exponentially. A character pummeled within an inch of death may be out of commission for days, or even weeks.
MEDICAL ATTENTION: Emergency aid can help reduce the impact of recent wounds, and if applied over time, accelerates the Recovery process, using bandages, splints, and salves.
MAGIC: By applying energy to twist the natural world, it is possible to knit together injuries in a way that would normally take extended Recovery, but magic is fickle, and runs the risk of warping the injury beyond hope of repair. Further, it takes a considerable amount of magical power, and an extensive understanding of biology, efforts and resources that are perhaps best spent elsewhere.
MIRACLES: By appealing to your deity, or contracting with a demon or other spirit, they may perform spell-like effects on your behalf, but this always tends to come at a cost.
INSPIRATION: Whether by motivational speech, or awe-inspiring confidence by commanders or representatives of faith on the battlefield, or even music, Steadfast can be replenished mid-battle, helping to absorb damage from incoming sources, but not ever fully saving lives.
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This may be too many styles of healing, but I wanted characters to be able to diversify beyond simply "party healer", "wave my magic wand" type solutions.
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RaR Musings #9: Defining Fun
Once upon a time, I was designing Road and Ruin v001, adding all sorts of variables and rerolls and sorting high-to-low, on the expectation that there was no reason not to rely on digital integration of tools at the table, if people were gonna be putting their character sheets and pdfs on their phone anyway, and googling their spells rather than checking the book or writing them down.
I pulled back from that for a few reasons. First, because the more variables there were, the harder it was for players to learn what they do, and where they come from, and why they matter. They didn't care if the computer handled it, they straight up didn't remember what they did. The second reason, is for the sake of elegance; it was a kind of challenge to myself, to boil multiple different variables away, until I was left with a single equation that best simulated the mechanic effectively. But the last, and probably most important reason, was that it wasn't fun.
It takes a special kind of nerd to get excited about a system that asks you to sort variables, reroll certain numbers, and multiply and divide, and while I wanted that kind of person to have fun sitting at my table, I started to care about the number of people who'd sit at that table. Not that I'm not willing to appeal to a niche audience, absolutely, but as a social game, it's important that you're able to find, and RETAIN, a certain number of players, in order to keep the game going.
Or you could do what I did and draft rules that allows players to play solo and without a dungeon master in a group BUT BESIDES THAT
I read an AngryGM article that references a paper, aiming to quantify eight different kinds of fun involved in a game: Sensation, Fantasy, Narrative, Challenge, Fellowship, Discovery, Expression, and Submission. Talking about how much people appreciate tactile feedback of dice, paper, and minis did a lot to get me to reassess why so many friends had inexplicably not warmed to the idea of playing tabletop games digitally during the pandemic, or over long distances when living too far to visit.
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Historically, ttrpgs like Dungeons and Dragons were a nerd hobby. It involved fantasy, something shunned by the socially well-to-do, and math, delighting only those who found a kind of joy in assigning values to fiction and modifying them with know-how. DND has since become mainstream, scooping up vast hordes of non-nerds who wander into just about every space, whether it's suited to them or not, and demand to be entertained. Some people stay, some people leave, but there begins dark mutterings about whether people are "playing the game right".
The common rebuttal is that there is no way to play the game right; that if you're having fun, then you're playing it as right as it can be played. Discard the rules, fudge what isn't satisfying, this is your free time and you deserve fun, dammit, and DND is fun!
But then, what is fun? Why is it some people don't have fun when playing DND? How is it that some people have fun playing DND, but only sometimes? With different hosts, different players, different rules?
No other game genre has the same expectations. Someone who enjoys a game, but then plays a session they don't enjoy, is almost exclusively the result of somebody screwing around and ruining the experience. But in ttrpgs? It's expected, nay, STATISTICALLY LIKELY that there are going to be groups you quit because of how they're playing a game that you otherwise enjoy, and that somehow you're in the wrong for it, not the group who threw the rules out the window.
Past a certain point, there's no sense trying to appeal to everyone. Making sure you entertain enough people that they can keep the game alive and going, that's definitely important, but I don't think there's anything wrong with people being told, "if you didn't have fun with this game and these rules, then this game and it's rules aren't for you. Feel free to seek a different game", rather than bending over backwards to try to fit 100% of all newcomers into the same narrow margins of modularity the game is capable of. And, there is also something to be said about community, togetherness, yadda yadda. It is important. But how big does the circle have to be? How many people does it truly have to encapsulate, before you start to undermine the enjoyment of the people who were there first? Why does there have to be a game that fits millions of people, at the cost of it's most diehard fans? Why can't there just be different games that appeal to different people?
I think a lot about this, as a fan of other, non-DND games. I'm not in circles where I get to start them up often, whereas DND players are overflowing at the brim, desperate to play, but few GMs are willing to host a game with 8+ players, and those who do, don't do it twice, and there's a non zero chance that the game your player thinks they want, and what they expect, isn't what you enjoy or are willing to provide. When the game's population has reached critical mass, but there aren't enough GMs to host, we should ask ourselves why. Clearly, the kinds of people who 'have fun' hosting are not the same breed of people who don't, and if the people who HAD fun hosting, don't anymore, then the game's most important, limited resource starts to decay, and it becomes harder and harder to find someone with the enthusiasm and the patience to host.
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So, as a designer, I'm at an impasse. I can design for myself, knowing that I distinctly don't represent the interests of the mass public, or I can design for a slightly larger, but still niche audience, or I can throw all my own preferences to the wind and churn out some mass-appeal game, that'll never manage to dislodge the abject obsession that people have with DND anyway.
I began by designing for myself, but over time, I realized that even I wasn't enjoying what I'd made, because I'd "forgotten to put the fun in it." Years later, I'm not sure that I fully grasp what's 'fun', but I am designing better, more game-y games.
My goals for Road and Ruin include having a split of simulation-type mechanics, to give a stable expectation of how the world works and what the average person is capable of, and input from player interpretation, to bridge the gap between players becoming game hosts, and to blur the line between what roles and responsibilities that the host is meant to have. The exact brand of fun I want to provide is one of invention and discovery; as a story is generated and twists occur, failure should be exciting, because of the opportunity to design what failure here means for a character and the narrative, rather than some kind of personal slight or punishment for something that was ultimately decided by dice in the first place.
In short, as I've been accused before, my goal is to create a game that's meant to be played by dungeon masters. But, crucially, the goal is to create a pipeline that warms 'players' to what being a game host actually means, and have them join the ranks of people who host games, using all the same skills that they would normally have developed as a player. A lot of people claim that there's no such thing as a GM and a player, that the GM is just another player at the table, but I'd say that the player is just another GM, and it's time to bring them up to speed.
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RaR Musings #8: Social Mechanics
I'm not even quite sure how to broach this subject, besides complaining.
Many RPGs only have one stat to cover social activity. Even DND, which has three physical stats, and two mental stats, only has Charisma, poorly covers why it's used by both likeable bards and intimidating warriors, by warlocks and by sorcerers, has no situational modifiers, and leaves even rolling of dice for the scenario up to DM discretion, with no meaningful mechanical distinction between what Friendly, Indifferent, or Hostile actually means. The entire section is a little less than a page long. Both DND and PF also have a "command" ability that lets you hijack another player's character to attack in your stead, no roll required.
World of Darkness has three stats for social: Presence, Manipulation, and Composure, as well as systems for situational modifiers, extended actions, variable success rate, and four pages of Social Maneuvering rules means that there are some solid example cases on how you might resolve a story beat through social means. The only real issue is that you're unlikely to attempt anything that you're not already good at, and stack narratives against your target, which is great storytelling, but it's not a GAME, really.
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STATS
Road and Ruin takes after WOD, having three of each stat.
Will is force of spirit, where the character dreams big and has strong ambitions. This represents a kind of baseline force behind the 'want' of a character's motivations.
Connection is your precision in discerning and applying intent, to both understand motivations and attempted manipulation, and the degree of accuracy when landing your own.
Poise is a kind of emotional buffer. Not exactly stubbornness, but an emotional maturity and stoicism that allows the character to emotionally process events in a way where they control the outcome, rather than their emotions getting the better of them.
WOD's stats are great, but they're a little too indicative of particular character tropes. I'd wanted to make each stat important to have, in a game where it's impossible to have a high amount of many things, to represent active weaknesses that the character will experience on a regular basis.
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MORALITY
When it comes to the subject of Morality, I was a bit stuck. DND has their alignment chart, that suggests Lawful/Chaotic and Good/Evil are opposites, and WOD has a linear morality/sanity meter that slides up and down as you perform immoral acts, but both of these games treat morality as black and white, with shades of gray, in no doubt influenced by western notions of purity, and left/right political structures. In reality, morality is a rainbow spectrum, where what can appear innocent to one group of people can seem like an unforgivable crime to others, and vice versa. Cultures around the world place different levels of importance on sometimes completely unique outlooks and beliefs, and while "human rights" is a pretty solid basis for every popular world religion, it doesn't always make it's way to the forefront of people's belief system.
To that end, Morality in RAR is made up of several things:
Compulsions: Beliefs that cause you to act proactively in some way. (Ex. Rescuing a child, squashing a bug)
Interpretations: Beliefs that involve perception of a thing in a particular way. This can lead to Compulsions, but don't always, and may not necessarily be based on facts, and while actions/Compulsions speak louder than words, Interpretations are a good first impression of a person. (Wealth is good, goblins are bad, honor is important)
Traditions: Things you build into everyday life, that bring you peace of mind and stability, but is rarely developed by you personally. This can also lead to Compulsions, and sometimes made of Interpretations. (Family is important, restore your honor, care for the land, pray for the fallen)
Essentially, RAR posits that there IS no such thing as 'good' or 'evil', beyond what is collectively agreed to by a culture of people, the moral judgements that they make, and what others either agree to enough to let slide, or take offense to and oppose.
[As an example: A paladin sees someone getting mugged in the street, and has the Compulsion to [Help the Defenseless], jumping in to protect the innocent. After all, outnumbering someone who is clearly defeated can't be true justice.
However, on investigation, they find the person getting attacked is actually a thief, well known to prowl the area, stealing food out of windows and coin out of pocket, and has been caught several times already. The paladin Interprets that [Stealing is Wrong], even to survive; it is morally incomprehensible, and they agree that the person should be punished for this crime that they've committed.
Part of this comes from the paladin's homeland, where there is a Tradition for everyone to work hard ensuring food and shelter is available to refugees and the needy. This Tradition is based on the Interpretation that no one should ever have to stoop to thievery in the first place, and so while any act of theft is Bad, the circumstances surrounding the thief means the town has failed those most wanting, so the paladin resolves to speak to the city council about their failings.]
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ROLEPLAY
When speaking or acting, players can declare what Interpretation, Tradition, or Emotion is propelling this behavior, as well as when reacting to something; an antisocial ranger may bite and snarl at those who he feels doesn't understand him, but impress and inspire a fellow warrior who sees and respects a fighter who regularly conquers adversity. Said ranger may not feel the same in turn, having a poor opinion of those who fight when not necessary and kill selfishly.
Characters spend a Spirit Point when making or taking social skill checks or saves, and can roll saving throws to perform an action that contradicts their morality, or a skill check when ordering a Command that contradicts the sensibilities of another. In the event of failure in either case, they can spend Spirit Points to offset the difference, and push the roll over the edge; not knowing how many points the other side is going to spend creates a kind of gamble.
Spirit Points is a spendable resource pool based on your social attributes, and the lower below maximum your reserves, the higher the escalating penalty on social checks and saves. This penalty is waivable by spending SP to match, which leads to a kind of emotional spiral that makes you more prone to influence in the future.
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INFLUENCE
Characters who are being worked have three possible results: No Change, Tempered Change, and Uncontrolled Change. The more shocking an emotionally charged event is to a character, the higher degree of moral drift.
Let's say that a character witnesses their parents dying. In an alleyway, even. The trauma of this event, especially by a child with an undeveloped emotional buffer, results in Uncontrolled Change, and the child grasps for meaning. In a bid to justify their anger and sorrow, they conclude that if such injustices are able to happen, then they will work to ensure they never happen again, and that perpetrators of such crimes are punished, one way or another. They go on to make this ethos the primary driving force of their life, consuming their every waking thought and sleeping dream, an obsession.
Let's also say that a different child, born to a nation of air nomads, is told that to defeat the fire nation, he must kill their leader. His Traditions and personal Interpretations tell him that killing is bad, and so he flees his responsibilities. When faced with the evils of the fire nation, however, he takes stock of his options: something must be done, but what will be done will be on his terms, not the insistence of others, and the child makes a Tempered Change.
then that air nomad makes friends with another child who was controlled by his low Poise through unrelenting rage for three years that determined just about every action he ever did lol
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BARGAINING?
I feel like the groundwork for Morality, and spending Spirit Points to command and resist compulsions, is pretty solid, even if I'm still working on how the math makes that work. I'm still working on a kind of 'bargaining' mechanic, where two characters who can't influence each other through forceful means manage to come to an accord where both actors are happy, but it's been tough marking out the mechanics in a way that involve stats and throwing dice.
The basics are such:
Value of the good or service, as the result of Material Cost, + Time, + Required Expertise, + Danger or threat to livelihood, + Demand, +/- the provider's need for trade, +/- the provider's level of Do I Wanna or morality
Quantifying each on a scale of 1-10 creates a value ratio: If a common material (2) takes an average amount of time to process (match 2), but requires high expertise (6, or a rank3 skill) and runs a risk of bodily harm (5), and is high in demand (6) and the person needs the work to survive (+8), but believes the job is in service to their faith (-6), they have a final Cost/Overhead ratio of 23:2.
Bargaining quantifies skewing the ratio, either by offering to pay less for the same service, pay the same for more service, or substitute cost for value of your own.
This isn't limited just to trade goods and services either, but should be able to power things like demonic contracts. The being has something, or can do something, or IS DOING something that should be stopped, and some kind of arrangement needs to be made.
At one point, I had this whole, gambling type mechanic. You'd guess a value, and roll dice, and the closer you were the value, the more influential you were, and that different class features would allow you to modify the roll up or down to fit your guess. The system was borked, requiring too much random chance and too much player metaknowledge of statistics, and ended up being a linear morality system that didn't jive with this "No True Morality" system I was trying to build. At best, I could declare that each 'influential' thing you did marked a value point on a d100, and that skills meant increasing the window of each value point, and the closer you were to the original value point, the stronger your case; it'd mean collecting more starter points, and widening the window of each, increased the likelyhood you were AT ALL effective, but it still doesn't feel a lot like a GAME.
So, if a linear system, like numbers, doesn't really suit a non-linear concept, like morality, I thought I'd try something else. I started looking into a rock-paper-scissors system, basically "pick a thing that you're influenced by, and a thing you're good at influencing". It ends up with an infinite number of potential throws, to suit the infinite variations of individual, and characters with high Will gain more things they're good at pushing, characters with high Connection gain more things they're good at targeting, and characters with high Poise have fewer things that they're influenced by, with influences measured on a scale of 1-5 so that they can butt heads, and still ultimately overcome each other. Like, if Influence constituted +3, and someone with Rock 5 fought someone with Paper 1, Rock would end up still winning the matchup, despite the weak play.
Still workin on it u_u
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Continuing this, since I capped it off when it was late and I was tired.
I do like my system, but understand why others might not. I specifically designed it so that it could handle as wide a degree of racial powers as an elf, a wolf, a pixie, and a fire giant all operating on the same math, without necessarily producing the same values, but this results in some decidedly 'unfun' dice math for the casual thrillseeker.
The best scenario for 'fun' involving dice is when the result on the die is the last action; no modifiers, no math. DND nearly achieves this, and still could, if you figured out the DC - Proficiency, to find the number you need to beat BEFORE you roll, but exploding dice, like what WOD has, involve not knowing how high the dice are going to climb. RAR is currently the worst of both worlds, involving addition of multiple dice, and multiplication of flat values, along with a minor exploding element, based on whether more 10s than 1s, or 1s than 10s, were rolled. A minor saving grace is that multiplying Proficiency by Specialization raises the values high enough that you don't actually have to roll for lower-skill checks, trading do-it-all-ness used by adventurers for the ability to ply the trade without fear of failure.
Considering, for a moment, the possibility of a shift to an exploding "Check Highest" dice system. Rather than roll Attribute as d10s, then adding (Proficiency x Specialization) as a flat value, to try to get results as multiples of 10 (10+ is 1 success, 20+ is 2, 30+ is 3, etc), I could transition to rolling Attribute + Proficiency, +5 if specialized, as a number of d4s, rerolling 4s, and counting the number of roll phases as the number of successes (1 3 4 4 is one success, reroll 2; 2 4 is two successes, reroll 1; rolling 3 ends the chain at two successes). Alternatively, if we want up to 5 phases of success, roll 1d2(Reroll 2s) would explode a lot more, and carry a higher degree of success when rolling large starting pools. It'd equate raw skill and trained expertise in a way that isn't precisely in the game right now, and mean that there's literally no math, other than determining the pool of dice you start with. In fact, you don't even have to use d2s, you could use any die, since all dice are divisible by 2, and just reroll the ones that land above the half threshold.
Now the caveat. This system is ALSO slow, but only because of having to examine and reroll-explode the dice. It's simplistic, which means a lower diversity of possible abilities, spells, and situational modifiers, but codifies them all under one umbrella. But it's also EXTREMELY swingy; 20d2 has little chance, statistically, to get to 5 successes, but 5d2 can get to 5 successes purely by accident, to the point that at times I was wondering what the point of having so much extra proficiency and specialization even was.
Does that make it a better game?
Personally, I don't believe so.
It's all a fun thought experiment, and I was using concepts like exploding dice in Musings #4 to have randomly generated rare elements, but I don't think that the entire core skill check resolution system should be based on it. There should be enough random elements to react to, character skills should be more reliable, dependable on SOLVING those random situations, rather than being another wrench in the machine.
RaR Musings #7: Meaningful Mechanics
I saw a post this week about other people in the ttrpg design space, lamenting their years of work, and being dismissed for their project seeming like "a dnd clone". A fair concern, to be sure, but it would turn out the criticism stemmed from having a fantasy themed roleplaying game, that uses a d20 and adds proficiency, has character creation that involves classes, and spellcasting with multiple levels of spells. Others suggested there might be similarities if you use the standard stats, like STR, DEX, and INT.
So what's a guy with a fantasy themed roleplaying game that uses Xd10, adding proficiency, has a character creation engine that has classes as a minor element, and spellcasting with a mana system allowing you to cast spells at a higher level, using some basic stats, to do?
Firstly: not worry about it. Creativity is iterative, and DND has been the fantasy roleplay standard for nigh on 50 years, having affected pop culture and videogame design alike. It'd be hard NOT to have anything similar to it, and for those who have no experience outside of DND, dipping a toe outside that space can seem daring and adventurous. The writer is probably upset because they don't understand how generally meaningless their reinventing of the wheel was in terms of convincing people to play their game instead; in fact, there wasn't any mention of WHY he made the effort to design his own game in the first place. Was it distaste for existing products? Because he had vision? Or just to prove that he could do it too, a kind of intellectual parroting?
Game mechanics can't be copywritten, so while it's not illegal to copy mechanics, there needs to be certified thought put into what those mechanics are meant to achieve, and why they may fail to do so.
As an example: both d20 games and Road and Ruin involve rolling dice to generate a random value, and then adding your proficiency as a flat number.
DND falls down here because even high proficiency, like +11 or +13, barely crests over half of the value generated by random d20, much less the more regular +1 to +6. This means a specialist, someone who has lifelong expertise at their craft, can still bungle even a basic action, giving other players a chance to perform, but completely botching the class fantasy of being a specialist, and there's no coded mechanics for varying levels of success or failure to even reward being a specialist beyond increased binary success rate. Multiple overlapping proficiencies don't have cumulative value, and outside of house rules, you can't mix and match Attribute to Proficiency, such as using Strength for Intimidation. However, the system is simplistic, and easy to understand. Not having different values for different proficiencies means only having to refer to a single number as a bonus, which makes stat scaling much more predictable, and as mentioned, giving other players the limelight means the skill monkeys won't hog it.
Road and Ruin HAD a much more 'unique' skill check system; roll your attribute (1-10) as Xd10, and your proficiency (two 0-5 proficiencies combined) determined the minimum score any dice could land. Dice were adjusted, totalled, and the sum divided by 10 to find Success Rate, with scores of 1 or higher expected. This ended up being too much adjusting and adding; it produced the ideal values, but was too slow, and not very fun, especially to do repetitively. Worse, it didn't enable 'skill' to exceed 'raw talent'; you needed a high attribute for the guaranteed 'floor' that proficiency provided to matter, and I wanted those with training to potentially exceed those without training. If INT4 rolls 4d10, and Proficiency 3 meant you couldn't get below a 3 on each, for a 'floor' of 12-40, that still meant an average ~22, regardless of if you were trained or not. Specialization 'rolled' an additional 1d10, but set it aside as an automatic 10, thus improving skill checks beyond what was possible via random dice rolls, raising both floor and ceiling by 10, but not solving the issue of speed or reliability.
So now, Road and Ruin has a Roll + Proficiency system too, except you roll Xd10 (1-5), and Proficiency is two scores (0-5 each), combined, and multiplied by Specialization, with a cheat-sheet of the most common Proficiency results for your character. Adding the dice, and Proficiency, before finding successes, is still slow, but faster now, and due to the multiplication of scores and specialization, your character may even automatically succeed basic tasks, without the need for a roll at all. Such skillmonkeying requires utmost devotion though, and is far better suited to an NPC assistant; but, said NPC will still be built using the same mechanics as what goes into a character, making it easier to understand and appreciate their service.
More importantly: I like it. I understand that others might not; it doesn't have the hallmarks of DND's 'gamble' economy, getting high rolls and confetti when you hit a 20, but frankly, I'm building this game for me, not for people who are satisfied with DND. Even my nine attributes are inspired by World of Darkness, though slightly redefined to suit the needs of my setting instead, and the proficiency skill list is entirely my own, designed to offer as many cases of two overlapping skills as possible. Using any attribute in the skill check, based on what you aim to affect rather than what the proficiency is most known for (using DEX and herbalism to get plant clippings, or INT and herbalism to recall plant facts, for example) is a much more direct and diverse way to handle skill checks, rather than trying to remember whether Nature in DND is Intelligence or Wisdom, and why. Rolling multiple dice instead of 1d20 helps protect against fringe rolls, making the rare cases truly rare, as well as creating a market for spells, equipment, and abilities that affect your skill checks to have meaningful use, rather than simply adding a +1.
But I'm having fun doing all this. Road and Ruin began because I was upset with DND, and over the years, I've done a lot of work, first to intentionally distance it from DND, and only later to begin to paint it in my own colors, doing what I want, not in rebellion of what I don't. Anybody looking to design their own systems should be more preoccupied with how their mechanics feel; if people think that it's too similar to an existing product, one that you intentionally avoided? Then that's tough beans for them. They don't get to define how you have fun, and at the end of the day, that's what playing, and designing, a game is all about.
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RaR Musings #7: Meaningful Mechanics
I saw a post this week about other people in the ttrpg design space, lamenting their years of work, and being dismissed for their project seeming like "a dnd clone". A fair concern, to be sure, but it would turn out the criticism stemmed from having a fantasy themed roleplaying game, that uses a d20 and adds proficiency, has character creation that involves classes, and spellcasting with multiple levels of spells. Others suggested there might be similarities if you use the standard stats, like STR, DEX, and INT.
So what's a guy with a fantasy themed roleplaying game that uses Xd10, adding proficiency, has a character creation engine that has classes as a minor element, and spellcasting with a mana system allowing you to cast spells at a higher level, using some basic stats, to do?
Firstly: not worry about it. Creativity is iterative, and DND has been the fantasy roleplay standard for nigh on 50 years, having affected pop culture and videogame design alike. It'd be hard NOT to have anything similar to it, and for those who have no experience outside of DND, dipping a toe outside that space can seem daring and adventurous. The writer is probably upset because they don't understand how generally meaningless their reinventing of the wheel was in terms of convincing people to play their game instead; in fact, there wasn't any mention of WHY he made the effort to design his own game in the first place. Was it distaste for existing products? Because he had vision? Or just to prove that he could do it too, a kind of intellectual parroting?
Game mechanics can't be copywritten, so while it's not illegal to copy mechanics, there needs to be certified thought put into what those mechanics are meant to achieve, and why they may fail to do so.
As an example: both d20 games and Road and Ruin involve rolling dice to generate a random value, and then adding your proficiency as a flat number.
DND falls down here because even high proficiency, like +11 or +13, barely crests over half of the value generated by random d20, much less the more regular +1 to +6. This means a specialist, someone who has lifelong expertise at their craft, can still bungle even a basic action, giving other players a chance to perform, but completely botching the class fantasy of being a specialist, and there's no coded mechanics for varying levels of success or failure to even reward being a specialist beyond increased binary success rate. Multiple overlapping proficiencies don't have cumulative value, and outside of house rules, you can't mix and match Attribute to Proficiency, such as using Strength for Intimidation. However, the system is simplistic, and easy to understand. Not having different values for different proficiencies means only having to refer to a single number as a bonus, which makes stat scaling much more predictable, and as mentioned, giving other players the limelight means the skill monkeys won't hog it.
Road and Ruin HAD a much more 'unique' skill check system; roll your attribute (1-10) as Xd10, and your proficiency (two 0-5 proficiencies combined) determined the minimum score any dice could land. Dice were adjusted, totalled, and the sum divided by 10 to find Success Rate, with scores of 1 or higher expected. This ended up being too much adjusting and adding; it produced the ideal values, but was too slow, and not very fun, especially to do repetitively. Worse, it didn't enable 'skill' to exceed 'raw talent'; you needed a high attribute for the guaranteed 'floor' that proficiency provided to matter, and I wanted those with training to potentially exceed those without training. If INT4 rolls 4d10, and Proficiency 3 meant you couldn't get below a 3 on each, for a 'floor' of 12-40, that still meant an average ~22, regardless of if you were trained or not. Specialization 'rolled' an additional 1d10, but set it aside as an automatic 10, thus improving skill checks beyond what was possible via random dice rolls, raising both floor and ceiling by 10, but not solving the issue of speed or reliability.
So now, Road and Ruin has a Roll + Proficiency system too, except you roll Xd10 (1-5), and Proficiency is two scores (0-5 each), combined, and multiplied by Specialization, with a cheat-sheet of the most common Proficiency results for your character. Adding the dice, and Proficiency, before finding successes, is still slow, but faster now, and due to the multiplication of scores and specialization, your character may even automatically succeed basic tasks, without the need for a roll at all. Such skillmonkeying requires utmost devotion though, and is far better suited to an NPC assistant; but, said NPC will still be built using the same mechanics as what goes into a character, making it easier to understand and appreciate their service.
More importantly: I like it. I understand that others might not; it doesn't have the hallmarks of DND's 'gamble' economy, getting high rolls and confetti when you hit a 20, but frankly, I'm building this game for me, not for people who are satisfied with DND. Even my nine attributes are inspired by World of Darkness, though slightly redefined to suit the needs of my setting instead, and the proficiency skill list is entirely my own, designed to offer as many cases of two overlapping skills as possible. Using any attribute in the skill check, based on what you aim to affect rather than what the proficiency is most known for (using DEX and herbalism to get plant clippings, or INT and herbalism to recall plant facts, for example) is a much more direct and diverse way to handle skill checks, rather than trying to remember whether Nature in DND is Intelligence or Wisdom, and why. Rolling multiple dice instead of 1d20 helps protect against fringe rolls, making the rare cases truly rare, as well as creating a market for spells, equipment, and abilities that affect your skill checks to have meaningful use, rather than simply adding a +1.
But I'm having fun doing all this. Road and Ruin began because I was upset with DND, and over the years, I've done a lot of work, first to intentionally distance it from DND, and only later to begin to paint it in my own colors, doing what I want, not in rebellion of what I don't. Anybody looking to design their own systems should be more preoccupied with how their mechanics feel; if people think that it's too similar to an existing product, one that you intentionally avoided? Then that's tough beans for them. They don't get to define how you have fun, and at the end of the day, that's what playing, and designing, a game is all about.
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RaR Musings #6: Specialists
I was playing Baldur's Gate 3, as a rogue. I dabble in rogues in DND, PF, and mmos, and they range from satisfyingly versatile to being boringly one-dimensional. DND's structure for sneak attacks is one of the few things I'm really impressed with though, because despite all characters being able to receive Advantage for attacking from stealth, flanking an outnumbered opponent, or hitting an incapacitated enemy, only rogues transform that mechanic into bonus Sneak Attack damage, and before it was patched out (for shame), the Arcane Trickster could inflict bonus sneak attack damage on spell attacks. In BG3, multiple magic items could grant advantage in different scenarios, which the rogue could use as a "magic wand of Backstab".
That kind of semi-detached crossclassing bait was a lot of what I wanted in Road and Ruin, and over the years, I developed a few abilities that either granted, or demanded, specialization to work, but it never really got to where I wanted it to be.
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'Specialists' in Road and Ruin are a necessity for a storytelling game; whether they're controlled by a player or brought in as NPC help, they represent broad spectrums of skill and knowledge that might be unreasonable for the player party to be assumed to have. The existence of specialists should lean storytelling in the direction of seeking them out, to get their insights, or pay for their services.
The simplest way to determine a specialist is specialization as a mechanic. As mentioned in Musings #5, specialization works as a x(2-5) multiplier for proficiencies when applied to a specific, niche topic. Specialization in horses might give Husbandry, Medicine, Binding, Command, or Ride multipliers, for example.
Secondarily, Disciplines act as specializations that are required. Crafts (Blacksmithing) or Research (Town History) are skills that require training; nobody is born knowing history, and nobody should be expected to accidentally replicate hundreds of years of advancements in crafting techniques. While an adventurer might pick up some basics in armor repair, they should in no way expect to be able to craft armor themselves without the associated discipline.
While specialization could extend to equipment, all it would be is simply being proficient in a device, I think, and preventing full control unless specialized, possibly incurring a breakage risk if someone isn't trained. Airplanes, for example, or other heavy machinery. An exception to this is combat:
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A fighter can specialize in both skill with a weapon, as well as fighting against particular weapon styles. I'd thought specialization might only apply in duelling, where both fighters roll a skill check and add their successes to the results of a d4/d8/d12 To Hit die, and that, turn by turn, the higher-skilled of the two would naturally gain an edge, but that ends up being too slow. Paired with the initiative changes from Musings #3, where fighters act each round simultaneously, and that health totals are so low in order to facilitate more lethal combat, and this blow-by-blow calculation ends up not feeling very good.
A simple solution would be to adopt DND's Advantage, and have specialization in a weapon allow you to roll one additional die per specialization level, and take the higher value. Since weapons only miss on a roll of a 1, and deal half damage or full damage otherwise, specialization effectively eliminates the risk of missing with a weapon. In the case of ranged weapons, like a bow or rifle, that use a kind of exploding-dice system of d4s, specialization would simply allow rerolls of a non-4 result, greatly increasing their accuracy, and thus, damage.
Specialization at fighting against a style could mean Taking the Edge, also mentioned in Musings #3. If you know your opponent, you'd be able to anticipate their moves much better, adding to their Preemptive/Presumptive speed.
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Beyond this, tool specialization effectively manifests as spellswords.
Squad Tactics can declare a Specialist unit type, who generates Tactic Points for use by other unit tactics. This lets multiple actors set up strategies like dominos, and if applying a specialization sets up more dominos, it results in greater conclusion power/success rating.
Celestial Trajectories, Martial Weaponry, and Fortress Guard all have customizable weapons, that specializing in would be a plus, but not a mechanically unique application. Instead, 'favoring' a specific weapon, not specializing in a weapon type, determines your attunement to the customizable weapon.
Mutations grant you specialization sometimes, such as darkvision, or telescopic vision granting advantages for Perception checks. Shapeshifters are able to grant themselves a variety of senses, and animal companions give you a second chance to detect things, if they're trained for that and have the senses, whereas sense-sharing would allow you to temporarily don a sense as a mutation.
Concealed Weaponry gives bonus damage and special effect application for rolling maximum on an attack roll against an unaware or distracted target, which would be made easier with stealth, but also with specialization in the weapon. It can also disguise said weapon, and has a special attack for a flurry with your specialized weapon.
Nimble Fingers' Maestro's Direction and Floral Flourish's Bud-bloom Brownies let you give commands to others, like conjured spirits, to do actions that you specialize in.
Cloaked in Shadow and Floral Flourish has material micromanagement, using mats like shadows and plants to grant specialization in a skill check.
So, after all this, I feel like I DO have some decent options for specialists, but as always, it depends what the specialist aims to achieve. Simply specializing in something doesn't have any kind of diverse spectrum of outcomes, so it'd have to be designed on an individual basis, but what I've got already is probably a good start.
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RaR Musings #5: Skill Checks, and Building a Goblin
This is more something I've been putting off for a long time; the tech is all there, I just hadn't done it.
It almost seems farcical to make a 'goblin' in Road and Ruin. To begin with, outside of humans, we don't use the standard medieval fantasy races. Anyone who's a fan of goblins can make one, using the available lore etc, but... well, we'll see.
To begin with, to define a goblin, we must define how stats work, using a human.
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Road and Ruin has 9 attributes; a power, precision, and resistance option for each of physical, mental, and spiritual categories. These attributes are measured on a scale of 0-5, with 2.5~ being the average for an adult human. Values above and below this exist in the form of Monstrous and Mini stats, as a multiplier or divisor of the basic stat output, and skill checks are made by rolling Xd10, where X is the attribute, adding the resulting die, and finding a "number of successes" based on the tens' place of the outcome. Proficiency are two relevant values, each 0-5, added together, multiplied by your specialization in the task, and added to the random values, before finding successes.
Essentially: to find stealth successes, you roll your Dexterity (2), as 2d10; we find a 7 and a 4, for 11. Our Sneak proficiency of 2 and Presence proficiency of 3, multiplied by our specialization in blending into crowds (x2), gives us a +10. Our final value of 21 gives us two successes. This system is a lot: but, it does what I want it to do.
A 'success' are levels of abstraction based on what a human might find challenging in life (as, you know, the only metric that everyone at the table can realistically agree on). Failing a check by 1 success has pitiable consequences; lobbing a paper at the trash and missing. Two successes are tasks that require practice, training, or a solid deal of luck, and failing by two successes has damaging consequences, such as the destruction of equipment, or loss of time. Three successes are tasks that require a degree of specialization to readily achieve, dedication to a particular brand of activity, and failing by three successes has extreme, permanent consequences.
Next, Size. Size is measured in roughly 0.5m spans; any human, sized 4.9-6.4ft, are considered Size 3, due to being less than 2m tall. Likewise, a child can be considered Size 2 (3.2-4.9ft), and an infant Size 1 (1.6-3.2ft). Weapons deal damage equal to their Size, and using weapons larger than your Size has appropriate disadvantages, while using equipment small enough hits a minimum damage based on your Strength instead, as you essentially are just punching things.
Physical ability can use this Size value: intelligent creatures are expected to have a Strength, Dexterity, and Endurance based on their Size, for the most part. (I have yet to come up with a metric to explain mental and social, but those aren't really rooted in physical parameters as it is.)
Humans' primary survival tactic is community. By sharing resources, distributing responsibilities, diversifying their specializations, caring for the wise elderly so knowledge transcends generations, distrusting outsiders, and spreading their reach absolutely everywhere, humans cemented themselves as a powerhouse race. Mechanically, humans as a statblock are free to choose... probably 4, proficiencies and either 1 specialization or another 2 proficiencies, with the expectation that they begin play with any equipment necessary for them to perform their job.
With their 2.5 averages, health value of 5 (a little on the squishy side, if gauging 2hp/Size), and six starting proficiencies, that gives humans a general value of 33.5. On a scale of 1-10 (anything above 5 is supernatural), I'd rate their "starts with any necessary equipment" to be a 2, so far as power goes, so that gives us a final 35.5.
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With all that out of the way: Barbozeen!
In the World of Ruin, there are various different intelligent species. Barbozeen are a race of humanoids, with skin muddy hues that range from vibrant greens and yellows actually more akin to snakeskin, and hair ranging from tawny browns to russet reds grown long and into tufts. Their age and maturity resemble humans, and they often have protruded snouts and large teeth.
They also have incredible genetic diversity, each tribe defined by myriad traits, such as size between 3ft-8ft, being covered with hair rather than just on their head, tails, hooves, horns, and incorporating elements of bison, hyenas, dogs and wolves, lions, and other terrestrial mammals.
It's using this race we can build a 'goblin'.
At Size 2, Gob'ozeens are on the smallest end of the 'zeen spectrum. This gives them an average an average Strength of 1, perhaps 1.5 on average. We want them to be nimble, perhaps more so than a human, so we can give them Dexterity of 3. It might be fun to make them scrappy, and give them an Endurance of 2; they are 'zeens, after all. Intelligence-wise, they have an average capacity of 2.5, with higher Wits than normal at 3, but a below-average Focus of 1.5. For Will, or the ability to assert themselves and the extent of their ambition, I'd mark that as slightly high at 2.5, and their Connection, or empathetic understanding of others, at 2.5 as well. Their Poise, however, should be a vulnerability at 1, for while they dream big, they do cower. Their health, at Size 2, is probably a 3, on the squishier side of 2hp/Size. They may be known for stealth, but for now, let's say that they don't have any proficiency or specialization advantages.
With a value of 22.5 to humans' 35.5, that makes goblins substantially weaker than humans, by almost 40%. As an random enemy encounter, this is fairly good math; a single human adventurer can expect to cleave down a goblin, but two goblins at the same time almost definitely defeat a single adventurer, and goblins would expect to attack in groups.
But what if we aren't reducing goblins to a mild enemy encounter? What if we want some greater measure of equality? What if we want to have goblins as a playable race, or otherwise be able to hold their own in human society?
Essentially, they need abilities that amount to 13 points of difference. Some features, such as excellent low-light vision, can be a biological advantage worth... 2 points. If goblins are known to have large families and many children, but not diversify their skill sets, goblins can expect to travel in groups of 2 or more, and apply strength of numbers (hence the combat example earlier); depending on their strength of numbers, this might mean anywhere from a +2 to +5 point advantage. The remaining 9 to 6 points should be spent on proficiencies, but potentially, specializations: it'd help the goblins enormously if they collectively excelled at something that humans could begrudgingly turn to them for expertise or guidance. Scouting, for example, or traps. Stealth, certainly, but potentially crafting, as a fun outlier. Their larger ears could also be represented as heightened senses.
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This is more rambling than I originally wanted, but this at least gives me a baseline I can pull for encounters. Like I said in Musings #1, I don't actually see much need to try to equate goblins with humans, balance-wise; what they bring to the story should be on the merits of the individual goblin or human, not by birthright. But, rules for balancing the two SHOULD exist, for tables where that kind of balance is important to the players.
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RaR Musings #4: Exploration, Hextiles, Schrodinger's Secret Door, and Searching
This has been a thorn in my side and a rock in my shoe for years. How best to have a game with randomly generated explorable spaces and no dungeon master, without making it a mess of tables?
In the first place, Road and Ruin uses a hextile grid for positioning. It's more organic than square tile, and is able to handle measuring distance a little cleaner. But it doesn't handle rectangular space, like hallway passages and rooms, nearly as well, for obvious reasons.
I messed around with tileset positioning for years, before finally arriving at a conclusion: Don't adhere to a grid at all. It's a narrative game, and the grid is just used to establish distance, so it's not actually that important that players sit on it. Instead, adopting concepts from Blades in the Dark, distances can be described as Touching, Near, Far, Very Far, and Too Far, Above/High Above, and Below/Far Below. Interiors can also be described as Corners, Halls, Doors, and Rooms. This frees players to be able to run up onto a table to do a leaping attack, or to escape far enough to break line of sight, or for spells to fill the confines of a space, without hyperfixating on what they can see on the board.
"You peek around the corner and see a Closed Door." "We travel to it and open it." "You see through the doorway a mid-sized room, with elevated ceiling, and a monolith by the wall on the other side." "How far away is it?" "Far." "I should be able to get over there in a few seconds, so keep the door open in case it does something and I need to run back."
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With the way that exploration is described established, the bigger issue becomes the actual content of the exploration.
Exploration is defined, largely, by discovery. Discovery, broken down, is mostly a conclusion of Possibilities, interacted with via Investigation, and Proven Realities. Sometimes discoveries can be made simply by arriving at a space; others, such in the case of secret doors and puzzles, require interaction.
Old DND had a rule for secret doors: You could look for one, but only if you had evidence to believe you knew where one was. This usually meant mapping the interior of the space, and noticing where there was a large enough gap to hide something, or learning which walls backed the enemy boss room, and searching for an escape route. Essentially, Investigating a Possibility, and Proving it. There was, however, room for the Investigation to fail, leaving the door undiscovered by the PCs, yet still very much real and known to the DM.
Since RAR doesn't have a DM to facilitate the existence of a door, we end up with a problem. Doors essentially have to be perpetually possible, and there needs to be a marker where the characters conclude their mistake and decide to move on. Schrodinger's secret door.
A method to handle this is in RAR's card system, which I'll probably define somewhere else later, but for now, we can solve this with dice.
Each time a secret is investigated, evidence must be submitted. Each piece of new evidence adds +1 to the success threshold of the search: first 20, then 19+, then 18+, and so on on a d20. Stronger evidence, on a scale of 1-5, adds 1-5 to the success threshold, thus increasing the likelihood the secret is uncovered, and encouraging hunting for stronger clues. However, each time the secret is investigated, 4 is added to the threshold of disbelief: first 4, then 8, then 12, and so on. Repeat attempts to search eventually, statistically, forces parties without sufficient evidence to discontinue searching, or, having wasted enough time and rolled low, to believe there is no door and move on. A secret door, thus, remains secret; neither proven, nor disproven, and the players have a kind of clock, measured in character patience, that discourages them from searching every single wall, multiple times, forever.
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Okay I lied I want to talk about RAR's card system
The cards, being tarot style, but not literally tarot cards, are designed to promote the use of common storytelling themes, as interpreted by members of the table. There'll be a guidebook for help and examples, but it's more important that the table uses what springs to mind, from personal experiences and pop culture, than to refer to the rules.
'Searching' uses the cards. By making a skill check associated with the kind of searching in question (books in a library, tracking animals, searching for clues, etc), the players draw a number of cards relative to the amount of success during a time span. By relating what's on each card as No Relation, Some Relation (1), or Strong Relation (2), players build progress toward the requisite number of successes to discover what they're looking for. For the secret door, weak/strong evidence is compiled as a result of the cards determining whether the clues they discovered relate to the supposed door, it's purpose, location, and history.
If the players aren't searching for anything specifically, their passive Investigation/Perception check nets them cards, that they then interpret as a set: if netting three successes, and drawing The Road, The Hunger, and The Gate, they might discover a pair of shoes, or a merchant's day pass to sell at the city market, or a key to a bandit hideout's secret entrance.
It's with this that I hope to subvert the look-up tables issue. Not that there won't be a table: just that you don't use dice to generate a number, and refer to the correlated item on the table. Instead, players can use the table as a reference point, and relate themes in their mind.
Let's use caves as an example:
There are many different kinds of caves. Halls take the form of fissures where rock has split apart, erosion paths where water has hewn a channel down the path of least resistance, volcanic vents formed by lava, tunnels burrowed by digging creatures, and even manmade structures, for anything from mining, to storage, to a place to live. Rooms can be places where water or lava once pooled and later receded, the interior of an animal's corpse, or the inside of an enormous crystalline geode. Each way, there is the Method in how it was created, and the Purpose it currently finds itself used for (living spaces, storage, a temple, a shortcut, a hiding place, and so on).
Drawing three random cards, we end up with A Twist, Gold, and The Forge. What comes to my mind, is that dwarves, digging too deep, stumbled upon an enormous deposit of gold. Turning it into a mine, the paths follow a half-organic, half-structured pattern, as gold is pulled from the vein, and tunnels are built to prop up the unsupported rock. With a large enough space, and the gold gone, the leftover minecarts and tracks are converted into a forging room, hauling in ore and hauling out the resulting slag and ingots. If dice determine there is more than one exit-entrance to this area, our next three cards are The Massive/The Mini, The Depths/The Heights, and The Maze. To me, that reads as an emergence hole for an enormous greatworm from deep below the earth, who burrowed a tunnel that twists and snakes through the lower levels in a seemingly random path, linear yet crossing upon itself, sometimes as vertical shafts potentially hundreds of feet deep, or tunnels miles long. As for Purpose, we draw The Grown/The Decay; perhaps these tunnels became a place to grow mushrooms and other underground plants in the nutrient-rich excrement of the passing greatworm.
You get the idea.
#road and ruin#indie ttrpg#ttrpg#ttrpg design#exploration#secret door#searching#generative storytelling
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