So me and my friends started a new D&D 5.1 campaign and it’s unusual for me to be running so much homebrew. I usually run modules. It’s strange to me because I feel so much more guilty when PCs die (so far two have died across three sessions) or when I try to find the notebook where the special treasures are or when I’ve missed a prep area and have to fall back to tier three truths much more often than when using modules.
I also did not make the campaign deliberately extra deadly “to teach them a lesson to be careful what they wish for” after they wanted to go back to D&D from Fate but I’m really worried that they will believe I did.
Overall I’m having a lot of fun and loving the campaign because the players have been bringing their A-game. I’m so impressed by them and grateful for them.
I created my homebrew world where instead of “elves”, “dwarves”, and “hobbits” we have Skajra, Daab, and Skirm (pronounced more like “skeerm” than firm or squirm) and so on. And 1960s tech like jeans and guns. Inspired by new wave SF like Caves of Qud and James Tiptree. It’s called Gåvoplaneten which is a bit hard to translate… “Gift-related planet”, “gifted planet”, “the planet is a gift” or something like that.
I practice radical transparency when DMing (even when specific instances of it are really really annoying to players who just wanna immerse I think the overall policy has huge benefits for buy-in and stakes) so I’ve truthfully said things like:
I mean things generally fall into:
…and I’ve been trying to brutally honest about what is what. Maybe that is an overcorrection but I came up in the “cult of GM secrecy” era of 90s gaming and I really belatedly ended up resenting and regretting that playstyle.
It’s actually the year 613 already, diegetically, because our first three sessions have spanned three hundred and seventy-nine days.
We have a ton of houserules in place old and new. We use spell points as per the DMG option, and when it comes to hitpoints, hit dice, and exhaustion, a short rest is 10 minutes while a long rest is a full week, and it takes a year to level up (which is going to become two years later). And we use the “roll high or low, not middle” from Suldokar’s Wake. The players really really hate that rule so far!
As for choosing 5.1 over 5.2, that’s not as slag on 5.2, it’s just that we’re all still on old books. I did give them the option to do PCs that are either…
but that we’re using exhaustion and stuff as per our pre-existing, already heavily houseruled 5.1 setup.
So far no-one took me up on that and all showed up with 5.1 chars and I appreciate that since I don’t have the 5.2 books available yet. We’re not saying 5.1 is better or anything, it’s not edition warring, it’s just what we’re doing practically.
In the past, I’ve been feeling kind of guilty for using “the quest queue” which is short is you prep a list of hooks and rumors and jobs and missions from various dungeons and if you’ve placed the dungeon already, that’s great, if you haven’t, there’s a procedural random way to place where it is.
Guilty because it felt a little bit two “tier two” and random.
But now having tried the opposite—i.e. taking a map and dotting it with X’s and writing down what module is at what X—the Quest Queue is super vindicated to a much greater extent than I would’ve ever expected.
“Go east or go west” isn’t meaningful player agency if they don’t have any rumors or info about the locations.
Now, I’m not saying necessarily that the random placement part of the Quest Queue is the good part. Doing both the actual placement and the rumor list is possible and the rumor list is the hard part and just noting down “it’s in G3” doesn’t seem like it’d be that much harder.
All I’m saying is that the players were frustrated because all those X’s on the map were basically equivalent to them.
I don’t know because there are so many video games like The Legend of Zelda or Sentinels of the Starry Skies that do work like what I presented yesterday; a map to explore and you don’t know what’s there until you go there. Did I accidentally create something better than my favorite video games when I made that lazy guilty prep shortcut years ago? I dunno.
Anyway where do I go from here? I have this map of 30 X’s and I’ll try to make some rumor tables I guess!
Atomic Robo has a great skill list too, yes. Short, in my sweetspot of two through seven skills. I like them a lot better than the approaches. Apocalypse World also has a good list. Hot sharp hard weird. And I liked Air Fire Earth Water too. Calling it modes or abilities or capabilities or possibilites or trainings or nature or elements is semiotics since they all work just like skills. All of these that I like have skills based on what you do, not how you approach it.
Street Fighter II on the Genesis (Mega Drive) three button controller was approach based. You could fight hard or fast or medium. What you actually did (punches vs kicks) you had to toggle with the start button. To me that is completely backwards and a constant uphill struggle. Does it have advantages? Yes. Is it possible or even somewhat easy to get around the drawbacks? Also yes. But are the advantages worth the drawbacks? For me no.
When using approaches you’re saying everyone is equally good at everything. C-3PO can make the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs. You’re saying that Fate thanks to the aspects and invocations and boosts already provide enough granularity that you don’t need skills on top of it. Everyone is doing everything at +0. Skill-less Fate. A completely workable idea if you want to simplify. You removed something that had some value but you gained simplicity. Fair enough.
Then adding approaches back on top recomplicates the game and brings it back to what’s on the symbolic layer exactly as complicated as skills were, no, more complicated even if there’s even a non-zero amount of negotiation needed. (Not saying there necessarily is that bad of a problem there but even a tiny grain of sand is perceivable.) So you lost something that had some value (differentiated character capability) but you gained nothing in simplicity. And what you gained instead in terms of narrativium is a positive, yes, it is cool to say you’re good you’re doing things flashily or cleverly, but, it’s also a negative in how it limits and shapes what characters do. Do I really want one character to be better at fighting or better at lore than another? Maybe not. Do I really want one character better at being flashy, better at being careful than another? Definitively not.
Bringing it back to the video game metaphor: Mario attempts to blast fire when you press B and attempts to jump when you press A. Makes sense. The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman basics: one key for each function. Approach Mario goes wild when you press B or goes careful when you press A. But what he actually does is random. A fun QWOP-py, Default Dan style experimental game? Absolutely yes. Conveying a feeling of character identification where the rules are your interface to being in the game world? Not nearly as well as the basic one key per function version.
Fate has a lot of “meta”-based rules (“once per session you can…”, “at the end of each scene you…”, “discuss the compel or concession with the table…”) and to be fair to approaches, they fit perfectly in with these. They afford author stance. Reminds you that this character likes to primarily be careful, this other character likes to primarily be flashy. This stance is a painpoint between me and Fate. I like rules that afford me not being in the writer’s room in change of one character but rules that make the interface, the “gloves”, between me and the character be super thin. To let me dream about the game world and spell the birch leaves and the torch smoke.
Now, most good story games, to be fair to them, manage a miracle. They are set up as “you are in the writer’s room not in a sim” but take step after step after step to increase bleed, to let me fully feel with the character in spite of the fact that I am writing the character. That is awesome and I love those games for it. I love playing those games and I admire those games for pulling off that feat. They do work and they’re great. I’ve cried over what happens in Microscope or Fiasco. I’ve felt myself being there fully and identifying with the character.
But adventure games live there. They don’t need bleed because they start out already fully submerged. You’re walking up those stairs to the Lost City pyramid watching for traps every step of the way. You’re counting your torches. You’re there.
The Fate RPG was created to make interesting outcomes even with an improvised situation without needing to prep first whereas the whole idea of blorb is to have prep.
Ergo, when trying to use the Fate rules together with a blorbier prep, something’s got to give. It’s not inherently a good fit. And that can mean giving up on blorb principles and/or house-ruling Fate. Blorb is totally my jam so I tried to go for the latter.
It’s because I want faster, less lethal, still interesting combats. The main appeal was lower lethality. Characters can still die but Fate has a reputation for being way less lethal.
The whole aspects/boost/invocation system stayed, as did stress boxes and consequences.
The number one have-to change from Fate to make it work with the blorb mindset is no more character-relative difficulties. Fate has a lot of “an enemy of this type has a skill two higher than the highest PC skill”. Same goes for lockpicks or all kinds of challenges. This has to change in order to play a blorby game. Bonus: it also solves the flagging dilemma.
Now, Fate zealots calm your calmables, because I’m not saying every Fate game ever has to change this. Fate doesn’t have the chasm-width problem. There is a defined chasm width. Unfortunately, by default, it’s nebulously defined relative to the PCs. That’s not what we’re gonna do in blorb. Again, if you’re playing unblorby Fate, you don’t need to change this, but this is part of what makes it blorb.
Opposition that is world-relative, not character-relative. While prepping, feel free to look at what’s a typical “highest PC skill” for the specific Fate rule set (made easier since most of them use “standard array”) and work out a reskinnable bestiary scaled by dungeon level, not by the current party’s capabilities. And work out a framework for setting difficulties. I like 0 for easy, and then 2 for every thing that makes the situation hard.
Fate, by design, has many rules that are “author stance”, more directed to players above the table than to characters inside the game world. Concessions and compels require meta considerations and table talk, and there are many many abilities that are “once per scene”, “once per session”, “once per scenario”.
This isn’t inherently incompatible with blorb but it is the opposite of my jam and preference for other reasons. I’ve spend years tailoring my DM style to be all IC stance, to put you in the mindset of your character. You’re counting torches when your character would count torches.
Author stance rules like what default Fate has aren’t all bad; one of the many advantages they have is to ameliorate some of the disadvantages of improvised play. Your mindset get shifted from a “how do I the pure new treasure seeker overcome this particular porte-monstre-trésor” to a “how do we the writer’s room create a wild and good story” which is a better more fit for an improvised story creation tool than for the fantasy Vietnam of yore.
But with a blorby prep, we can afford to lean into the IC stance mindset all the time and then all these author stance rules like “this clears after the session” stuff are a mismatch, are something that yanks us out from our right to dream.
So far we changed “scene” to “exploration turn”. Your mind consequences, once they’re set to heal, clear after the next exploration turn. Ten diegetic minutes. We haven’t changed “session” based rules yet but that’s probably coming sooner rather than later.
Our first session we didn’t have any compels or concessions yet, both of whom are also challenging for the more IC stance play we prefer but the “golden rule” helps with both. Decide what your character wants to happen and that might be a concession, or buying off a compel, or giving into a compel, or refusing a concession or a compel with the “bogus” rule.
Also we didn’t even get through character creation before adding in a real inventory list: You can carry ten things (small, medium, big), you can’t have more big things than small things, one medium thing can be a pouch that can carry 250 tiny things. You can add two extra slots for each + of strength you have (we had str, dex, con, int, wis, cha for our skill list).
We don’t like just “roll adventuring gear” or “roll a usage die”. We tried. We tried to just have the stuff mentioned by aspects be enough. But. Enh. Don’t fight human nature and our nature is to have an inventory like Threepwood intended.
Wholly off-topic to the whole issue of blorbiness because really there’s no blorbiness obstacle but I the DM just don’t like popcorn initiative. We use swashbuckling initiative. We got rid of the light, first strike stuff but stuck to group by group.
I’ve tried to run Fate many times with many groups and it never ever worked for me until now. It might’ve seem reckless to try a super modded blorbified Fate when I couldn’t even make the vanilla version work but a couple of other insights made all the difference, and only one of them is tangentially related to blorbiness.
Do not try to force a bunch of advantage-creating, invocation, or compelling into the game. Run a normal RPG. If all you do is overcome, attack, defend, don’t worry, just keep playing. You’re still good. Even if you go long stretches without any rolls at all, just old-school-primer-ing your way through the muck, you’re still good.
“The game only ‘sings’ when everyone’s tagging and being compelled and…” No. Hear me out. Trust in letting the diegesis drive and remember that aspects are just a confusing word for facts and conversely all facts are aspects. Come up with what your characters want to do in the game and if what they wanna do leads to create-an-advantage, that’s when you roll for create an advantage. And it’ll happen often enough. It’ll start happening all the time actually. You don’t need to force it.
Now, the one caveat there is to let them roll for things that in my normal game I’d just let them have for free. In my old D&D house rule set, skills like “investigate” or “persuade” are totally banished. Just tell me where in the room you look, or say to me what your character says to the NPC. But here I do let them roll because that can give them free invokes, or if they fail, we get the free invokes. The rolling isn’t an obstacle, it’s just something that affect the probabilities of future rolls.
One of the ways I was frustrated with Fate before was that I was like “oh no the Fate point econ has rusted and is dried up and people aren’t getting compelled enough and therefore they can’t do anything and all those aspects are just useless”. I wish someone would’ve told me this:
The econ of the game is free invocations and boosts. That will ebb and tide. You don’t even need to create an advantage for it (even though it’s the best way). Even just a good defense can create a boost if you succeed with style.
Fate points are just gravy. They can bring in any aspect, not just the ones you have racked up invocations on, so they really are great, but they aren’t the bread and butter. They are the cloudberry jam.
I used square boxes for the party’s free invocations, circles for the bad guys’ free invocations, and glass stones (smaller than our Fate points) for boosts.
The module we were playing (it’s called The Crypt of Crimson Ice. Players, do not read, because you still have a few rooms left to discover when we left off) was so fun and awesome that I believe the session would’ve been good even with a bad rule set. Now, I don’t think it was a bad rule set. I found boosts especially fun. I loved the fighting system. And no, I didn’t bring all my over-engineered ranks and mêlée groups and lingering injury tables over. Except for swashbuckling initiative instead of popcorn, we used vanilla Fate. It was fun and good. But in between the fights, I wasn’t trying to “force Fate-iness”. Normal exploration, interacting with weird magical traps and contraptions, classing dungeon crawling fun. This especially was good for us who have failed at Fate before and want to get used to the rule set in a less stressful, less having-to-be-creative setting. And an unforced at the Fate-iness was, it did show up all the time.
Players: “We clog those magical gutters”
Normal D&D: “You do that!”
Fate: “Okay, roll strength (to see how many free invokes that’ll give you)”
It’s not a failable task but you still get more rewarded for doing it well. That sounds awful and overly symbolic-layer (at the expense of diegesis) the way I write about it. Not sure if what you get in return in worth the extra roll, but I want to accurately report how we were playing and that we did use the system outside of fights too.
We used the Crashing Beasts & Crumbling Halls rules which are more familiar to D&D with the str/dex/con/int/wis/cha skill list and example weapon stunts and familiar spellcasting schools and a familiar game world. I’ve tried to start Fate games in the past but some players get stuck at writing aspects. (Maybe I should have tried pregens? It’s a bootstrapping problem, you can’t build a Magic deck before you have tried playing Magic. But the D&D trappings here gave us plenty to build on.) Here everyone was stoked to play and put up with rules that we thought were gonna be bad (and some of them turned out to not be so bad after trying and we’re gonna keep those).
The magic system in Crashing Beasts & Crumbling Halls had a problem and that problem was called Ghoul’s Touch. If you choose necromancy as a stunt you get two spells, and this one spell (so, half of the stunt cost basically) is more powerful than any martial stunt. You get +2 not only weapon:2 but actual +2 to hit always, and, you attack against int (even the tanky monsters in the game have high con and wis, not int) and you still deal damage to the physical spell track. It’s like the value of four stunts (+2 to hit, +2 damage, switch what you attack with, switch what they defend with) at the cost of half a stunt. We haven’t looked at the entire spell list, this was just one thing that came up. Maybe it’s time to dust off Wonder & Wickedness (which has utility spells + reflavorable generic blasting akin to Feng Shui and Unknown Armies).
Okay this is gonna be heresy to my OSR and PbtA peeps but hear me out.
I think there are two kinds of game systems that work for my group.
One is the rules heavy “buildy” games with lots of character options and crunch to choose from. You’re building your character out of Lego pieces, out of big ugly rock pieces even, but you have plenty of pieces to choose from. Like 5e with its dozens and dozens of subclasses and spells.
The other is the more story gamey system that’s super rules light where the little crunch that’s there generates all kinds of characters. We’ve had fun with Microscope and Fiasco and Hillfolk and DitV and Cthulhu Dark, and I would imagine that games like Wushu and Fate would fit in here too. Games where a simple core system evoke millions of character options, more clay than Lego.
In between these two extremes is a zone of suck where there are distinct prefabricated characters but they are too rigid and too few and have too few options and not enough “buildiness”. The characters feel too samey.
But outside of the Zone of Suck, both kinds of games are okay and good.
This entire essay is me just guessing how my players feel. Why don’t I just ask them? I’m gonna, that’s why I’m writing this so I can send it to them.
I met my group playing Magic and board games, they’re gonna want a more system mastery type kind of game. Whereas me myself I have a more minimalist streak, I’m gonna be into something like Knave or World of Dungeons or Cthulhu Dark. Pick a profession, bring your own imagination. Open ended and flexible.
How you’re rewarded for giving away the most coins, it’s completely counter-intuitive there’s a rewards/conveyance mismatch that fights affordance. And the less coins you have the better your chance at winning is; so the best tactic is often to pay to dismiss interruptions instead of weaving them in, which would’ve lead to a better story.
Two similar games which rewards giving in. In Hillfolk, giving in gives you a good token, in Svart av kval, vit av lust prevailing gives you a bad token. I’m not sure which of these two is the right approach; I’m leaning that it’s Svart av kval, vit av lust, because Hillfolk tends to be a li’l unintuitive at first.
How you’re so strongly rewarded for having only one type of outcome as opposed to a mix of outcomes.
I know these story games weren’t designed to be gamery games and I love them regardless.
For how it downplays Fudge’s USP where you can be a great detective or make a legendary shot and you don’t have get all “+2 Mace” in your roleplaying. The Fate ladder is sort of vestigially attached but in a way that’s almost more cumbersome than awesome. I miss how in Fudge you could really play it “numberless”. I’d want to do that but with the awesome additions of Fate Condendensed.
Here is my aspect advice for Fate.
For the character aspects on a player character’s sheet, sure, stick to the advice from your typical Fate book. That’s fine for those aspects.
Aspects added in play are a little more restricted since aspects are true.
Is the a consequence on a character (whether it’s a player character or an enemy)? Then please don’t bypass the stress tracks and defense roll system. No fair trying to put “decapitated” on that big bad evil guy with create an advantage. And same goes for the GM; if that gnarly hardwood floor in the overfull inn wants to inflict a “poor night’s sleep” character consequence, give the players a chance to defend against that.
For aspects on locations or on situations, stick to things that you (the table) can live with as true. Some things (like “The city is completely destroyed”) that might be a stretch for a single create-an-advantage roll may be more appropriate as outcomes of challenges or contests. And some might not be appropiate at all and people can call bogus. Don’t overdo these restrictions because part of the tone that this game creates is wild things happening.
All roleplaying games have aspects because all roleplaying games have facts about the situations, locations, and characters. In Fate, there’s not more aspects, there’s just more accounting of those aspects because you might have free invokes on some of them, or might gain or lose fate points through others. When that goblin is using your “sand in eyes” aspect for a +2 defense against your attacks, you get fate points. The point of this all this accounting is to make the diegesis have an impact on the symbolic layer of the mechanics.
Most good games have some way of making a toppled-over bookcase help you. In other games, that bookcase might grant you “advantage” or “cover” or impose “difficult terrain” to your foes. In Fate, there’s a limit to how much it can help you (the invoke budget, made up of free invokes and fate points).
That limit is there for a kinda weaksauce historical reason, I feel—my theory is this: In a classic advantage/disadvantage game like GURPS, you pick a disadvantage like “fear of heights” and you get an upfront reward (ten character points) when selecting it. That’s not all bad, and maybe the pros of that upfront approach outweigh the fiddliness of all the on-the-fly accounting work in Fate, but some of the disadvantages include having to look that phobia up in a huge book (that’s from B150), and then there might be lots of heights in the adventure making the phobia a really huge deal, or there might be none, making it free points. The GURPS approach also exacerbates the chasm width problem. Fate scales the rewards and costs by how much the advantage or disadvantage is actually used, which also solves the lookup issue. Sounds awesome? But modern indies have shown that not everything needs to be accounted for in order to be fun at the table, so while it’s an interesting solution to “how do we cost advantages and disadvantages fairly” problem, that problem is maybe not really a problem we need to care that much about.
But that limit, weaksauce reason or not, also promote variety in play. That bookcase is only gonna be interesting for so long. (Each action you can spend no more than one Fate point in it, but you can use as many free invokes on it that you want as long as you have them.) If you want other advantages in the situations, you need to get then elsewhere, by swinging from chandeliers or brandishing legendary weapons or what have you. If you think this reeks of narrativium rather than physics, you’re right, but also you can spend more rolls to rack up more free invokes on that one toppled bookcase if you really want. The aspect accounting doesn’t limit what you can do, but it makes it so that what you do impacts the action econ of the game, both time (taking turns off to create more advantages with that same bookcase) and fate (through the points). Hitpoints in D&D have a narrativium component too, and they still work great in that game.
Fate has a rule “Aspects are true”. But vice versa also works: all canonically true things are aspects. “Wait, doesn’t this break the action economy of the game, millions of things are true about every scene, don’t I need to roll to create them” hold on and don’t worry. With “Create an Advantage”, you never just create the aspect, you don’t spend the action just to create the aspect; you spend the action to get free invokes on the aspect whether that as aspect is new (toppling over a book case to create Toppled Bookcase) or it’s something that was always a true part of the scene.
The chasm width problem in TRPG design is named after how in GURPS, the rule for how wide chasms the player characters can leap over is min(((2×([yards ran before the jump]+(HT+DX)/4+[Extra Basic Speed]+[Extra Basic Move]))-3), (2×(2×((HT+DX)/4+[Extra Basic Speed]+[Extra Basic Move])-3))) feet, a kind of cumbersome formula derived from point spend decisions the player made at build time, but the rule for how wide chasms the GM can introduce into adventure location is… there is no rule.
I’ve called games with this problem half games in the past.
That’s not a slag on GURPS; many games have the chasm problem. Not all do.
It’s not just about the chasms. It’s about everything. Lock difficulties, enemy strengths and amounts, everything. It’s related to the flagging problem.
I came up the blorb principles as one generic solution for the chasm problem that fits many older games and also solves many other things. It’s not the only way, and it also comes with its own set of drawbacks and problems, but it does work.
In Fate I’d like to come up with a more deterministic approach to deciding between stress boxes or consequence aspects so that the engine or GM could do it automatically, because it’s such an extradiegetic decision: “do I want to get stressed out or should I get slashed instead?” maybe happens sometimes but Fate makes you make that decision all the time and I’m not into it.
From the gamist perspective deciding between consequences (which has a coarser granularity, but take longer to heal) and stress (which is limited and fine grained, but clear up after the fight) is an interesting and meaningful decision, and that’s the problem, since it doesn’t tie into the diegesis.
Fate players, have you found a heuristic like “if such-and-such is true, take a consequence, otherwise take stress”?
This is why I was interested in Silhouette; it assigns consequences deterministically along this line:
(stamina × consequence threshold factor + armor) / weapon DM = shifts needed
So for example if I’ve got Stamina 25 (I wish…) and you’re coming at me with a knife, I get a moderate consequence if you get two shifts, or a severe consequence if you get four shifts, or am taken out if you get seven. And if I put on a chainmail armor, those thresholds are instead four, five, and eight.
Silhouette doesn’t have stress boxes; attacks that hit are either nicks and scratches or they have consequences.
It uses the word “mos” for what we call shifts and I’m assuming a DM 8 knife here. With DM 9 (as that knife would have for a stronger character), the thresholds are three, five and eight against my chainmail—only the chances of a moderate consequence increased. Or without the chainmail it’s two, three and six. The chances for a moderate consequence stayed the same while the chances for something more serious happening increased.
This is great! There are plenty of underlying “knobs” in order to make a gamist equipment list and character build option since DM and stamina are based off character traits, but it boils down to one roll trying to make shifts, and the interface is diegetic.
Silhouette also has a “called shots” feature, described under “aiming”, but it’s a li’l broken. If you say you’re going for the head for example, even if my chainmail does have a hood, the new shift thresholds become three, four and five (since my “head stamina” is effectively halved) but your skill decreases by three. With Fate’s 4dF system where increasing difficulty exactly corresponds to decreasing skill, that’d effectively mean that the new shift thresholds would effectively be six, seven and eight, but Silhouette’s dice pool system doesn’t have that property; skill four vs eight is 1.5% whereas skill 1 vs 5 is 16.7%, making going for the head a really good idea in this particular matchup if you’re going for a “taken out” result.
So while the interface itself is clean and simple (make a roll, hope for many shifts) and diegetic “I made a great attack” “OK, my arm is broken” we end up with a problem similar to GURPS—in GURPS, due to it’s math issues, it’s sometimes right to go for a “telegraphic attack” and sometimes right to go for a “deceptive attack”, and some players use a chart in front of them to try to figure out which to use. I guess similarly in Silhouette you’d want to know when you must go for a called location and when not. Fate doesn’t have that problem since there’s only one dimension to its rolls.
I also think that the formula is not exactly simple.
I presented it as “(stamina × consequence threshold factor + armor) / weapon DM” earlier because that’s the boiled-down way to go from the input I care about (how good your attack roll is) to the output I care about (what happens diegetically; wounds are both diegetical and mechanical consequences, in both Fate and Silhouette). But that’s not how the game presents it. Instead, you take the shifts generated, multiply it by the DM, and then compare that to a “wound threshold” derived from stamina and armor. This is good since it’s easier to understand but it sucks because you have to do a big multiplication for every hit and also because you have to spend time doing stuff in the symbolic realm of numbers and sheets when my goal here is to be in the diegesis, then do a roll, then go back to the diegesis, quickly and easily. I came up with the idea to have a place in my GM’s protocol where I could fill these thresholds in during play. So the first time you’re coming at my dumb li’l chainmailed head with a dagger I’m filling in those shift thresholds by dividing the dagger’s DM, and then I can keep referring to that for every dagger swing against a defender with similar stats, and then later if your friend pulls a gun I can figure-and-fill those numbers.
But Fate Condensed has an optional system that’s a lot more direct on page 58:
A weapon value adds to the shift value of a successful hit. If you have Weapon:2, it means that any hit inflicts 2 more shifts than normal.[…]
An armor value reduces the shifts of a successful hit. So, Armor:2 makes any hit worth 2 less than usual. If you hit but the target’s Armor reduces the attack’s shifts to 0 or below, you get a boost to use on your target but don’t do any harm.
No division or multiplication, just good clean fun.
Either way, the question of whether to delay some of the consequences with a “stress box” system is almost orthogonal. Both system use shifts, and the specific shift numbers are modified by weapons and armor. It’s only after that that there’s a choice where one system immediately gives a specific, deterministic outcome mappable to an amount of shifts, whereas the other system puts a “stress box” system in between.
Here’s where I’m at currently; I’m intrigued by Fate’s coarser math and hopeful that you can still make an interesting equipment list especially if weapons have other traits like speed, inflicting specific aspects, parry, weight, handedness, price etc, but I’m also attracted to the immediacy of not having the stress boxes.
Silhouette has more consequence slots (the default for an average person is five moderate consequences [“flesh wounds”] and then severe consequences [“deep wounds”] counts as two) which helps the pacing a bit there, but I do like the way stress boxes wear me out and gradually increase my risk of losing, without actually harming me permanently. Although that makes them difficult to communicate diegetically. I like the characters to know they’re closer to the edge.
Hence my original conundrum; if there could be a deterministic way to select between stress or consequences, that could be the best of both worlds. For an example, if you’re on Fate Condensed’s default of three stress boxes, one mild consequence (absorbs two shifts), one moderate (absorbs four), and one severe (absorbs six), and you’ve still got all that unchecked, and there’s five shifts incoming. Does that mean all stress boxes and a mild consequence, or does it mean a moderate consequence and one stress box, or just a severe consequence? That would depend on your estimation of how rare that result was, i.e. how likely you are to get hit again. Did they get that one-in-a-million thermal exhaust shot by stacking a ton of invokes? Or is this just a normal Friday night firefight for them? It’s a gamist choice that’s utterly disconnected from the diegesis, which is a huge turnoff for me; I love my gamist choices but I want them to be more evocative and immediately tied into the game world or “the fiction” as indie designers like to call it (or “the cloud” if they are hippies).
I like how the stress boxes are a buffer between you and a more serious result but I want them to be used up “automatically” with no thought.
The main advantage of Fate Condensed’s “three 1-boxes” as opposed to Core’s “one 1-box and one 2-box” is that it’s less confusing for players but if the engine or GM is handling this then it’s much better to use the Core system. Core also has a rule that you can only fill one stress box per hit, along with any number of consequences.
That leads to a way easier and better heuristic: I’ll try to not underfill any boxes, and as long as I’m not doing that, taking stress is better than taking consequences, and I need to follow the “only one stress box per hit” rule, which means:
Again, not exactly optimal since, again, mild + moderate is often better than severe, especially if you’re gonna run away (or win) right after that.
From Fate’s default system, I like how the effective shift thresholds change during the game and how options quickly start to narrow. The optional weapons/armor system from Fate Condensed move the consequence thresholds together. Upgrading your knife to a sword moves all the boxes one step.
From Silhouette’s default system (which is way too deadly by default), I like how the three consequence thresholds move independently from each other as DM, armor, or stamina ratings change.
Fate is so much less deadly (which is good); eight shifts take someone out in Silhouette but in Fate it’s a severe consequence and stress. But once you’ve taken a severe consequence and all your stress, eight shifts become lethal. The thresholds are moving independently based on how much stress you’ve taken; fresh it’s six, eight and sixteen. Put a chainmail:2 on and it’s eight, ten and eighteen.
When I first saw gazetters I was frustrated as all heck with them. They to me seemed like unplayable nonsense. “In this part of Eberron the hobbits ride dinosaurs” gee thanks! Where is the game! That’s how I felt.
I was overwhelmed. I didn’t wanna learn a bunch of stuff before we could even get going. That’s why I loved wainscot settings like Feng Shui or World of Darkness; you could just start playing because it was basically a world similar to ours. And that’s one of the reasons we got into Magic, because you learn the setting card by card, no need to study beforehand.
And then when the OSR came around with it’s table-driven city books and its location-specific bottom-up campaign books like the Trilemma Adventures compendium, I was in heaven!
But…
…and now you’re getting hot-off-the-presses insight here because this is something I’ve only recently been realizing.
We’ve been playing the aforementioned Trilemma Adventures and it has a li’l history section in the back with the very most super important background info also summarized in the front. Works great. But…
There were no info about what types of being lived there, so I was like “guys, roll up humans” only for us to then later run into a bunch of all kinds of fun creatures like gnomes, automatons, orcs, half-demons, martoi wraiths etc that are playable. We’re used to that, our (maybe a bit videogamey) word for it is “unlocked”, as in “OK from now on you can play an automaton! Use the ‘warforged’ stats for it!”. That’s fine but the initial offerings were a bit too limited because of this setup
Stuff outright contradicts itself! Like, I needed a calendar so I generated one with some online app and ended up with a ten month calendar but then in some of the adventures it turns that nope, the winter is three months out of twelve. Nothing that can’t be hacked—now it’s canon that our Tristhmus has ten months so that adventure site’s dates now is hacked to be three months out of ten. A minor issue, don’t worry—but it goes to show that a good index or a good way to find info can be golden!
I still overall prefer the bottom-up, location-first approach but I’m coming around to how gazetteers can be great!
I love hooks.
Modules with prewritten hooks are incredibly useful for me when DMing a larger sandbox campaign. The more we’ve played, the more that’s become evident.
Hooks help me as a DM when I’m placing the module.
Hooks help the players make informed decisions about which locations they want to visit.
It’s true that I can read the module and come up with my own hooks. The inverse of that is that pre-written, provided hooks help me place the module before scouring it line-by-line. Hooks is the perfect name since it helps me hook the module right in place in a bigger world. Rumors about the location can show up far and wide, making it an impactful place and not just a one-hex silo.
It saves me an incredible amount of work to just paste hooks onto the job board or the rumor table. Hooks are one of the key reasons to use a module instead of just throwing out some geomorphs and random tables.
They also allow me to use modules of all kinds of sizes. A three room li’l lair has the same connecting interface as a ginormous gigadungeon. I can also add homebrew with the same interface.
When I hack games I’ve got such a hangup to approximately match up with the same end results as the rule I’m hacking, just with a different interface. Like how I immediately wanted to hack the underclock to add up to 20 (just like a doomsday clock gets closer to midnight) rather than subtract. Same way I count monster HP up from zero to their death threshold. That doesn’t change any outcomes, just how we do it.
That hangup is sometimes to the detriment of the game because sometimes the original mechanics that I’m trying to match were just pulled out of a hat. Like, with Ghosts of Saltmarsh I combined the navigation check, hazard check, and encounter check into one die roll with roughly the same probabilities as the original book. That was a great hack in how much the fun-to-bookkeeping ratio increased for our sea voyages in our boatmode campaign, but it failed to take into account that a 1-in-20 chance of a hazard was way too low! Yes, some of the hazards are super intense with a burning ship in a storm but some of the other stuff on that table is weaksauce like “there’s a mild disagreement onboard”. Especially since it replaces a weather table. I was eager to change the rule but since I didn’t wanna tamper with the outcomes, I missed a chance to actually improve them, I just improved the interface to them.
An even worse example is the Golden Voyages weather state machine. I spend so much more work on that; the original rule had an awful interface; a chart buried in one booklet set up as a patch on a chart buried in the 2e DMG. I combined the two charts into one state machine but what I ended up with was a disaster because it exactly matched the same outcomes as those original rules and what I didn’t know was that those original rules were awful—the weather kept quickly ratcheting towards never-ending hurricanes!
The “underclock” system by Goblin Punch is pretty interesting!
You roll an exploding d6 and subtract it from 20 and something happens when you hit zero (and right away I wanna change it to you add up until you reach twenty. I am that much worse at subtraction than addition).
Exploring a new room (including long hallways).
Moving through 3 already-explored rooms.
Lingering or searches.
Making noise (e.g. kicking down a door).
For me, exploring new rooms and lingering & searches already trigger turns ticking up. (And you can move and search in one turn.)
And making noise doesn’t interact with times or the turn system, but either triggers an encounter check right away, an additional one outside of the turn system. Or it makes the next check be two-dice-use-the-higher.
But “per three already-explored rooms”, that’s what caused me to really pay attention here! In 5e RAW you can move incredibly quickly through the dungeon, so fast that it’s almost dumb. You move 30 feet per round which is a normal walking speed, less than six km/h, but compared to the creepy crawling of Moldvay’s exploration speed it’s lightning. It’s a hundred times faster! But that’s how we’ve been doing it; exploring new areas Moldvay crawling, re-treading already-explored areas 5e speedwalking a hundred times faster. So things like new exits out or portals throughout the dungeons haven’t been particularly appreciated since we already have pretty much fast travel. “OK, we go back to the room with the bull statue” and that’s just a single exploration turn as long as it’s within 2000′.
Reading this makes me remember that I can have other things trigger encounter checks, not just “three turns passed”.
Goblin Punch shows the math how one d6 roll on the underclock is roughly equivalent to one d6 encounter check. (EV is approx six rolls for both.) So it’s a li’l wild that he’s checking every room—no wonder he’s getting more encounters this way!
Some dungeons are stocked and then the random encounters are just extra, other dungeons instruct us to roll every room in addition to the time-based random encounters. Either works well.
So for me the one-in-eighteen per turn is pretty good since that’s supposed to be extra, an extra risk. OK, no, honestly, it’s a li’l low. Sometimes nothing happens because those ones never get rolled and we’re bored.
My takeaway here is that the least I can do is have three explored rooms count as one turn for random encounter purposes only, it doesn’t cost torch time or shoes. I remember when playing Labyrinth Lord before I started my own group and became a DM, it was exciting that we pointed to the map and said “we wanna go here” and the DM then rolled a bunch of math and said “OK, but as you turn this corner, there’s a patrol of skeletons!” That’s something I loved as a player but that doesn’t typically happen with our own system of “explored space” being that much faster. Even though it’s super expected that something would show up because when you move through huge swaths of dungeon, you’re bound to run into something no matter how well you know the twists and turns there!
I’ve really loved turns in D&D so much that we added them back in to our 5e game from B/X. It’s probably the biggest difference from 5e. Never had a problem with them. I track them in a paper notebook incrementing them on my side, while the players on their side are playing freeform and normally. My latest kick has been drawing a box with an X in it; that’s six lines, one per turn, and each X:d box makes one hour. (It’s been working well but I’ve already learned that I must also come up with a faster-to-draw symbol for just marking hours, when they go by more quickly, like when they travel for two hours in the wilderness.)
So OK. Sticking with turns, and extra encounter checks for noise, but also… nine rooms of explored space is a d6 check. It would be better if I could add these “pseudo”-turns (three rooms of explored space) in with the real turns for encounter check purposes but that’d be super fiddly to track. Keeping them split instead, I can just count the rooms as they “fast travel”.
Whether these numbers are too low, if one-encounter-per-18-turns (three hours) along with one encounter per 54 retreated rooms is too low, that’s a separate issue. They probably are way too low. But that’s a separate question from the shape of the system itself.
Goblin Punch’s clock roll matches one normal roll, it just adds this tense countdown feel, but the main difference is how much often he’s doing the clock rolls. Once per room instead of once per three rooms make it one encounter per hour instead of one per three hours. If that’s what we wanted we could just change the encounter rate from d6 per three turns to d2 per three turns or d6 every single turn or something like that.
Now, the DMs that are switching to the underclock system are doing that because they see other advantages with the system and not just the increased encounter rate. And that’s great! I’m glad they found a tool that they liked. Me, I was like “ah, no, there’s a lot about underclock that I don’t like, it’s a li’l too [symbolic diceland] instead of the diegetics of time passing normally”, what made me pay attention to the article was how it pointed out that 1/18 is low and how explored space is too safe.
Actually maybe it should be a check for every three explored rooms.
With underclock:
(The clock is set up to match an 1/6 roll but he’s rolling it that much more often!)
My old system:
The idea I was juggling around above, I was thinking of bumping explored space danger up to 1/54 but maybe I should go a li’l further!
My players don’t hate encounters, they’re just prudent about their torch time and shoe time, so if I make it so that every three rooms is a d6, or every room is a d20, but don’t charge any more time, maybe that’s gonna make the game more fun for everyone?
Because if I’m moving through a city I’m gonna meet almost the same amount of people if I’m moving quickly through the city as if I’m moving slowly through it? I dunno!
Everything you need to know about 2024 Player Handbook video:
If you are playing a 2014 character with 2024 characters, we have designed things so that 2024 rules should be used in that situation. Those rules can handle a 2014 character being present, but the 2014 version of the rules will grind in a few places with a 2024 characters
So apparently only these combinations are fully supported:
And you can mix-and-match the first three of those options at the same table. Old subclass support is a good thing for fans of third-party stuff since that often had custom subclasses.
You can use “adventures” from 5.1 but the rulebook itself with conditions, combat system etc is supposed to be 5.2 (D&D “2024”, since referring to this new edition as a new edition is taboo) if you want to to support 5.2 characters.
I’m trying to not slag WotC since I’m so grateful for the creative commons SRD, but this is a little cumbersome for where I’m at right now.
Of course I’m not saying that they should hold up their entire release, I’m just complaining about my own bad luck and poor timing a little bit: I’ve moved to a smaller apartment and can no longer have all kinds of rulebooks and setting books handily available.
I’ve been using an app as I’m getting settled in but it’s been so glitchy and I wanna get away from having my tablet at the game table, get back to it being a offscreen hobby.
I’ve been thinking of switching from our huge mix of 5e, 2e, B/X, RC, and houserules to instead use Rules Cyclopedia since it’s a single book and I happened to already have it and so does one of the players. And what’a great is that it’s more compatible with the type of OSR modules and prep we use anyway.
But another player is giving me so much pushback on that as he’s so hyped for the new release.
I was wracking my brains in anguish but then I figured out I had a solution to the rules creep by me switching to the super light Dungeonesque booklets on the DM side (along with Forge of Foes as a more complete monster book) while letting the players themselves juggle all of their many special books and expansions that some of them love so much. They can drown in books and new versions and hype—and I wasn’t begrudging that, being on the consumer train checking out D&D videos and articles online based around the newest stuff can be a lot of fun.
I was like “old adventures are compatible, right? So that means everything I do on the DM’s side is compatible” and I was really happy, thinking I had settled in with a 5.2 compatible future firmly rooted in the past.
But it seems they’ve changed conditions and fighting rules and a couple of other things so that solution isn’t gonna work.
I still wanna keep it super light. For 5.1, there was the orginal Starter Set and the Essentials Kit, both which had pretty much all the rules (exhaustion levels were maybe the biggest omission) but only low tier spells so running spellslinging non-player characters would be a problem.
What woulda been great for my plan going forward would’ve been if the game itself could’ve been 5.1 so I as DM wouldn’t need to get new books. SRD 5.2 is coming out in February 2025 (if I’m alive then). Not sure when a booklet version of it akin to Dungeonesque or Essentials Kit would be out.
Of all the stuff that a DM does, the most important one is to be the keeper of the secrets. To know (or have a way to find out) the off-screen canon game state. Like, the characters have a treasure chest that they haven’t opened. It’s your job as DM to know what’s in there.
If you’re playing a kind of game where you’d just be making it up, or roll randomly every single time, your group doesn’t need a DM. Now, random generation is something I do use a lot; it’s a necessary tool for bigger game worlds. But I don’t use it literally 100% of the time.
I’m not trying to shame or intimidate anyone here. I want more people running these games, not fewer. We started with just the starter set and had fun right away, only slowly making things more detailed and expansive. And nobody’s perfect: I’ve been running our game continuously since 2014 and I still accidentally do things like this yesterday:
―Uh… That’s odd… It says that this golden statue is invisible…?
―Sandra, you’re not supposed to tell us that it’s here!
―Oh! But, uh… You guys have that sword that lets you see invisible things, right?
―No, that’s our other party, you insensitive clod!
I’ll just keep doing my best.♥︎
I do a good job for the most part. Things like that only happen like five or six times per session.
You can work on the rest of the game together:
Running monsters,
portraying NPCs,
calculating prices for castles and armies and magic items,
keeping time records,
looking up rules,
scheduling the game,
getting food,
rolling dice…
The only desert you’ve got to walk all alone is prepping and keeping the secrets. Don’t prep what’s gonna happen, only what has happened and what’s already there.
I used to be in a situation where my friends didn’t really wanna play and getting a game together was like pulling teeth so I didn’t dare delegate stuff to them. (Their reluctance was understandable since back then I didn’t understand the basics of what makes these games fun; it was more Sandra Story Hour than participatory culture.) Now that I have a group that actually wants to play, we can do stuff together that makes the game more awesome.
The Robgoblin proposes going to a three mile hex size (and also links to a couple of other posters who have proposed similar).
Funny. I’ve been going in the opposite direction. Huge hexes. One hex = one day of travel.
Lately, we’ve been playing a lot of Arden Vul, which does use three mile hexes on its valley map. One hex is one hour of travel, at my party’s current pace.
But I’ve also made versions of the map with one hex per day of travel. And for our ocean map I made even larger hexes since a sailing ship sails a lot longer in 24 hours than the party can walk in ten hours.
It’s great. For this specific region, a day is the salient number. Three encounter checks per day (two in the day time, one at night), scratch food and water.
So many mechanics key off of “one day”. Just as how in the dungeon, one exploration turn is the relevant number.
Anything that’s within a day, enh, we can eyeball it (“this looks to be about a third of a day”) or have maps with subhexes.
Yeah, yeah, the smaller hexes were also good so that we now know that it’s four hours between Arden Vul and Gosterwick. But I’m so happy that I made the huge-hex version because things like “we’ve got to go down to Bilsham to get some stuff from our ship that’s anchored there” which used to be a two-session ordeal is now like thirty minutes. And we’re not losing out on any salient stuff! Talking to people on the way down, running into monsters, handling the resource game; that’s all there! Handling things at this course granularity only loses the tedious stuff and not any of the good stuff.
Robgoblin’s point is that a six mile hex isn’t great because it contains too much stuff. You tend to oversimplify, thinking that a six mile hex only has one thing that’s cool while in real life it might’ve had three entire cities in there. Ironically the huge-hex version makes sense even for this problem because you know there is a lot of stuff in each hex. There’s a whole day of travel in there! Each hex is its own li’l kingdom almost.
I have a nitpick quibble around this one part:
And that idea has merit, it’s certainly mathematically convenient. But we don’t make maps for the convenience of mapmakers: we make them to describe territory.
The six mile side-to-side, seven mile point-to-point convenient property isn’t for the benefit of map makers, it’s for the benefit of map users. “How can this gameplay tool best help us run the game?” How can we best support salience time zoom? Making gameplay be about new and interesting decisions. Yesterday we had a six hour session and most of that was spent on one in-character conversation: how to deal with an incoming army. Six days happened diegetically but we could handle the travel bookkeeping quickly. There were plenty of fights also.
The characters are restoring one of the palaces in the ruined city and they had to deal with venom-lobbing spiders. They’re also at war with a baboon tribe and there’s an incoming threat of Burdock himself (or Sultan al-Dabab, as he’s been renamed in our campaign) sending a couple of hundred mamluk soldiers after them.
Going to huge hexes has been such a good change because we’re spending our sessions less on the tedious and fiddly counting and more on the actual real gameplay decisions that matter, and on the ham acting and, uh, let’s call it “character studies” that we love.
Robgoblin wrote in, saying:
And I don’t disagree - the right sized hex for the right purpose, and rules to suit!
Of course, you can easily subdivide a 24-mile hex into 3-mile (or 6-mile) hexes if that suits you. Elide the tedious days of travel, then zoom in when you need to.
👍🏻
(To nitpick, the 30_10 map we’re usually using to represent one day of travel has 30 miles. But just like Robgoblin is saying, that’s also dividable into 3 or 6 mile hexes.)
Inspired by how Stars Without Number managed to use a fighting system similar to D&D but a skill system similar to Traveller, maybe there can be a way to bolt on some of the stuff from GURPS into RC. And here I’m specifically looking at the version of GURPS 4e as presented in the GURPS Discworld book.
Anyway, design goals:
Magic system we’re spoiled for riches. Easiest is probably to just use RC’s system straight up. Fits pretty well with the Vancian system as described in The Color of Magic, so that’s what I’m gonna go with in this text. Another option is to use Wonder & Wickedness. That’s often my goto when in want of a magic system. The third option would be to use the system from GURPS Discworld itself. That, I fear, is beyond my ability. It seems simpler than RPM but still more than I can figure out with my li’l pea brain!
The basic idea is that you’re making a character as per the Rules Cyclopedia but you also get some more options for skills, advantages and disadvantages.
As per RC, normal characters get four non-combat skills, high int characters get four plus their adjustment (so int 13–15 gets five skills, 16–17 gets six, and int 18 gets seven).
You can mix and match between the skills in RC chapter 5 and the skills in GURPS Discworld starting on p 71.
In addition, thiefs and mystics can also swap out their extra abilities for other skills. Feel free to change the name of your character class if you change your character so much that you’re no longer good at stealing or being mystical.
That’s for general skills. When it comes to weapons: fighters get four weapon skills, other characters get two. You get more as you level up.
You can also optionally skip the entire skills chapter (chapter 5 in the RC). If you do, you get one compensation: people who do use the skills system, when they use weapons they’re not skilled in then they only deal half damage. But people who don’t use the skill system don’t have that limitation.
Here there are tons of ways to customize your character with points! It’s called character points.
The amount of points you have to spend depends on your ability scores. The worse stats you have, the more points you get to spend here.
For all six of your ability scores, look at the the “bonuses and penalties for ability scores” table on RC p9. Having a value of 9–12 doesn’t cost anything, other scores will have a number.
Sum them up across all six of your scores!
Here, I’ll roll up an example for you:
So that’s +1 +1 +1 –1 totalling up to 2.
Subtract that number from five, or from three if your character class can use magic, and multiply by ten!
That’s how many points you get! So low stats have a silver lining of giving you more character points! The example I just showed, they’d get 30 points since five minus two is three.
Advantages and perks cost points, while disadvantages and quirks give you points! But there’s a limit, you can’t have an infinite amount of disadvantages. Let’s say… 75 points? Decide with your own group!
You can also get even more skills at this point: that costs four points per skill.
You get even more points as you level up. Between every level you get nine points. You get them based on the experience points you have. Every tenth of a level gives you a character point.
You can roll up a human (cleric, fighter, thief, magic-user, druid or mystic) as per RC and just skip the advantages part here! The GURPSification part is just giving you extra options, it’s not mandatory.
If you’re going demihuman the advantages chapter is not optional since your demihuman abilties is gonna cost points. Although all the dwarve stuff costs 27 points which most low-stats and mid-stat characters could afford anyway. But it’s a good way to get a feel for the type of beings that are on the Disc. For example there are no hobbit or elf PCs in that setting, but there are plenty of other options.
Typically in RC to use skills you roll a d20 under–or–equal-to the relevant ability score. For people who are obsessed with systems where you roll high, you can instead roll a d20 and add your ability score (your entire score, so if you have 13 you roll d20+13) and then you try to meet-or-beat 21. That gives the exact same odds. Or if you’re making a lot of skill checks you can note on your sheet the number with ten subtracted (so that an ability score of 13 means roll d20+3) and then the number to meet-or-beat would be 11. GURPS has something something 3d6 instead but let’s not go too wild here.
Sometimes it’s just fun to have a more fleshed out character especially in a setting that’s less based on exploring a location. I dunno. This kind of game isn’t my main jam, it’s just, I had the idea for this mashup and wanted to write it down before I forgot it.
By the way, if you really wanna make great characters, check out Hillfolk and the “dramatic pole” idea from that game.
Roll up a RC character and optionally make it more interesting & flavorful with some GURPS stuff!
I recently read the GURPS-based Discworld RPG and they have a fun way of blending social skills with reaction rolls!
Decide which Influence skill you’re using: Diplomacy, Fast-Talk, Intimidation, Savoir-Faire, Sex Appeal, or Streetwise. Choose wisely! The GM may allow other skills to work as Influence skills in certain situations (e.g., Law skill, when dealing with a judge). Then roll a Quick Contest: your skill vs. the subject’s Will. In this situation, your skill is subject to all the modifiers that would affect a reaction roll from the same person (pp. 171-172), regardless of whether they would normally apply to that skill.
If you win, you get a “Good” reaction from the NPC – “Very Good,” if you used Sex Appeal, but the target may have a specific idea of what you are going to do in that case. On any other outcome, the NPC resents your clumsy attempt at manipulation. This gives you a “Bad” reaction – “Very Bad,” if you attempted Intimidation. Exception: If you used Diplomacy, the GM will also make a regular reaction roll and use the better of the two reactions. Thus, Diplomacy is relatively safe.
Maybe that’s how normal GURPS 4e does it but if so I musta missed that part of the basic set! And that extra li’l social skills pamphlet for GURPS 4e, I glanced through it but have ever used anything from it.
I don’t use reaction rolls normally but they don’t seem as bad as rolling for the entire outcome of a social situation.
Y’all know I hate the Fast-Talk skill and its ilk so much but having it replace your normal reaction roll, if you were making one anyway, that might work. That might work for Rules Cyclopedia also which has a set of similar “social skills”.
I’m curious about reaction rolls because they seem to only set the initial disposition of an NPC. The PCs can then still mess it up.
Althoug I feel that the Socialite Challenges table from Silent Legions is way more interesting in that case. Rolling to find out “Does she know, and why won’t she tell?” is more fertile ground for roleplaying than “this lady really likes the party”.
What even is blorb? A blorby situation in an RPG is when the room, the monsters, the stuff in the rooms, that’s all canonically decided. You’ve written it down even. Maybe there are some random encounter tables in there.
The players know some of the stuff, or maybe they don’t know it all yet, or maybe they’ve figured it all out through “playing 20 questions with a door knob” as some like to call it. They’re stuck down here and now they need to find rope. Or they know that the floors are trapped but how do they get across? Or they’re just in a boring office building and trying to figure out how to get Maddy to tell her secret.
You’re not introducing new stuff out of your own whim. Instead, the “playing pieces”, the hard landscape, that’s all there, you prepped that before the player got in, before you saw their characters even. You knew that there was a village, who lived there, what was on sale there, what troubles they had, and what wilderness and dungeons nearby could be explored and what was in them.
Plenty of pages on here about how to blorb or how I first found out about blorb or just how to start out as new a DM (hint: get Lost Mines of Phandelver or B4 The Lost City!) but I also wanted this short li’l one that’s a super zoomed out view of what it is.
Really wish sometimes when I saw RPG reviews they would get right to the point because the number one question I have for a game setting or game system or even a module is: is it blorby? Or is it full of cheaty, scripted, railroady, forced “this-is-gonna-happen” beats? Or conversely, full of blank spaces where you’ve got to wing it?
I love story games also. They’re usually super un-blorby, they’re more like story-creation games that you and your friends play out together where you’re scriptwriters and play actors at the same time. I can get really into a good story game if I know what it is and if it’s well done as a story game. They’re the opposite of blorby games in many ways.
If I see a game that’s not clear about what kind of game it is, I assume it’s a “90s game” and steer clear of it (so game designers, please be more clear about what kinds of games you’re selling so we know how to approach it constructively!).
Now, this is what I hate. I grew up on ‘em and maybe that’s why I’m still so frustrated with them. They’re the games that have rules for creating and playing a character but on the DM side there’s just “lol make it tense and dramatic like a movie” or it tells you to put flowcharts of scenes or setpieces or skill challenges. I can’t even. Sometimes it’s super railroady, sometimes it’s all winged, either way it’s all bad.
Calling ‘em “90s games” is super arbitrary since they’ve been around since the 1970s and are still around today. I just associate ‘em with the 90s since in the 90s they were pretty much all we had. I have a pet theory about them. In the early days everyone had grown up on B2 Keep on the Borderlands and were playing blorbily. You could by a game that had a completely different setup, like you were rolling tons of D10s looking for successes, or you were rolling low on d100 or whatever and you were 1920s dilettantes or modern leather jacket vampires or whatever, but DMs were still prepping places, obstacles, rewards, and interesting people to talk to, just like any old Moldvay joint. How to prep and run games that way didn’t even need to be in the game because “everyone has played D&D, right?”. In parallel, DMs were also piece-by-piece compromising away the blorbiness with initially awesome results. “Wow, my players don’t need to TPK against this dumb random encounter if I put my finger on the scale! Wow, this boss fight can be a li’l more epic if I just cheat a little!” But the back end of the game was being hollowed out.
Meanwhile, the front end, the player side of the game was being completely overloaded with 500 skills and powers and feat trees and quadratic wizards and vehicle spreadsheets while the GM guide was turning into 200 pages of “lol make shit up make it ‘dramatic’”.
And, of course, after a while the foundation of “everyone has played D&D, right?” fell away since no actually, everyone hasn’t played Moldvay D&D with stocking and dungeon levels and treasure-by-type. Everyone doesn’t know how to prep blorbily.
So the kids of the second wave, xennials, who were getting into roleplaying after the fad era was long gone picking up books were being taught a completely different play culture. This lives on today as “adventure paths”.
Everyone loves Apocalypse World, Blades in the Dark, and Fate, right? These games combine the functional “procedure-oriented” backbone of a story game with the player-facing “feel” of an adventure game.
Lumpley explains how the “physics” of neotrad games PbtA is different than your traditional RPG and it’s a key read for people who wanna understand this kinda stuff.
But once you’ve got a situation really set up, established, players know what’s what, you can get plenty of that good old blorby feel out of these games.
Fate (and The Shadow of Yesterday) are more traditional with their own brand of quirky narrativium-driven physics but can work well with an atomic encounters style, where you set up scene-by-scene blorbily instead of an entire game world.
Blorby vs unblorby isn’t the only way to slice the world. Rules-light vs rules-heavy, high magic vs low magic vs sci-fi, wilderness vs urban, scoundrels vs heroes and so on. Me as a super monomaniacal fan of blorb, I feel like blorb is a good way to get rules light to work (if you have an interesting enough “hard landscape” full of weird and dangerous toys for the PCs to explore and play around with, you don’t need much in the way of rules) and is also great for crunchy, buildy rules-heavy games (if you’re just unblorbily “shadowboxing”, all their efforts into character building is meaningless, but with a blorby world to throw their decked-out characters into, those choices matter a lot more).
The shared touchstones between “rules-light” and “rules-heavy” games is that those games are all about the character as the interface for the player, and the player-facing rules being based around the capabilities of the character. That’s true for neotrad also; even if the “physics” of an Apocalypse World game is different, I’m still handed one character and I’m still given stats and HP for that character.
Here’s the fix:
Characters can have skills that do nothing mechanical, like say Persuasion for example, let’s say it does zip & nada for you dice-wise, you need to roleplay it out, but here’s the fix: when you do use it, you get an XP bonus. Max once per session or rather, every session where you have used one or more of your “the skill fix!” skills you get an XP bonus equiv to one tenth of a level (in addition to other XP you’re getting).
Y’all know how I hate skill checks in RPGs. Especially for things that are fun or scary to do at the table, like solving puzzles or making decisions or roleplaying social situations. Yes, I know that it’s scary but that’s also what makes it fun to attempt to do. Even after many years I’m still really bad at them but that’s part of the appeal & “danger” of them. I don’t mind skill check for things that are not fun to do at the table like fighting or lockpicking.
In our 5e game, we use the “Ability Check Proficiency” variant from the DMG, but before that came out we did use skills but we had just straight up banned Intimidation, Deception, Persuation and Investigation. Maybe there were more also. I was like “it’s better that you just know right away that these skills aren’t gonna be used”.
It led me to think that there were two ways of defining a character. One was to build ‘em up out of skills like Lego bricks. The other was to work from a completely capable baseline but add ideals, bonds, traits & flaws to chisel out a complex & real person by a subtractive process instead of an additive one.
Fair enough. But there are plenty of games out there that are otherwise good except for the fact that they have some of these skills. And sometimes for good reason; many players do respond well to the idea of building their character up additively from what they can do (what skills they have) rather than through what they can’t do (what flaw they have).
Hence “the skill fix!”. Use the system, just replace any skill you’d rather roleplay out to “this skill gives you no increased chance of success, no dice roll, no flowers no wedding dress, no nothing but if your character does the thing you get more XP that session”. They don’t stack but the more such skills you have, the greater the chance that you’d used one of them. And, this doesn’t or shouldn’t prevent any other player from doing the thing just as well. Anyone can fast-talk, but people who have invested in the fast-talk skill gets an XP bonus for doing it.
Is this inspired by keys in The Shadow of Yesterday? Yes, a it is, a little. And from the “exceptional skill use” rule in the Rules Cyclopedia. Exceptional skill use as in “you used a skill for something anyone could do without a skill”.