On nude teleportation

There's an occasional debate in GURPS-related circles (I can already see some of you pulling hats down and turning abruptly away; I promise this will have some broader relevance) about teleporting people out of their clothes.

Transparent competitive dicepools

A friend recently raised a question about dice mechanics, and while I won't go into the details, it sparked some thoughts about dicepools.

The broad idea was something transparent, allowing degrees of success for comparison, and not requiring maths at the table.

When avoiding maths, I tend to think of dicepools as a starting point. I don't know if this will work out but let's give it a shot.

The idea I have in mind is, for now, a pretty basic one. You'd roll a handful of dice, looking for values of X or more. Immediately we hit the downside that this isn't actually all that transparent - odds for dicepools are not all that intuitive. Okay. Let's blatantly ignore that for now and move on...

For comparisons, we could say that higher values are better. So the target might be fixed at a 4+, but when the margin of success matters, your 5+ beats their 4+. For an opposed roll, this can essentially set the target difficulty.

Okay, for a five-die pool looking for rolls of 4+, we have 97% chance of getting 1 or more, then 81%, 50%, 19%, and finally a mere 3% chance of getting 5 successes.

Looking for 5+, we go 87%, 53%, 20%, 5% and 0.4%. A group of n 4s is always less probable than a group of n-1 5s and more probable than n 5s. For example, going by sheer rarity, 4x4s should beat 3x5s, but lose to 4x5s.

Looking for 6+, we go 60%, 20%, 4%, 0.3% and 0.01%. A group of n 6s is always less probable than a group of n+1 4s or 5s, or a group of n 5s. It doesn't work entirely neatly, though - 3x6 is less likely than 4x5, but 2x6 is just as likely as 3x5, and 1x6 is more likely than 2x5.

Keeping things simple

One straightforward way of handling opposing rolls would be to have dice cancel out. Let's say you roll 4, 4, 5, 6, 6 and the opponent rolls 4, 6, 6, 6. The opponent's first two 6s cancel out both of yours. Their third 6 cancels your 5 (since it's higher) and their 4 cancels one of your 4s. This leaves you the victor with a single roll of 4.

In this model, having a bigger pool should make you more reliable at overcoming opponents. Sure, the novice might get a lucky 6, but if you're rolling more dice, you're more likely to roll some 6s and cancel it out. Conversely, if you're putting up a defence (or setting the difficulty of a challenge) you're more likely to roll a high number that the novice will struggle to cancel.

Is this significantly different from just having a dicepool without that comparison? I'm not sure...

Skill numbers

Okay, let's think about another approach. What if rather than contributing to the size of your pool, your skill determined the target number you were going for? I feel the more intuitive way to do this is rolling equal to or less than your skill, because descending numbers being better was bad when it was THAC0 and hasn't improved since.

So if you have a skill of 1, you need to be rolling 1s. If you have a skill of 3, anything from 1-3 is a success. We'd compare these like blackjack, so your successful 3 beats the opponent's successful 2.

I feel like I slightly prefer this, because higher skill makes you more reliable at getting successes, rather than extending the maximum number of successes you can achieve.

This could be part of the classic Attribute vs. Skill model, with Attributes + circumstantial bonuses determining the size of your pool, and Skill making it easier to get successes. I'm not sure that's necessary, but it's an option. One downside there would be that having both as adjustable axes makes things less transparent, at least when creating characters: you'd potentially need to think about the impact of both on a particular ability.

GURPS and large-scale spellcasting

I've been thinking about how you'd set up magical precautions against natural disasters in GURPS. It seems like exactly the sort of system where you could do that sort of thing. Hurricanes, earthquakes and so on are devastating, so it's reasonable that a benevolent government would pour effort into effective countermeasures. Even an actively malevolent ruler might do so, because the economic impact and infrastructure damage is really inconvenient.

This post examines the case of Seismia, a country prone to various disasters.

One of the troubles is the sheer area natural hazards affect. GURPS generally handles area spells with a fixed cost ("base cost") per radius in yards.* This cost is the amount of Fatigue Points you need to spend (basically, how tiring it is). A meagre half-mile radius with a base cost of 1/2 clocks in at 440 Fatigue Points. That's roughly one noble estate or village.

*they also measure things in miles per hour, degrees Fahrenheit, pounds of weight, feet and inches, making the system an absolute ruddy nightmare for the sort of scientific realism it's meant to support. For those wondering why the game isn't more popular, this is probably a factor. Yes, I know Americans have an abiding love for their imperial measurements (and I use plenty of them myself in everyday life), but they are wildly inconvenient when calculations come in. Put out a metric version, for the love of all that's holy.

I'm not a great judge of typical capabilities in GURPS, but human capabilities hover around the 10 mark; I'd guess an experienced mage would buy up Health and buy extra Fatigue Points, so they might be able to throw in 20FP or so. Far short of our total.

Ceremonial casting might help. This is much slower (one-tenth of normal speed), but that isn't a problem. It allows other mages, and even random bystanders, to contribute some of their own energy. We're still limited, though...

• Each mage who knows the spell at level 15+: as much energy as he wishes to contribute.
• Each non-mage who knows the spell at level 15+: up to 3 points.
• Each mage who knows the spell at level 14 or lower: up to 3 points.
• Each unskilled spectator who supports the casting (by chanting, holding candles, etc.): 1 point, to a maximum of 100 points from all spectators.

"Mages" are those who have the inherent power of Magery, rather than merely having learned a spell; they're better, faster, stronger and more wizardly.

So a 440-point spell to keep rainstorms out of a 1/2-mile radius would require the full exertion of 22 mages who know the spell at a high level. That's a tough order for one village.

If we have all the villagers come along to chant, they can add up to 100 points to our total. Let's say we can find 100 of them. Let's also say our Head Wizard can rustle up extra energy from magic items, contributing 40 points and leaving us a nice simple 300.

To make up the 300 points, we'd need 100 lesser spellcasters - mages who don't know the spell in question, or non-mages who know it very well. Mages are generally in short supply, though. Perhaps Seismian government compels everyone to study certain spells for national defence against hazards, the same way they might require longbow practice?

That 1/2-mile radius is 0.78 square miles, or about 2km². The population density of Scotland is 70/km², so that would give us 140 inhabitants or thereabouts. Conceivably, if all of them had been forced to learn Protection From Hazard at 15+, and we made all of them participate in the ritual alongside our Head Wizard (20 FP), we could get the energy we need: 3 FP x 140 = 420 FP.

Of course, learning those spells requires investment of time and effort. Most spells are Hard skills, and expensive to learn. For those Seismians lucky enough to have average IQ 10, learning the skill at IQ+5 will cost a mighty 24 points. Those down at IQ 8 have to spend 32 points! Considering ordinary folks tend to have 100-150 points in total, that is a very significant investment in one niche skill.

Looking through Thaumatology, not many options help with spellcasting costs. The obvious one is, of course... sacrifices.

Sacrifice

This section of rules is deliberately fluid, giving no specific set of rules, but a set of ideas and discussion of their implications - for example, how the value of a sacrifice is calculated will determine the kind of sacrifices that happen.

Fantasy, however, gives some useable guidelines.

The basic currency of sacrifice is hit points. If the victim is sapient and consents to the sacrifice, use his full HP. If he does not consent, divide his HP by 3. For nonsapient victims, always divide HP by 3; they are presumed not capable of consent. At the GM’s discretion, offerings of material goods worth 20% of a campaign’s starting wealth count as 1 HP. Offered wealth may be cast into the sea, burned at a shrine, ritually consumed by someone possessed by a god or spirit, or otherwise destroyed or made inaccessible... Each HP of sacrifice could be exchanged for two energy points of magic.

According to Low-Tech Companion 3, sheep have 10 HP. They can therefore be sacrificed for the equivalent of 6 FP.

Wales supposedly contains around 1500 sheep per square mile (I resist my inclination to fact-check this in detail). Let's assume this is a reasonable figure for our hypothetical country, and that whatever sheep-equivalents it might farm (potentially including crops) are fungible in terms of density and sacrificial potency.

With a modest 1% tithe of livestock, Seismia can gather 15 sheep per square mile for sacrifice each year annually, providing 90 energy towards spells of various kinds.

Putting it together

We have to make some assumptions about mage density here. Let's say that there is one high-class mage per 10 square miles, able to contribute 20 energy. There are 2 decent wizards per square mile, who can contribute 3 energy. Assorted inhabitants can give us another 100, and we have 90 energy per square mile from sheep.

Putting all that together... we don't have enough. Our half-mile radius can produce 306 energy, far short of the 440 required. To protect the village from storms, we'd need to increase the Seismian sheep-tithe to 4% of livestock, which is a fair chunk considering it'll be on top of other taxes.

It only gets worse when I reveal that the actual cost for protection from storms (Weather Dome) is 3, not 1/2. We'd need 2640 energy to protect the village!

Thankfully, this sort of thing works better at scale. In a 10-mile radius, we have 31 top-flight mages, 628 decent ones, and a 2% sacrifice will net us 9420 sheep. This gives us 59132 energy, more than our target of 52800.

Sticking with Wales as our current example, it's roughly 170 miles from top to bottom, so we need to cover an 85-mile radius. That will cost us 448800 Fatigue Points to bespell against storms. However, we can muster an impressive army of mages: 2270 top-class mages for 20 FP each, and 45396 decent ones giving 3 energy apiece. There's frankly no point getting the ordinary folks involved for a mere 100 energy. We'll make up the difference with sacrifices: a mere 2 sheep per square mile will suffice and to spare.

Of course, we'll probably want to cast some other protective spells on the whole country, so I'd better stick with that 1% tithe. Plus... with ceremonial spellcasting, any roll of 16+ on 3d6 is a failure! We might need to give this a few goes, lads. Still, it's not a bad outcome.

Base FP cost of spell
Radius (Miles)	1/2	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
1/2	440	880	1760	2640	3520	4400	5280	6160	7040	7920	8800
1	880	1760	3520	5280	7040	8800	10560	12320	14080	15840	17600
2	1760	3520	7040	10560	14080	17600	21120	24640	28160	31680	35200
3	2640	5280	10560	15840	21120	26400	31680	36960	42240	47520	52800
4	3520	7040	14080	21120	28160	35200	42240	49280	56320	63360	70400
5	4400	8800	17600	26400	35200	44000	52800	61600	70400	79200	88000
6	5280	10560	21120	31680	42240	52800	63360	73920	84480	95040	105600
7	6160	12320	24640	36960	49280	61600	73920	86240	98560	110880	123200
8	7040	14080	28160	42240	56320	70400	84480	98560	112640	126720	140800
9	7920	15840	31680	47520	63360	79200	95040	110880	126720	142560	158400
10	8800	17600	35200	52800	70400	88000	105600	123200	140800	158400	176000
85	74800	149600	299200	448800	598400	748000	897600	1047200	1196800	1346400	1496000

 

Top mages	OK mages	Sacrifices	Top mage energy	OK mage energy	Others	Sacrifices	Sum	Without sacrifices
1	2	30	20	6	100	180	306	126
1	6	90	20	18	100	540	678	138
1	24	360	24	72	100	2160	2356	196
3	56	840	56	168	100	5040	5364	324
5	100	1500	100	300	100	9000	9500	500
8	156	2340	156	468	100	14040	14764	724
11	226	3390	226	678	100	20340	21344	1004
15	306	4590	306	918	100	27540	28864	1324
20	402	6030	402	1206	100	36180	37888	1708
25	508	7620	508	1524	100	45720	47852	2132
31	628	9420	628	1884	100	56520	59132	2612
2270	45396	45396	45396	136188	100	272376	454060	181684

Have I missed something? If you know of an energy-saving technique that would help Keep Seismia Safe, contact your local Hazard Dispelling Bureau immediately.

Firearm crutches for fantasy RPGs

This post is immediately inspired by a Twitter conversation, but of course its parent inspiration is the Combat Wheelchair created by Sara (mustangsart).

Firearms in Fantasy

Pathfinder, which I play weekly, has long had rules for firearms and an entire class dedicated to them, the Gunslinger. I've always been a bit chary of them for a couple of reasons. One is simply that fantasy with firearms drifts into a different space from fantasy without, mostly due to source material. The other is my personal, non-expert discomfort with things like "targeting touch AC" (meaning firearms bypass armour and shields) and the very rapid reloading that 6-second combat rounds and fights that generally finish within 5 rounds require.

I'm not really interested in delving into the exact realistic chances of these things, especially given a fantasy world. But for the record:

In the first case, I find it immersion-harming that a small lead pellet fired by alchemy from a tube has a rules mechanic of simply punching through armour (or perhaps inflicting damage through sheer force?), but an arrow fired by a Strength 24 orc sniper's composite bow or from a gastrophetes doesn't. This is before we get into oddities like "this Diminutive sprite the size of your thumb has a pistol that will shoot right through the frost giant's tank-like plate mail, but the frost giant's tree-sized spear can be deflected by the sprite's thimble breastplate."

In the second case, obviously it varies a lot with guns, but by my understanding you'd be doing well to fire a flintlock weapon three times a minute.

The topic of making crutches that doubled as firearms came up in the thread, and got me thinking of magic, and actually - while I'm not enamoured of actual "magical firearms" in a general fantasy setting, incorporating minor magical elements into a mechanical & alchemical firearm actually works pretty well for me. I'm a fan of thinking about how the fairly widespread availability of trivial magic might affect society!

The concept we're looking at is sturdy, adventurer-friendly crutches with a built-in firearm. So how might this work?

Skills as described vs. skills as used

So I was visiting Dan and Arthur over the holidays, and we had many conversations about roleplaying, of course. One of them eventually pottered around to musing on skill interpretation. Or, to be a little uncharitable, skill misinterpretation.

Here, as usual, "skill" means an aspect of an RPG's mechanics which determine your competence in a specific field of activity. In some cases things we would normally consider to be Attributes or Statistics or something work in a way similar enough that we can also consider them here. White Wolf's dots, for example, are basically the same whether they're in an Attribute or a... whatever you call the other things, I forget.

Let's take as read for this article that a skill has four components: a Name, an optional Fluff, a Description, and an Application. The Name is literally the name of the skill ("Ignite Fish"). The Fluff is a bit of flavour text which some games include. The Description is the section of the rules which explains what the skill is, and may give specific mechanical subsystems, special uses, examples and so on; descriptions may be very mechanical or largely narrative.

Finally, the Application is simply the way a given set of players actually uses the skill in their games. This does not necessarily correspond to any of the above.

Magic Scales

So at some point I had an idea for a different kind of magic/power system, and basically just wanted to scribble it down while I remembered. I'm certain that someone has already thought of this for an existing game; I just haven't come across it yet so I don't know where.

The immediate inspiration was reading some White Wolf stuff, which to my mind has a real problem with powers. Basically, they want you to have supernatural powers that sound really cool (and which, in game fiction, are really cool). Unfortunately, they also want to make those same powers very specific in their mechanical capabilities.

There are different possible interpretations of this. A generous reading is that, although White Wolf want to enthuse readers and fill their mind with possibilities, they're concerned that vague rules would leave the Storyteller to create mechanics each time a power was used; the narrow capabilities are designed to lighten the load for STs and avoid balance issues. A harsher reading is that White Wolf aren't very good at matching mechanics to fluff, and are violently averse to giving players access to tools that might derail the Storyteller's beautiful plot; giving them very very specific tools ensures the Storyteller knows exactly what their capabilities are and can overrule requests for a broader interpretation.

Given that utterly broken powers have been a mainstay of the White Wolf experience from its inception, through its history, to the present day, and many of the powers are so oddly-written that the Storyteller still has to make arbitrary rulings on what's allowed, I'm going to have to plump for the latter.

There are a couple of downsides to this mixture. One is that players can be confused and disappointed when (for example) the power that they think allows them to overwhelm enemies with raw terror can be used exclusively to make them run away from you. The other is that you have to pay attention to what's possible, and some things that seem equivalent may be impossible because the designer didn't think about it, and there may be odd gaps in your supernatural arsenal.

My idea is basically the complete opposite of this ("complete opposite" is not a helpful description, and probably straight-up wrong) a very different approach to this.

So the White Wolf tack can basically be seen as permissive mechanics: You Can Do This. I've seen (somewhere) a more quantitative mechanics: You Can Do X Amount of This. I've seen narrative-quantitative approaches: You Can Roll Dice and Fluff the Result as This.

Insofar as I can classify it at all, I think this approach is more like narrative-dramatic. Essentially it's based on You Can Overcome These Challenges. Powers don't have any mechanical specifics at all; you simply choose a type of thing you can do, and decide how useful that ability is. Does it occasionally save you from mild inconvenience, or regularly allow you to achieve goals that would otherwise be beyond you?

• Trivial. The magic is nominal, or cosmetic, and of virtually no practical use (although it may be cool). Maybe you can change the colour of small items, create tiny illusions in your palm, create sparks,
• Convenient. The magic allows you to achieve something you could have done anyway, but sometimes saves you effort or time. For example, copying a document, flipping a light switch from a few feet away, reheating meals, making noises, cleaning objects, or giving someone an electric jolt instead of a pinch.
• Useful. The magic is a significant and regular asset that makes your life easier. For example, keeping your devices powered without charging (or even without batteries), locating an object you want within a room, protecting you from mild injury, telekinetically preparing meals while you watch TV, helping you win on the races, distracting an annoying person, providing a weapon, opening doors without the key, getting favours, or completing a task much faster than normal.
• Impressive. The magic provides major benefits or allows you to overcome substantial problems. For example, summoning a lost item, surviving dangerous situations, finding a person, learning hidden truths, getting into a secure area, providing a potent weapon, travelling great distances quickly, speaking new languages, removing physical barriers, or altering a person's opinion.

Note that the scale of your ability is absolute, even if you use it in different circumstances. If you have Convenient Electrokinesis and use it to turn on lights with your mind and therefore look cool, you cannot use this to turn off the forcefield using the switch on the other side of your prison barrier. Why? because that would be Impressive. It's up to you and the GM to establish why it isn't possible, if you care. In this case, clearly the barrier interferes with your mental powers.

Fractal Mythos Knowledge

I had some thoughts about the Call of Cthulhu Cthulhu Mythos skill while listening to some podcast or other - I can't remember which one now. Possibly RPPR. You can read a tome about Hastur and suddenly know about Ithaqqua. Or you can sometimes know about byakhees, and sometimes not. It's weird.

An idea came to me that you could introduce a fractal approach to Mythos skills (and indeed others, but let's stick with Mythos for now). This would be a tweak specifically for games where there's quite a lot of Mythos going on, and particularly suitable for long-term campaigns focused on a subset of the Mythos but including elements from other factions.

As it's Call of Cthulhu specific I've posted it on my Call of Cthulhu blog. But feel free to comment there or here as suits you.

On failure, its outcomes and its implications: simulation vs. storygame?

As I was writing this mini-series, I've been reading a bit around the internet. Other people also have their issues with Fail Forward, including major "Powered by the Apocalypse!" content writers, apparently.

Something I picked up on in that reading was something that I did touch on myself, but think is a bit secondary in my concerns. That is, basically, is there any connection between what the character attempted, and the consequence of the failure?

The first example has a rogue make a Charisma check in order to befriend an officer on a ship. The rogue fails, and the GM interprets this to mean that rather than fail to befriend the officer, the character did in fact make a good impression, but the officer is now suddenly a cannibal.

Don't get me wrong here. This example here makes me furrow my brow and raise an eyebrow and sort of shake my head in mild confusion; it's just that I'm more worried about other, larger-scale aspects of Fail Forward.

On reflection though, it struck me that this might be down to a bit of a storygamer vs. trad gamer mindset difference. I think the spontaneous cannibalism is weird, as does David Guyll, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's objectively bad. I'm wondering whether this might actually reflect attitudes towards the simulationism or otherwise of the gameworld.

In the kind of simulationist game I run, this example seems silly, because a person is or is not a cannibal. I mean, I might not have determined that in advance (it's not exactly one of the core stats), but equally I sort of expect cannibalism to be a trait I decide on some narrative or logical basis. I would find it weird to have a mechanical roll on a skill change a part of the gameworld reality that isn't even related to it.

To be fair, I might potentially get the idea that an NPC could be a cannibal based on the interactions involved in a skill roll, probably if it made me think it would be ironic in some way. But it'd be a consequence of the narrative rather than the die result.

However, if you don't subscribe to the view that a game is approximately simulating a reality for you in the first place, maybe this makes a lot more sense. Plenty of games and gamers are happy with games where a lot of narrative control rests with the players, and where parts of the game reality are subject to change. To take a classic RPG example, when a players looks for a diamond in a safe, some gamers are happy for a successful roll to mean the diamond is in the safe, without any need for the GM to have decided it was there beforehand.

As far as I'm concerned, this is mostly unsatisfying. But that's just my preference.

Players who enjoy this kind of Conflict Resolution-based approach, and the relatively flexible game reality, may be more amenable to the idea that a game-mechanical consequence of their actions or failures doesn't necessarily match the game-narrative consequences of their actions in a mappable way. If you're tending to view things more as Conflicts than as specific Tasks in the first place, then it may make more sense to you.

To pull things back to our example: maybe for a storygamey player, it's natural to model the Charisma roll as a Conflict like "do I manage to befriend the nice officer", where a failure allows that the officer is secretly a cannibal and so not so nice after all. Maybe Grignr failing to behead an orc and suddenly being endangered by a plummeting chandelier feels like a natural sequence of events simply because it comprises part of a story of sequential events.

On failure, its outcomes and its implications: caring and minding

This is a bonus spin-off thought from the main mini-series. It doesn't quite fit into the main thread.

Caring and Minding

There's another case here which I think Fail Forward handles suboptimally, but which is relatively common. This is the situation where I care what the result is, but I don't mind.

Now, you can make a case that this is exactly the situation Fail Forward tries to create, by making both options equally interesting. But let's ignore that, and focus on situations where it's inherently true, rather than those where the GM makes it true.

This is actually a really common situation in the types of games I tend to play, which are generally relatively simulationist. The most obvious case is the very frequent one where I simply want to establish facts about the world around me. For example: Is there a secret door in this wall? Is this ruin historically associated with the Dark Lady? What kind of outfit is Hilgarth Enterprises? Can I hear anyone on the other side of this door?

I care what the result is, because otherwise I wouldn't have asked.* But I don't mind. I have no personal stake in the specific answer, but collapsing that particular waveform will open up new lines of enquiry or simply inform my future actions.

You can usefully distinguish it this way:

• I care whether there is a secret door, a letter for me, anyone inside the room, any reason to suspect Lord Surly of treason, or a pretty girl eyeing me across the room. I don't particularly mind whether those things are true or false.
• I mind whether my gold has been stolen, a balrog is chasing me, I can escape my manacles, I know a spell to banish this spirit, or I have any ammo left.

For example, if there is someone on the other side of the door, they might be a prisoner in need of rescue, or a dangerous enemy. Either of those might be good (I do a good deed and perhaps gain a reward or information; I test my mettle and gain XP) or bad (I have to keep the prisoner quiet, free them, wonder whether the guards will notice and raise the alarm, and complete an escort quest; the enemy kills me). I don't specifically want there to be someone there, but I do want to use my senses to establish that fact.

Similarly, if I'm playing in a setting with a Dark Lady in the backstory, and exploring a sinister tower where something has happened, it makes sense to rack my brains and check whether this tower is associated with her. If so, that suggests some things that might be happening: some of her followers might be here, or the tower might be rife with undead, or an evil influence might flow from a relic buried here. I can use that information to make guesses and prepare accordingly. If not, I want to think of other possibilities and carry out appropriate research. Either way, I want to use my historical and mythical knowledge to know the answer.

A Fail Forward system doesn't handle this particularly well, because it's not clear what reasonable consequence there could be for failing "I look for secret doors". In extreme cases it doesn't handle success well either. After all, you're not trying to create a secret door with sheer force of will; you just want to know what's going on. If I succeed at listening at the door, I don't want to have to tell the GM that there's someone inside.

In fact, Dungeon World handles this by not having any consequences for this kind of failure. Which I think is probably better than the alternative, but feels a little inconsistent. It does seem to highlight that adding consequences to an event is very much not always an improvement.

It gets even worse with "I check for traps". The very last thing you want is to try to ensure your safety by making sure there's no traps, and instead end up actively creating a hazard that then injures you. Or, coming back to our secret door, to suggest that there might be a secret door, fail the roll, and suddenly be ambushed by goblins emerging from a secret door that didn't exist until you thought of it. These are, to be clear, examples of reasonably bad GMing rather than game design per se, but I think they're a decent example of where the idea of dividing character skill rolls into two equally-interesting sets of consequences breaks down.

I also think in general it's worth considering GMing and design advice from the point of view of "what happens if the GM isn't very good?". You can't design away GMing problems, of course. On the other hand, there are always going to be situations where a GM is inexperienced, underconfident, takes things quite literally, assumes the advice will explicitly state caveats rather than assuming they will work it out, tired or drunk.

The thing is that if someone does fail a roll to look for a secret door, the chain of thought that leads to them being ambushed by goblins makes a degree of sense. You looked for a secret door and failed. Well, you can't have failed to find a door that isn't there, so maybe there was a door, in which case how does it go wrong? Ah, there were goblins hiding inside! Or there weren't, but some will come soon and sneak up on you!

Unfortunately this sort of thing affects what you might call the metagame. If, when you look for secret doors and fail, this action can cause you to be ambushed by goblins that otherwise did not exist, you are creating a penalty for yourself by doing something that wasn't necessary (but was fun and interesting) in the first place. The natural response is to avoid looking for secret doors.

This is true of any similar mechanic: if failed Social Interaction rolls can have you attacked by otherwise disinterested merchants, it really deters you from talking to anyone. If fighting Dreadbears gets you horribly injured, you'll tend to avoid fighting Dreadbears.

This kind of gameplay can discourage or sabotage certain playstyles. In particular it harms deduction-style investigation, where players want to painstakingly check leads and suspicions and eliminate possibilities. It also potentially harms cautious tactical play, where players want to use research and observation to gain as many advantages as possible.

On failure, its outcomes and its implications: derailing

Abstract

There are basically three topics in this miniseries. Thread one is about (mechanical, die-rolling) failure per se and how it feels to me as a player. Thread two is about failures, interestingness and the Fail Forward/Roll Dice or Say Yes sort of concept. Thread three, today's topic, is about the interaction between failure, narrative and the coherence (in the non-Forge-jargon sense) of the play experience.

Failure, Narrative and Coherence

So, what am I wittering about today?

There's two interrelated ideas here. I'd like to begin by talking about how various types of failure affect the coherence of a game, and the table atmosphere. Then I'll discuss the relation between spontaneity/improvisation and narrative coherence. Finally, I'd like to tie these back into the main topic of the miniseries, by talking specifically about the way mechanically-mandated spontaneity affects coherence.

On failure, its outcomes and its implications: consequences

Abstract

There are basically three topics in this miniseries. Thread one is about (mechanical, die-rolling) failure per se and how it feels to me as a player. Thread two, today's topic, is about failures, interestingness and the Fail Forward/Roll Dice or Say Yes sort of concept. Thread three is about the interaction between failure, narrative and the coherence (in the non-Forge-jargon sense) of the play experience.

Failing Forward

One of the arguments that came up in our conversation was more or less this:

"Fail forward" systems (like Dungeon World), which insist on providing "interesting consequences" for failure, just create an unnecessary burden on players and GMs to improvise "consequences" for things that really don't need them, or which already have consequences that arise organically from the failure.

This touches broadly on both Fail Forward and Roll Dice or Say Yes. Both of these proposals work roughly on the basis that die rolls (or whatever resolution mechanic) should be used when you're indifferent to the outcome or when both outcomes are equally desirable. This idea is built into things like Dungeon World's dice mechanic, but also links to a lesser extent to Numenera and its GM Interventions. The principle seems sound, but in application is gets trickier.

I think there are several points to consider here, including:

• Why are we rolling dice?
• What is the resolution mechanic resolving?
• What is a consequence?
• What is "interesting"?

As a quick aside, let me say that I don't think Fail Forward is an inherently flawed idea, although I will be suggesting a lot of problems with it. I think it emerges from some genuine problems (like hitting a dead end or constant whiffing) and is a sensible means to address certain situations in games (more on this far below). I try to apply it in Call of Cthulhu, for example, to avoid discouraging players and keep investigations moving. However, I think generalising it to a standard rule risks creating a new set of problems. Like all tools it is best applied with care.

The reason I will begin by focusing very heavily on the "keep things interesting" usage of Fail Forward is that this seems to be the motivation behind the systems that build it into their mechanics. I say this simply because mechanically-mandated consequences don't really seem to do anything to address potential dead ends.

Dice are fun

As Dan pointed out, one of the assumptions that these philosophies seem to make is that rolling dice is a value-neutral activity, and that's not really the case for a lot of people. Picking up the dice and rolling them is fun. It is a moment of tension, an opportunity for glory or for dramatic failure or for opening up a new possibility space within the game reality, and you don't know which or what will happen.

This is simply not comparable to making a decision about what will happen. If you decide it's cooler that Gnurk the Barbarian snatches the goblet from the altar at the last second before the ceiling crashes down before rolling under a closing door, that's nice, and it may well be the best way to handle a particular situation (especially if it keeps a campaign going) - but it simply doesn't have the rush of satisfaction that comes from the dice and your character's mechanically-assigned skills pulling together to create that result. A successful die roll feels like an achievement; the possibility of failure lends it the tension that gives it punch, and makes whatever steps you took to contribute to that success feel like work well done.

Resolutions

The second point is one I've touched on before. There are many different types of situations that a mechanic may be resolving.

• Do I spot the clue that allows us to keep the investigation progressing smoothly?
• Do I spot the warning sign of an imminent ambush?
• Do I correctly draw the magic circle to protect me from the demon I'm summoning?
• Do I unlock the door?
• Do I shoot the ork?
• Do I convince the guard that I'm allowed in here?
• How fast do I complete the race?
• How long does it take me to do the jigsaw?
• Do I find a secret door?

Some of these situations open up new possibility spaces: the situation was A, but it is now A+B. For example, opening the lock or finding the clue creates new opportunities to do things.

Some of these situations irreversibly bifurcate the possibility space: the situation was A, but transitions to either B or C. Either you convince the guard, or you alert the guard.

Some of these situations modify your circumstances: the situation transitions from A to B anyway, but you are more or less prepared for it (you might call these B1 and B2). The imminent ambush is a good example; you will be attacked, but are you caught off guard or ready to defend yourselves?

Some of these give you information about the game world. You might discover that there is a secret door, or that there is no secret door you can find. Often, these also open up new possibility spaces.

Some of these situations establish other things about the situation. Running very fast might impress NPCs, or create rivalries, or win you a prize. Doing the jigsaw slowly might consume valuable time, or prevent you from helping allies, or you might not finish it before B happens.

Some of them have long-term consequences which it makes no sense to try and determine now. Your magic circle might bind the demon for a hundred years, or as little as a single night. You might have persuaded the NPC to join your side, or they might be planning to betray you next week. You may have memorised the crucial spell to banish Yog-Sothoth, or not. You will find out when the time comes.

And some of them are more complex. If I shoot the ork, it may die. Or it may be injured and decide to take cover. Or it may be injured and attack ferociously to get revenge. The orc being injured may leave it vulnerable to an ally's attacks. It might scare the ork's boss, who decides the fight's going badly and retreats. It might hearten a scared ally. If I miss, the orc might decide I'm easy prey. Or it might decide I can be safely ignored. Or another character may take the orc down with a spectacular headshot. This kind of situation leaves the consequences of failure very much open.

What kind of consequence anyway?

In games in general, and perhaps in whiffy* games in particular, it can seem as though the possibility is: "something cool happens, or something cool doesn't happen". It seems superficially obvious that in such a case you'd want the cool thing to happen all the time, because it's cool. Except brains don't always work like that.

* i.e. games where it's common that you just fail at things, and often that your opponent also fails at things, so several rounds may go by without anything particular happening.

If my character is shooting a gun at an NPC, then in a diceless system I would typically choose for my character to hit rather than miss*. From a purely rational perspective it doesn't make sense for me to prefer a dice-based system in which I have a chance of hitting to a diceless system in which I can select the most appropriate outcome, any more than it would make sense for me to prefer a job where every month I have a 50% chance of not getting paid.

* assuming that it was genre- and character-appropriate, since a thing being cool is often a function of those, even when it's failure. In some cases, my character emptying a revolver at point-blank range without landing a shot is appropriate and cool.

Similarly, if I'm trying to open a safe, climb a tree or hypnotise a bear, I feel like I would generally like to succeed rather than fail.

This line of reasoning ties into the Fail Forward situation, where games compel players and GMs to add "interesting" outcomes to failure, so instead of deciding between an "interesting" outcome and a "boring" one, you're deciding between two interesting outcomes.

This relies, crucially, on an assumption that not-succeeding at something is boring. I'll return to this below.

In theory this solves "the problem" (whatever exactly that is).* In practice it solves some problems for some people (for some others the problem never existed in the first place). And I think this solvedness relies heavily on interpreting reality as consisting only of a subset of the situations I listed above.

*Establishing what The Problem is, and to what extent it exists, and for whom, is frankly beyond the scope of this blog. It's something to do with making things interesting, at least.

It seems to me (both from reading and from listening to Actual Play) that the Fail Forward model tends strongly to interpret situations as forks in the road. Reality is in state A, you attempt to do X, and reality shifts either to state B or state C depending on your success. Either it thinks most situations are like this, or, possibly, it thinks they should be like this in a game narrative.

I think this is a genuine weakness in the approach, which is partly tied into its tendency to assume a conflict resolution model rather than a task resolution model. This is particularly pronounced when we bear in mind that games involve multiple players, of which more later.

And I think this is a weakness because that's demonstrably false. If I search for a secret door, and there is no door, the most natural consequence is that nothing happens. If I try to pick a lock and cannot, the most natural consequence is that nothing happens. If I try to win a race and don't do better than everyone else, the most natural consequence which is simply that somebody else wins. If I try to shoot an orc and miss, the most natural consequence is that my shot goes astray with no further effect. If I try to build a bridge and fail, it might collapse any time in the next decade.

It's not that none of these things can have more complicated consequences; of course they can. However, I think Fail Forward systems tend in these situations to push GMs to improvise immediate consequences which don't always have much to do with the actions of the character, or which at least rely on specific interpretations of how things happen which don't necessarily match what the player intended.

The "natural consequences" offer several possible advantages. The possibility of trying an alternate path from the same state, so you aren't tied completely to whatever you first tried, and can indulge in exploratory gameplay to sound out options and approaches. The opportunity for another player or character to step up with a new idea or ability, which can be especially valuable for newer or less confident players. A potentially important element of predictability that allows planning.

The following example is combat-themed, but it's worth noting that our inspiration here, Dungeon World, doesn't use full-on conflict resolution for most combats, but models them at the level of a single exchange of blows. Typically, the consequence is simply a matter of whether you cause damage and whether you take damage.

If this inconsistency on my part annoys you, feel free to mentally substitute "I sever the chains of the snarling dire boar!" for "I chop the Orc's head off!".

Do I really want an Awesome Fork?

The assumption of Fail Forward in its starkest manifestation is that when I say "I chop the Orc's head off!" I want my assertion to irrevocably set the game down one of two paths: one in which I chop the Orc's head off and it is awesome, and one in which my failure to chop the Orc's head off creates an exciting and dynamic scene.

And let's say for a moment that this is true, that I explicitly want our next forty-eight seconds of gaming time to consist of either the DM saying "Grignr's axe bites into the Orc's neck, severing its head from its body and spattering the walls in its oozing, grey-black blood!" or "Grignr's axe swings wildly, severing one of the supporting beams of the overhead scaffolding, causing piles of mouldy orc-dung to cascade onto the battlefield."

The thing is, both of these outcomes are time consuming (especially because they don't flow as easily in speech as they do in writing), and both of them centralise me specifically.

Similarly, in a non-combat situation: if I attempt to lockpick a door, the DM might say "the tumblers clatter into place, and the door swings open, exposing the Duke's secret devil-worshipping chamber!" or "distracted by the clicking of the lock, you fail to notice the watch-panther padding along the corridor, and it springs towards you with a roar!"

Player creativity is not a finite resource,* but time and things-that-need-doing are. If we are fighting an orc, and I chop its head off, I have denied you the opportunity to deal with the orc by some other method. If my failure to chop the orc's head off causes us all to be buried in orc dung, I have denied you the opportunity to enact any plans you might have concocted that relied on our not being buried in orc dung. Or simply the satisfaction of killing the orc yourself. If my failure to pick the lock doesn't simply waste a few minutes but lands the party in a fight against a panther while creating noise that attracts other guards, the fallback plans laid for this stealth mission are worthless, and if you thought your plan was better you may feel justifiably annoyed with me.

I don't entirely agree with this! I'll touch on it later.

And those are consequences which do at least tie in logically to the events underway, whereas a hurried GM can easily end up suggesting what seems like a random event. "As Grignr rushes the orc, a rusting chandelier detaches from the ceiling and plummets towards them both!" "You are unable to convince the old man to tell you anything, and you suddenly realise your pocket has been picked!" "Your attempt to forge a letter of credit is interrupted by ninjas!"

In contrast, if we were resolving this in a system without Fail Forward, both failed rolls would typically result in nothing particular happening - and this leaves things open for someone else to try.

Organic outcomes are interesting

To put it another way, in a traditional RPG system, failure actually does have interesting consequences, but a lot of the time the interesting consequence is "another player has a go at resolving the situation, often trying a very different approach."

You can make a strong case that traditional systems actually produce the Fail Forward effect in a far more natural and organic way than systems that mandate consequences, but this is only apparent in retrospect looking at the way multiple players' actions and successes interact.

For my money, Fail Forward games place rather too much emphasis on consequences of failure rather than on the consequences of player action. If the PCs are going to wind up getting thrown in gaol after an altercation with an aristocrat, I'd far rather it happened because Brenda the Barbarian started a fight after Billy the Bard failed to resolve the encounter diplomatically than because the DM decided that "you get thrown in gaol" was an interesting consequence of Billy's failed Diplomacy roll.

Generally speaking, with something as simple and inherently task-resolutiony as an attack roll, I'd probably rank my preferences as "I hit", "I miss" and "I miss and something interestingly bad happens as a consequence". It gets trickier when you think about social rolls or rolls to interpret information, but even there I would prefer "I fail and a reasonable consequence ensues" to "something interestingly bad happens with no particular connection to your actions".

Dead ends

At this point I should perhaps come back to the dead end idea I mentioned at the start, because most of this post has been about keeping things interesting. I think this is the main point where Fail Forward genuinely helps out.

It's quite possible to hit a point in a game where players simply don't know how to make the game continue. This is a common complaint of investigative games, where players either run out of leads, haven't managed to put the pieces together, or blew some rolls and locked themselves out of information. However, it can also happen with certain physical challenges or "puzzle" situations, including things like geopolitical shenanigans.

You can very easily hit a dead end. Your only way out is apparently through the locked cell door, and you can't pick it. Your only lead is this neighbour you just insulted. You've tried every configuration of this weird science device but you botched your roll to make it teleport you home. The group sits scratching their heads and looking at the GM, who is wondering why they paid no attention to half of the clues that were laid out, abandoned their door-removing equipment before entering the complex, and both shot the teleport operator and set fire to the manual. Or maybe things just didn't quite go as expected. Or the scenario is not as robust as you hoped. Or it's just been a really long day.

In these cases, Fail Forward is one perfectly good way for the GM to recover momentum. Here, it's not about adding interest to a failed roll per se, but using that circumstance as an GMing opportunity to throw in a clue or hook, or just to shake up a situation where the players were stuck and frustrated.

Just being stuck is not necessarily enough. Sometimes you may want time to sit, talk and mull things over and aren't really worried about whether you're "progressing the scenario". But often you are.

So you fail to pick the lock, which the GM rules means you're still fumbling when the door opens and slams you in the face; the guards sigh, threaten the rest of the party, and one of them drags lockpicker off to the infirmary, where they'll have a new chance to escape, overhear some news, or palm vital equipment.

You get an earful from the neighbour, and after he slams the door, a couple of local kids pop round the corner to sympathise, ask for a fag and hint that they know something - because that guy's always loud and they've overheard some of his other complaining. If he doesn't like you, you must be alright.

Your bumbling attempts at operating the device instead trigger a completely different function, and now a coolant maintenance bot is being despatched to the teleporter. Maybe it's intelligent enough to talk to, or has a telecomms function so you can call for help, or a company datalink that'll give you access to that manual you destroyed.

Content is not the same as interest

So, that "not-succeeding is boring" business. I think when Fail Forward starts to fall apart is where it assumes that "explicit consequences" are always more interesting than "no consequences" and should be mechanically mandated, and I think that's often not the case. Quite frequently, "that thing you were trying to do just doesn't happen" actually ends up being a more interesting outcome than "your attempt to do that thing has dire consequences", and for many people it is certainly more satisfying and even interesting than "that thing you were trying to do just doesn't happen and, for reasons that are game-mechanically connected but have no in-character logic, this other bad thing happens." The "consequences for all!" mindset basically seems to tie into an assumption that more stuff is better.

This is simply not true. Too much stuff clutters up a game. To take a simple example, I have played board games where every single turn involved doing several things: you always rolled a die for movement, you always moved, you always drew a card based on the square you landed on and a consequence ensued.

And generally these games were so boring they should have been wood-eating beetles.

In the case of an RPG, the problem is that you are generally trying to Do Something, and that it is surprisingly easy for complications and consequences to clog up the works. One of the advantages of failure-means-whiffing systems is that they tend to also be simply and relatively fast. If a bad roll means nothing happens, you can simply move on to the next character.

If you need to wait for the GM to think up and then narrate a consequence, and make sure you understand its implications, and then the next player to act has to reconsider their intentions in the light of a potential major change to the situation, this can really slow down play. It can also lead to layers of Things To Deal With piling up on the game, and making it increasingly difficult to follow, or to decide what to do. Constant consequences can act like a Cat's Crade, making each move seem to only tangle the characters, story and even players more deeply in a web and paralysing the game, or making it seem like a stream of consciousness.

And that's what I'll be discussing next.

On failure, its outcomes and its implications: psychology

I feel like it's been ages since I was able to put together anything substantial for this blog. To be fair, nothing I write now is ever likely to compare to the insane (in relative terms) popularity of my post about animal companions...

And also to be fair, it's been a very busy few months and I'm ill. But still. I do enjoy writing for this blog and feeling like someone appreciated it.

This is going to be a miniseries about failure in RPGs, or at least in some RPGs. I fear it may be a bit dry and very rambly. Still, I present it for your delectation, or at least to keep you mildly diverted on the bus.

So a while ago I wrote some responses to a Walking Eye episode about Numenera. Very little of that is relevant right now, so let me pull out the bit which, randomly, sparked this week's post-game conversation. It is is in fact talking about Dungeon World, for some reason.

Numenera and some uncanny valleys

So a couple of us played another game of Numenera recently, and despite our initial hesitation and previous concerns, we had a good time.

We are actually implementing one of the rules I thought up: combining the two sets of XP rules by making it so that you have to spend XP on a reroll or a benefit, before it transfers to your "actually learned something" pool. The idea behind this was twofold: firstly to make sure everyone roughly balanced out, and secondly because I actually find that mechanic quite elegant. Your nebulous "experience" lets you achieve something within the game (like recovering from a near-failure, or gaining familiarity with an activity, etc.) and that learning experience builds towards you gaining a permanent benefit. Of course, the permanent thing you gain may not actually relate to what you learned, so... look, I tried.

Starting Small

We did once again run into the sense of vague disappointment when you look at the low-level abilities. This can happen a lot; it's very tempting to keep feeling like the next level will be the one where you're finally awesome and completely satisfied with your character, and it never is.* But examining the low-level Numenera powers does seem to show up that they are genuinely quite limited.

* I actually think this is an argument in favour of sometimes playing non-levelling characters (basically iconics) rather than always using levelling systems. In theory, you should be able to make a character who does what you want them to do, and then play without that vague shadow of dissatisfaction and anticipation distracting you from what you're doing now.

Niggling Nanos

For example, the Nano is the 'esoteric powers' type, and I tend to associate that with having an array of different mystical capabilities even at low level. I think most people do. Unless you're playing (or reading, or watching) in a setting where the majority of player characters do Weird Shit, I think the assumption is generally that the Weird Shit Doer is defined by breadth. Generally speaking, you have some sort of dynamic like: the Fighter, the Thief and the Mage. Or, the Brute, the Face and the Mystic. Or, the Merc, the Tech and the Psychic. Even in Warhammer 40K, where often the whole party do quite similar things professionally (especially Deathwatch), the psyker ends up as the one who not only interacts most with anything supernatural, but also has the broadest range of knowledge in general, and has access to several different psychic powers of which most can be used flexibly.

This is partly because magic-type stuff is very strongly associated with intellect in most games I've run across. That doesn't have to be the case (as I've discussed before). But because it is, magic-users and psychics are typically also very intelligent, and so typically know a lot of things. They may have access to skills other people don't, which essentially gives them new subsystems to play with. They may just get more Skill Points or whatever you're calling them, and so get to be accomplished at more types of task than others.

A further complication is that, because a spell (and I'm just going to stick with "spell" here) allows you to break the normal rules of the game and indeed of physics, each spell essentially creates a new subsystem for you. The spellcaster can now do A Thing that other characters cannot do; they have a new tool to apply to problems.

If you consider the D&D wizard - and I know that's not the only comparator, but it's the one staring you aggressively in the face - then a starting-level wizard from 3rd edition onward typically knows a handful of cantrips plus two or three individual spells. Moreover, some of those spells are quite specific (typically combat spells), but utility spells often leave a lot of room for creativity: you can do a huge amount with mage hand (minor telekinesis), prestidigitation (basically any minor magical trick), unseen servant and so on. You can play tricks, gaslight NPCs, distract monsters, drop objects from a height, impress NPCs, carefully arrange large numbers of small objects in complicated arrays to do things at a distance (set off a trap, injure an enemy, break down a door, pull a lever, press a button...), convince an NPC that food has been poisoned, convince an NPC that food hasn't been poisoned, pass objects between cages suspended in the air, retrieve something from a grating...

What the Nano can do is, in comparison, extremely limited and often very specific. The Hedge Magic esotery is roughly equivalent to prestidigitation, but there is no mage hand. The Push esotery allows you to shove a creature or object violently away from you, but specifically can't be used to push a lever or otherwise interact with the environment. The Scan esotery lets you scan a three-metre cube and determine the type of material and energy present, but it's relatively expensive and is an instantaneous thing, rather than a lingering ability. Other abilities can be used all the time, like Ward (permanent armour) or Onslaught (an attack which, for a Nano, is usually free).

But on reflection, I don't think there's anything specifically wrong with that. What can the other characters do? Well, the Glaive gets a selection of static bonuses to their combat abilities, and a couple of general physical boosts. The Jack gets a little from the Glaive and a little from the Nano. In other words, as far as I can see, the Nano isn't less interesting than the other two; it's just that the Nano isn't significantly more interesting (in terms of variety and scope), and I think we are generally trained to expect that.

The Nano begins with two of the following abilities. "Permanent" means always-on. "Without limit" means your Edge lets you cover the 1-point cost of an abilit without spending from your pool so you can do it as many times as you want under normal circumstances:

• a relatively powerful ranged attack*, without limit
• a long-ranged telekinetic shove**
• a permanent magic shield that improves your Armour by 1 - this is genuinely really good
• scanning a 3-metre cube and learning the mechanical Level of entities within it (which largely determines how dangerous they are) plus information about matter and energy composition
• performing a wide variety of small temporary magical effects, without limit

* Onslaught does 4 damage at range, or 2 damage ignoring armour but to Intellect (this is, in almost all cases, functionally equivalent to all other damage). This is as good as a Medium ranged weapon, or better if the target is heavily armoured. Medium ranged weapons are pretty expensive - ammo is particularly expensive. None of your "20 arrows for 1gp", this is 12 arrows for 5gp, which is as much as medium armour, most weapons, and so on. Getting free unlimited ranged attacks is genuinely valuable. You can even use it to destroy terrain and objects through patient attack, which isn't feasible for an archer.

**"short range" is the second distance category, about 50', which is really quite a long range to be able to forcibly shove an object from.

The Glaive begins with two of the following abilities:

• do less damage on a hit but slightly hamper the target for 1 round, without limit
• fight unarmed as though you have a medium weapon (a sword or whatever), permanently
• do +1 damage on a hit if using a pointy ranged weapon, without limit
• do +1 damage on a hit if using a sharp melee weapon, without limit
• a small defensive boost when not wearing armour

I would note that at low levels, much of the time, the first ability is strictly worse than not using it. For example, fighting a Level 2 creature with Armour 2 and 6hp, a Glaive with a medium weapon does 2 damage normally. Do you want to kill the not-particularly-powerful enemy in 6 rounds, while making it always slightly less likely that it causes you 2 damage, or do you want to kill it in 3 rounds and allow it half as many attacks?

Similarly, because Glaives can wear at least 2 points of armour without penalty, and this is quite a lot of armour, the last option is mostly there to allow for playing a character who's narratively unarmoured without a substantial effectiveness penalty.

The Jack begins with two of the following abilities:

• do +1 damage on a hit if using a slightly weird range of weapons, without limit
• do +1 damage on a hit if using a sharp melee weapon, without limit
• do +1 damage on a hit if using a pointy ranged weapon, without limit
• performing a wide variety of small temporary magical effects, without limit
• wear medium armour without it slowly sapping your life (same as the Glaive), permanently
• defend yourself slightly better, permanently
• a small defensive boost when not wearing armour, permanently

So... one of these choices actually gives you a new ability (Hedge Magic). Three of them increase damage, and they're just the same power tailored to different weapon choices. One is a small mechanical boost to defence. One essentially allows you to wear armour at all.* The other makes you tougher when not wearing armour.

* Wearing armour you are not Practiced in (which is not the same as training, you cannot Train in armour) causes you to lose points from your pools once per hour. This is directly equivalent to taking damage. If you wear heavy armour for 12 hours continuously, you will die. Strictly speaking, simply putting on a suit of armour and sitting still all day is fatal. Oh, and you incur a cap on your Speed Pool size until you take it off.

Examining that list, it looks to me as though the Nano is still relatively interesting. The Glaive has exactly one "new ability" and it's a minor mechanical combat trick with exactly one application; all the others are strict mechanical tweaks relating almost exclusively* to combat, and the only choice is whether you want free extra damage. The Jack has one of the Nano's options (Hedge Magic) that gives a new ability; all the others are strict mechanical tweaks relating almost exclusively to combat* and the only choice is whether you want free extra damage. The Nano has one permanent boost that relates mostly to combat*; one new attack form that is at least as good as most weapons and more flexible than any (although if you have it, using it or not is hardly a choice); one new ability to gather information that's of broad application; one new ability (Push) that's usable inside and outside combat, though its application is relatively restricted; and one new ability that can be of wide application depending on player creativity and GM flexibility.

* Defensive benefits are of course useful whenever you might take damage, so there's some occasional application in dangerous bits of exploration.

Of the five Nano options, I think three are genuinely reasonably interesting specific abilities to have, Ward is more of a narrative choice that you want to be tough, and Onslaught is kind of a no-brainer but not strictly obligatory. Knowing two of those (of which one is probably Onslaught) is a significant limitation compared to being a wizard in D&D, no doubt about it. Yet this isn't D&D.

There's a side issue as well, which is that Nanos are always trained in numenera. That is, they are trained at dealing with the magical-scientific weirdness of the setting, the weirdness so pervasive that the entire setting is named for it. If there's a weird machine, a forcefield, an artefact, a monolith, a robot, a cypher, a gadget, a woobly monster or anything like it, they can know stuff about it, and quite possibly interact with it, better than anyone else in the party. I know it's not a choice on the player's part, but I think that's a genuinely meaningful benefit in terms of doing the weird shit.

Ironically, although I started out focusing on the Nano, I think what this best demonstrates is that the Glaive feels dull in its choices. The fact that you have choices at all, but none of them do a great deal, is weirdly I think more disappointing than not having those choices and just getting a flat +1 boost to damage.

Frustrating Foci

To be honest, the bit of Numenera characters that seems coolest is the foci. You have options like: Bears a Halo of Fire, Commands Mental Powers, Controls Beasts, Controls Gravity, Employs Magnetism, Exists Partially Out of Phase, Fuses Flesh and Steel, Rides the Lightning, Talks to Machines and so on. Don't those sound cool?

Okay, some sound less cool. Carries a Quiver and Entertains are completely mundane things anyone can do - they just offer mechanical bonuses. Crafts Unique Objects is, like most things that hang on crafting systems, suited to a very specific playstyle. There's several fighting style ones that, in a game which I consider to be pretty forgiving of flavour, just don't quite seem necessary when I can just say I'm Fighting With Panache. And Works the Back Alleys is frankly unfortunate.

I have already written extensively about the baffling inclusion of Howls at the Moon.

Let's take a look at the actual abilities though.

• Bears a Halo of Fire lets you damage anyone who attacks you melee, as often as you want. Potent, but specific.
• Carries a Quiver lets you do more damage with a bow and spend from different pools. Useful, but very specific.
• Commands Mental Powers lets you talk to nearby allies via telepathy. Sometimes useful, fairly specific.
• Controls Beasts gives you a beast companion. Not very powerful, but moderately flexible.
• Controls Gravity lets you hover in the air and move slowly. Sometimes useful, but specific.
• Crafts Illusions lets you create a single illusion in a 3m cube within a few metres. Sometimes useful and moderately flexible.
• Crafts Unique Objects grants you training in two crafting skills. Usefulness and flexibility depends entirely on the campaign.
• Employs Magnetism lets you telekinetise a metal object for non-combat use. Useful and moderately flexible.
• Entertains gives a small passive bonus to recovery during rest. Slightly useful but very specific.
• Exists Partially Out of Phase lets you slowly move through solid matter. Useful but fairly specific.
• Explores Dark Places gives you training in several skills. Useful and fairly flexible.
• Fights with Panache lets you give a bonus to allies whenever you attack. Potent but specific.
• Focuses Mind over Matter gives you a slight defensive boost. Moderately useful but specific.
• Fuses Flesh and Steel gives you some slight permanent boosts. Moderately useful but specific.
• Howls at the Moon gives you an ability that, by RAW, you can't control and is far more likely to be a severe liability to the party and yourself than in any way useful.
• Hunts with Great Skill gives you some skill training. Moderately useful and fairly flexible.
• Leads gives you some skill training and you can always 'advise' another character to grant a bonus. Useful and fairly flexible, but liable to lead to some rather repetitive (and perhaps quite irritating) playstyles.
• Lives in the Wilderness grants some skill training. Sometimes useful but fairly specific.
• Masters Defence makes you slightly better at using a shield. Moderately useful but very specific.
• Masters Weaponry lets you do +1 damage with your favourite weapon. Useful but very specific.
• Murders lets you do sneak attacks for slightly more damage, and gives you stealth training. Useful but quite specific.
• Rages lets you... it's mechanicsy. Look, it makes you slightly better in combat, okay? Useful but fairly specific.
• Rides the Lightning lets you add a little electrical damage to an attack, and also recharge some devices. Useful but fairly specific.
• Talks to Machines lets you activate most types of machine at a distance. Useful and quite flexible.
• Wears a Sheen of Ice gives you armour and protection from cold. Useful but very specific.
• Wields Power with Precision gives you more points in your mental pool. Slightly useful but quite specific (depends what you do with them of course).
• Wields Two Weapons at Once lets you mechanically dual-wield two light weapons. Honestly not that useful for most characters most of the time, and very specific.
• Works Miracles lets you heal. Useful but very specific.
• Works the Back Alleys gives you training in a few thiefy skills. Somewhat useful but quite specific.

I think in some ways the best comparators here are the X-Men. No, really. Think about these splats. They're the same kind of one-phrase descriptors you'd slap on a mutant with one shtick.

Wears a Sheen of Ice feels a bit like Iceman. But you can't control ice, shape ice, craft barriers, walk through ice, walk on ice, or anything like that. You're just a bit armoured with ice.

Rides the Lightning just lets you shock people. You can't impress people with lighting powers, repel or absorb electrical attacks, control machines with a touch, stun robots, or actually ride any kind of lightning. You can recharge powerful magical items, if you have any.

Employs Magnetism lets you move one metal object around fairly slowly. I actually think this is the most interesting of the powers, which is why I chose it this time - it's genuinely quite flexible. You can't usually use it in combat, but there's a lot of possibilities in the exploration end of things. Technically you can also use it to fly by just standing on something metal.

Controls Gravity doesn't actually let you control gravity in any sense. You can just levitate a bit. You can't walk on walls, make heavy objects float to carry them around, pin enemies to the floor, make incoming arrows fly up into the sky, and so on.

So although the Foci sound very flavourful and fun, they are actually far more restricted in most cases than we tend to expect. I think they fall into an unfortunate uncanny valley: they sound like a Fate Aspect or a handwavy superpower or perhaps a Mage Arcana that lets you do a wide variety of thematically-appropriate stuff, but they are mechanically extremely traditional and more akin to a heavily-balanced D&D spell or special ability.

What Makes a Man?

People, most definitely including me, tend to have D&D in their heads when playing Numenera. This is entirely natural. It looks like D&D, it's by one of the designers of D&D, you basically play a fantasy adventurer like in D&D, you have a fighty one and a magicky one and a tricksy one like in D&D, you roll d20s like in D&D. But it is a genuinely different game that works in some genuinely different ways

D&D has Race + Class. Numenera has Descriptor + Type + Focus, and your Type is very much not mechanically equivalent to a D&D class.

Numenera is also keen to remind you that Cyphers are a major part of the game; you are supposed to use them regularly. I believe they play a bigger part in determining not only how powerful you are, but also what kinds of things you can do, than is the case of magic items in D&D. I am very sceptical as to whether this is a good thing; it depends on what the game wants to be, but it does appear to work against its stated position on what defines your character.

Specific vs. Generic

I think one of the deceptively-different facets of Numenera is that the weight of abilities falls differently to other games that it looks like. Most trad roleplaying games tend to emphasise the specific named rule-bending special abilities that your particular class, splat or species grants you.

A Numenera character is not equivalent to a 3rd+ edition D&D character in terms of named special abilities.

A Numenera character in some ways significantly surpasses a 3rd+ edition D&D character in terms of generic ability.

I think Numenera is less about applying special abilities than D&D is, and expects a more wide-ranging style of play. I think in a lot of cases, the special abilities are the equivalent of a TV character's shtick that they apply once per episode to significant effect, rather than something they do continually. Of course, you can use most special abilities multiple times per day, but you get the idea.

I think Numenera expects you to spend more time doing things that aren't specifically on your character sheet, because you are generically quite competent at absolutely everything. This requires quite a big change of mindset and I think it's something I struggle with, at least.

The most obvious example is that when we first played, we had a Glaive and a Nano and a Jack, and as the Nano I kept talking about how we weren't any good in combat. This is completely, 100%, factually untrue. We were exactly as good at hitting things with weapons as the Glaive was. The Glaive had some special abilities that gave damage bonuses or special riders in combat, and had a bigger pool of Might points to spend on attacking, and was allowed to wield Large weapons.

The latter is actually the major difference, because doing 6 damage minus armour is massively better than doing 2 or even 4 damage minus armour, considering most things have about 12hp. If the thing has armour, this can be the difference between "reliably hurting Thing" and "being mechanically unable to hurt Thing at all unless you roll a 19 or 20", which is like the difference between zero and infinity. If the thing has no armour, this is the difference between killing it in two hits and killing it in six hits.

I did some maths.

• A light weapon user can kill a Level 3 enemy (a lot of common threats) in 8 rounds, a level 4 in 14 rounds, and a level 5 in 25 rounds.
• A medium weapon user requires 4, 7 and 12 rounds respectively.
• A heavy weapon user requires 3, 5 and 9 rounds respectively.
• If the creature has Armour 2, a light weapon user cannot kill it by conventional attack, only through critical rolls, or finding a way to gain additional damage.
• The medium weapon user requires 8, 14 and 25 rounds respectively.
• The heavy weapon user requires 4, 7 and 12 rounds respectively.

It's almost impossible to overstate how important armour is in this game, and the impact of that on weapon choice. The crucial take-home is that Nanos absolutely require the Onslaught power, because (unless they choose to take a weapon they're not proficient with and suffer permanent penalties) it is the only way they can reliably harm an enemy with 2 points of armour, which is relatively common - many low-level enemies have 2 armour, though higher armour is thankfully relatively rare.

But still, we were entirely competent in combat. Compared to, say, a D&D wizard, who can easily be so ineffectual at attacking and so vulnerable to damage that it's genuinely a party liability for them to try and fight, a Nano is a very competent combatant.

But forget combat for a minute. This is one of the non-obvious subtleties of the Numenera system.

If you want to sweet-talk a Level 3 NPC, you need to roll a 9 on 1d20. Everyone is inherently equally good at doing this, even if they don't have an appropriate skill, and your chances of success are quite high. You can even spend points from your Intellect pool to drop that to, at worst, a 6+ on 1d20. In contrast, sweet-talking a guard in D&D would likely be a Moderate DC15 (roll 15+ on 1d20), meaning that only an actively charismatic PC is liable to succeed.

Similarly, everyone can climb cliffs, leap chasms, sneak!, tinker with machinery, or attempt to decode ancient writings. There are some characters who are actively skilled in those things, but the benefit is relatively small (a +3, basically, so +15%).

What this means is that a lot of the time in Numenera, any character can attempt to react to a situation in whatever way seems sensible, and their chances of succeeding are far higher than a D&D-attuned brain tends to estimate. And this is something that's genuinely difficult to adjust to. I know, because I ran into these credence issues from both directions when playing Deathwatch. I regularly wanted to apply skills when I had a remarkably small chance of succeeding despite expensive training, and I tended to underestimate the likely effectiveness of certain combat tactics.

So I think what Numenera expects from you is different, in a way I haven't quite worked out yet; and partly as a result, I think the named abilities on your character sheet tend to be either of limited use, or constant benefits that feel mechanically dull. I think you need to step high, wide and plentiful with gleeful exuberance, and expect that the system and the GM will support your far-reaching interpretation of what you can reasonable attempt. Of course I can do this. I'm a hero.

It reminds me in some ways of, for example, a lot of pulpy and action films. Of course the protagonist can fool the guard. Of course the protagonist can solve the riddle. Of course the protagonist can fly the plane. And so on.

I don't think these excuse Numenera from the fact that these abilities seem underwhelming. How a game makes you feel is important. I think this particularly in the light of its presentation: much is made of the idea that You Are An Adjective Noun Who Verbs, whereas mechanically you're very much more of a Verbing Noun who is a bit Adjectival, and I think if looked at holistically, you are actually An Adventurer Noun Who Verbs and Is a Bit Adjectival. That is to say, I think that the bulk of your effectiveness in Numenera actually comes from being a Player Character, with your Noun and Verb giving you a small package of abilities to colour your capabilities, and your Adjective being of very small benefit.

It's not what I'd do with an Adjective Noun who Verbs system, not at all. But I'd like to try and play it for the game that it is, not the one I'd expect it to be.

Tradition, Story and Numenera's Dilemmera

I'm getting the sense that Numenera suffers from a continuing tension over where it wants to fall on the loose spectrum between a Traditional RPG and a narrative game.

A very high proportion of abilities are actually just rather bland purely mechanical benefits: a flat bonus to this, or training (equivalent to a bonus) in that. I'm not sure why these are thought to make your character cooler. The names sound cool, but do they feel cool?

Mostly what I feel makes me cooler is Being Able to Do a Thing. It's being set apart from others in a qualitative or semi-qualitative fashion: being able to break the rules, or to interact in a way others can't, or to understand something others don't. Or, in a low-mechanics game, it's flavour and character and background. And I can't help wondering if, despite being very mechanicsy and trad-RPGish, Numenera would actually like you to focus on the latter and treat any mechanical benefits or new abilites as mere perks. But I think in that case, its approach of having specific and discrete powers works against that, at least by setting expectations.

On the one hand, Numenera offers you a template that looks a lot like trad-RPG Race + Class. Yet as I've argued, much of your mechanical competence comes from simply being a Player Character, which feels more storygamey.

On the one hand, Numenera offers you an array of foci that seem to be broad-brush archetypes of Stuff You Can Do, as I'd expect in a storygame - is "Covered in Fire" not an ideal shorthand for a flexible story-focused game? Yet mechanically, they offer you a single specific benefit, and often one which is a pure bonus with no additional flexibility or options to make your character feel more interest; something more typical of a Trad RPG.

One the one hand, Numenera seems to offer a Fighter, Mage, Rogue triad that defines your playstyle and capabilities, exactly what a Trad RPG tends to do. Yet the latter two, at least, are much more combat-ready than their Trad RPG niche generally permits, partly because they have far less in the way of niche abilities.

On the one hand, Numenera has specific templates that offer specific powers that do specific things, which feels very Trad. But on the other hand, you are encouraged to make up your own skill lists and to try things you have no particular training in, which feels very storygamey.

On the one hand, Numenera has no particular rules for combat: you can attempt anything, there's a flat target number for the enemy based on how "powerful" it is, and the GM simply determines what modifiers might apply and exactly what the outcome means. This feels like a loose, flexible narrative combat system from a storygame. Yet almost everything in the rulebook is a monster that hungers for your flesh and can't be negotiated with, and there's a simply but highly mechanical damage system that goes as far as having fixed damage amounts and subtractive armour, which means some characters literally can't hurt some others, which feels quite Trad to me.

On the one hand, Numenera has a quite specific setting with very highly-described locations, artefacts, monsters, individuals, political systems and even local economies. Yet it's also very handwavy about exactly how any of this is supposed to work as a functioning world, what anyone actually does with their time, what life is like for the people, and all the other details that allow you to run a simulationist-by-default campaign.

And of course, to top it all off, Monte Cook then goes and tells us that actually what's really important about the system is... the cyphers. The ten-a-penny one-shot minor magical items you roll up on random tables from looting enemies and ruins. He describes these as "more like abilities and less like gear", and goes so far as to name the entire game mechanical system The Cypher System. And the thing is... given how limited and specific most of the actual chosen character abilities are, quite often having a cypher that can do X will indeed be at least as powerful as anything you can do, and they do indeed grant a meaningful expansion of your capabilities. Sometimes a dramatic one. You can easily have one cypher that lets you climb sheer surfaces, one that offers remote viewing at unlimited distance, and one that translates any language. Bearing in mind you'll typically start play with three abilities, at least one of which is usually a flat bonus... that's a big increase in options.

The end result is that I never know which lens I should be looking at the game through: am I thinking like a mechanical Trad Gamer who knows exactly what I can do and how and when, or a narrative Storygamer who takes cues from general descriptions to collaboratively create a wonder-filled story of exploration and adventure? The truth probably lies somewhere in between, and it's hard to find.

The bottom line

I think Numenera is perhaps more sophisticated than I initially gave it credit for. Unfortunately, I think context will hinder it. You can only play a game in the context that exists. I don't think the expectations raised by all the games that have come before allow us to approach a game with classes and levels and specific special abilities and modifiers, like Numenera, with a mindset that what's really cool and important about my character is how I think about them. Particularly when the game iself tells me otherwise - tells me that I'm an Adjective Noun who Verbs.

When I think, at the core of it all, when all pretence is stripped away, I'm a guy walking across a desert of broken civilisations a billion years in the future, breathing nanotech and looking up at artificial stars, scavenging forgotten miracles for a few measly shins.

Lover, Fighter, Thief: a simple spying ruleset

So I accidentally started writing a James Bond-y, Zorro-y, Scarlet Pimpernel-y sort of game and I thought I'd inflict it on you. I'm now struggling to remember how it happened.

I was definitely inspired by an episode of Improvised Radio Theatre with Dice - specifically episode 26, at around 48 minutes in. There's a brief discussion of using flavour and quirks to distinguish characters.

I think that I very much like... the idea that you have things that define your character that are not just about how good you are at adventurey stuff. They are about, you're greedy, or you're fond of a drink, or you're particularly smooth with the ladies or whatever. Okay, in some games that's going to be especially relevant...

Being Mean About Rangers, part 3: Homebrewing

Constructing a Ranger

So having spent all this time arguing that the ranger doesn't need or deserve to be a class of its own, and indeed that insisting on it is probably deleterious to the game as a whole... what if I had to make a ranger class?

What, if anything, do I think can stand out as unique selling points for the ranger?

These must be:

• Sufficiently generic that they don't lock the ranger down into one character concept
• Sufficiently flexible that they are regularly relevant in most campaigns; which is to say, you will actually get to use these features during the game session
• Sufficiently related that they seem to form a coherent whole
• Sufficiently visible that they manifest in the narrative. Phrased much less pretentiously, I mean they should be something you actually notice happening, because unless you actually notice it in play, it doesn't feel like a real part of the story.

Being Mean About Rangers, part 2: Spelling Tests and Typecasting

Last time, as you may recall, I was pretty comprehensively dismissive of the 5e ranger's claims to be a class, based on what I argued to be a rag-tag collection of attributes and some shonky fluff-crunch joints. In particularly, I feel most of its non-combat abilities are overly dependent on the campaign, and the DM's preferred style, for relevance.

Mechanics

What about the mechanical end? Rogues and barbarians are to a non-trivial extent defined by a specific class mechanic (sneak attack and rage respectively). Of course, these are strongly tied into their fluff.

Unfortunately I feel like the ranger is, in a sense, self-sabotaging.

Being Mean About Rangers, part 1: Decline and Fail

So I've been thinking about the Ranger a lot, because it's one component of my multiclass character. I ran into problems at 4th level when I realised taking several more levels of ranger would not meaningfully affect the feel of my character. I'm not going to delve into that because it's as inside baseball as you can get. But I do want to talk about rangers.

Discussing things with Dan, the conclusion I came to was that the ranger is a bit of a problem.

The ranger has a core mechanic which actively discourages you from using a large proportion of its other capabilities. It has an unusual proportion of features dedicated to the "exploration pillar" in a way which makes its relevance uniquely vulnerable to the campaign and the whims of the DM. It lacks a strong and coherent archetype to explain what the class is all about. And in place of a strong defining thematic mechanic that supports a range of concepts, it has a hodgepodge of abilities that encourage playing a specific character.

...dammit. This is going to be controversial.

Hi, I'm Shimmin Beg, and I don't think the Ranger needs to be a class.

Random Political Shenanigans

So in a recent edition of Improvised Radio Theatre with Dice, Roger and Michael suggested the need for a Random Political Shenanigans Table (roughly 36:00). I was intrigued by this idea, and I think you could actually probably do it.

There's probably two very broad categories of approaches to something like this.

Focused approach

In the first approach, you have a table of specific shenanigans that occur. I think for this one to work, you need to have things quite well pinned-down. That's to say, I think you could probably do something like this for Ankh-Morpork, or for The Eight Queendoms, or for the governments of the various Outer Stars, where you have a very specific setting and tone in mind.

You'd probably also need either a broad-minded approach to the events that happen, or quite a lot of interpretation to make them better fit the context.

Prodecural politics

The second approach, and the one I'm going to actually dabble in, is something more like (to borrow from Shamus Young) procedurally-generated politics. That is to say, rather than a table of specific events to roll on, this would be a set of rules for generating events.

The thing here is that you'd be tracking various variables of the situation, and then deriving shenanigans based on those variables.