Frankenstein's game

Now that I've ranted about my misadventures in finding or making One True game engine, I feel compelled to compile game sub-systems I would want in any ideal game systems. And yes, I said 'systems' because I accept there's no such thing as One True way to play.

I'll break these down into categories and detail them, as well as talk about game systems that either inspired or embody the idea.

Now I am doing this not because I'm trying to find/construct One True system again. But to maybe look at what I really like about given games and consider how to make them add-ons to existing systems. Take what works from game B, to enhance what game A lacks when game A is otherwise the ideal system for the story I'm running.

World building is dynamic and open to input

Not all games are open to worldbuilding, but many are to a greater or lesser degree. This is about those later games. Ideally, the GM sets out with a concept and scope and the players help flesh out some details. The majority of this should happen before people start generating characters and playing but there's also often a need mid-game to invent details. I consider this an extension of the "Say Yes" principle of gaming and storytelling.

• MICROSCOPE is entirely about world-building and in theory it could be used in conjunction with another game system when the players want to deep dive into a particular Scene to see what transpires. 
• FATE supports this to a degree, but not mechanically. 
• BURNING WHEEL (and TORCHBEARERS and BURNING EMPIRES) actively endorse this and support this with it's -Wise type skills, as well as it's Circle mechanics for finding allies and assets (often at a cost). I love Circles, because it's actually a hidden vehicle for drama and side-stories and quests (more about this later).

Character creation is tied to their concept and history

Character creation should allow for concept-driven choices that assemble the character at the point play begins. While interesting characters can come out of random character creation systems (I'm looking at you, Little Black Box Traveller), it's more likely to create something you're uninterested or unable to play.

• RISK does this with it's Background choices, but you're limited to two. However, they're all fairly balanced with each other, and creating new ones is easy.
• BURNING WHEEL/EMPIRES has wonderfully fleshed out Stock/Lifepath systems, but generating new ones isn't easy. They're complex and intricate, but don't have to be 'balanced' because BW isn't that kind of game.
• STAR TREK ADVENTURES and INFINITY also have their own lifepath systems; STA is more concept- and choice- driven, while INFINITY is mostly random but gives you a fixed number of opportunities to make crucial choices (I'm not a fan of this latter example, really).

Fractal and scaleable mechanics 

By Fractal I mean the same methods of describing something (a person, a place, a thing) work the same: by a combination of Stats, Traits, Skills, Levels, etc.  Want to play an entire nation or culture? A piloted giant robot? A person? How do you qualify and quantify the items that person has? Fractal mechanics means that at all levels people, places and things fundamentally work and are detailed in the same way. Good Fractal mechanics should allow for representing something by a single value, a full spread of details, and some level in between.

By Scaleable I mean the mechanics work the same from micro to macro scale of action. When everything is Fractal, then things should easily be Scaleable as well, but the reverse doesn't necessarily have to be true.

• FATE introduced me to the concept of a fractal-style of stating things. 
• The later SHADOWRUN edition let you either describe an electronic device with a flat rating, or a full spectrum of statistics.
• FUSION (Mekton and Cyberpunk) does scaling great; giant robots and starships do battle with the same dice mechanics and options that people do with only minor differences. The MTS scaling mechanics are awesome.
• TURK had the concept of Primary, Secondary and Tertiary inputs to a dice roll: Primary sources determined the base number of dice you got to throw and keep, Secondary sources added unkept dice to the pool and Tertiary sources add a flat bonus to the result. The GM would determine what would count as Primary, Secondary and Tertiary inputs and this created a effect of diminishing returns to limit munchkinism and min-maxing.  

Story-driven / Story-driving mechanics 

This is the dividing line between simulationist-gaming and storytelling games. I won't waste more words on nitpicking about simulationist games, but I will say game mechanics should allow for elements of random effects but ultimately the decisions of how and what happens should come down to the players and GM.

This is also about crunch in gaming and by crunch I mean: overly complex, layered mechanics or rolls/test/checks that can be encapsulated in a single action. For example: "Roll to hit, roll to penetrate, roll damage, roll trauma, roll knockdown, etc..." Burning Wheel has a rule called 'Let it ride' that basically said: neither players or GM's can keep asking for additional tests when the first test answers the question of 'did they/didn't they'. If the intent of the test is "sneak into the castle" you don't demand a test to cross the moat, then another to scale the wall, then another to avoid patrols, and so on.

My favorite example simulationist games affecting 'roleplayability' are settings like BattleTech or WH40k. The rules as written are too lethal, too deterministic, to really justify investing much in any character. In BT, all it takes is a 12 on 2d6 and half the weapons in the game can decapitate your Mech and kill your pilot. Whee.

• RISK really changed my perspective on what you actually do with rolling all those funny polyhedral objects and doing maths; I love the concept of 'narrative currency' that lets players choose where and how to affect the story in discreet mechanical ways. I'll probably have to write something separately about Narrative Currency systems.
• FORGED IN THE DARK's mechanics are a framework for outlining dramatic moments while leaving the context and color of those moments entirely open to color.
• I mentioned loving BURNING WHEEL's Circles mechanics and here's why: Rather than forcing characters to buy specific 'contacts' ahead of time (and then never having the opportunity to use them in actual play), Circles allows anyone to say "I think I know a guy..." and then roll to determine how effective that statement is. Circles is one of those mechanics where failure on a Circles -test is more fun than succeeding, especially when you apply the principles of "Yes and..." or "Yes but...". Yes, you know a guy who can help, but he's currently mad as hell at you. Yes you learn that someone knows what you need to know, but they're currently imprisoned. What are you going to do to get what you need, and what are you going to owe them when all is said and done?

Mini game systems

I'm included this is a category because it's not a must-have but should be talked about. By mini-games I mean where there are subsets of game systems or mechanics for specific activities. Video games do this a lot for things like hacking, research, dialog and so on. Ideally the core mechanics should all be the same (how you roll dice, determine success/failure, etc), but build upon that framework with almost puzzle-like structures for solving conflicts or challenge.

• BURNING WHEEL is a great example of this with it's 'Duel of Wits,' 'Range and Cover' and 'Fight!' sub-systems. Burning Empires added 'Firefight' and 'Infestation' mini-games.
• Lots of game systems have mini-games for handling research, construction and other long-term activities. Too many to list here. Burning Wheel also consistently deployed a rock-paper-scissors matrix for choices characters made in conflict. Mouse Guard created the simplest version of this with only four Actions to consider: Attack, Defense, Maneuver or Feint, and let that work for arguments, combat, exploration, anything.
• FORGED IN THE DARK has 'clocks' for tracking progress on anything that can't be resolved in a single test/action/scene. Clocks tick up and down, representing progress or time running out, as needed.
• ROLL AND KEEP, original 7thSea specifically, had a structured way of learning new Fencing and Sorcery mastery abilities based on how you mastered the choice Maneuvers of that school/magic. That was a framework I wanted to keep and make part of TURK.

Character Advancement/Growth

...

• BURNING WHEEL counted tests against your stats and skills, and when you'd recorded enough marks, that skill or stat would increase automatically. It's an organic and realistic method, but also required book keeping. The Mouse Guard variant had the simplest and most streamlined way of calculating this: you needed a number of successes equal to your current rating, and a number of failures equal to one less than your rating. This encourages characters seeking to improve their abilities to strive to push their limits because you learned from failure and that's a good lesson.
• FUSION (at least in Mekton and CP2020 editions) had both marks against Skills you tested, and general IP (Improvement Points) to spend as you wish. Advancing Stats and gaining new Advantages and the like weren't addressed until FUSION came about, and then it was handled by giving more of the same points you used to create your character with to spend on what you wanted to improve.
• D20 games with Leveling systems makes for a quick and easy way to evaluate character experience and how challenging a given combat might be, but Level games always seem to break down logically when everything a character does gets better just because of a combat experience ("Wait, I killed that Orc... and now I'm better at Cooking?") Some games that have Leveling-type mechanics also separate out combat from non-combat, but really, how is that different from renaming 'classes' as 'skills'?
• FORGED IN THE DARK games track experience both for specific skills you use, and a general pool that you can spend as you wish. Skills get an XP whenever you test them under in 'desperate' tests (regardless of success or failure). General XP rewards are tied directly to character type, background and goals. Whenever a 'track' fills up, something advances.

Minimal GM overhead

Part of the reason an ideal system should be Fractal is so that the GM doesn't have to do the same level of record keeping that players do for their characters but for every other character, monster, place or thing in the game. The GM can abstract what isn't as important, and focus on what does need a high level of detail, and (hopefully) switch between the two as needed.

• CYPHER is the best example of this: The GM sets Levels for things, and players make all the rolls (roll to influence, hit, dodge, resist, etc...).
• In RISK, you can frame any Risk in terms of Consequences and Opportunities, and include things like thresholds and timing limitations. Brutes are dirt-simple, and Villains can have as little or as much detail as you like. I like how RISK lets you setup a challenge to players almost like a puzzle to solve, and it's up to them to generate the Raises and apply them to solve it.

????

No One True Game Engine

No, this isn't a No True Scotsman argument. This is mostly a self-directed rant.

I have this problem where I keep trying to find/invent the 'one true' game engine to play all the games/settings I want to experience or run. Sadly, this is a bad habit that I gotta kick myself off.

I wanted to find that mythical One Game Engine with TURK (True Universal Roll-and-Keep), and I eventually gave up on the project because Roll n Keep can't do everything I wanted. I've tried again and again to cherry-pick my favorite mechanics from various systems and Frankenstein them together into something that does everything I want and nothing I don't. What I left off with at TURK was a complex and incomplete 'framework' that would need interpreting with every setting I wanted to use it in. Not only would you need a 'CORE' book, but a 'WORLD' book to tell you how to apply the Core rules to each setting. It got crunchy, which was one of the things I was trying to avoid.

Oh hubris, your aftertaste is so bitter.

The humbling truth is: Game engines/systems are tailored to produce their desired effects (whelp, at least modern games systems do. There was a time when everything had six stats, XP and levels and you rolled a d20 in combat and usually percentile dice for everything else...)

In no particular order:

RISK, as in the 7th Sea 2nd Edition, and the forthcoming 7th Sea: Khitai game, has a mechanical focus on using Raises generated by dice rolls as your narrative currency. Players and GM's then spend this currency to decide what their focus on the story details will be. I love some of the ideas in this system; it's a streamlined and evolved version of the original Roll and Keep that inspired me to write TURK in the first place.

D&D, especially 5th Edition, is great at high fantasy storytelling with an emphasis on exploration, combat and character power growth from those activities. Yes, out of the box it doesn't support character emotional and relationship growth, but there's nothing stopping a good GM from making pathos an essential driving force of a story. You don't need mechanics to do that.

Mekton and the FUSION engine are great at the grognardy-number-crunching-mecha-design and smashing stories. The Mekton Technical System is still my favorite because it focused on relative design choices, very flexible scaling and adaptability with a focus on anime physics and storytelling. The only thing holding it back is just how crunchy it gets with character design and advancement (nine primary stats and a variable number of derived stats?!?) and actual mecha combat could get really slow as well.

GURPS started as a wonderfully 'universal' system and was heavily focused on character over everything else. It suffered, i think, from trying to point-balance and option everything possible in character creation. Some of the later editions had VOLUMES published about character options. And don't get me started about GURPS Vehicles.
Okay just one gripe and then moving on: do I really, REALLY need to worry about the weight of the fuzzy dice I hang in my tricked out muscle car? Not to mention calculating the square surface area of the radio so I can determine how much damage it can take? (Fire, Fusion and Steel for Traveller TNE had the same problem.)

Burning Wheel is all about character drama in a gritty and hard way. It encourages player buy-in and adding to the game world and supports that mechanically.

FATE is fantastically abstract, generic and diverse in all the settings it's been used in, but that's also it's weakness. It depends on players and GM's having a firm and agile grip on how to use FATE.

2d20, specifically Star Trek Adventures, does a fine job of capturing the feel of principle-driven science-fiction storytelling. the Momentum mechanic makes intra-character cooperation and collaboration easy. The Infinity setting is just bonkers with the crunchy details that STA lacks.

Eclipse Phase, while a percentile system, does a fabulous job of showing how a game engine can reflect the setting; the separation of ego and morph and how they work together is a wonderful metaphoric mirror to the ideas behind a transhuman/posthumanist setting.

Cypher is fascinating for both it's innovation and return to really old-school themes involving bizarre encounters and devices. It DOES do interesting things with putting all rolls on the player's side of the table and making the GM's management of other characters easier and nominally having an open system for any kind of world-building and setting-making. See here for a separate post about other things I've taken away from my reading of the Cypher system.

Blades in the Dark and Scum and Villainy -both Forged In The Dark games- focus on storytelling with imaginative yet open-to-interpretation universes. This system sets up mechanical frameworks that quickly establish qualitative results that imaginative GMs and Players can color however they wish.

I really do need to embrace the wonderful variety of game systems out there.
Hell, I spend enough on collecting new and interesting games, I should bloody well use them!

Except percentile systems. To hell with them. They're too granular and fiddly and imply arbitrary limitations of capacity and ability. That and I just have terrible luck with them. (Ask me about my RoleMaster experience sometime and buy me a beer, and I'll spin you a yarn about the root of my antagonism towards %-dice based engines.)

Reverting to type

So this last weekend I played in a one-shot game of Scum and Villainy, and it made we aware of something about myself and the other players in the group. We each had a 'type' of character we tend to play, and I especially will revert to that type if I am just learning a system or settings. Characters of my 'type' are stoic, humble protectors of others. In D&D I'm usually the Paladin. The characters I play are an exaggeration of whom I strive to be.

Roleplaying is a medium that encourages, even demands sometimes, pushing boundaries and being someone other than 'yourself'. And what I observed is that people tend to play what they want to be, what they can't always be in real life. Some players are loud and sarcastic and absurdist, because they can't be that way around most people. Some are impulsive, independent and not very collaborative with their fellow players. Because they can't in real life? (yes, I'm making an assumption here, but its one based on observations)

I'm beginning to feel typecast. I am wondering how do I break out of the comfort zone mold I've made for myself of a hobby that means so much to me?

I've picked up a copy of Improv for Gamers, also from Evil Hat. We'll have to see if it has anything I can put to use. LARPing is a fascinating game form in my mind; one I am not at all certain I could do properly.

More thoughts on this to come...

Thoughts on GEAR in RISK-engine games

Luth and i recently put out a PDF on DTRPG adding gear and supplies to 7thSea 2e but I'm still thinking about _stuff_ in games, particularly high-tech games were equipment and tools are important. However, rather than having to deal with an infinite variety of _things_ and their myriad details to track, both as a GM and as a player, I'd like to think about how to abstract that but still allow for mechanical benefits.

So I'm thinking about characters having dice pools, which characters can burn dice from during RISKS/Conflicts to add to their rolls. These dice are 'expended' because they represent one-use exploits, recharging items, or expendable goods that can have impact but limited number of uses.

Hacker exploits, for example, generally work once then the target system(s) react and cut off that vector.

Tactical combat assets represent grenades, deployable sensors and/or noisemakers, ablative armors, etc.

Other 'Pools' can exist, much like the Resources as in Larder, Armory and Stash, but they'd be smaller and more portable than as detailed in that document.

Questions that come to mind:
1. What's a resonable 'cap' for characters to have at any one time? I'm thinking Skill rank, with a bonus if you have the right Advantage. ('Ace Hacker' grants +2 dice to Hacking pool)

2. How often do these pools reset? Depends on the pool: could be after the Risk, after the Scene, after an Adventure, or after another Risk is undertaken to acquire/update/re-stock (this would be like in Larder, Armory and Stash.

Thoughts?

I am a(n) Adjective Noun who Verbs

The Cypher system likes to summarize (or initialize?) character creation with a sentence in the structure of: "I am a(n) Adjective Noun who Verbs" and there's something sublimely cleaver about that. Cypher The choices then goes on to assign stats, powers and situational bonuses (also tied to the experience level of the character) to the character based on the choices you make when you choose your Descriptor (Adjective), Type (Noun) and Focus (Verb). The words themselves don't really indicate anything after that; they're just identifiers for the choices made. On the one hand, you know that every character with the ‘Adroit’ Adjective is capable of; On the other hand, you’re limited to the choices that have been defined with stats, skills and modifiers.

I like the idea of decoupling those defined modifiers for the most part, and return to just relying on the context of your Adjective, Noun and Verb choice. I feel this could work very well in a FATE kind of way where Aspects have mechanical benefits but are totally open to creation and interpreting in context.

We could even take this concept one layer deeper (what FATE refers to as the ‘fractal’) and consider how the same descriptive phrasing could be applied to not only player characters, but NPCs, objects and even places.

Consider:

• A Person who is: a(n) (Adjective) (Noun) who (Verbs)
• An Object that is: a(n) (Adjective) (Noun) with/that (Verbs)
• A Place that is: a(n) (Adjective) (Noun) that (Verbs)

Nouns define the quintessential function of the person, place or thing. For people, it’s their root career, story purpose, ‘class’, etc. For things it should encapsulate the general use, purpose and effectiveness of that type of thing. All Rifles fundamentally are the same; a firearm that requires two hands to hold and brace properly for use, etc. In a game with generic versions of a class of weapon or tool, all types of the same Noun start with the same base stats/values.

E.g. all pistols in 1st edition 7thSea were 4k2 weapons. All heavy melee weapons were 3k3, adding Brawn to the number of dice thrown. All longswords in D&D do d8 damage, and so on.

Adjectives are Enhancers which are boons when they are relevant to the situation, and added complications when the are inappropriate to the context of use.  (In RISK games, I’d adjudicate this as a free Raise when appropriate, and at least one Raise of Complication if inappropriate.) Against an opponent with the same or opposing Adjective, the bonuses cancel out.

A sniper who is forced into close-combat with a melee attacker tries to shoot their opponent with their longarm. The GM adjudicates the ‘sniper’ Adjective of their weapon means they have to overcome a 2-Raise Complication to not damage or loose grip on their weapon during the melee.

Verbs are Enablers and augment base abilities with additional or unusual functionality. For ‘magic’ items, this is where the special and magical ability is defined (e.g a longsword that drains life force). For modular and modified technology items, this is the added features/functions of the modifications (e.g. an Assault Rifle with an underslung grenade launcher; the grenade launcher is the added functionality.)

A soldier armed with an Assault Rifle with Grenade Launcher, is attacking a Brute Squad. The GM adjudicates that the Verb on the weapon lets them take out their Weapons skill rank in Brutes for a single Raise. BOOM.

Not everything needs Adjectives and Verbs in their descriptions, but everything must have a Noun. +Adjectives should be common, while +Verbs represent rare, unique and especially important or powerful people/places/things.

Another thought: could this system work with skills or other character traits? Let the (Adjective) be the relative level of experience/ability, the (Noun) be the broad skill, and let any (Verb) represent specializations or extra effects the character has associated with that Skill.

I’m an Expert Hacker.
I’m a Novice Archaeologist who Finds Lost Things.
They’re an Experienced Marksman who Dual Wields.

Thoughts?