The Byzantine Dice of Torg

I played in a session of the new edition of Torg last night (well, a few nights ago now, but it was last night when I wrote the first 2000 words that follow). It was fun, but, man, are the die rolls complicated and weird in this RPG. I'm really glad we were playing over Roll20, because I wouldn't want to try to engage with the core mechanic of Torg without die-rolling software.

To use a skill in Torg, you: Start with your Attribute value, add your skill value,  and add any miscellaneous modifiers (like +4 for an All-Out Attack that leaves you Very Vulnerable afterwards).

So far, so good, it's not sounding any more complicated than d20 games.

Now you roll a d20, but instead of adding your roll to the total above, instead you look at a chart that converts your 1d20 roll into a Bonus from -10 to +7.
 

Okay, that's a little weird. Not horrible, but already a tiny bit clunky and hard to intuit what your average roll will actually be. At first, I thought the chart was flattening the roll by making the average roll more common... but on studying the math of the chart, I quickly realized it doesn't do that at all.

Things are going to get a whole lot stranger from here on out.

If your die roll was a 10 or a 20, it "explodes", giving you another die to roll, which can also explode if it rolls a 10 or 20. So it's a system with the potential for arbitrarily large successes, big memorable die rolls where you out-perform anyone's expectations. This is technically infinitely open-ended, but the progression of the resulting modifier slows down once you go further up the chart than a 20. So while a natural roll of 20 is +7 bonus, a total of 50 (which requires exploding at least twice to accomplish) is just +13.

Except, you can't actually roll a 20, because the natural 20 would explode, as would any roll of 50 (20+20+10 explodes for a 4th die, for example). So as near as I can tell, the entry for the +7 result (which only happens on a 20) is almost never needed, and the entry for the +13 result actually happens on 46-49, not 46-50 as the chart indicates. For that matter, the chart says a of 9 or 10 roll is a -1 bonus, but you can't normally actually roll the 10, so that's also somewhat misleading.  Well, you can roll a 20, 30, 50, etc, but only if you've got a bonus die from an Ups or Possibility (both of which are described below). Rolling an exact 10 is even harder to do (and requires an Ups).

So what is the actual average roll? The math is kind of tricky, but I made a big spreadsheet to figure it out.  The average rolled bonus is... -0.26127955.  Yep, on average, you'll roll slightly less than your Attribute+Skill combination. Which is counter-intuitive, because the potential for big memorable high-value rolls makes you expect that you ought to be averaging rather higher than your stats. That is not the case at all.

An aside about approximations: I only calculated rolls of 80 or less, so I'm probably low-balling it by a few one-thousandths of a percent. Rolling above an 80 requires rolling a "20" four times in a row, or a "10" eight times in a row, or some combination splitting the difference like 10-20-10-10-20-10. The odds of scoring above an 80 are less than 1 in 10,000, so I figure it's probably safe to round off at that point. Calculating it only to rolls of 70 or less returned an average of -0.26271358, a variation of only one one-thousandth of a point of bonus, and I'm pretty sure the math runs out to diminishing returns even as you approach infinity.

Yes, you could technically roll a one-million Bonus, but if you ever did the game would grind to a halt of multi-hour die-rolls and a re-enactment straight out of Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen, and I don't feel I need to extrapolate the math out that far, either, just for the sake of accuracy.

So at that point, I'm already really glad that Roll20 has a die-rolling function that calculates it all in the blink of an eye. In our session, we had two rolls that were above 60. While rolling a d20 three to five times and counting up the math out loud would have been dramatic and awesome, it's also likely to feel weirdly clunky, and kinda suspicious. Like, if the same person rolled a 61+ twice in the same session, as GM I'd start wanting a closer look at his dice. Maybe I'm just an untrusting jerk, though. Roll20 eliminates the chance of dice-deception, so I didn't have to worry about it.

So the next question that springs to mind is how often you succeed at the standard difficulty. For that we need to know a bit about Character Creation. Characters are made with a point-buy method, and your point budget matches an average Attribute of 8. You're given 16 skill points to spend, with an initial cap of 3 in any skill. In my limited experience from making a single character, it seems like there are more than 8 skills that you'll want on any given character (I ended up putting points in 10 skills for my fairly simple fighter-y Edeinos character, because it would have taken 13 different skills to represent the more ranger-y concept I'd wanted), so you're almost certainly going to have a 2 or less in any skill that's not the centerpiece of your character. 8+2=10, and the Standard Difficulty listed as default is a 10, and the average roll reduces your Total, so you can expect to have a less than 50% chance to succeed at a random task. You will, of course, likely focus your character, getting an 11 or so in your best attribute, brought up to a 14 by the skill bonus. This comes at the cost of most likely having a 6 on some attribute (4 out of 5 PCs last night had a 6 in Charisma, and my character had two 6s and a 7 to afford his 10 Dex and 11 Str), so there are definitely going to be critical rolls that face a very low chance of success, and those will pop up from time to time regardless of your efforts to avoid them (unless you give your PC an 8 in all 5 stats and spread your skill points thin, too). Succeeding at an average Difficulty with a 6 attribute and no skill requires rolling a 17 or higher (or an exploding 10 followed by a 7 or higher) on the die, which works a 23.5% chance of success.

That is assuming that Difficulty 10 is the norm. While it is the stated Standard Difficulty, there's plenty of reason to expect that the actual Difficulty you're shooting at is going to vary from that quite often. Instead of a single Armor Class and maybe a few kinds of Saving Throw, each character has about 10 different defensive values calculated from their other stats, and the potential to take an Active Defense Action to raise the difficulty from an attack.

But it gets even weirder and more elaborate from there, as Torg has degrees of success, so it's not just hit or miss, succeed or fail. It's failure vs standard success vs good success vs outstanding success, with increasing degrees of success adding on extra beneficial results. Contrast this with D&D. In D&D, once I know the enemy's AC is 15, if I roll high I don't have to do any math and can skip straight to damage. In Torg, even if I know the enemy Melee Defense is 12, and I just rolled a 18, I still have to look at the chart, find that 18 = +5 bonus, add that to my 10 Dexterity and 3 Unarmed skill to know my total post-bonus is 18, then subtract his Defense of 12 to get 6 and know that I have a Good-ranked hit, which will do bonus damage. Again, with Roll20's lovely die-roller and the output from the automated character sheets this is pretty painless, but I imagine all that math would murder the pacing of a face-to-face game.

Torg also gives you a lot of ways to reroll or add a die, and all of those rerolls have special rules of their own. Before we can discuss these rerolls, however, we need to explore the Mishap rule, which can shut down your rerolls completely. Certain types of Actions are prone to Mishaps. These are generally high-risk Actions like full-auto gunfire, and spellcasting. These Actions will trigger a Mishap if the first die rolled is a "1", and some Actions may have a higher Mishap range (up to a 4 on the die in some cases). Mishaps are automatic failures (regardless of stats) that can't be rerolled, and they usually also trigger some sort of critical fumble consequence. None of my Actions were Mishap-applicable last night, but I was involved in a shooting-into-a-Melee situation, which we will discuss later, because it interacts very strangely with some of the reroll options.

One of the reroll options my character had available was that I was able to make "Favored" rolls in melee and stealth. During character creation, I read this sort of like having Advantage in D&D, but I was very wrong, as functionally it's quite different and not nearly as strong. Favored is a re-roll, rather than rolling twice and taking the better result. Since more than half the rolls in Torg have a negative "Bonus" (and the average Bonus is negative as well), Favored rolls are somewhat unlikely to produce a good result. Let's say I roll a 13, for a meager Bonus of +1. If I invoke my Favored ability, I will improve my total only 34% of the time. I will break even 10.5%, and I have a 55.5% chance of actually hurting my results. So invoking my Favored reroll is usually a poor choice in that situation.

So it seems like Favored is mostly useful to prevent really bad results, but you'll recall that a Mishap cannot be re-rolled, so for some types of die rolls, Favored doesn't actually mitigate the worst results, either. Which more or less means that Favored is only useful if the GM is very transparent about the Difficulty Numbers. Thankfully, page 260 of the Torg Eternity rules specify that the GM should be very forthcoming with difficulties. I didn't realize that last night, and as a result I felt like my Favored abilities were actually pretty useless. After all, I'm only willing to risk using Favored to reroll a +1 roll if I'm pretty certain that the +1 is a failure.

Having read the rulebook since last night, I now know that I can actually quiz the GM about the monster's stats. That seems weird to me, as it is very gamist and spoils some of the mystery that most RPGs provide by default. That said, I spent both of the two Perks you get in character creation to buy Favored status on die rolls, so if I don't want to feel like I wasted my choices, I'm going to have to invoke page 260 a lot (even if it does feel a little weird to me to do so). Honestly, having such non-intuitive math at the core of the game probably means you do have to be forthcoming with mechanics and target numbers if you want the players to ever be able to make the intelligent decisions that skilled characters should be making in-universe. The math is so fiddly, you can't really be sure your gut instincts are going to be probabilistically accurate.

Let's move on to the next type of reroll: The Up. Ups are really more of a bonus die than a reroll. They are triggered by certain cards, and generally affect the entire party of Heroes for a round.

Yep, eagle-eyed viewer, you read that right. We are 1,800 words into a discussion of the complicated mechanics of Torg Eternity, and I am just now making my first mention of any of the three major card-based mechanics in the system. Man, this game is weird.

Ups add a second die to every roll. These are combined into a single die roll value, but the rules say the second die is added after the first roll, probably to preserve the chance of a Mishap. Either or both dice may explode. So what do Ups do to the success rate? That math makes my previous calculations look like child's play. After a lot of number crunching, I think it works out to the average roll with an Ups being about +6.185. The doubled opportunity for exploding dice really gives it a shot in the arm, pushing it above the value of simply being double the roll. Going from -0.26 to +6.2 is a very strong swing in the PCs favor.

Again, I didn't take the math out terribly far (nothing above a roll of a 63 in this case, but it still took a hell of a lot more number-crunching to get that far than it did to get to 80 on a normal roll), so if anything I'm possibly underestimating the results by possibly as much as a few one-hundredths of a point.

Ups are rare, but I don't have ready access to the cards that trigger them, so I'm not sure how rare. When they kick in they often (maybe always?) affect the rolls of the entire side. So GMs need to be aware that when the card comes up that gives the PCs all Ups, they will crush the opposition mightily that round, and it may end your fight scene (and your major villain) earlier than expected.

The rules implied this Ups only appears on cards that help the Heroes, but I don't have the cards in front of me to be certain of that.  In the unlikely event that a card exists that gives Ups to all NPCs, the GM would likewise need to be prepared for the TPK that would likely cause. That threat of a TPK makes me suspect that bad-guy across-the-board Ups cards probably don't exist. For the most part, the cards exist to make the PCs look like badasses, not to randomly end your campaign anti-climactically. Or at least, that's the impression I get from the percentage of the cards that I have seen after 1 session of play.

The final, and probably most common, form of reroll is spending Possibilities. These are like Bennies in Savage Worlds or like Drama Dice in 7th Sea. You spend one to roll an extra die and add it to your total, and what's more, if the extra die rolls less than a 10, you get to count it as a 10. So in that way, it's even better than an Ups. The thing about the minimum value of a 10 is kind of crazy in that it is super good if your original roll was pretty awful, and only provides a very modest bump if your original roll was strong. It's a weird system, but kind of beautiful.

Let's say you have a combined attribute plus skill of 12. You rolled a 2 on your first die, resulting in a -8 "Bonus", so your final Action Total is a 4, which is almost always going to fail at anything. You spend a Possibility and roll poorly, so you get the minimum bump of turning your 2 into a 12. The Bonus on a 12 is +0, bringing your final Action Total up to a 12, so you've gone from a guaranteed failure to what is very likely a success.

Now let's say the same character rolls a 19 on your first die instead, resulting in a +6 Bonus, for a final Action Total of 18. You spend a Possibility and roll poorly, so you get the minimum bump of turning your 19 into a 29. The Bonus on a 29 is +8, so your final Action Total is 20. It's only an effective increase of +2 to your total, which might not even be enough to change the degree of success. 
 
There is definitely something really cool about how all the math works out on that. It's kind of awesome... but it's also just really arcane and complicated. I can admire how tightly and precise this system runs, and yet be really glad I'm not having to calculate it all by hand on the fly while people at the table are waiting for their turn. Once again, Roll20 makes an otherwise unwieldy mechanic very playable.

So now that I've explained all those different re-roll and added-die mechanics, I'm going to pivot and talk about a related rule in the game that really doesn't seem to fit well at all with everything else the game is doing. As described above, you have a mechanical base where rolls are open-ended, with varying degrees of success and lots of tools for turning a bad roll into a strong result. The game shines a spotlight on players, sometimes going so far as to empower the party to suddenly smash through against hardened enemies and wrap up a battle way early. So how do you imagine that game engine handles shooting into a melee? You might expect that firing into a melee scrum where a fellow PC is wrestling with a bad guy would mean that you had to be wary about the consequences of a Mishap. You'd be wrong. The Mishap rule doesn't apply in that situation. Instead, it's far worse. Seriously, shooting into a melee is damnably nasty in this game. Don't do it!

Whenever you shoot into a melee, if your die roll is odd, you hit a random participant instead of your target. So that right there is a little surprising, because the characters are mostly hypercompetent badasses, so the notion that they would have a close to 50-50 chance to shoot the wrong person by mistake seems odd. Again, the math turns out to be really complicated, because it's not just an equal distribution of odds and evens on a normal d20. You can't roll a 10 or 20, but you could roll a 37, so it's not 50-50 exactly.

In our session, the villain had taken a child hostage. I rushed forward to try to wrest the baby from their grasp, and succeeded, but the movement rules are a little vague (it's not really a map-and-miniatures game, at least not as our GM was running it), so when my action was done I was still arguably engaged with the villain. Another PC went to shoot him. They did a called shot to the head, and rolled an outstanding success... but the die was odd! So this effectively canceled out their success and their called shot, and meant they would instead hit a randomly determined person in the scrum: that being either the villain, or me, or the child. So a 2/3rds chance of disaster! It came up the bad way on the first roll, and the player's instinct was to spend a Possibility to add an extra die to the roll in hopes of making it even. At first glance they assumed it meant a 50-50 chance of fixing the problem. It doesn't however, because any roll less than 10 on the Possibility die is treated as a 10, meaning the overall total was still odd. Effectively, the extra die had 5 sides that would save my bacon and 15 sides that would kill me or the baby! Thanks to some card play, I survived. Obviously I'm not an objective observer, having been in the center of the target zone, but it definitely strikes me as a weird design choice to forgo the existing Mishap mechanic for something that's a lot more punishing.

3,100 words, and I still haven't gotten to the card mechanic. Damn. I guess this will have to just be an article on the dice, because if I dive into the card decks right now, who knows how deep I'll have to go before I can surface.  For now, let's just acknowledge that the cards enhance the game, but they also ramp up the complexity that much further.

TL;DR: Torg Eternity is math-intensive, card-driven, and chart-reliant. Playing on Roll20 with the button-programmed character sheets and custom die rolling API works like a charm, but I don't think I would want to play (or run) the game on the tabletop with nothing but dice and charts. Thankfully, online technology still works in my native Cosm.

On my Crunchometer, this is a big shiny c24. It looks weirder than it actually plays, and at first glance you might misjudge what it actually is. It's definitely not something that I feel every gamer needs in their collection, but I'm happy to have one in my dice bowl, even if it's mostly just to show off and gawk at. It's more complicated than the current edition of D&D.

5-Yard Penalty for Failure To LARP

I went to two LARPs last night, and completely failed to actually play at either of them. I'm frustrated with myself for my recent inability to come out of my shell. I am also absolutely puzzled at the unnecessary complexity of character creation at these two LARPs, and the lack of a good summary or tool for new players. I plan to got back, because the hard part is over and I might as well get some value out of the night I invested, but I imagine that there must be a large number of potential players who are just turned off and away by the initial hurdles.

Both LARPs were at the same location, and apparently they have a total of 4 LARPs that run there every weekend. Three use the old (pre-reset) World of Darkness setting, and one the newer (but still nearly a decade old) World of Darkness. I made characters at Changeling and Vampire, the other two games are Werewolf and nWoD mortals game.

Now, before I get into my gripes about the experience I had, I should temper it with acknowledgement that this may not have been the typical situation. The LARPs had just moved to their winter location, so it's possible that the venue transition may have shaken things up a bit. Also there was a big competing event this weekend (a 6-month special event at a boffer LARP called Alliance) that greatly diminished the player turnout at the Vampire game at least, and a couple of the Vampire Storytellers were either absent or late as well. Any of these factors may have reduced the effectiveness of the staff to facilitate a new players entry into the game.

As I said, both games use the old WoD setting(s). They don't use the oWoD LARP rules (Rules of the Night, or Shining Host), instead they use a home-brewed system called "Mod-Dot" that is effectively a filter applied on to the tabletop rules. One game uses Changeling: The Dreaming 2nd Ed + Mod-Dot, and the other uses V20 (Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition) + Mod-Dot. Mod-Dot, if I'm understanding correctly, replaces each dice roll with two rock-paper-scissors matches. These RPS matches function rather like FUDGE dice, in that they generate a plus 2 to minus 2 modifier to your base number of successes, which are derived from your tabletop dicepools by some similar formula (not sure if it's 1/2 or 1/3 x dicepool). If you win both or lose both of the RPS tests, that's essentially a critical and triggers another two tests so the modifier can range out to plus or minus 4 (or maybe further, I'm not yet certain what happens when you score two wins followed by two more wins). I didn't participate, and merely watched from a distance, so it struck me as a lot of work for such a strongly centered bell curve. By my math, you have a 78% chance of scoring with one success of your default result. Compare that to FUDGE dice which have a 63% chance of scoring within 1 of the median result. My one complaint with FATE (which uses FUDGE dice) has to do with the overwhelming strength of that bell curve, and here's a system that out-FATE's FATE. Or, so it seems to me from my outsider's perspective. I haven't actually played with Mod-Dot yet, and it's apparently functional enough for several local LARPs to use it for many years. At first glance, it strikes me as more complicated than both the tabletop rules and the old White Wolf LARP rules. I wish either game had a hand-out that covers the mechanics of Mod-Dot, because after 1 night in proximity to it, I'm still pretty iffy on the core resolution mechanic. That said, one does not LARP for the rules, one LARPs for the story, the setting, and the scene.

Unfortunately, I didn't know the Changeling setting all that well. I had emailed the Head Story-Teller a few weeks ago to ask about the game, and we'd exchanged some conversation, but I didn't really have a solid character concept going in. I'd suggested that I'd probably play a Troll because it was one character type I'd remembered from my ~2 sessions of Changeling experience over a decade ago. He encouraged me to not limit myself to a core book character, and showed me lots of Kith write-ups (more or less character classes for Changeling) that came from various sourcebooks or were derived from the old Arcadia CCG. Some of this he'd sent me over a week before, but it was the week where I got a promotion and worked overtime, so I had still had _so_ much to read at the session. There were several people (including the HST) willing to help me out with the process, but their approach was pretty much "let me read you a giant list of options", rather than either making suggestions or asking questions that actually narrowed down the giant pile of information I needed to sift through. After more than an hour of reading I fell back on the Troll idea I'd emailed two weeks back, in hopes that something simple and mildly familiar would let me actually finish my character in time to play or at least watch some scenes. Unfortunately, the wealth of expanded character options continued past basic concepts and into a huge Merit and Flaw list, plus I had to at least skim over the lists of Arts (special powers in Changeling, akin to Disciplines in Vampire, or roughly equal to spells or feats in D&D). Again, so much reading.

The way character creation works in tabletop White Wolf games is that you get a small number of points to spend in each section of the sheet, followed by another pool of freebie points to spend wherever you want but at sort of an exchange rate (such as 7 Freebie points for a Discipline rank in Vampire). The character sheets didn't list the exchange rate. A person walked up and offered to help just as I was wrestling with that, so I asked them about it. They told me there is no exchange rate, just add 15 dots to things. I foolishly took them at their word, thinking they were one of the Assistant Story-Tellers since they were over there offering to help newbies fill out paperwork instead of playing in any of the many scenes going on elsewhere. I should have known better, but instead I accepted their word and my math got completely messed up. I finished my character right about the time the game was wrapping up, and only discovered then what a mess my sheet was.

Now, I had chosen the Changeling LARP because an acquaintance had invited me to it and the Werewolf LARP that followed it. He didn't show up to Changeling. I don't know if he made it to Werewolf or not. It was in the other part of the building, whereas there was a Vampire LARP in the same space where the Changeling game had just finished. I was a little let down to not get to play in that first game, and I only knew Werewolf a little bit better than Changeling, so character creation was likely to take nearly as long and involve almost as much reading. Vampire, on the other hand, that I knew really well from my years of running a V:tM LARP. So rather than head to the other area in hopes that maybe the guy who invited me would show up late, I decided to just do Vampire. Surely, I could bang out a character in a hurry.

But as I mentioned earlier, only a lone Assistant StoryTeller showed up to Vampire on time. A couple others were late, and I gather that at least one of the STs went to Alliance instead. The one that was there didn't have the needed materials to begin character creation. She did have character sheets, so I started planning and lightly socialized while waiting. The thing that held me back was the beads they needed to draw. This group uses a system to allow differing levels of character power and rarity while eliminating all danger of favoritism. You draw three beads from pools corresponding to the ideal mix for the campaign. If you get a lucky draw, you may start with extra XP, or be allowed to play one of the rarer clans or bloodlines. So I started mentally sketching out a Toreador, but had to wait to finalize it till the beads arrived. By then, there were four other new players, and only one copy of the rulebook. So while each step of the process took me a lot less time, I had to frequently wait my turn to look things up while these two guys read every single Merit and Flaw to their non-gamer friend they'd brought with. So slow.

As it turns out, my bead draws gave me completely normal starting generation and basic clan choices, so it started off as an easy build. However, I drew a bead that gave me a bunch of bonus XP to spend. So creation went in three stages: normal points, freebie points (using the various conversion rates as mentioned above) and experience points (using a totally different conversion rate). On paper, my character looks really strong, which is kind of funny as I was completely prepared to play a wimpy little Toreador for just the easy hook in to characterization that provides. And it may still play out to be wimpy, if the obfuscated values of the bead draws means that most characters already start with as many or more XP than I got. The overall power-level of the chronicle is not yet transparent to me.

And I guess that level of complexity and confusion is why I'm here griping about a game that I totally plan to play and enjoy. They said attendance was down because of the competing event, but it still seemed like a big group and probably a good place to game and meet new friends. I'm most likely going to have a lot of fun, but that's because I'm going to power through the initial awkwardness of it all and dive into character and plot. And all of this headache could have been made so much easier for new players. I find myself wanting to lay out a one-page summary sheet for each of these games. At the top it would say which rule books are considered canonical for that game, then explain the Mod-Dot success formula that modifies the engine in those books. Below that would be a listing of the three beads you draw and what options they unlock for that chronicle (and a statement about what percentage of the pool is each bead level). You'd know at a glance what kind of character you could make, how potent or rare they were in the setting, and where to go for more information on the game or rules.

In terms of my old crunchometer system, I had rated oWoD at a crunchy but playable c12 level, and the Mind's Eye Theatre LARP rules at a somewhat simpler c10. After this level of exposure, I'm inclined to eyeball Mod-Dot at around a c20. Thus far it is significantly crunchier and more complicated than I prefer, but I'll give it at least a few sessions for the plotlines or the playgroups to engage me. I used to have a lot more tolerance for needless complexity and the character niches that complexity carved out, but over the decades I've been shown repeatedly by games like Amber, Microscope, and PDQ that the best RPG experiences don't require complicated rules and fiddly modifiers. Good games are made from rich plotlines, nuanced characters, and the presence of good friends.

By the time character creation was all done, it was after midnight. The game had been running since 10:30, and would be continuing for more than an hour. About half the players were sitting around in the main room quietly playing with their phones or having whispered conversations, and the rest were off behind closed doors having private scenes. There was no obvious in-roads for actually joining a scene at this point. I was tired, discouraged, very hungry (hadn't eaten in over 8 hours) and a little grumpy, and I had a long walk home ahead of me, so at that point I bailed. I'll get a fresh start at the next session.

You got your Everway in my Warhammer!

This is an article about how I folded two very different game systems into one another, and found the place where they intersect to be more immediately enjoyable than either on it's own.

First, some context about the two games:

The new(-ish) Warhammer FRP has some really awesome groundbreaking elements like group initiative, abstract movement, multiple-axis of success, and wickedly cool dice. However, on the whole it's a lot more fiddly than I'd like it to be, and it involves a boatload of components that hog the table-space. It's a strange (but mostly enjoyable) mix of complicated bean-counting and elegant time-saving innovations. It's a game that can't quite decide on its target audience. Too fiddly for fans of most indy games, too revolutionary and abstract for those who approach combat as a comfortable tactical challenge.

Everway is a cool older game that was one of the first really light and abstract game systems. But it's in practice, too light. Combat is entirely narrative, and things like damage, healing, initiative, and even who wins any given conflict is almost entirely a matter of GM fiat. With the right group, and the right GM, a good dose of trust, and plenty of time to get the balance of the non-mechanics fine-tuned, it can be incredible. I've had some fun with Everway before, and gotten a lot of joy from Amber, another game with roughly the same level of GM fiat and rules non-existence. While I like that style of gaming, I know they're not for everyone. If you're playing infrequently, don't know your play group well, or want a little more "game" in your game, Everway is not a good choice.

Hauling out my old Crunchometer, I'd say Everway is an umistakeable c4. It's light and simple, the rules could fit on a single page. Character creation is entirely open-ended, with the exception of four very basic and flexible attributes. There's hardly any math involved in character creation, and far less while you're actually playing.

Warhammer 3rd, on the other hand, occupies no single niche, and instead is spread across a hazy band near the other end of the spectrum. It's a c20 that plays more like a c12 (and gets to that lower rating by incorporating some features usually found in a c6).

The resulting hybrid was about a c8, which for me is pretty much the sweet spot where the gaming is really good. I was very happy with the way it turned out.

I'm not sure exactly how I realized that Warhammer had exactly what Everway was missing, but after that thought popped into my head last week, I started noticing other similarities. The real breakthrough came when I realized that in both games, nearly all character attributes will be in the range of 3 to 6 (the extreme apex of the range is higher in Everway, but in practice I've never seen a PC go above 7 and most don't go above 5). Which meant the basics of Warhammer's intriguing dice system could be ported over into Everway without having to make major changes to the character creation system of the lighter game. From there, it all fell into place organically.

Friday night, after arriving in Portland, I taught the basics of the system to my three players (two of which had never played either Everway or Warhammer), and they created characters. On Saturday, we played all day long (about 10 hours of play, IIRC), and everyone had a blast. It was probably the best gaming I'd ever had with this particular group.

So here's how "EverHammer" works. Character creation is identical to Everway. All the differences are in game play, not character creation.

The four elemental attributes use blue warhammer dice to actively do things. The difficulty is a number of dice equal to the defender's relevant stat, of which the first die is purple and rest are black. So if an archer with Air 5 attacks a target with Fire 4, they'd roll 5 blue dice, 1 purple and 3 black (about a 57% success rate, and the counter-attack with the stats flipped would be about a 37% success rate).

Powers added either white or yellow dice to active rolls. As I ran it, I had 0-point powers add a white die, and powers that cost a point or more add a yellow. I'm not 100% certain that was the right break point. The way I did it worked, but it might not have been optimal. I could see reserving the yellow die for powers whose points come from the "Major" quality, instead, for example.

If a power was defensive in nature, it added a purple die to the roll.

Additional white and black dice could be (and frequently were) applied as improvised situational and terrain modifiers.

In all cases, dice pools flow from the character creation system, and causality comes from the shared game world and goes into the dice. Never the other way around. In other words, you can't buy a yellow die on it's own, or upgrade a power to Major just to get a die.

Likewise, if a power is defined as "immunity to fire" and that character is attacked with normal mundane fire they cannot take damage. We still roll, to see if there's any fatigue changes or fortune effects (see below) but damage is off the table. If they were attacked by magical fire, or dragon breath, or some complicated mix of fire and something else (such as a volcanic explosion) then damage might be a possibility but they'd get the bonus purple die for defending with the fire immunity.

I ditched the stance system from Warhammer. I'm not sure I had to, there's probably some reasonably elegant way to work in red and green dice (possibly Fire & Air = Red, Earth & Water = Green), and finding meaning for the delay icons despite not having action cards (more about that later). I was a little pinched for time (having gotten the idea for this system less than 72 hours before we were going to be playing it), and didn't want to try to figure out how to include that extra layer of complexity that comes from stance.

You roll the dice, do all the cancellations, and if there's at least 1 success left, you hit for normal damage. If you score 3 successes, you hit for double damage. Normal damage is 1 card. I made some wound cards to handle this, they were basically the equivalent of a critical wound from Warhammer. I'll probably devote an article to discussing them in depth at some future date, because I think there's some non-obvious considerations on what types of criticals enhance a fight scene, and what just ruin the game. If you suffer more wounds than you have points of Earth, you pass out. Any hit after that point could be a Coup de grâce.

For purely mental attacks, I ginned up a "disorder deck" that's basically criticals for mind powers. It's got a bit of overlap with various critical hits, insanity cards, and party tension meter effects from Warhammer. Again, when I get around to writing the article on the wound cards, I'll revisit this topic in depth.

Boons and banes were handled more simply than in Warhammer as well, eliminating all the complicated effects of various action cards. I kept fatigue, but rolled stress into it so there was just one type of fatigue point to worry about. I ran it with the existing Warhammer rule of 2+ banes = 1 fatigue, but in hindsight, I think I'll run that as 1+ bane = 1 fatigue next time. There were a lot of rolls of 1 boon or 1 bane, and not enough fatigue going around (An Everway character is less likely than a Warhammer character to have a weak-spot that fatigue penalizes.) If fatigue is higher than the active attribute, each additional point of fatigue adds a black die. Passing out sucks, and the wound system already emphasized Earth enough, so I set the pass-out to 10 instead of something attribute-based. One could argue the other way around (that wounds should be a set high number and fatigue based on Earth), and I wouldn't have a good counter-argument. I did what I did, and it seemed to work.

In theory, I still kept the door open for location cards to have more elaborate / non-fatigue-related boon or bane effects. I wasn't quite organized enough to implement that to the extent I would have liked this time out, but I'll be ready with it next time we play.

The biggest changes to the dice mechanics involved the Sigmar's Comet and Chaos Star results. In Warhammer, there's a lot of options when one of these is rolled, and deciding which option to invoke really slows down the process as either can change the other dice in the pool. Comets can, on a Warhammer attack roll, be used as a success, used as a boon, trigger a comet-line of an action, or add a critical hit. It's a lot to contemplate, and the chaos stars aren't any easier. I got rid of all the dice/symbol switching options, and just made these special symbols trigger a card draw. You'd flip over the top card of Everway's Fortune Deck, and if you rolled a Comet the GM would interpret that card in a beneficial way. If you rolled a Chaos symbol, the GM would interpret the card in a negative way. In theory this could have been as severe as a wound, but in general it was narrative effects and bonuses or penalties on future rolls. For next time, I may draft up a list of suggested/default effects by card type or severity.

I used the "group initiative" system from Warhammer 3rd. Initiative rolls were made with the water attribute, because it's linked to senses and awareness, and because Water was looking to be the least-used attribute otherwise (since Earth determines health and Fire and Air determine most attack rolls).

We used abstract movement rules and manoeuvre system per Warhammer 3rd, and the associated fatigue costs. Late in character creation after everyone was done with the Everway Vision Cards, I sorted out all the pictures of places to use as Warhammer Location Cards. I definitely need to supplement this deck, but it worked well enough for 10 hours of mostly-improvised adventure.

Pretty much everything else was pure Everway.

The hybrid system worked well. It had enough going on to spark some interesting challenges during the fights, including an interesting exchange with 2 PCs trying to draw the attention of the bad guys to protect a third that resulted in a very fluid rolling battle. Outside of combat, it was non-intrusive and simple enough that no role-playing scenes were disrupted by needing to consult rules. I think we were all very pleased with the results. There's a few things we'll do a little differently next time, but in general it exceeded all my expectations. Good gaming all around.

Ideas towards a Warhammer Lite

Just thinking out loud about what I might do to really trim down Warhammer Fantasy RolePlay 3rd Ed down to a lean, mean role-playing machine. Keep the parts I like, ditch the parts that get in the way.

Let's talk Crunchometer for a moment. Warhammer FRP 3rd is a c20 that plays like a c12. In truth, it's every bit as crunchy and fiddly as D&D 3rd Ed, but the wealth of tools, shortcuts, and card-based reminders, combined with the reduced dice math, makes it play like a system that's much lighter. Problem is there's tons of effort and complexity in set-up and character advancement that just doesn't seem worth it to me. I prefer to run about a c8 or c10. Which means that at the table, I can live with Warhammer, but between sessions I'm stuck looking at it's uglier aspects. Thus my desire to pare it down a bit.

Funny Dice - Love these. Absolutely love the two-pronged twin-axis success system, with all it's non-binary silver linings and side-effects. I even love the high success rates. I'll probably keep all of it. Honestly, I could do without certain symbols, as they complicate things more than they add. Comets, Chaos Stars, and Righteous Successes could probably have been a Success + Boon, Failure + Bane, and Double Success respectively, and it'd still be just as good. The savings in time and complexity would have more than made up for not having a few more subtle options.

Action Cards - Love some of these, but am not thrilled with others. Active Defenses are my favorite, followed closely by Riposte and Counterblow. The "spend my whole action to just get +1 Fortune on my next turn's action" cards are stupid, since the success rate is so high you're always better just trying twice instead. Actions that take opposed checks mystify me, as they really punish low traits, and have success rates so different from a basic attack. There's a number of cards that just aren't good enough - but the other way of looking at it is that Perform A Stunt is too damn good. It's also easy to end up with too many cards and fall victim to Analysis Paralysis. Since I sometimes game in another city, it's a drag to have to haul 150 cards with me to every session just in case someone wants to buy an Action advancement.

Recharge - Means well, but is so damnably inelegant. I love that it keeps people from spamming their best attack, and that it makes fights dynamic. At the same time I hate that it involves a bunch of bean-counting and eats up so much table space. Feels like there ought to be a solution that involves standardized recharge, and thus no counters. Perhaps a row or pile of three cards, each new action you play goes to the left of the others. At the start of your turn, if you have three or more cards in the row, the right-most card becomes available again. The "encounter powers" from D&D 4th are much more elegant way of accomplishing something similar.

Stance Meter - Like the concept, but not the fiddliness. You have enough decisions in a turn as-is, without needing to micromanage your depth of stance. A better way to handle this would be to simplify it to a trinary mode, with just 1 space each of Conservative, Neutral, and Reckless. If you're in green or red, you roll all your dice in that color. Or maybe your max dice in that color, based on career and stance purchases. C/N/R might even be one step grittier than it needs - what the heck does "neutral" really mean? You could argue that you're either being cautious or being reckless, and that there's nothing really in between.

Fatigue and Stress - Could probably be merged into a single Exertion stat without really losing anything. Or, fatigue could stay around, and stress could be merged into the Party Tension meter. Or we could keep fatigue and stress, but drop the "strained" condition.

Delay - Changing the Recharge mechanism would of course make the Delay icon work differently. If using the row of cards idea for recharge, perhaps the GM would be able to rearrange your row on a Delay.

Talents - Are awesome in that they let PCs slot in little abilities that distinguish them from each other, and I like the general categories and concepts. However, the impact on leveling up and career changing is weird. May choose to have the categories just define what you can purchase (or what counts as Career Advancements) but allow any slot to be used universally once you have bought them.

Party Card - Like the concept of the party card, the tension meter, the talent slots and the special ability, but I'm not sure I love the actual execution of any of this. Maybe this could be done away with, maybe it should be radically re-envisioned, or maybe it should just be given a font and layout that can be read from anywhere at the table.

Fortune Points - A must have. Love them, and especially the way they refresh. Does such a great job of turning "stunting" and "drama dice" into a team-building experience. If I run Savage Worlds again, I may change the bennie system to be doled out like these.

Abstract Movement, and Location Cards - I love these as will gladly keep them, but to some extent I worry that the numbers are a little wrong. It's pretty easy to rush archers (and for that matter, there's no incentive to stay under cover), and otherwise run the length of the largest possible battlefield in one to two turns. Perhaps fatigue needs to be harder to deal with, so that such rushes are more costly.

Wounds and Crits - This could be really simplified, but still be colorful. Perhaps you could reduce all the math out of it. Every successful hit could just do 1 crit, or even 1 crit per uncanceled hammer, with no non-crit wounds, and no wound threshold. These ideas are pretty radical, though. There'd be lots of ripple effects. No soak anymore, for one thing, and not much differentiating weapons. Plus, depending on how much I altered the other rules, the existing crits might not work so well. There's a good chance I won't touch any of this, as it would be a lot of work.

Spellcasting - I definitely want to keep the notion of Miscasts. I think the miscast deck is fun, and it makes magic interesting and unique. It reinforces the themes of the setting - that magic is dangerous and chaotic.
The mechanics for recharging your power points are nice, but a little clunky. Wizards are on a really long leash. You can pop off your best spell, and then cast it again a few turns later with just a little bit of hoop-jumping. That's definitely preferable to spells-per-day systems, or even to Savage World's power points that take hours to recharge. My instinct is that they hit the right balance... but then I look at the actual spells, and I realize that the attack spells are no better than shooting an arrow or swinging a sword. The non-combat spells aren't phenomenally better than things you can do with a skill, either. If your spell effects are no more impressive than what a non-caster can accomplish, why burden the caster with the extra complexity and limitations of having to channel power? Which leaves me wanting to either simplify the casting process, or rachet up the power of the spells.

EDIT: My words about spellcasting were written before the supplements came out that introduced the higher-rank spells. The high level spells are indeed worth jumping through hoops for, but the first rank spells are generally less powerful than what a non-spellcaster can do with just normal skills and equipment.

Careers - These were at the heart of the 1st & 2nd Ed systems, and still play a big role in 3rd Ed. Problem is, they aren't as extensive in the current system, and the existing ones are a little arbitrary and not too well balanced. It's a poor mix, which results in people house-ruling that you can repeat careers. I'm not willing to allow that, because it would encourage min-maxing. The game either needs a lot of more careers, or needs to ditch them entirely. I could go either way, and be happy. I'd probably prefer to go the "lots more careers" route, but given how many other things I'm considering changing, that might not be worth all the extra trouble.

I don't really have a solid plan of where to go from here. I'll either pare the system down to something less fiddly, or go so far as to build it up from the ground as an entirely new system that uses the dice and their lovely two-axis results. Later this summer they're releasing a magic supplement, which will also have rules for corruption and mutation. Probably, I'll buy that and see what it does to magic, then decide thereafter whether or not to continue purchasing this game line. If it turns out I'm likely to rebuild it entirely, I probably don't need to keep buying. But if they plan to release more career cards, and I plan to just trim out some of the less elegant bits, then I could see myself continuing to buy new releases and adapt them as I go.

Crunchometer and Savage Worlds / Deadlands Reloaded

My current Deadlands Reloaded game is moving towards a storyline climax after which we will change systems, and possibly just do something else completely. I like the setting, but it's a lot more complicated than vanilla Savage-Worlds. I've been running Deadlands Reloaded every other Sunday, and a few sessions of straight Savage Worlds fantasy with a different group in-between. What I've learned is that if Savage Worlds is a c12 on the crunchometer, Deadlands Reloaded is at least a c16, and probably a c20. Even without the Adventure Deck (which we've been using), the additional fate chip options and the far less homogenous magic of Deadlands make it really hard to keep on top of the expanded system.

By contrast, in the vanilla fantasy version I spend a lot less time looking up rules, and especially charts. I can run it without opening a rule book except when we're leveling-up the characters or if a PC gets incapacitated. For the Deadlands version, I've made a different summary-sheet for each spellcaster, plus printed off combat modifier cheat-sheets for the whole group, and yet we still end up having to consult charts or text every single session.

I know there's D&D groups out there that make do with that all the time, but for me it's a real drag to pause and look things up in the middle of a session (in session after session). It's been diminishing the fun, so we're intentionally moving towards a plot resolution that will allow us to ditch the system. The group was a little divided on this. Of the 5 of us (down from 6 after one player moved out-of-state), 1 really likes the system, 1 loves her character so much she'll tolerate the system, and 3 of us detest the system enough we want to end the game. Obviously, that's not healthy or sustainable, so we're wrapping up. My plan is for 2-3 more sessions.

More Crunchometer

Here's a quick link for anyone that found my Crunchometer useful or interesting. (The Crunchometer is a system for categorizing RPG mechanics by overall complexity level and burden on the players. Link to my original post)

Anyhow, the main point of today's post is to provide a link to a blog that used my idea. "Vampire", author of the blog Alea lacta Est, put up some crunchometer ratings for games he's run. Here's the link to his crunchometer ratings. Many of the games he rates overlap with ones I rated, but he adds Ninja Burger, and disagrees with me a tiny bit on a few White Wolf products.

A quick aside about that: Comparing our ratings, I see he marked Scion a little less complicated than I did, but Exalted more complicated. Hmm... Glad I never got past character-creation in Exalted. :) All joking aside, I will say that Scion starts out much simpler than it becomes. Hero-level Scion, especially if you're just using the Hero book, is probably a c12 in my opinion as well, it's just that as you push into Demigod and God the mechanics start coming apart at the seams and maintaining play balance becomes a continual chore.

Risus is actually a c6

Last night (at the Emerald City Game Feast), I played in a Risus game, and my PC got knocked unconscious by Miss America. While I was out of commission, I picked up the printout of the Risus rules that someone had brought to the table, and started looking at them.

I noticed several things we were doing "wrong". Not wanting to be a rules lawyer, I said nothing. I may bring it up with the group before the next time we play Risus again, I just wasn't going there at that moment. The notion of arguing over rules in the middle of a scene is excruciatingly vile to me, even if the thing we did "wrong" was part of what caused my character to be knocked out just then.

More importantly, and more to the point, in those 5 minutes of reading I learned a good deal about Risus that I hadn't known before. I've played it several times, but had never read it. When designing my Crunchometer, I had rated Risus as a c4, upgraded to a c6 if this one optional rule was being used. I've never played with said optional rule, I've just heard three different GMs say they had no intention of using such a rule because mucks up an otherwise elegant system.

Having now skimmed the rules, I can say that Risus is not as simple as I believed it to be. It's not really a c4. It's a solid c6 (even without the dreaded optional rule that I still know nothing about). I've played it under 4 GMs, and they've all abstracted / house-ruled the game into something a whole bracket simpler than the rules as written. The more complicated by-the-books rules actually strike me as far more robust than the dumbed down version we've been playing, but it's not as easy to remember across the months between one-shots.

I think I'll have to download Risus and read it more thoroughly sometime.

Crunchometer

I was writing this comment:

My ideal level of game-mechanics crunch is a little less than normal Savage Worlds, say 80% to 90% of SW's complexity, whereas Deadlands Reloaded runs about 115% of Savage Worlds, and F# is (to it's credit) only about 10-15% as crunchy as Savage Worlds.

and thought "how annoying. There's got to be a better way to express that concept!"

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After some thought, I think I hit on it - how about if we express the complexity of game systems as die types? We'll use a "c" instead of a "d" so as to reduce confusion. Here's the scale I'm using:

c20: We start with c20, it establishes our first and most basic baseline for comparison. D&D 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5, along with the majority of their variants would be c20s. It's simple: d20 equals c20. If it's less complex than D&D 3.X, you bump it down a die type, if it's more complex, you go up a step or two (see below). 3.X, given enough player-accessible source books (especially mixed 3rd-party sources) can easily creep up above a c20 as well.

Another classic c20 game would be CP2020 - Cyberpunk doesn't have the tricky combat options of 3.X D&D, but makes up for it with the way it handles armor and damage, the enormous list of redundant skills, and the way cyberware totally transforms characters.

c12: A game like Savage Worlds is a c12. It's got some complexity, but streamlines a number of elements to simplify and speed up things better than c20 style game. A lot of generic systems fall into this category - they're not as detailed as D&D, but they still have fiddly bits. Many of them allow for a good deal of variety.

Old World of Darkness is a c12. It's almost light enough to be a c10, but the sliding success scale just nudges it up. Stick to just one type of supernatural, especially if it's just Vampires, and you're probably safe calling it a c10. Most of the complexity comes from mixing the streams, Mage, or that Combat book. Any of those make its a solid c12, maybe even a c14 (see below).

Other c12 examples would be Feng Shui (where the shot clock complicates some otherwise simple rules) and Rune (where the rigors of scenario design and need for player to know the game well enough to GM it bumps it up from the c8 the actual rules would have otherwise been).

c10: Mind's Eye Theatre (at least, the old Rock/Paper/Scissors version) is about here, but again only if you're not mixing your Supernatural types. It's core mechanics are fast and simple, but there's still a some fiddly bits, and a plenty of powers to memorize.

Old School D&D is probably in this category, too, but for the inverse reason - it's rules relied on silly charts, but were pretty darned light when you weren't looking at a chart. It's a c10 that feels like a c8 if you're not the GM or a spell-caster.

c8: Fate, Dogs In The Vineyard, Trail of Cthulhu, and the like. These are games that still have some granularity to their core mechanic and some modifiers to remember, but actively discourage miniatures, and tend to not have many spell descriptions to memorize, nor corner-case rules to look up. A game like this probably won't have an encumberance chart, instead abstracting weight-lifting to a strength roll, GM fiat, or common sense. What complexity is left here is most likely focused into character creation and a skill list. If a more experienced player walks you through the first session, you'll be running at full speed by the second one.

c6: We're deep into Indie-RPG "Hippy Game" territory, with things like InSpectres or Universalis (or Risus when you're not using those optional rules that most GMs skip). At this level, a game has only one or two core mechanics, and very few bells and whistles. There's certainly no spell lists, and not more than one or two charts. There's either no skills, or you can make your own. You can make a strategic mistake in a game like this, but not a tactical one. c6s are pretty simple, and you can usually get a handle on the whole game in a single session even if it's your first play. Fudge is probably a c6, though the use of words instead of numbers can make it feel like a c8 on your first couple play-throughs.

A Trail of Cthulhu game set in the "Purist" idiom, where combat was always a bad idea, and neither Stability or Sanity could be recovered would probably be a c6 rather than a c8.

c4: The epitome of elegance, such as Wushu, F#, or Risus at it's most simple version. Players define their own skills, or traits, or whatever you call it, and everyone starts out mechanically identical, with only flavor distinctions. One type of die roll solves everything, and modifiers are off the cuff. The rules fit on a single page, or close to it. If it got any less complex, you'd be flipping a coin, not rolling a die. ;)

Oddball dice: There are, of course, many dice beyond those found in a traditional 7-set, and I'd be remiss to leave them out:
If you're running a D&D game with a lot of houserules or allowing just about any published OGL sourcebook, then you're looking at something a bit more complex than a mere c20. You've bumped up to one of those odd-ball dice, a c24 or a c30. Warhammer Fantasy is also probably a c24, maybe a c30 if the GM relies on the random charts a lot or really pushes the Chaos themes.

It's a rare game, and again probably chart-filled, that gets above that, but I've seen (and will never play) a couple of games that looked like they might push towards a c100.

There's also few games out there that are like the tens-place d10 (numbered 00, 10, 20, 30, etc.) These are games with much lighter abstract mechanic, but a huge powers list, or the ability to make your own spells on the fly. In other words, simple games till you look at all the weird corner cases that players can push the system towards. That's my impression of Ars Magica and Mage: The Ascension, but I haven't played enough of either to really speak knowledgeably.

Between the c12 and c20 there's a couple of other weird dice as well, though most games stick heavily to the more common complexities. Just the same, I've seen some c14s and c16s out there. Exalted falls into that territory, as does Deadlands Reloaded. I think D&D 4th falls in this range as well, but I haven't played it enough to say for sure.

Scion was a c16 that'd had a corner filed down, so it rolled kinda funny and made the GM nervous.

Continuum was one of those double dice c10s. A hollow translucent d10 with a smaller opaque d10 inside it. It's skill and combat system was a little complicated, and the time-combat system was also a little complicated. Either on it's own would have been fast and easy, but trying to parse both simultaneously was a bit of a challenge.

And then there's the coin flips and the rock/paper/scissors affairs, the ultra-light c2s. Games that really have no mechanics, and are just collaborative storytelling experiments. Games like Amber, that hide the character sheets after the first session, and only let the GM know how the rules work.

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My tastes typically run about a c10, but you'll note that I offer very few examples of that complexity level. I'm just a crabby old grognard. Most games are either too complicated or not complicated enough. I like using miniatures when it's appropriate, and I want the PCs to each have their own special niche that no one else can fill. Even for the games I rated at a c10, I wasn't completely happy with. I've GM'd things all the way up to a c24 (7th Sea with a bunch of house rules, Rune with encounter design included, D&D with a lot of sourcebooks being utilized, etc), and also run extended (and successful) campaigns at complexity c2 (Amber and Everway). If a game is too complicated, I'll get sick of dealing with it, but the opposite has never really happened.