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.

Social Combat system from Exalted

I posted this comment at someone else's blog today, and thought I might want to save it here for future reference. He was considering porting over the Social Combat system from Exalted to Scion, as someone had done on the White Wolf Wiki. While I think the notion of Social Combat (making social interactions have more game element and thus giving them more screen time), I think that system is a poor fit for Scion. Here's why:

That system uses temporary Willpower to track how well you’ve convinced, tricked, or intimidated someone. There’s a couple problems with that.

Willpower totals max at 10 in Scion, for both puny mortals and the most strong-willed Gods. So, it doesn’t really scale as you go up, and almost all PCs start at 70% of maximum. Social attributes, however, have a higher cap, and Epic socials expand almost geometrically (+46 automatic successes at the top level). Social characters will wrap the gods around their fingers with fairly minimal XP investment.

Rather than scaling up the willpower pools, the designers just made lots of knacks that restore spent willpower, especially in Demigod and God (but those knacks can be purchased by Hero-level characters). In fact, there’s several different knacks that refresh someone’s entire willpower pool for a single point of legend (and Gods have over 100 legend points). Two characters both armed with that power would render each other immune to ever being dissuaded.

I’d guess by Legend 5 or so it’ll break down almost completely. You’ll always succeed at persuading someone if you talk to them in private, but are incapable of affecting groups of 2 or more. That just doesn’t sound like fun.

A possible solution would be to create a new stat that works similar to willpower, and is the target of social combat, but which scales up like Epics and/or can’t be refreshed infinitely via knacks like some sort of M:TG combo deck. But that may be a lot of work to implement.

I have one other complaint about that Social Combat system, or anything similar. I think allowing a Player to roll to schmooze their way past troubles the character could handle but the player can't is a good idea. However, such a system has to be quick, non-intrusive, and doesn't pull you out of character too much. It'd be very easy to accidentally create a system that smothered the improvisational acting elements of RPGs. You need a system that solves impasses and gives the GM guidance, not a system that undermines peoples efforts to portray their character. That's not an easy tightrope to walk.

White Wolf Marketing Genius

This is really clever. 2 months before D&D 4th releases, White Wolf will be giving away 2,500 free copies of Exalted 2nd Edition. To get one, all you have to do is send them your "lame duck" D&D 3.5 Player's Handbook.

Why? Because White Wolf remembers how the rest of the RPG industry tanked for the year following the release of D&D 3rd. This is an effort to distract a couple thousand gamers away from 4th (and thereby ensure WWP isn't stuck with a warehouse full of Exalted sourcebooks and no audience to buy them).

Come to think of it, I wonder if that's why GW/BI chose to abandon the Dark Heresy line? Perhaps they had no confidence in the line's ability to sell after the event horizon of the 4th Ed blackhole. If so, then it may have been a poor decision for FFG to pick up the DH rights.

Scion of Exalted

Scion's mechanics are lifted whole-cloth from Exalted 2nd Edition. Individual powers are different, but the combat rules are all the same. The biggest difference between the two systems is the inclusion of Epic Attributes in Scion.

In Exalted (which, to be fair, I've never played) your dice pools just get bigger and bigger. My friend Mike (aka "Doomshadow") had a starting character who rolled 27 dice for his big attack - thankfully he could only do it once per fight. I was invited to play in that campaign, and started concepting a character, when Mike told me about that dice pool. It scared me away.

In Scion, Epic Attributes grant automatic successes, and so there's no "need" for ever-increasing dice pools. It's more efficient (in XP) to increase your Epics instead. I strongly suspect that by the time you get to Scion: God (Legend Ratings 9-12) the game will be more or less diceless. Being (or not being) focused in an area will mean a difference of 10 to 30 auto-successes, so your dice pool of 6 to 12 dice (averaging 3 to 6 successes) won't be worth rolling.

This, however, will not hold true for Greek Scions. They have an ability called Arete, which grants ever more increasing dice. I predict the benefits of Arete will be enough to make Greek characters roll frequently, even at Legend 10.

On the other hand, XP costs may get so out of hand that everyone fills in their weak spots instead of focusing at all - which would be a bit of a let down. This would result in die rolls being a big deal even at high-Legend.

There's also a good chance that the disconnect in reality between (what) the rules (encourage PCs to spend points on) and (what) the authors (of the monster section expect when designing challenges) may result in monsters that are utterly focused in the wrong ways. While this was a problem in Hero, and an annoyance in Demigod, I think it may actually be a benefit in God. Innappropriately focused monsters will push that diceless aspect I'm hoping for. Let's hope the authors didn't read complaints on the forum and adjust to match reality.

I have some issues with the implications of High-Legend on the XP system of Scion, which I intend to blog about sometime soon. However, it won't be for a while. My wife gets back from Disney tonight, so I'll be engaging in the time-honored husbandly tradition of scrambling to get everything clean at the last minute, followed by the time-honored couple tradition of being really needy and clingy for the first day she's back. At least I'm honest about it.