The Meat Shield (Truth & Justice PC)

Played a little Truth & Justice last week. It's a reasonably rules-light superheroes RPG.

I tend to over-think my characters too much, and take way to long making a PC. So, with my back up against the wall at the game, I slapped together a thin parody of a character, which I named The Meat Shield. Despite being so shallow, the character was kind of fun to play.

The Meat Shield

• Hot dog vendor by day, heroic sidekick by night.
• His superhero suit is printed with the cuts of meat he could be chopped into.
• He has some minor thematic equipment, such as a Knockwurstchuku and a hot-dog shaped cell phone, but nothing that actually provides a bonus (well, except the hot dog cart itself, which is mundane but amusing).
• I intended him to just be a lackey, but discovered in the process of playing him that there's some pretty enjoyable grandstanding to be done when your character resides at the intersection of invulnerable and ridiculous.
• Officially I'm the sidekick of the great Beef Wellington, a hero of immense girth reknown, who is, sadly, out of commission with some sort of food poisoning.
• The police got annoyed with me in one scene, and put a "boot" on my hot dog cart. It's hard to be a superhero when your bicycle is being impounded.

Powers:
Invulnerability +2
Regeneration +4

Qualities:
Body Guard +4
Karate +2
Unobtrusive +2
Bicycle-driven hot dog cart +2

Weakness:
Can't disobey anything a Superhero tells him to do (-2)

Gaming Withdrawal (Too Many Cancelled Games)

It's been a rough couple of weeks for me, as I'm not getting my fix of choice. Gaming, that is.

My typical weekly gaming schedule involves a Continuum campaign I run, a Fate game I play in, and an additional one-shot that I either GM or play in. I really hate canceling sessions. I don't like letting people down. Also, I must admit I get really psyched to game, and there's a huge let down for me when I don't get to follow through on it.

• A couple weeks ago, I missed a Thursday night one-shot. (And I missed another 2 weeks before that, come to think of it.)
• That weekend we went camping, and so the Fate game was canceled.
• I'd hoped to get some horror gaming around the campfire going that weekend to replace it, but rain, and a smoke-inhalation-induced headache kept me from running the game I'd prepared.
• Then on Wednesday, there was a last-minute emergency that canceled my Continuum game just minutes after was supposed to start.

All this came about during a time frame when I thought the amount of gaming I was doing was actually going to increase. A player who'd had to leave my Continuum game a couple months ago because of schedule conflicts inquired about returning, but at a different day and time. It being a game with time-travel and teleportation, where party unity is already quite fragile, I agreed. I'm weaving a related narrative for him into the main narrative for the folks playing in the "main" session, and the limited overlap shouldn't be much of a problem.  However, the first session with him was mostly recap, and the two scenes I did run fell a little flat (I kinda prepped the wrong things). The second week of it was much better, but the player had something come up in the middle of it, and had to leave early.

So that's four and a half sessions I've missed in recent memory. Two and a half of which I did my normal amount (as in, more than is really necessary) of GM prep work for. So I'm kinda wound up, bursting with ideas and wanting to run them.

This week, for various reasons, I'm going to have to miss all four games. I can't imagine what that will feel like, knowing that I missed out on 8.5 games in just over a month. I bet that by my next opportunity to game, my hands will be shaking from the withdrawal.

Actually, as I look at my keyboard, I see that's already happening. I'll try to look at the bright side: there's a chance the dice tracks on my arm will finally heal a little, assuming I can keep from picking at the scabs.

It was probably Fate

Played in a great session at the Fate Steampunk  campaign yesterday.  My character came very close to dying, repeatedly. Surprisingly, I took hardly any damage, just a single "clipped" result, but to get by with so little injury took activating all six of my aspects, spending all three of my fate points, and getting three different assists from other players (using the optional rule where they can spent two fate points to give me a +1 bonus).  I boarded two enemy vessels, one in the traditional "boarding party melee" fashion, the other more sneakily to plant a bomb. Trying to sneak back off the enemy battleship, I was accosted by guards, and had some bad luck trying to escape. I barely got off the ship before it blew up, and was left adrift on the luminiferous aether. Luckily, one of my fellow PCs was able to fly over and save me. Had it not been for the assistance of my team-mates, I would have gone down in a blaze of glory. Instead, I waded through the carnage virtually unscathed, as though I were protected from on high.

Of particular personal pride was that I used my "Phlogiston of the Sierra Madre" Aspect and my Fireman (+1), Mining(+1), and Midshipman(+0) skills to destroy the enemy ship. These were some of the wackier elements of my character, the sorts of things you take that give flavor and a sense of history. At the same time they make you worry that perhaps your wasting your points because they're rarely going to come up, and they're really outside the purview of the what your character was built to do.  Yesterday, however, they were absolutely vital to me having the tools and training to get into weird places on board the enemy vessel, and deploy the dynamite.

---

This seems as good a time as any to discuss the probabilities behind the mechanics of Fudge (which is the basis of Fate, and several Fate-derived games, as well as being the basis of F#). All three systems use Fudge dice (though, you can also play Fate or Fudge using two d6 instead, and just subtracting one from the other). The dice rolls end up having quite a pronounced bell curve, with around 20% of all rolls netting a +0 result, and the odds dropping off pretty fast as you approach the outer ends of the curves. Here's a graph comparing the three die mechanics I've played with for Fudge-based games.

Nothing terribly surprising in that chart. Four Fudge Dice provide more variance and a gentler curve than 3 Fudge Dice. The steeper curves emphasize your Skills, the gentler curves emphasize the random element. So F#, which (ironically?) abstracts and downplays skills, actually makes skill level matter more definitively than it does in vanilla Fudge, simply by using one less die.

You can compare these odds to the d20 system by extending the chart out to about +/- 10 and just drawing a horizontal line at the 5% level. Fudge characters have very narrow results windows that are very skill-dependent, unlike d20's haphazard and wide-ranging variations.

One more note: Your odds of rolling a -3 or -4 on 4dF are about 6%, but we always seem to get them more often than that at the table top. :)  I actually rolled -3 on three consecutive rolls last session!

---

The real point in making these curves was so that I could figure out when to use Aspects in Fate. In Fate 2.0, an Aspect can be invoked for either of two major dice-related effects. You can turn 1 Fudge die to it's "+" side, from a blank side or a "-" side. Alternately, you can invoke the Aspect to reroll all four dice.  At the tabletop yesterday, I had a hard time deciding which to use when my dice came up "+---". Flipping a die to it's best side was a guaranteed boost of two ranks, but since that would only generate a +0 result, it felt like maybe the odds favored rerolling instead. Looking at the 4dF bell curve, it becomes obvious that the reroll option is okay at -2, but really shines at -3 and -4.

• If your roll is +4 or +3, obviously you don't want to (and really can't) use an Aspect at all. Be happy with your good luck, and don't get greedy.
• If your roll is +1 or +2, you may consider using an Aspect to turn a "-" into a "+". Doing so would get you a lovely roll that's likely to be a success even if your skills are only fair or average. Personally, though, I'd only do that if this were a critical roll, with a life on the line. Otherwise, I'd hold on to my Aspects to save my bacon further down the road. You definitely don't want to reroll, as that has more than an 80% chance of being a wasted effort, and is very likely to backfire.
• If your roll is -1 to +0, then it's definitely time to swap a "-" into a "+". Fudge-based systems tend to have a very unforgiving results ladder. The step from "nearly impossible" to "stupidly easy" is just about two or three points away. The sweet spot from the GM's point of view is difficulties just 1 above the PCs skills, as that gives them a less than 50% chance of success on rolling alone, but is still easily within the reach of a single Aspect of Fate Point to correct. If you're playing with a GM who's challenging but fair, there's going to be a lot of cases where the difficulty is 1 above your skill, so boosting your roll from +0 to +2 is frequently going to pay off. (At least when I'm GMing, my goal is for the players to win, but only after a hard-fought battle.) On a roll like this, never use an Aspect for a reroll - rerolls have a less than 40% chance of improving your position, and are just as likely to make things worse.
• If your roll is -2, you'll want to reroll if your action is offensive (an attack roll, or a skill check that will advance the plot but not ruin you if it's failed).  If your current result is -2 on 4dF, the reroll has an 80% chance of improving my situation, and only a 6.17% chance of making things worse. If you reroll an attack, you can afford to be risky, as it's not usually the end of the world if the reroll fails. Your only real downside is that you've spent a resource (the Aspect) and wasted a turn. There's big benefits to be gained if your attack roll rockets up from -2 to +4, as not only does your chance of hitting go up, but the damage you do on a successful hit goes up as well. On an attack, a high roll always means more impact.
  However, if your roll is something defensive, you're actually better off flipping a die instead of rerolling all of them. Turning the die is a guaranteed +2 boost, which means it will always reduce the type of damage you suffer by category. Getting a bad reroll means not just depleting a resource, it usually means taking even more damage. A defensive reroll when you're sitting at -2 has only a 40% chance of saving you more damage then the single die flip would, and equal odds of being less effective. On a defense, a high roll is often no more effective than a medium roll, as either cancels all the damage - it's more important to assure you don't have the crummy below average roll that would amplify your injuries.
• At -3 and -4, reroll, reroll, reroll. It doesn't matter if your roll is offensive or defensive in nature, you've got a better than 90% chance of improving your situation, and your average improvement is nearly double what you'd get if you just flipped a single die.

---

And now a brief rant about a house-rule that's been used at the game I'm playing in. This house rule, which apparently originates in Spirit of the Century (and I've been told appears in Starblazer Adventures, Dresden Files, and other Fate-based games), goes like this: "Spending a Fate chip gives +2 on a roll instead of +1." Man, I think that rule is awful. I don't think I would never use it in a game I was running.

Aspects are cool character-specific things you can invoke to boost your rolls. They help differentiate between characters, because not everyone will always be able to invoke all their aspects in every situation. Finding a good use for your "Phlogiston of the Sierra Madre" Aspect is, as previously mentioned, a spotlight moment where your character stands in stark relief from the rest of the party. So it's very cool that the Aspects have a little bit of complexity, a great deal of variance, and some serious power potential. Aspects are hugely potent, but not very reliable - they're great for saving your bacon in a tight spot or fumbled roll, but don't tend to be helpful on average medium rolls and are useless if the dice are deliver their top natural results.

Fate points, per the default Fate 2.0 rules, can be spent on any roll to get a flat +1 boost. This can help take the sting out of a failure, but it can just as easily turn a home run into a grand slam.  While a Fate point's over all power is less than an Aspect, they're simpler to invoke and much more reliable. They also don't add to character flavor or differentiation at all. An Fate point says to the world "I'm a Hero", where as an Aspect says "This is the type of Hero I am." Fate points make any hero a little more capable of doing the same things everyone else can do. They make the other stats on your sheet matter less, and make the characters less unique.

Given the steep bell curve of the system, I completely understand why Fate points are needed, as the odds can be pretty harsh if the players lack the most relevant skill. But I think the balance between the two mechanics in Fate 2.0 is very deliberate and intentional. Aspects are meant to be more powerful, but narrower in scope and less reliable. Aspects make you an expert. Fate points make you a generalist. If you had to choose between getting an extra Aspect point or getting an extra Fate point, it'd be a tough call.

Once you've applied that house-rule, however, that balance is upset. Suddenly Fate points grossly outstrip Aspects, because they're now just as potent as an Aspect 98.77% of the time and yet still much easier to utilize. This really degrades character niche and uniqueness. I'll admit that's a personal hobgoblin of mine - I really like it when characters act and play differently, and I'm known for playing some oddball characters.

I just feel that if a game like Fate or Spirit of the Century is going to have a long involved character creation process (where you chart out the PCs life and assign skills using complex little tree diagrams, and dream up these catchy flavorful Aspects), it's really counter-productive to have some mechanism overshadow all that. If Fate points give +2 to a roll, making them better than Aspects, and more beneficial than most of the skill ratings on the typical character sheet, then they really do threaten to dwarf and trivialize all other mechanics. I think that's a shame.

If someone else is playing the Mad Scientist and I'm not, I really don't want my character to be able to build steam mechs and reanimate corpses. That's their "thing", their niche, and I'd rather they get to keep that spotlight for themselves. But a double-strength Fate chip means I've got a decent shot of duplicating their efforts. It filled in the conceptual gap between our characters.

I despise that house rule, but not to such an extent that it's a game-breaker. I'm still really enjoying the campaign I'm playing in, and yesterday's session was incredible. A big chunk of that is because our GM is really good at improvising and putting us in difficult positions with no obvious solution. I enjoy having to squirm out of the situations he creates for us. But honestly, I took some ridiculous risks in that last session, and I probably should have at least been badly injured. Fate points are what saved me, and they're what allowed me to pull of three stupidly high-risk rolls that I really had no business succeeding at. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

FATE steampunk characters

My wife and I are playing in a very enjoyable steampunky alternate history game on Sundays. Our characters have been selected to take part in the first U.S. mission to the moon, which is happening in the late 1890's.

I'm such a thin-skinned perfectionist, I always find something to complain about even in a game I'm really enjoying. So let me get that out of the way:

• I have some minor gripes about the FATE system, and Fudge-based games in general, but I think I'll mostly save them for another post. The system is somewhat lacking in granularity and gradation, and you never want to be the underdog.
• The lack of a published setting means the players aren't really sure how far to take the steam-punk and pulp elements (the cliff-hanger of the last session suggests to me that the GM pictures both being more prevalent than we PCs have assumed thus far).

Those both are pretty minor complaints. The game is rolling along at a great pace, and our characters and situations thus far are pretty memorable. We've had to think on our feet, and narrowly avoided some dire fates.

Here's the stats for the character's my wife and I are playing:

---

My character is Basil "Boyo" Munsby.

Basil is a former member of a New York street gang. After getting in trouble with the law, he was ordered into the Navy by Judge that wanted to scare him straight. After he served his time, he decided to go prospecting for Gold. Instead of the yellow metal, he stumbled across a vein of Phlogiston, the rare mineral that the U.S. Government in the setting is now using to power it's expedition to the Moon.

As far as NYC street gangs go, the Bowery Boys were "pretty boys", and almost respectable. So, while Basil is clearly our adventuring party's resident cold-blooded murderer, he can still dress sharp and hide his psychopathic streak if he needs too. He's uncultured "new money", but at least he doesn't look out of place.

I either bribed or intimidated my way into this expedition, on the flimsy excuse that my experience mining Phlogiston will be useful when we get to the moon (which is clearly full of the stuff). So far I've mainly proved my worth by killing foreign spies that tried to sabotage or infiltrate our mission.

Aspects:

• Half-Mad Bowery Boy: 2
• Court-Ordered Military Service: 1
• Phlogiston of the Sierra Madre: 2
• "New Money" Adventurer: 1

Skills:

• Confidence Man: +0
• Dirty Fighting: +2
• Fireman: +1
• Intimidation: +3
• Midshipman: +0
• Mining: +1
• Petty Larceny: +1
• Politics: +0
• Sense Treachery: +0
• Survival: +2

The various criminal-related skills are mostly from his time as a hoodlum, but so is the Fireman skill, as the Bowery Boys ran a volunteer fire-department.

Survival and Mining are mostly from his time prospecting, but he had some rough situations out there in the wilds that further expanded his Intimidation and Fighting skills.

Midshipman was a mistake, and needs to be renamed. He spent some time on a ship in the navy, and I chose a word I'd heard but apparently always misunderstood. I thought Midshipman was an enlisted rank. Looking on the web now, I realize Midshipman is actually the lowest Officer's rank. I should replace it with "Seaman" or "Leading Seaman". I could believe that he's got what it takes to get promoted once while at sea (he's brave and focused), but he's not Commissioned Officer material.

---

My wife's character is Theresa White.

She's an inventor and engineer. I don't know much of her character's backstory. My wife is at work, so I can't really pick her brain right now, but I've got a copy of her character sheet. Here's what I do know about her PC off the top of my head: She's a published author on various scientific topics. She was the women's fencing champion at college. Margaret E. Knight is a colleague, friend, or role-model of hers.


Aspects:

• Nine Impossible Things Before Breakfast: 2
• Obsessed With Technology: 1
• Unhealthy Curiousity: 2
• Women's Fencing Champion: 1

Skills:

• Alertness: +1
• Athletics: +0
• Electrical Guru: +2
• Here's What I Need: +0
• I'm Published: +0
• It's Never Been Done Before: +1
• Melee: +0
• Phlogiston Specialist: +2
• Technological Gadgeteer: +3
• What Is That?: +1

In our second session she built some mechanical shackles with a 10-hour time lock, so I wouldn't have to kill the enemy that had surrendered to us. We were on an out-bound train, so as long as he couldn't get free till we'd reached our destination, we didn't need more blood on our hands. Or so she told me. :)

---

The rest of the play group includes a Pinkerton, a daredevil escape artist, a journalist, an employee of the Vanderbilts, and a young Smedley Darlington Butler. Smedley Butler is one of my personal heroes, so I'm kind of jealous that one of my fellow players had the idea first.

Our second session ended quite unexpectedly with the cliff-hanger of a dog-fight in space. We've been attacked by rocket ships from an as-yet-unidentified nation. Just when you thought it was safe to go into orbit...

Color-Blinded

Here I am reflecting on the Warhammer 3rd dice yet again. This time it's the red (reckless) and green (conservative) dice. In previous posts, I've looked into how the red dice are a bit of a mixed bag. They generate some big hits, but run a lot more risks in the process. Largely, this is balanced by the way that most action cards have a much-better red side. Or do they? As it turns out, many of the red actions only look much better than their green counterparts. I think Vegas casinos would love those red dice and red sides of the cards, as they look much sexier to the players than they really are.


Let's examine the action Troll-Feller Strike. I chose it partly at random (it was in the first PC ziplock I opened), partly because the math on it was reasonably easy for me to figure out, and partly because the other special attack in the PC bag I pulled that one out of is a bit of an under-performer. Troll-Feller Strike, though, while not one of the absolute best cards, but it's pretty darned good. It's a solid tier-2 card, and the tier-1 above it is comprised of just 2 or 3 broken cards, 2 of which have seen major errata from the publisher. I imagine you could easily argue that Troll-Feller Strike is in a 12-way tie for 4th best non-magic attack card. It certainly doesn't suck, and is the type of action you'd be happy to have in your arsenal.

Looking at the Troll-Feller Strike card, one's initial instincts are that this card is much better on the red side than the green side. The red side has that juicy double-boon line and the very respectable comet line, both of which are absent from the green side. What's more, the green side adds an extra black die of difficulty to your roll. First impressions are that this card is much better on red than green. In theory, you could roll a hit for + 7 damage, +2 criticals, and a number of bonus wounds based on the severity of one those criticals. While that's not gonna happen very often, it's still clear that the red side does tons more damage than the green!

Except it doesn't. After running the math, I've concluded that on average it does 0.2 damage more per attack. Average damage for the red side is 12.8725 minus target's toughness. Average damage for the green side is 12.66 minus the target's toughness.

Here's how I arrived at those figures.

I used an attack pool of 1 purple, 3 blue, 2 stance, 1 yellow. In my experience, most attack pools also have at least one white and at least one black die, but since they kinda come close to cancelling each other out (and the math is much simpler without them), I figured we'd leave the white and black out and just stick with this. (Also, I started on this line of thought in a reply to a post on the FFG forum, and the original poster had sited that pool when they asked their question.)

I ran the numbers through the online probability tool at http://www.jaj22.org.uk/wfrp/diceprob.html, as that saved me a lot of time, though it meant I don't have numbers for odds of rolling 4 or more successes, or similarly large numbers of boons and banes.

I rounded those results to the nearest percentage point and made little results charts.

Given those numbers, the red side has the following Hit or Miss percentages:
10%: Miss
35%: Hit +1 damage
55%: Hit +3 damage

The red side has the following boon or bane odds:
1%: 2 Fatigue from Banes*
16%: 1 Fatigue from Banes*
21%: 0 boons or banes
25%: If it hits, gets +1 damage, ignore armour soak
19%: If it hits, gets +3 damage, +1 critical.
18%: If it hits, gets +4 damage, +1 critical, ignore armour soak

To determine the overall damage odds, I multiplied those two percentages. These are rough numbers, for several reasons. (The accurate math is actually more complicated because some results are less likely to occur concurrently. With the red dice, you get slightly more banes on rolls that have fewer successes, and some sides have more than one symbol so you get more extreme rolls. I played around with that for a little bit, and decided the numbers weren't different enough to justify the extra effort. This is part of why I rounded them to the nearest percentage point for the charts here, as the long flowing digits aren't any more accurate than the shorter numbers that are easier to read.)

This multiplication came up with the following percentages for the damage results of any given roll.
10%: Miss
13%: Damage N+1
21% Damage N+3
9%: Damage N+2 (+ignore soak)
7%: Damage N+4 (+1 crit)
6%: Damage N+5 (+1 crit, ignore soak)
14%: Damage N+4 (+ignore soak)
10%: Damage N+6 (+1 crit)
10%: Damage N+7 (+1 crit, ignore soak)

If we assume that N=10 (Strength 5 + Hand Weapon), and that the ability to ignore armour soak adds on average 2 points of damage to the total**, then this generates an average damage per attack roll of 12.86.

That doesn't take the comet line into account. The comet line turns one point of damage into a crit, and then adds bonus wounds equal to the severity of that crit. Crit severity will vary wildly depending on what cards have been handed out already as wounds, and which expansions you have. I did a number crunch on my deck and found the average is 2.25 damage. This assumes a fresh deck and no pre-existing “flesh wound” crits on the foe.

The next step was to calculate what percentage of hits can actually find the comet effect useful. Obviously, you don't want to use the comet line if you didn't net any other successes, or if it could be used as a boon to do +1 damage AND cancel a couple points of armour soak. So, this is only going to be an additional boost in the situations where your roll shows 2 or more potential successes, AND you also already have 1 or more banes or 3 or more eagles as your final boon/bane result from all the other dice but the yellow one, AND you roll a comet. You have a roughly 19% chance of rolling a comet (17% from your initial roll of a yellow die, plus 2% from rolls that get one or more Righteous Successes before rolling the comet), a 76% chance of scoring 2+ successes, and 35% (17% + 18%) chance of scoring banes or 3+ boons. So at best, the comet line is a smart move on 5% of all rolls (as .19 * .76 * .35 = .05054). So, on 5% of all rolls, we add .26 damage, meaning we add an average of 0.125 damage per attack roll.

The end result being that we do an average damage on the red side of 12.8725 minus the target's toughness.

Now let's look at the green side. Same process (except we can skip the obnoxious part about the comet, since there's no comet line on the green side).

Green Side:
Hit vs Miss Odds:
11%: Miss
40%: Hit +1 damage
49%: Hit +3 damage

Boon and Bane Odds:
0%*: 2 Fatigue
10%: 1 Fatigue
19%: 0 boons or banes
71%: If it hits, gets +1 damage, ignore armour soak

Overall damage odds:
11%: Miss
12%: Damage N+1
14% Damage N+3
28%: Damage N+2 (+ignore armour soak)
35%: Damage N+4 (+ignore armour soak)

Assuming the same value for N (10) and for armour soak (2) as we did for the red side, this results in an average damage of 12.66 minus the target's toughness.

About 33% of all red rolls will do more damage than the best green roll, which seems pretty good. However, many of the high red rolls are just 1 point higher than green. What's more, the red dice have higher chances (than the green) of rolling the two lowest possible damage results as well. It all works out to the red side of the card having considerably more variance, but just a fractionally better performance in the long run.

The red side does an average damage of 12.8725, just 0.2125 damage per hit more than the green. As I indicated, most of the above numbers were rough, and there could be rounding errors that I've missed. But the margin of error on my numbers is likely to be smaller than the margin of damage bonus that the red side of the card has. Whenever there was doubt (such as the comet effect), I chose for the numerical result that gives the larger boost to the red side, yet it still only got ahead of the green by 2 tenths of a point of damage.



The upshot of all this is that the two sides of the cards are deceiving. The red side often looks much better, when it's actually just minimally better or just breaking even. This all has to do with the extra banes on the red dice, which make you much less likely to score beneficial boon lines. For a card like Accurate Shot, where the green actually looks better than the red, I say with confidence that the red side is actually quite horrible and the gap between them is huge.

I'm continually impressed with the extents to which the designers of WFRP 3rd went to to make a well-balanced game despite it's highly opaque and unique mechanics. Somebody over at FFG must really like math.


CAVEAT: This took some significant time, so I doubt I'll do this level of analysis with any other cards. Which means I can't be certain I didn't just luck into the Troll-Feller Strike as my first card chosen at random. Confirmation Bias may be influencing my conclusions. I expect the other cards to hold true to the same patterns this card did, but I can't be certain without doing a lot more work.

Notes:
*: In addition, there's a 36% chance of getting a fatigue from the red dice's exertion symbols, which happens almost independently of the boon-bane status of the rest of the roll. Overall, the roll has a 47% chance of generating 1 or more fatigue, with a maximum fatigue gain of 3 points per roll.

By contrast, the green die only has a 10% chance of getting fatigue at all, and a less-than two-tenths of a percent chance of getting 2 fatigue (and no chance at all of getting a third). Given that every roll of the green pool has a 48% chance of qualifying for recovering a fatigue, they can pretty much ignore their exertion status.

36% of green rolls will end up adding 2 extra recharge tokens to an action or dropping the parties best initiative token down by two. Just how bad that is compared to the red sides fatigue has a lot to do with the situation and character build, not to mention just how sadistic the GM is feeling at the moment.

**: I chose to equate “ignore your target's armour soak value for this attack” with +2 damage as 2 is approximately the average soak of foes in the Tome of Adventure. One could argue that this is below average for the sorts of foes you'd use Troll-Feller Strike against. However, since the green dice has very reliable odds of getting the single-boon trigger to ignore the soak, if we assume soak is higher it just makes things worse for the red side. If armour soak is 3, then the red side does an average damage of 13.42 and the green side does 13.29, closing the gap by nearly by half.

Conversely, the red side fairs a tiny bit better against low-armour foes. The red side would do 12.47 damage vs the green sides 12.03 if the armour soak were just 1 instead of 2. The higher the foes armour soak, the better the green side of the card does.

Last Night's Fiasco

Last night I played in a one-shot of "Fiasco". It's a rules-light GM-less RPG that seeks to capture the feel of a Coen brothers movie. In our case, we were a touring rock band that was on the verge of breaking up. Our scenario ended in tragedy, followed by a killer solo album.

If you've never heard of Fiasco, there's plenty of reviews out there that will tell you the basics. I suggest taking a look at:
http://artbroken.livejournal.com/1095154.html
http://critical-hits.com/2010/06/25/review-fiasco/

Rather than cover all that ground, I'm just going to mention a couple things I particularly liked, and a few I didn't.


What I loved about the system:

• The charts and mechanism for creating character relationships were awesome. There was a random element, but the players had a collaborative decision-making process to go through in choosing which (rolled) numbers to use on which charts, and interpreting those chart results. It was great source of inspiration, and made sure everyone had a voice in how things started. I will absolutely steal this idea for future one-shots I run that may or may not use any other mechanics from Fiasco.
  
• The "Tilt" mid-game. It uses a similar mechanism to the character-creation system to show us the end goal/condition half-way through the session. This was pretty genius, and helped us provide structure at the point where the game was just about to explode out of control.
• The "Aftermath". Not quite as cool as the character creation and tilt, but still pretty neat. Each PC got a montage of images showing the impact of the events detailed in their future life.

What I wasn't crazy about:

• The unstructured GM-less mechanics of the scenes themselves. The set-up, tilt, and conclusion mechanisms were all pretty awesome, but I wasn't completely enamored with what went between them.
  It felt a little too "Gong Show" or "Voted off the Island" for me. The other players voted on whether the scene was beneficial or damaging to your character, which in and of itself was just an okay mechanic. Problem was there wasn't a clearly-defined end point for a scene, so you didn't know when to start kibbutzing about the voting part. If someone jumped the gun, it would disrupt the scene / spoil the moment.
  I could easily imagine situations where it would lead to out-of-character social tension as well, like Player A constantly cut Player B's scenes short, always gave Player B a damaging vote, or metagamed the voting procedure to make sure the Aftermath for Player B was dismal. With some groups I've gamed with in the past, that would have been a recipe for disaster.
  
• Giving away your results dice in the first Act. My dislike for this may have had to do with the impromptu nature of our session (we'd all showed up for a different game, but there'd been too many players, so some of us broke off into a second table, and decided to play Fiasco instead). Since we weren't prepared for it, the description of how things worked was a little weird, and I couldn't quite internalize what the giving away of the results die represented... if indeed it represented anything. It may have been purely mechanical. The second Act, where you keep the results die for yourself, made more sense to me. The first act felt more like a board game too me, where the mechanics trump the story, and the second felt more like an RPG where the mechanics support and enable the story. I can't say for certain how much of that had to do with this one little rule change between the two acts, and how much had to do with simply progressing through the games learning curve (which is very light, but not transparent).
• It was over too soon. I expect a 5 or 6 player game is probably about the right length, but the 2-act structure seems to make a 3 or 4 player game just whip right by. It was over before we knew it. I'd like to add a third Act for smaller groups, but I imagine some changes would have to be made to the Tilt and Aftermath to make that work.
  

I had a lot to say about the two things I didn't like, but I would be very interested in playing this again sometime. I suspect it's a game that benefits greatly from playing it repeatedly and getting a handle on the nuances of both the mechanics and the narrative structure.

Final note: I'm not 100% certain that it needs to be GM-less, and I think it might actually work better if there was a single authority giving it structure during the bits that aren't chart based. You could then just essentially use the Tilt and Aftermath as an improv tool for the GM.

Ennies Voting

If you haven't done so yet, there's just a couple days (ends on the 25th) left to vote for the 2010 Ennie Awards. There's some very cool games (and gaming-related products) up for voting this year. There's also a couple real stinkers, in my opinion, so you should head over there and vote for the ones that actually deserve it. :)

The ballot includes links to the publishers product pages for every nominated item, so if you've never heard of a particular game, you can at educate yourself. I found out that way about a couple games I definitely going to buy in the next month or two.

Inglorious Plummers

This cracked me up.

The Bugger of Pacing

I ran a pretty slow session last night at my Continuum game. This is definitely against my normal trends.

Disclaimer: What follows is just a tiny peak inside my brain, and what I'm thinking while I GM. It's internal monologue, but posted in public so I can't just ignore it. No guarantees anyone will find it useful...

I have a tendency as a GM to throw too many things at the players. It's the single criticism about my GMing that I've gotten most often. My settings are very complicated and rich with plot threads, and I don't have a lot of patience for players dithering and weighing their options all session long. So if the players drag their feet at all, I tend to just lump unfortunate events on them until they take an action. Mostly it works, and nearly always gets the results I want, which is a taught fast-paced and exciting game. Sometimes, though, I over do it (hence it showing up as a recurring criticism). The strongest critique of this aspect of my GMing came earlier this year, in regards to it's impact on the fatigue rules in Savage Worlds. While I think not all of that situation was mine to own, I have tried to be more careful about it since then.

In a time-travel game like Continuum, in theory the PCs have all the time in the world to solve their problems. If there's not someone actively shooting at them, they can take as long as they want to solve the current dilemma, or even stick it on the back-burner and deal with it when they're more skilled. So, throwing more trouble at them would fly in the face of a major setting theme. Beyond that, Continuum has some serious "player driven" potential, in that PCs can teleport and time travel in the blink of an eye. As GM you have to be prepared for anything.

The previous session, they'd wrapped up a plotline / adventure (and had done so about 2 or 3 sessions ahead of schedule due to quick and clever actions on the player's part.). The wrap-up had happened in the final minutes of the session, so we hadn't really planned out a likely next move for the PCs. Their characters were in a fairly remote location, too, so there really wasn't much for me to throw at them if I'd intended too. The ball was in their court, and it took them a while to figure out which way to go. Nothing wrong with that.

I mostly let them take their time, but yet I feel conflicted about it. I threw in a couple short conversations with NPCs, but didn't ask for a single die roll all night. Yet due to that Savage Worlds situation back in January, I'm left wondering if maybe even those two GM-initiated conversations were me pushing too hard on the throttle. At the same time, the session seemed painfully slow to me. None of the players yawned or seemed distracted at all, but not much happened.

At least part of why I'm unhappy with it had to do with how much chatter and table-talk we had at the start of the session. Because there was no cliff-hanger, I didn't start the game as soon as I'd like. We chatted and chewed the fat for most of an hour. These are all good things for a group of friends to do, but I think it contributes to my feeling like the game was too slow. Players participate in your game to have fun, and as long as they're having fun they often don't care whether the time is spent killing monsters or just socializing at the table. Even though everyone had fun, the plot was at exactly the same point (in neutral) that it was at when the session started, and on some level that offends me. I have no one to blame but myself, but it's definitely something I should either try to pre-empt, or try to get over. Should I learn to relax, or learn to get the game on track before the late hour annoys me? I guess that probably depends on who I'm playing with. When I'm a player I just detest a slowly paced game, but nobody complained last night so I may be worrying a lot over nothing.

Sometimes getting the pacing right is way more effort than I'd like it to be.

An idea in need of a blank d20

I've come up with an interesting way to get "boon" and "bane"-like effects from Warhammer 3rd into just about any RPG, but without the extra baggage and complexity, and without disrupting the normal mechanics of these games. First I'll need to establish some context about which aspects of the boon system I want to port over.

I really like the ideas behind the Warhammer dice, but I'm not sure I would have taken it as far as they did. Having so many skulls and eagles come up means you really have to really come up with a lot of Boon and Bane results. This forces a pretty crunchy system with action cards, and requires either a lot of GM effort between sessions, or the use of a published module. The latter is clearly what the publisher is pushing towards, but it's never really been my style. I've tried trimming it down a bit for Everhammer, which worked pretty well. I've also tried trimming it down rather further than that, for WhamTrek, which didn't work as well mechanically but was silly enough to function for a one-shot. In the lite narrative version, it felt like boons and banes were happening way too often - every single die roll resulted in the GM having to come up with something cool and unexpected. It was draining.

One of the other problems I have with the Warhammer dice is that it's not symmetrical. (Peter pointed this out to me the other day.) If I roll Observation opposed by your Stealth, in Warhammer's system my Stress or Fatigue go up or down by the results of the roll, but your stress or fatigue is always unaffected. As a GM, I plan to roll dice a lot less often than my players do (I prefer player-facing systems), but this particular effect of the Boon & Bane system makes that plan a tiny bit undesirable.

My players the other night got me thinking about the Wild Die in d6 Star Wars. Overall though, if I recall correctly, it didn't quite do what I wanted, either. The benefit of rolling a "6" was that it increased your success rate instead of adding beneficial side effects. The not-strictly-numerical complications and side effects of a "1" only happened in one roll in 36, and that just wasn't often enough to be interesting. Making them happen 1 in 6 rolls would likely be too much, though.

What I think I want in an RPG mechanic is something that works like boons and banes, but a lot less often, maybe 30% of all rolls having some sort of side effect either good or bad (instead of 60% or 70% of rolls like it is in Warhammer 3rd). It would also have a few less levels of gradation, too - I'd like to be caring about 1 to 2 boons or banes on a roll, not have to be prepared for oddball rolls like "4 boons and 1 chaos star".

I was contemplating this the other day, and it occurred to me I could handle this, in any tandem with just about any game system, by using a single blank d20. I know chessex makes large blank d20s you can mark up with a sharpie. I'd prep this extra die, and use it in conjunction with a more normal success/fail mechanic of whatever game I was running. As an example, you could add exactly one die like this to the default dice pools of World of Darkness. Or, you could roll this die along side a normal d20 in D&D to trigger exceptional events that are more interesting than just double-damage.

I'd draw on 6 sides of it (so 30% chance of something unusual happening), with a total of 4 symbols. Probably this distribution:

• 2 sides marked with a 4-leaf clover - "Lucky Break" - These would result in something unexpected and good happens to the character. These would be improvised, or could be prepared on a list in advance and crossed off as they come up. They'd be able to vary a bit in power, sometimes being minor but other times huge, but they'd always be helpful.
• 1 side would be marked with a Jolly Roger - "Ill Luck" - Something unexpected and unfortunate happens to the character. Again the GM could improvise, but I'd probably come up with a list like my "101 Wild Die 1's" chart from back in the day to fall back on if nothing inspired me during a scene. Players would know that when this symbol came up, things were going to get nasty. 5% seems about right.
• 2 sides marked with a Tower - "Situational / Location-based Event" - These would trigger a specific result depending on the location or scene. It might be good or bad, but it would be consistent through-out the scene. Examples: If the scene is a fight on a narrow ledge, rolling this symbol means you're falling off after this action. If the scene is taking place in the Imperial Palace, this roll means that your action is observed by a random powerful NPC courtier (and thus it's good or bad depending on who saw it). The GM would prep one of these for every scene they intended to run. I might do this symbol in two colors, so that it's possible to have two different effects, or severity levels, in a scene if the GM desires.
• 1 side would be marked with a stick figure, or a trio of stick figures - "Minor NPC Event" - this would mean that something unusual happens to some NPC in the scene, typically a minor one. This would again be something the GM improvises, but it would probably be guided by whether or not the task failed. If you fail, this symbol means some NPC working against you gets a lucky break. If you succeed, this symbol often means your action affects an extra target, or that an allied NPC gets a lucky break. This way we get around having to roll dice for all the extras, but also avoid the "you can't gain Stress because I'm sneaking up on you" problem with opposed rolls in Warhammer. If the PCs are alone in the scene, this symbol causes an NPC to arrive at the location (or triggers a wandering monster encounter if it's that sort of campaign).
  

For now, I'm going to mark the die in pencil, so I can test out how well this idea works, and fiddle with percentages after getting some actual experience with it at the table. It may turn out that the Jolly Rogers and Clovers need to appear in equal numbers, or that the Tower needs to show up more often. I'd like to be able to tweak it after a session or two.

Another option, though this would require more work (at least the first time) is to make small decks of cards that correspond to these symbols. Whenever the symbol comes up, you flip over the top card and apply it if it makes any sense in that situation. The main benefit of such a further randomization is that it would let the GM make some of the results really potent without the players feeling like the GM had it out for them. If made up on the fly or chosen off a list, there's the danger of favoritism or perceived favoritism, neither of which is fun.