System Matters Only As Much As Your Table Needs It To.
The main issue with the interminable ‘system matters’ debate in tabletop role-playing games is that it’s perpetuated by shitheads looking to game the online attention economy for crumbs. Anybody claiming that they know better than you and your friends at the table how you should play your games almost invariably does not do so with your best interests in mind.
That is not to say that ‘system does not matter’, but that any system you elect to use should always serve the needs, wants and enjoyment of you and your friends at the table, and never the other way around. If a mechanic in a game is causing frustration or discomfort at your table, rip it the fuck out. Discard it. Designer intent be damned. Likewise, if you or your table need structure or precision where none exists in your rulebook of choice, pilfer it from another text, or even better, make something up.
Role-playing games are, at their core, games of make-believe. Systems as usually described inherently cannot be imposed on players because they are simply ideas, communicated in writing. The rules, procedures and shared imaginative spaces of role-play rely entirely on the mutual consent of their players, and anybody seeking to impose constraints on that externally, either by claiming that a game designer knows better, or that their advice will make you a better referee or player, is a fucking dweeb unworthy of your attention.
October 7, 2024
Destiny 2 is Frightened of Itself
Let me say upfront that this is a rant, and I am a huge hater, but I’m not trying to chew out any of Destiny 2’s rank-and-file developers here. They are an unquestionably talented and passionate bunch, and care about the game a great deal, as evidenced by the fact they hadn’t all walked the fuck out the Bungie office doors after suffering the consequences of close to a decade of absolutely boneheaded creative decisions by upper management.
Destiny 2’s final entry in ‘Light and Darkness’ narrative arc, The Final Shape, ended in a manner just as confused and anticlimactic as Destiny 2 has been since the decision was made to gut the entire story of the base game plus two years of expansions. The impetus from the top since that embarrassing low-point has been to make Destiny feel more like an ongoing Marvel movie.
The culmination of this is the final mission, dubbed Excision, where 12 players plus every ally they have accrued throughout the last few story expansions pile in for one final standoff against the narrative arc’s ad-hoc antagonist, The Witness. It’s very consciously cribbing from that scene in Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame - zero subtlety, just as much noise and spectacle as possible, a crescendo of hypermaximalist superheroic violence.
After whittling down the hitpoint bar of the big bad, who is now REALLY big via the medium of some Power Rangers bullshit, a gnawingly trite cutscene of heroic sacrifice plays out that you’ve seen in 100 different movies before, robbed of any impact at all by the most predictable twist you could possibly imagine. And then? You’re back at your home base, where your leader delivers a melancholy “we won, but at what cost?” monologue, while lighting a Kǒngmíng lantern. Fade scene, roll credits. The culmination of 10 years of plotting. Jesus fuck.
I’m sorry if I sound cynical here, but given Bungie employs a whole team of extremely talented professional writers and artists should I not expect a bit better than the safest, most boilerplate ending possible to a years-long story that people were really invested in? As if almost to rub your nose in it, the narrative thrust for the next major expansion is set up via a post-credits monologue. It’s fucking awful.
Really, I get it. We’re living in an era of pathological aversion to creative risk in the big-budget creative industries. Everything cribs off proven success stories because they have to. It’s all or nothing - you either make more money than God, or you flop, investment dries up and the studio goes bust, everybody is out of a job. The reasons for this trend are clearly far too complex for a peon like myself to understand, and I’m sure has nothing at all to do with CEOs taking home thousands of times more in pay than rank-and-file developers.
Destiny 2 needed to become a vehicle for MCU-style mass-market entertainment in order to sustain itself, this was how it had to be, there is no alternative, neoliberal economics will slowly kill everything you love, nobody can do anything about that and this is just how things are. Now eat your slurry you fucking worm.
Destiny 1 was a game entirely possessed by its sense of self-importance. The core group of Bungie veterans responsible for the creative decision-making in the Halo trilogy and its two spinoffs were high enough on their own fumes to just go to fucking town and make the most pompous, aesthetically ambitious sci-fi game that they could. They unironically described it as a ‘brave new world’. They took classic westerns, Andrei Tarkovsky, Terry Gilliam, Zdzisław Beksiński and Masamune Shirow as creative points of reference. They hired a fucking Beatle to assist in composing the score.
The end result was probably more David Lynch’s Dune than Aejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune, as the Unstoppable Force of creative ambition met the Immovable Object of development constraints, and predictably enough, the Immovable Object won. Destiny was, as a result, a very compromised thing. But you know what? I love David Lynch’s Dune and I love Old Destiny precisely for being deeply flawed artifacts of much grander, more ambitious designs.
Years after Paul McCartney got deservedly poked fun at for his awful pomp-rock theme song, after Dinklebot and Moon-Wizards and never having enough time to explain, and Unknown Fallen Houses, these things feel… strangely endearing? They’re the faultlines at the borders where all of the rest of Destiny was crunched into form, reminders of all the naive ambition that went into the part of making the game when the possibilities were vast.
Nearly a decade of reactive course correction in the crucible of live-service software development has more or less scrubbed Destiny 2 clean of this initial character, and in its place we get something much safer, more sterile, because it had to be. The old quirks were simply too big a financial risk to countenance, as would any new creative risk-taking. The Final Shape was a pretty apt title.
June 29, 2024
In Defence of Uncertainty
I read Marcia B’s blogpost earlier today about Randomly Generated Constant Damage and Prismatic Wasteland’s response regarding to-hit rolls or lack thereof, and feel the need to defend both to-hit rolls and variable damage, because I believe they are both necessary sources of uncertainty in violence / combat / etc.
Absolutely no shade to any of the authors who have advocated for this kind of thing, but whenever I have run games for my table who have absolutely no interest in the OSR blogosphere, the response I get back from systems like Cairn or Into The Odd that do away with to-hit rolls is that combat feels boring and predictable. This is obviously undesirable. I’m perfectly willing to concede that maybe I just wasn’t narrating combat hard enough as a referee, but frankly I think I’m pretty good at that, and way less so at crunching numbers, so really I should have nailed this style of resolution.
The best answer I can come up with as to why this might be, is that stripping away the possibility of failure leaves you with something without meaningful stakes, which seems at odds with how something as risky as engaging in lethal violence should feel. Combat therefore becomes a game of attrition as characters wail on each-other to roll the biggest damage number, whittling down each-other’s health-pools until one side loses. Of course, engaged players will still try and inject some drama into this, but asking them to do so feels unnecessarily burdensome - what’s the point in expecting agency when the outcome is already determined?
Constant damage I suspect would feel similarly rigid, but instead of eliding away the uncertainty of landing a hit, you’re making a predetermined judgment about how a player-character might act in combat. Keeping to-hit in this equation could at least still hold some interesting stakes, but there is still a fairly obvious issue in that by pre-determining a weapon’s possible damage, you create strongly optimal and sub-optimal approaches - a weapon that can only deal 1hp damage is boring and tedious, and a weapon that can only max damage is… boring and tedious for the opposite reason.
Ultimately, “is this PC able to hit their target?” and “how hurt is their target by the hit?” are both questions that I want to answer when I run combat. I’m not wild about being beholden to how Gygax ran things back in the 70s, but I do think there’s a lovely straightforwardness to how those questions are addressed in D&D, i.e. ‘if successful, determine the effect’. Of course, framing it like that opens up other potential ways of doing things - maybe you go PBTA style and do a single roll of 2D6 with varying degrees of success (miss, glancing, weak hit, strong hit, deadly?), maybe you omit HP and track damage completely narratively, or through an injury table? In all fairness, this is what Prismatic Wasteland was advocating for when suggesting adding Blackjack-style hit resolution, and their blog is full of neat ways in which to add layers of unpredictability back into pure damage-roll combat.
Ultimately for my old Cairn games, I went with something as unfussy as possible in the spirit of the text, while still allowing for the degree of uncertainty my table enjoys - make every attack roll a skill check. Ask the player to narrate how they attack - if they try and slide their sword between the plates of an enemy’s armour, roll dex. If they want to swing a hammer in a wide arc, roll strength, or if they want to try with a different stat, justify it narratively first. Passed the check? Great - roll a D6 to see how well you did. It worked great.
April 11, 2024
Antrin Playtest Report 1
This is the first playtest report for the RPG I’m currently working on, influenced by Scots folklore, Ursula LeGuin and Luke Gearing’s Wolves Upon the Coast. It’s still got a ways to go, but I recently invited a few friends to battle-test what’s there.
NOTES:
- Change ‘Stalker’ to ‘Outlander’ per L’s suggestion. ‘Stalker’ seems fine in text but doesn’t land right at the table.
- Think about how players might want to play against their class / ancestry archetypes.
- Shortbows and longbows are distinct. Mechanically? Ehhh not sure yet.
- Barter isn’t the most intuitive thing in the world. Let players have coins if they find it easier to track. As there’s already a ‘currency’ there, not too big a hassle.
The party, Mhairi (sídhe healer), Pim (urisk mystic) and Teaguy (dvergr outlander), start having met as crew on a Sprawlboat, a huge dvergic longboat that functions as a self-sufficient travelling settlement. Mhairi is trying to pay down her tab with the barkeep, and offers him some dried mushrooms which he accepts as a partial trade, but says he’ll call her tab settled in exchange for completing an errand. He’s heard rumours of unsanctioned tinkering in the lowest deck of the ship, a door or a hatch being constructed where it shouldn’t, and wants the party to check it out and report back.
Teaguy quizzes a fellow dwarf from the lower deck about this, who confirms that this rumour is true, but they don’t know the function of the door or why it was built - on that, the party gather their things and prepare to head down to the bottom deck. They make their way down past the cargo and rowers to the bottom deck, which is damp, dark and uninhabited. Pim has a conversation with a glowing mushroom, who convinces Pim to eat it, gaining some mild hallucination and heightened senses as a result. With this, he senses a tinge of honey in the air the others are not able to pick up on.
Moving forward, they eventually find a door that has been crudely constructed into the hull of the ship out of wood and iron scraps. After discussing whether they should report anything first, Mhairi decides instead to just open the door, which leads out into a sweeping, grassy plain at sunset. Pim steps through the door and explores around its periphery, discovering it appears as a featureless one-sided portal suspended in the air on the other side, and deduces this is likely a doorway to the Otherworld.
Mhairi steps through the doorway, and discovers a river of flowing honey close by. She approaches and begins to collect the honey in a large jar. Pim comes over and drinks a little of it. Teaguy elects to stay back inside the ship, and readies a lasso in case either of the other two need to be pulled back to safety. He also spots a number of figures emerging from the honey further upstream, but is too far away to make out their features.
Teaguy alerts the other two of the figures, 5 mellwraiths, which are rapidly advancing on them, brandishing rusted old blades. Having failed a dexterity check at throwing the lasso, he runs in and looses an arrow at the mellwraith the closest to the other two, stopping it momentarily as the arrow lands squarely in its chest, rancid old honey gushing out of the wound.
The three make it to safety and block the door behind them, but not before they are set upon by three human figures in crude bronze masks, speaking a language none of the group understand but clearly furious at their intrusion. Choosing to flee, the assailants give chase, but do not go beyond the bounds of the bottom deck. They do however notice on their way back up through the decks of the ship that the crude carpentry visible on the door seems to be spreading to other parts of the ship.
March 3, 2024
Getting Hit
Getting whacked in the chest with a mace is going to fucking smart even if you’re wearing a breastplate, and attacks constantly whiffing because a PC or NPC has a magic number attached to their statblock is boring as shit. Armour class feels even more like a weird relic of the hobby’s milsim roots in 5e than it does in OD&D. Titles like Into The Odd have tried to remedy this by making armour a soak value, turning HP into a pool of abstract luck / stamina, and making every attack a guaranteed hit. As it turns out this is also really boring. Both systems rely heavily on the referee narrating the stakes instead of involving the players. This garnered a universally negative reaction at my table, so I went back and thought about how to make defending against attacks more enjoyable for my players.
In the end, I kept it really simple - Players roll to attack, and they also roll to defend. So far, it’s worked out great. Instead of rolling to hit for NPCs, I’ll announce an NPC action like the following: “The orc lunges towards you, swinging his rusty blade!”, and then prompt the player to contest the attack. No farting around with the action economy - players can always contest an attack, unless they’re downed or incapacitated. This is straightforwardly just more fun and interesting than the GM rolling to beat a target number, and gives the players more moment-to-moment involvement.
As with a few other books and systems, I’ve split these moves up very roughly into Dodging, Blocking and Parrying, which play out as follows:
- DODGE: Roll DEX, penalty in heavy armour, permits flanking attacker on success
- BLOCK: Roll STR, requires weapon or shield unless attacker is unarmed, shields confer bonus
- PARRY: Roll STR or DEX depending on weapon type, critical success allows immediate follow-up with attack.
There are caveats: This is currently only for NPC attacks, players who attack still roll against a difficulty score assigned to the NPC, as feedback from the table was that they generally enjoy rolling to hit. I may in future go back and revise this, possibly separating out attack and defense scores. ‘Difficulty’ feels somewhat more intuitive than AC, even if their purpose is similar, but this means that PCs and NPCs are asymmetrical and thus this doesn’t really work for more ‘wargamey’ play. It’s also potentially less fun for the referee, but at the end of the day, accommodating a fun time for players is way more important than ‘design rigour’.
Ideas for future iteration:
- Do away with NPC difficulty and just have all attacks be contestable regardless of who’s controlling. This could open up options for more wargame-style play, but the stuff I run is mainly pointcrawls and dungeons, so isn’t a priority just now.
- Further bonuses depending on equipment - rapiers get parry bonus, naked dude covered in grease dodges better than knight in platemail etc
- GURPS-style separate save values for blocking, dodging and parrying (terrible idea, do not do this)
Fuck everything and RETVRN to OD&D- Swap HP for wounds (my beloved)
December 11, 2023
