MECHANICS (part one (of however many it takes))
Hello there! I’m actually on vacay hopefully enjoying myself as you’re reading this so it’s me from the past. BOO! I’ve also enabled comments across all blog posts so please say your piece if you’d like.
Untitled (Own work, digital collage, 2021).
In this one I wanted to talk a little about mechanics. Mechanics are nice and cool because they separate daydreaming, streams of consciousness, one-upping, shooting the shit and whatever else similar activity from role playing games. They codify this activity of ours, carve a space where the hobby can exist and have an identity, and importantly give our stories an air of fairness.
Rules can also be a pain in the ass if they’re too complicated or too involved. My first edition of Dungeons and Dragons was 3.5 and is in my opinion an extreme example of this. Apparently it was so common to have bad DMs that the rules had to cover each and every possible scenario ensuring the balance and fairness the DMs couldn’t provide. I heard someone say that the edition was so thoroughly designed you practically didn’t even need a DM.
The question then becomes what is the correct amount of rules and procedures? I’ve searched for an answer to this question for the past five years or so, and have in the course of that abandoned both 3.5 and fifth edition. My search has led me to B/X, retro clones, and the Old School Renaissance movement. Notably, I’m a fan of Dungeon Crawl Classics, Old School Essentials, Into the Odd, Electric Bastionland, Cairn, and Basic Fantasy RPG.
The campaigns I run tend to sit in the center of this Venn diagram. I was always a bit reluctant to create a house rules document but as my system of choice became simpler and simpler, this obstacle has progressively decreased in scariness. I realised very quickly that it wouldn’t be much harder to create a whole system specially designed to do what I want it to do.
So, what do I want it to do?
The game I’m making will focus on individual characters who will not grow very significantly in terms of mechanics, but may participate in multiple sessions that may or may not form a coherent storyline. So, we need a system that covers the kinds of actions such characters may take. This obviously includes fighting, taking damage, using or gathering items, interacting with other characters and other standard fare. But, I want there to be robust tools for the ‘referee’ (special term pending) that will provide some structure to the setting. These will cover reactions of NPCs, some limited information about economics, hierarchies one might encounter, mass combat, events, locations, that type of thing. As you may have noticed, this borders with information on the setting and generally the lines are not very clear between the things I expressed in this paragraph. This isn’t a problem as in my mind, the book will be a very singular and coherent thing designed to deliver a very specific experience with all the tools needed for that. HOWEVER, it is in my opinion absolutely necessary to leave plenty of space for people to interpret and build upon it, so where does this leave us in terms of rules? Well I have a collection of things I want to implement and I will share them below! Please keep in mind all of this is liable to change and does not represent the exact nature of the final product :)
Skill system
A very simple 2d6 skill system to adjudicate most actions that are not impossible but also not guaranteed to succeed. Credit for this one goes to u/gnombient, whose comment is found on this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/wk6333/the_simplest_2d6_skill_system/
Attributes
The game will have at least three different attributes that describe aspects of characters and creatures. These will range from 0-20, or 3-18 for characters. I really really like rolling 3d6 in order to discover your who your character is. It prevents character builds which I heavily dislike and busts people out of their roleplaying habits. Another benefit of this is that it ties in super nicely with a roll-under d20 mechanic for attribute tests. 0 and 20 also serve as nice boundaries as a score of 0 indicates total inability to do something related to the score and 20 a mystical talent or domain wherein success is a matter of fact. This is nothing new, so what I intend to innovate is to label these scores a bit differently. A small change like this will serve to more strongly stratify the numbers, making what would be in OSE for example a middling score, something to behold. This is supported by the idea of rolling under attributes only in dire circumstances where the stakes are high.
Attribute score brackets. Sorry for this one if you’re reading on mobile.
The attack roll (?)
On the one hand it is really cool and accounts for the unpredictability of fights. It can lead to very cool diegetic points of the narrative where it expresses a clumsiness or superiority of a foe.
On the other hand it can be quite boring and frustrating if your math is wrong. A solid argument can be made that people who use weapons can be expected to cause damage rather consistently and even with minimal training.
In game terms, I think it is a 50/50 case which is sadly not good enough so it has to go. I first saw this done in Into the Odd and it left a mark on my brain that I will carry to the grave. Keep in mind, I still use it in my OSE campaign, it’s just not for this game. So what we do is we apply damage directly.
Armour
I’m not entirely sure how it will be in the final version but I like the idea of armour and shields being a kind of expendable resource. Currently, a shield absorbs one hit and a suit of armour with a helmet absorbs two. This goes for any two hits you just announce it after damage is rolled. There is downside as these are obviously battlefield instruments and so would not be acceptable to wear in any kind of civilised context.
I prefer this solution to the armour situation of ItO and Bastionland because it introduces a decision. When I played ItO, characters would buy armour as soon as they could afford it, wear it everywhere, and it just became this static thing that makes you a bit more powerful. Now there’s nothing wrong with this, I just think it can be a bit more interesting.
Toughness
This is my response to the whole Hit Point debate. In the mockup document I phrased it like this:
“[Toughness] is a representation of skill in combat. It is the buffer between starting a fight and getting wounded. It is an abstraction of factors that would influence a real fight.”
I want there to be more of these than your typical old school RPG to encourage people to get in fights more frequently, as well as damage being overall higher to make combat more swingy.
Taking damage
Lastly, I’ve simplified everything I possibly could about running combat for the referee. This is because I suck at running fights, especially if there is more than one foe. A creature or opposing character can have either targeted or group attacks. Generally, attacks that affect the whole group should deal much less damage but be a constant annoyance or have another purpose such as pushing away. When running an encounter all targeted attacks can be resolved quickly with the referee determining who is getting attacked and that player rolling damage against their character. Simple, elegant, handled by two or three braincells.
That’s all for this week, thank you for visiting and reading along. The mechanics given here are not the final version of things obviously, but I feel like they make for a pretty solid skellington hehe. Next time, I’ll try to elaborate a bit on what I want these other mechanics relating to the setting to be, or maybe we’ll do something else, idk. Please contact me however you will if you have any input, comments, or critique. As mentioned above, I’ve enabled comments across all blog posts so feel free to chip in.
