Character competency, game feel and dice randomness

In the recent years I've explored a number of systems with my group. We've played some games with Godbound, Chronicles of Darkness, Powered by the Apocalypse and Star Trek Adventures systems. I'm a very system-focused player, so I enjoy exploring how the different systems play and what's their "game feel" like. Most importantly, I was really keen on exploring the most core mechanic of almost every role playing game - the dice mechanics.

Character competency

Whenever I would start playing a new system, I would inevitably ask myself - "does this roll as well as World of Darkness"? Vampire the Masquerade has been the first system I've played extensively and say what you will about how clunky it might be at times, the dice rolls in that game felt great. You always rolled a nice handful of dice (but not a crazy amount like Exalted or Shadowrun!), and you felt like your character was competent - it wasn't hard to roll a success, and you could rely on your character performing their specialities more often than not.

To contrast that, we've played about a year worth of Godbound between our Exalted game, Ancalia game, and doing one-shots. The system used a single d20 roll extensively, keeping with its OSR roots. Despite the system being geared towards feeling epic and grand, whenever a roll was required the characters didn't feel nearly as competent. It wasn't that uncommon to get a streak of low-value results and fail entirely, despite playing demigods.

I've been trying to figure out why those systems felt so different, and I think I figured something interesting out...

Binomial vs linear distribution

Two basic, simplified math concepts. Binomial distribution is a randomness distribution that looks like a bell-curve. It's similar to a normal distribution, but there are only a finite amount of values it can take. You can get extreme results from either end, but you're a lot more likely to land somewhere in the middle. 2D6 roll has a binomial distribution - you're most likely to end up with a 7, but 2 or 12 also happen on occasion. Linear distribution means you're as likely to get any one result as another one. 1D6 has a linear distribution - you're as likely to roll a 1, a 6 or a 3.

A useful spreadsheet to reference.

My guess is the difference in game feel between Chronicles of Darkness (the modern, updated version of World of Darkness, here is our game) and Godbound lies in the way dice rolling is handled. In CoD, the more skilled you are, the more dice you roll. Each dice landing on a 8, 9 or 10 is a success, 5 or more successes is an exceptional success. You often roll 5 or more dice. In Godbound, you always roll a single D20, add some modifiers and you have to roll above some threshold - 20 for example.

CoD feels good because you can rely on your dice rolls thanks to the binomial distribution - you know you're very likely to roll at least one success - having just two dice (a very paltry amount) you're already more likely to succeed than fail, 4 dice gives you 75%, 6 is over 88%, and 9 gives you 95%. Godbound feels worse due to the linear nature of its rolls - rolling a 1 is as likely as rolling a 10 or 20. You have to get +10 to reach 50% success rate, +15 gives you 75%, +18 gives you 90%, and you only get 95% at +19.

Why are those percentages important? Because that's basically halving the chance of failure - a half (0.5), a half again (0.25), and again (0.125) and again (0.0625).

Progression between 2, 4, 6 and 9 is a fairly linear one in CoD (the previous editions were a bit harder), while in Godbound you start somewhere in the middle of the progression and polishing up to the final few points is a challenge.

So subjectively at least, it seems having a binomial distribution in your game is the key to having a good game feel. Now, the question is, how many dice do you really need to pull this off?

Many dice, or just two?

I've played with two systems that tackle the binomial distribution in fundamentally different ways. First one is the already mentioned Chronicles of Darkness line of games. The other is Stars Without Number (it has a free edition, do check it out!, and here is our game), a game by the same author as Godbound.

In SWN, a skill roll is just a simple 2D6 roll, modified by your skill rating. So it's the simplest binomial distribution you can really get. The skills just shift the result. You usually have to get 7 or better to succeed at a basic task, 10 at something more complicated, or 12 at something very complicated.

How does this simple roll compare to rolling something like 10D10s in CoD? Well, looking at our handy spreadsheet, pretty favourably all things considered! Rolling 2D6 gives you a simple binomial distribution, and while rolling more D10s not only shifts the curve but also changes its shape a bit, it might not be enough to affect the game honestly (a binomial distribution that is thinner means results are very likely to end up near the centre, while a wider one as we see rolling a lot of D10s means there is a spread in the ranges - you're less likely to end up on the dead centre).

Both systems behave similarly - the higher your skill in SWN or the more dice you roll in CoD, your probability shifts upwards, meaning you're more likely to reliably land a success.

Honestly, as someone that was very much in love with CoD dice mechanics, it's surprising to see that rolling 2D6 is a fairly good substitute for having a handful of D10s.

Conclusions

It appears a binomial distribution from rolling two or more dice instead of one makes games feel a lot more satisfying and gives characters a degree of competency - the players can rely on their characters succeeding at a given task they're specialising in. It seems that you don't really need a lot of dice to achieve this either - rolling 2D6 and shifting the result accordingly might be enough to achieve this game feel. Rolling a single dice is generally the worst due to the linear nature of the probability distribution.

Other resources:

• Dice System Ease, Speed, and Probability Distribution in RPGs

How Chronicles of Darkness almost fixed minmaxing

The various World of Darkness games have a long history in the RPG community. The games have been around since 1991 and always had a strong following - not competing directly with D&D, but instead going for a more modern gothic horror settings with various staples of modern horror movies - Vampires, Werewolves, Mages and so on. Also for a long while they were pretty much a heaven for minmaxing. The most recent edition (Chronicles of Darkness) however, managed to largely solve this issue.

World of Darkness and minmaxing

World of Darkness (the old games, Vampire the Masquarade, etc.) had a very appealing character building and progression system. It was essentially a point buy system - you would have a budget of dots to spend on given categories and you could make your character within those boundaries however you liked. So if you had 7 dots to spend on your Physical Attributes, you could max out Strength and get your Stamina very high, but you would have very low Dexterity. Having 13 dots to distribute in your Knowledge Abilities you could be a PHD in Science and world's greatest surgeon at the same time, but you might know nothing about Law, Occult or Computers. You could also make yourself a generalist, having some basic knowledge across all fields but specialising in nothing.

You also had a few freebie points to spend at the end of the character generation, either taking Merits, or buying up more points in Attributes, Abilities and Advantages. If you really wanted to be the world's greatest hacker, surgeon, lawyer and politician in the same combination, you could invest in those dots.

The system was pretty straightforward and elegant - you didn't have any random rolls during character creation, you started off roughly at peak mortal level of competency and you could make your character however you wanted...

Unfortunately, there were ways to build a character optimally, and I'm not talking about "let's build a murderer so he survives longer".

See, after the character is created, you start earning XP. You don't level in this game, but instead can spend those XPs directly to raise your stats. So you can go from Strength 3, to Strength 4 to 5, etc. Again - very elegant approach, much more organic than hitting level milestones and so on. You're constantly improving yourself.

The main crux is that the higher the stat, the more it costs. Attributes cost current rating x4, so Strength 1->2 costs 4XP, while Strength 4->5 costs 16XP. Abilities cost current rating x2, Disciplines cost x5 or x7.

In other words, if you only focus on starting the game with a few very high stats you will be possibly hundred or more XP worth of dots ahead of a character that is an all-rounder. And this is a game where getting 5XP or more in a session is somewhat rare.

This pretty much meant a lot of characters were hyper-specialised early on and comedically incompetent in other areas. Not necessarily the best choice for a game more focused on more grounded narrative.

Chronicles of Darkness and minmaxing

World of Darkness came and went with its Time of Judgement. After a decade of a metaplot, the series got a reboot in a much less metanarrative-heavy setting called at the time the New World of Darkness. The new line of books focused on being more streamlined, chipping away some stranger bits and keeping the core more focused. Overall, it was a very good reboot, and the mechanics also got a small update.

For our discussion - the freebie points were gone, so you no longer had as wide of an option to push the minmaxing limits, and now the cost of the last dot of any given stat cost you double to further curb minmaxing. However, the old problem still persisted - generalists were punished, while specialised characters still got way ahead.

In comes Chronicles of Darkness, the second edition of nWoD. Not as large of a reboot as last time, but it was still a redesign of a few core mechanical concepts of the game. Something you didn't know you wanted until you got it. Once again, more streamlining and this time - the problem of minmaxing was almost solved.

You once again built your character a dot at a time, this time with no extra cost for the last dot. No freebie points, just a normal distribution of dots. Then, when you get into the game, you notice that one big difference - all of the XP costs are flat. Strength 1->2 costs 4XP, Strength 4->5 also costs 4XP. The costs are flat across the board. Since you didn't get any freebie points, every character has the same amount of dots in the various categories. This means the system is finally fair and even no matter what you do, right?

Well, there is a new, small problem - Beats.

Beats, Botches, Conditions and minmaxing

Beats are a really cool concept, certainly a welcome addition Chronicles of Darkness has introduced. Basically, each time the character fulfils an aspiration, or get into a really big fight, etc. they get a beat. You get five beats, you get one XP. Simple and fun.

Since you don't have to spend as much XP to push your stats to that final level, you get a lot less XP per session - one full XP is a generally good session, as opposed to about 4XP in the previous edition.

You get beats for a lot of activities - fulfilling your goals, getting beaten up, at the end of a session, etc. However, you also get them for taking "a dramatic failure" (a botch), or when a condition is resolved. Those two relate directly to dice rolling.

Another change Chronicles of Darkness introduced was that players had control over when they botch and not. The players don't just getting a bad roll and botch straight away (minus chance rolls, but those are infrequent). Instead, whenever the character fails a roll, the player can opt to turn that failure into a dramatic failure and get a beat that way. This gives the players a nice agency of when they really don't want to screw up badly and when they can risk it.Very neat.

On the opposite end, when a player rolls very well. When they roll an exceptional success, they get a condition - basically a short-term advantage they can use. Often, the players will get an Inspired Condition, which they can spend to make a roll turn into an Exceptional Success easier. That counts as resolving that condition, which means they get a beat. From our play, this also often ends up triggering the exceptional success and chaining into another Inspired Condition, giving players a perpetual way of generating beats.

Now, there is a small limit - you can only get a beat from any given source once per scene, so you can't just botch 5 times over and get an XP. You can, however, botch 5 times in 5 different scenes and get that.

So how is this minmaxing? Well, whether your roll fails or gets an exceptional success is heavily dependant on how many dice the character has in the given roll. If they have very few dice, corresponding to low dot amounts, they will fail more often, giving them a chance to take a dramatic failure more often. If they have a lot of dice in a roll, they are more likely to achieve an exceptional success, take the Inspired condition, resolve it on a similar roll, get another exceptional success and keep chaining it.

At either extreme, you get more opportunities to get more beats, therefore advance more. If you're average, you will often succeed, but not enough to trigger an exceptional success. So a minmaxed character will be able to both roll very poorly and very well, while a generalist will be stuck at being mediocre and neither getting the dramatic failure and a beat, nor the exceptional success and the condition resulting in a beat.

Overall, it's not really that bad in-game - you will usually have a way of getting beats one way or another, and introducing group beats means you don't feel like you fall behind other players. It's definitely an improvement over the previous editions!

Conclusions

World of Darkness and New World of Darkness gave a high XP-equivalent advantage to minmaxing characters as opposed to ones that spread their dots around. New World of Darkness curbed that a bit, but it wasn't until Chronicles of Darkness where that problem was largely solved. However, the last edition introduced new ways of gaining more XP that favour minmaxed characters. CoD is still a notable improvement over the previous editions, however.

Godbound - "grow into your problems" Cult

When it comes to roleplaying games, I enjoy engaging with the various systems presented in the book and seeing how they can be broken or what is the optimal way to play something. After playing Godbound for awhile I stumbled upon some weird approach to engaging with a core mechanic of the system - how to build a divine Cult that will consistently provide players with a large amount of Dominion AND be a viable Faction in the late game. I call this strategy "grow into your problems".

Godbound Cult mechanics

(Check out the Godbound free edition if you want to follow along)

In Godbound, the players play a demigod. As a demigod, you have access to some divine energy called Dominion with which the PCs can shape the world. Dominion is accrued in two (main) ways - going on adventures (each session nets you some Dominion) and having a Cult. The first income is rather fixed - the whole party will roughly get the same amount of Dominion per person per session. The second can be influenced a bit.

A Cult in Godbound is a Faction - a group of people that has various Features and Problems. However, Cults also have Taboos - divine mandates that hamper their effectiveness, but give their deities more Dominion to spend. They are analogues to real-world Five Moral Precepts of Buddhism, observing Ramadan, or wearing temple garments in Mormonism.

The amount of Dominion the Godbound receives per month is proportional to the Cult's Size (from a village of Size 1 to an empire of Size 5), and to the amount of taboos it has. A Cult generates +1, +2 or +3 Dominion if it has 25%, 50%, or 75% of its "action die" (rounded up) in Trouble. An action die corresponds to the Size of the Cult - D6, D8, D10, D12 or D20 for Sizes 1 through 5.

So a Size 1 Cult with 3 points of Trouble generates 1+2=3 Dominion. A Size 5 Cult with 5 points of Trouble generates 5+1=6 Dominion and so on.

As the Cult grows in Size, you need to take on new Taboos to maintain the percentage needed to gain extra Dominion. Most players tend to keep at 25% Taboos, since it's a good place to have an effective Faction and not go crazy trying to eliminate that last bit of Trouble.

Now, let's talk about how to break this system.

Growing into one's problems

Typically, you'd start the Cult at Size 1 with 2 points of Taboos to get that extra bit of Dominion. You'd be getting 1+1=2 Dominion at a start, not too bad. As it grows, you would add some more Taboos to keep at 25% and you'd get 3, 4, 5 and finally 6 Dominion at Size 5 and 5 points of Taboos. Your final Faction will always have that little bit of Taboo left, but it can still succeed 75% of the times, not bad.

The thing is, early game Cults are weak. The amount they can accomplish in comparison to what the PCs can do is negligible. They won't have that many useful Features, and their dice rolls will be weak in comparison to anything bigger. So let's take the exact opposite approach.

We start the game with 5 points of Trouble (6*0.75=4.5, rounded up turns to 5). Our Cult can't do anything without tripping over its own legs. However, we are getting 1+3=4 Dominion - we're twice as effective as the other Cult, and 4 times as effective as a Size 1 Cult without any Taboos. Early game we only undertake actions that don't require a roll (Extend Interest mostly). Instead, we let our PC Enact Change with all that extra Dominion.

Now, late-game, we don't want the Cult to be hampered this much. We want it to be a strong, viable Faction. If we choose to remove a Taboo though, we create a schism and have more problems to deal with.

So here is the trick - each time the Cult increases in Size, we keep the Taboos fixed. Normally at Size 2 we would need to have 6 points of Taboos in order to get the +3 Dominion, but that's not what we're aiming for. Instead, we go for +2 Dominion, while still having 5 points of Taboos, instead of the 4 required. We're still generating 4 Dominion, but this time it's 2+2.

At Size 3, we need 5 Taboos to be at 50%, so we're now earning 3+2=5 Dominion. At Size 4, we would need 6 Taboos to get to 50%, so we drop into the lower bracket, again paying more than needed. We get 4+1=5 Dominion. At Size 5, we have 5 Taboos, so we get 5+1=6 Dominion.

So by sticking to 5 Taboos, we are earning 4, 4, 5, 5 and 6 Dominion for each Size our Cult is at. In comparison, the Cult that stayed at +1 Dominion was earning 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 and still ended up at the same amount of Trouble in the end.

Conclusions

The approach of "growing into your problems" for a Godbound Cult gives the players both early access to higher Dominion income as well as a late-game Faction that is very competent in its actions.

At the same time, trying to optimise a game that's all about just doing cool things and focusing more about an enjoyable narrative might be missing the point a bit ;).

Facilitating PC's downtime activities

Over a year ago my group and I were in the middle of playing a large, sprawling game of Exalted. As it is with such large games, there is a lot of going on in the world - a lot more than can be portrayed in a session. You also get characters that do a lot more than can really be played out without boring everyone else at the table. Unfortunately, I haven't even seen that many games try to address this issue. So I figured I can chip in with some examples and ideas to help give players and GMs some useful tools to draw from.

Solo sessions

One approach to the problem of having too much stuff going on in the background that only some players / PCs are interested in is to run some solo sessions every now and then. While it's not an ideal situation, requiring either the GM to facilitate extra gaming nights or letting everyone take a break for awhile to have one-on-one sessions, it is a solution to the problem.

For example, during the above mentioned Exalted game, our group had a few sets of solo sessions (S4E4 A, B, C, D was one of them). Our GM had some spare time, we all lived close by, so we could have some week of solo sessions between two normal sessions. In this time each PC could pursue the goals they were interested in, but the rest of the group wasn't - dealing with some trading, diplomacy, gaining intel and making babies. A good chunk of them were personal goals, and another chunk set up future plot devices - one character was looking for infiltrators, another for an ancient treasure, and yet another - studying a mysterious cursed artefact.

One problem we found with solo sessions however was the fact that only some players could carry the game on their own. They either had clear goals in mind, or came prepared with a number of things they could do. This sort of approach won't be for everyone unfortunately.

Downtime Actions in Mind's Eye Theatre

Years back I was involved in a Mind's Eye Theatre LARP for Vampire the Requiem. Due to the amount of players that were involved, the game naturally had to allow for players to be able to perform actions outside of the relatively fixed sessions. The rulebook provided some good guidelines for how to do Downtime Actions that covered such mini-adventures. Moreover, the system went one step further, allowing players that want to focus more on such Actions a way to do more by the proxy of their minions and other Merits.

This system worked pretty well as far as I can remember. That is, as well as it could given the system it was tied to (MET had in my mind some mechanical issues that normal nWoD handled better). It gave every player an opportunity to bring something new into the game sessions and it was structured enough not to be too big of a burden on the GM like the solo sessions would've been.

Idea - downtime goals and point buy

I've had this idea while playing Exalted using the Godbound rules. The system had a mechanic of Influence - a measure of PC's interest they can exert in the downtime. It's usually used for them upkeeping some structure or project that doesn't matter in the long run, like bolstering some rebellion, keeping the peasants suppressed, etc. However, since it's basically a measure of what PCs do with their spare time, it would lend itself naturally to allow the players to set goals for their characters and using those points to accomplish them.

For example, you could have goals to "spread misinformation about our last battle", "gather intel on the political situation of the royal houses", or "find information about a long-lost treasure". Neither of those goals are an actual Change you would normally use Influence or Dominion for (the state of the world doesn't change, only character's knowledge), and the actions themselves are rather boring in themselves to roleplay. However, the outcome of said actions is a meaningful thing for the character or the party.

Now, you may think that you could just give the players such things without the extra steps, but that makes them a bit less meaningful to the players themselves. Just being given an intel the party needs carries less weight than having to spend the last X sessions devoting resources to obtaining that information. The latter gives the player some sense of accomplishment, that it's their actions and sacrifices that got them that information.

Mechanically, the players would give GMs the goals they want to accomplish and in what order, the GM would assign them some point value based on how much time needs to be devoted to them, and each period of time (a session, a month), the players' unused Influence would be put into those goals until they are completed. This works especially well if the players are using Influence on regular basis (making NOT committing the Influence a meaningful sacrifice), or if the players purchase Influence with their XP (which was more meaningful in our Exalted Godbound conversion than vanilla Godbound).

At some point I'd be interested in playing a character that is focused on such background machinations...

Conclusions

Sometimes, especially when playing longer games, the players will want to do things in the downtime withotu eating into the actual game time. It's generally a good sign - the players are really engaged with the game and are invested in what they are trying to accomplish. It might be worthwhile for the GM to facilitate such aspirations in some structured way to allow for this expression and not play favouritism to one player.

Godbound's Dominion economy part 2 - how the players break Factions

Continued from Godbound's Dominion economy part 1 - Factions and Artefacts

Last time we gave an overview of how the Godbound game uses the Dominion system to allow players to enact large-scale changes in the world. Today, I would like to talk about how those changes will often break another core component of the game - the Faction system.

If you'd like to read the sourcebook for yourself, there is a free edition of Godbound available that contains about 95% of the full release's content in it.

The Faction System

The Faction System is a way for the players and the GM to simulate how various cities, nations and organisations would interact with one another and with the Godbounds as a whole.

Each Faction is defined by their Size (from a village to an empire), Cohesion (essentially, health points), Trouble (a gaige of how bad things are), Features (what the Faction can offer - "an abundant farmland", or "The Witch-Queens have mighty magics") and Trouble (various problems the Faction has - "Their lord taxes them cruelly", or "Neighbours fear and hate them").

Each month every Faction can undertake various actions as a part of their Faction Turn - building up resources, try to fix some problems, attacking someone, etc. Overall, it can take a few Turns before a major change takes place, and wars can drag on for even longer.

Overall, the system is very simplified. There are no elements of a grand strategy here - you don't move units on a hex map, you don't have to balance an economy or the like. The system is more about giving players an overall sense of the place and some clear goals for them to work towards - "let's cure this plague that is haunting the city", or "I want to build a mighty citadel to protect the civilians" and so on.

How PCs break the Factions

As the demigods they are, PCs in Godbound will hold sway on a number of factions and be able to influence many more. From their cults, to the villages they come by, up to the nations that they will conquer sooner or later, they have the power to mould them as they see fit. However, this comes at a cost.

When a Godbound of weapons will start arming the populace, those freshly minted warriors might get a bit cocky and start strong arming other villagers. Or maybe the local lord will become less than pleased with the peasant revolt waiting to happen. Or perhaps there will be a food shortage as there weren't enough farmhands to tend to the fields. When large-scale change is happening really fast, something will have to give.

As mentioned in the previous article, Godbound can spend Dominion to "Enact Change" - Change Facts, Solve Problems, or Create Features.

The first one is more aesthetic than anything, so it doesn't have an impact on the game mechanically.

The second is beneficial to a faction - the Godbound uses their divine powers to cure a disease, or stop famine, or bring peace and so on. This Change removes a Problem from a Faction, thus decreasing Trouble.

The third one is the crux of the problem. The Godbound creates something new to impose onto the Faction - they add a new, beneficial Feature, like creating a garrison of warrior monks, or a perpetual forge, or a fountain of gold. However, each time a new Feature is created this way, it also generates a Problem and increases Trouble.

The same also happens when a Godbound uses Influence in lieu of Dominion. Rallying a small army up just in time for battle will cause internal strife, but unlike a Dominion expenditure, once the PCs leave the area, the new Feature they pumped up will fizzle away, while the Problem and Trouble will remain!

Trouble as a general concept measures how dysfunctional a Faction is. The higher it is, the more often the Faction will fail at some important tasks. A Faction might try to collect money, but fail because raiders would steal the payment, or people would be too sick to pay, or the broken economy would make that money worthless. Or it might try raising an army with those funds but fail because someone would pocket too much for themselves, or the population is too afraid to volunteer.

All in all, you don't want this to raise too much. So the players would learn to balance Creating Features with Solving Problems. However, this usually means some of the following - either you focus mainly on Solving Problems and try leaving once you put everything in order, or you spend Dominion to both Create a Feature and Solve a Problem, basically paying double, or you Create a Feature and do a quest to Solve a Problem, making you spend more game time babysitting a faction essentially.

Moreover, the players are often driven to Create Features rather than Solve Problem since it's frankly more fun and cool. You want to build something new and exciting - raise armies, do great works and so on. It's much more fun to be the god that created an academy of wizards, than the god that made sure people weren't embezzling the taxes.

Finally, the players are every now and then forced to dump their Dominion into something in order to level up. This usually isn't an issue for diligent players that engage with the Factions on a regular basis, but if you have a few PCs that have done nothing in the last few sessions suddenly having to dump enough Dominion to jumpstart a medieval society into the modern age, you can be in for a lot of trouble.

How does this work in a real game?

I've played in two somewhat long games that used the Faction / Dominion system - Princes of the Universe and The Living Years. The first one only switched to Godbound midway through, meaning a lot of the mechanics were glossed over, but the second one used the system from the beginning.

In my experience, you will run into a few problems with the Faction / Dominion system.

First, you will be playing a game of wack-a-mole with the Problems. You will come into a town, fix a few key issues up, then proceed to make it better, creating more Problems than you originally started with. You will then have to solve them again and so on. A session's worth of Dominion will often be able to create more Problems than you'll be able to solve in a session by questing, especially if the problems get diverse in scope and causes.

Secondly, you will either have to create random Problems, or risk running into the same issue over and over. We had an order of knights that got buffed to be veterans. They got bossy and started strong arming the local population. After dealing with that, we decided to give them superhuman strength, and make them charismatic and commanding. It would be very easy to just make the initial Problem come back since it's a natural fit for what was going on... In the end, when we couldn't think of smart Problem ideas we resorted to using news headlines and tweaking them a bit.

Thirdly, you will run into some players that will tend to dump their Dominion in large chunks right as they need to level and that will be a wave of new Problems to deal with. You often are starved for Shards, so you won't be able to just dump that Dominion into Artefacts, and Solving Problems usually is more creatively demanding than just Creating Features.

Fourthly, it's often hard to increase Faction's Scope (making it bigger), which will often be a limiting factor as to what you can do with it. You can't just toss Dominion at a small town to make it bloom into a densely populated megacity so you can have more worshippers. Creating projects larger than the Factions you have at your disposal will be tempting, but it will also be tricky at the same time.

Lastly, the players will want to create their little walled gardens of a Faction. They will want to make their Cult great, or they will have a favourite Faction to build up. This might make it a little bit more hard how to give then Problems that wouldn't ruin things on one hand or be too blase on the other hand.

Conclusions

The Godbound Dominion and Faction systems create an interesting intertwined mechanic. It is, however, not without its own problems. The system might feel too shallow for people that want to have a system with strategic depth. It also falls too easily into a wack-a-mole cycle of PCs creating Features that generate Problems only to spend time and resources dealing with the Problems before being able to "get to the real game" and subsequently dumping more Dominion into the problem afterwards. At the same time it's a very thematic mechanic that allows the PCs to do large-scale changes to the world in a very approachable way.

Godbound's Dominion economy part 1 - Factions and Artefacts

Godbound is a game about playing demigods created by Kevin Crawford. It has a number of attractive features - high-power game setting, simplified game mechanics, robust power sets, compatibility with other OSR books, etc. However, today I would like to talk about a few interesting, intertwined mechanics that I first came across while reading the book - the Dominion system, its economy, Influence, Factions and Artefacts.

If you'd like to read the sourcebook for yourself, there is a free edition of Godbound available that contains about 95% of the full release's content in it.

Dominion, Influence and Shards

In Godbound, the players take on the role of the titular Godbound, mortals that ascended into a proto-divinity status. Think Gandalf, or Marvel's Thor or Vision. The PCs are gifted with a variety of superhuman powers for handling their day-to-day problems, but they also possess the power to affect the game setting on the larger scale through Dominion.

Dominion is an expression of Godbound powers to alter the world. The characters accrue the Dominion Points over time with worship and adventuring. They can spend those Points to make large changes to the world - Changing Facts, Solving Problems, Creating Features and building Artefacts.

Changing Facts relates to altering the setting in general manner. Erecting a mountain, shrouding a valley with eternal night, creating a race of flying humans, etc.

Solving Problems and Creating Features relate to the Faction System. Basically, every major group, town, nation is represented as a Faction that has beneficial Features ("The city has a prosperous mine", "Nation ruled by a great philosopher-king"), and negative Problems ("The city is plagued with disease", "Nobles are waging a secret war with one another"). The characters, basically through sheer force of their will, can change those. They can Solve a Problem, eliminating it entirely (for example, Gandalf removing Saruman's influence over Théoden), and they can also Create new, beneficial Feature (Tony Stark building the Ultron Program to help with global peacekeeping would've been a new Feature, save for Ultron himself...).

Lastly, the same Dominion can be spent to Create powerful Artefacts. We're not talking about +1 swords, but something more akin to The One Ring, Mjölnir or Yaka Arrow. Each of the Artefacts would be a significant boon to the already powerful Godbound, rather than being "just a piece of gear".

Godbound also features Influence, a more temporary form of Dominion the characters can invest into temporary changes. It allows the players to quickly train up an army, fortify defences, create stopgap solutions for some problems and so on, as long as their characters keep maintaining those measures. When the PCs leave, the changes revert back to the original state.

The game also features Celestial Shards, basically glorified scrap that is required for creating Artefacts and making really impossible changes happen (for example, creating a floating city, starting an entirely new species of humans, or building a network of teleporters). This generally means that the players have a limit to how outlandishly they can affect the setting at any given time - you get only so many Shards at a time and there are always multiple projects that could use them.

The Dominion Economy

Godbound creates an interesting dynamic with its Dominion Economy. It's a shared currency the players can spend on many disparate things. In the same game you could basically have a swordsmith forging a blade Artefact that will cut down an entire army with one swing, a tinkerer creating a mechanical angel that will be their herald, a warlord making his winged hussars actually fly, a merchant prince that would bring new riches to his old mines, a king quelling a rebellion with the power of his will and a fire god erecting a volcano as his new seat of power, all using Dominion in different ways.

Moreover, because Dominion is a universal resource, it will never go to waste - a character will always have something to spend it on. They are even required to spend it in order to progress - a Godbound character can only level if they get enough experience AND they had spend a certain amount of Dominion.

Lastly, Dominion costs can vary depending on the power portfolio of a given Godbound and the Points are non-transferable. This encourages the players to work together and trade favours. A mighty warrior might make his army very strong, but he would have problems giving them power armour. It would be trivial for an artificer however. So now the characters need to figure out what would be an equitable trade for such services...

In the actual play however, you can expect varied level of engagement from players. In the two campaigns my group ran, we had some players that were diligently spending their Dominion on regular basis, and we also had some that would let theirs pile on until they had to spend it to level up. It really depends on the party you have.

Conclusion

All in all, Godbound's Dominion system is an interesting take on creating a robust system for godly powers acting on a macro level. It is so universally applicable as to be useful for most styles of gaming, while still remaining simple and easy to use.

That is not to say it's without fault. But for that, a separate blog entry will be required to delve deeper into how the Dominion system and the Faction system don't gel all that great in the long run...

Continued in "Godbound's Dominion economy part 2 - how the players break Factions".