Some thoughts on running political intrigues in TTRPGs - a look at Storms of Yizhao

Recently I ran a political intrigue / investigation adventure called The Storms of Yizhao for a few groups. It has a few neat approaches to doing a political intrigue game that you might want to borrow for your campaign. So let's go over them!

(If you want to run the adventure yourself, I strongly recommend using The Yang Version of the module since it addresses a few problems the original adventure had. We've also done a conversion for Fellowship and Exalted Demake if you prefer those systems)

The adventure sees the demigod PCs investigate the titular storms of Yizhao - a supernatural curse that is ravaging the city. They are tasked to solve the problem by the local governor that will give them a sizeable reward for stopping the storms. The players quickly learn the storms are caused by an Altar of Heaven, an ancient artefact created by a diety that imposes its morality onto the people and punishes them for its transgressions. So that means someone in the city is doing something really bad to upset the local customs, and getting to the bottom of who caused it is the PCs' ultimate goal.

During their investigations the players will interact with a couple of big name NPCs, from the governor, through a philosopher sage, down to a merchant matriarch. And here the crux of the mystery and political intrigue comes in.

Each of the big NPCs the players meet will gladly tell the PCs what they want out of them and what their take on the situation is. The merchant matriarch wants the governor deposed, dead, or both. The local royal caretaker of the Altar wants to just blow it up and go be a movie star. The philosopher sage wants to brainwash the entire town into being perfectly loyal citizens. Many of the motives are extreme and in a normal game might be a reason to send some constables after the NPCs to get them arested, but this isn't a normal situation. The NPCs aren't hiding their motives because each one of them lacks something that they need the PCs to do for them to complete their plan. A censor needs some documents stolen. The philosopher sage needs the PCs to tresspass by the Altar where they are not allowed to go. The merchant matriarch needs the PCs to steal a shipment of taxes.

So the NPCs will gladly let the PCs know exactly what they want to accomplish and what needs to be done to fulfil their goals. This lets the players know exactly what is going on, who hates who, and what their chemes are so they can make a somewhat informed decisions on what to do without having to do a roundabout song and dance to figure the basics out. It gets them right in the action and making decisions within minutes of meeting a new NPC.

Of course, there are layers to the situation. Every NPC has a goal and a plan, but sometimes their motives are hidden. Each of the NPCs also has a lead on what is really going on in Yizhao that is at the root of the problem that they will disclose if the PCs complete their quest or find some other way of leveraging them. They also each have a bias to what truth they see.

The merchant matriarch hates the governor because of his high taxes. She wants the PCs to steal the tax shipment so she can return it to the people. This is a lie. She wants to pass the shipment onto the censor to frame the governor of trying to steal his own silver to get him executed. She will tell any kind of sob story to the PCs to get them to get the governor deposed, she will lie that he's embezzling the taxes, spending it on his vices and latch onto anything the PCs bring to her to pin it on the governor. The truth she knows though is that there are people going missing from all walks of life in the city, which is really strange...

The philosopher sage believes the lax morals of the common people are the reasons the Altar of Heaven is punishing everyone. She is biased and wrong in that regard, but she doesn't know it. She wants it to be true, so she believes in it wholeheartedly. She is convinced that by empowering it to turn all the commoners of Yizhao into brainwashed Upright citizens the truth will be inevitably unveiled because it cannot take root in such a moral society that will be created. In that regard she is right, at least if you lean into "ends justify the means" kind of thinking...

Of course, some NPCs are simpler and some are more complex. The royal caretaker will let the players know he wants to just be a movie star straight away and what he needs from them to help himself escape. He is also quite eager to talk about what he thinks about the Altar and what insight he has. There is no second layer to him. Meanwhile the merchant matriarch will gladly lie about everything just to get what she wants. She will gladly ommit that she's extorting the people for money, that she's in cahoots with the censor, that she will use the stolen taxes as means for getting the governor executed, that she doesn't know if the governor is doing anything unsavory and what have you. Some variety like that means players don't expect everyone to have exactly one fake mask on they need to get through.

The garnish to the adventure are the various lesser NPCs and situations the PCs can interact with. People that have small immediate problems that show the players what the more ordinary life is like in the adventure. You have some young man that is being publicly humiliated for disobeying his mother, a merchant that can't pay the new taxes and will be fined for complaining about it too loudly, some courtesan that tries to hex the demigod PCs to give her a singing voice, etc. I tend to pace the adventure so that inbetween meeting any big name NPCs the players run into one minor situation to have something simple to solve in five to ten minutes.

Having a good number of such encounters also lets you tailor them to what the players are thinking. If they think the governor is up to no good and you want to double up on that, show them how people are treated by the government. If you want to expose the merchant matriarch for being corrupt, give them some merchant that can't afford guild dues. If they have done most of the adventure but can't connect the dots, give them an encounter that steers them in the right direction.

Finally, this adventure has multiple off-ramps for the players to end it how they see fit. They don't need to solve the mystery to solve the problem of the storms. Based on character skills, they can destroy the Altar, modify it, empower it, get to the bottom of the problem and punish those responsible, or even just leave because this place is just misery. All of those are valid end points for the adventure, some can be achieved within an hour or two of playing it.

Conclusions

The Storms of Yizhao showcases a few interesting tricks to running a compelling political introgue game.

First of all, all the NPCs share exactly what they want out of the PCs and why they want it quickly and readily. They will gladly share what they think of other NPCs. This lets the PCs understand the political landscape of the adventure fairly quickly without having to pry information out of the NPCs.

Secondly, some NPCs operate on multiple layers of truth. What they tell the PCs might be a lie, it might be a biased view of things, or it might actually be true. The PCs have the means to figure out what is really going on with some effort, but no NPC holds the whole picture.

Thirdly, minor NPCs and encounters help flesh out the world and can shape how the players view the situation. There are more such encounters than the party will encounter in an adventure, and which one gets presented depends on what the GM needs at the time.

Finally, there are multiple off-ramps for the players to complete the adventure before seeing the entire picture that feel like a satisfying end. Those ends are always triggered by the players consciously going for them rather than something the NPCs do in the background.

While it might not be the only way to run political intrigue games, I do think the scenario is an interesting case study. The recordings of multiple groups going through it should eventually be uploaded to this playlist in case you want to see how it plays out in practice.

The velvet rope of perceived limits in RPG sessions

Recently in our Star Wars Fellowship game we had a session filled with some roleplay encounters. We talked with a clone trooper conspiracy theorist that believed the Clone Wars were perpetrated by a shadowy presence, a phantom menace, working behind the scenes of both sides of the war. We had a vision of a possible future where we talked in some mummified ally. Finally, we learned why the Big Bad Evil Guy is carrying out his plan of destroying all life in the galaxy. While all of them were interesting scenes that were pure roleplay (like so many people argue you should just roleplay social encounters), talking them over after the session we realised they were hampered a bit by some perceived boundaries mostly made out of the players being too polite to force their way through and not wanting to resort to mechanical rolls to deal with not to lose that flow of conversation. In essence, we were stopped by velvet ropes that prevented the players from taking reign of those scenes.

Velvet ropes of perceived limits

The velvet ropes are the perceived limits of what players think they can do in a given scenario that in actually are soft boundaries - thing they can go around or overcome with some determination. They can be easily mistaken for walls or invisible walls - limits that cannot be overcomed that the GM communicates clearly ("this scenario is about investigating a murder on the Orient Express, you can't just leave the train at the first stop and not come back"), or indirectly ("you try to leave Barovia through the Mist, but you are turned back around"). Both velvet ropes and walls can also come from the system or player's assumption about the game or the system ("in Fellowship the BBEG will never win", "I don't see a rule for stealing someone else's things, I guess I can't do that...").

The biggest issues velvet ropes bring to the game is that at first glance they might appear as invisible walls to the players, and crossing them feels like a slight transgression. Because of that, if things aren't communicated clearly, the players will cut themselves out of exploring a given path the GM would welcome them exploring.

In our examples, the conspiracy theorist clone trooper couldn't be reasoned with, because he was filled with paranoia and conviction. That didn't mean they couldn't be convinced to join the party, stand down or the like, but just talking to him would just make him go in circles. At the same time, in Fellowship, NPC's Stats are only truths if they are undamaged. So you could talk them through things or even punch them, damaging their "I cannot be reasoned with" Stat and make him be able to be reasoned with. That, however, would require the player to stop talking with them and decide to change the reality of the fiction with rolls, which in the flow of the moment can be hard to remember.

In the future vision, the NPC jedi had a hazy recollection of the past and where he was in the "now" of the future. He gave the PC indirect answers - "where are we?", "I don't know, I think we're on a planet, it feels wet...". The player perceived that as an invisible wall, while the GM didn't intend it to be some unknowable truth that he was on Kamino. The player could've pushed the narrative, trying to use his own jedi investigative skills or talk the NPC through focusing to realise where he was and what was going on by rolling an investigative or social roll. But because the player decided to stick with the fiction and just roleplay talking the situation out, those velvet ropes didn't get crossed and the scene felt like a bit of an exposition from someone in a fugue state.

Finally, the talk with the BBEG was all about learning about his motivation and discovering the secret of his plan to wipe out all life in the galaxy to end all suffering. Because his motivation came more from grief of all the suffering he has witnessed as a wartime doctor and was fuelled by evil spirits that feed on suffering rather, you couldn't easily reason him out of that mindset. Doing so would in the terms of the system amount to a social conflict, which would be very dangerous to a solo player. However not engaging with the system meant that once again, the players could not change the mind of someone in a conversation because of those velvet ropes. The BBEG needs to remain irrational for the game to move forward, so you can't just roleplay him changing his mind, but at the same time if you want to change his mind the system has provisions for that, Moves you can use to start accomplishing that.

Overcoming the velvet ropes

The velvet ropes can be overcome, but they require a bit of mental reconditioning. Similarly to how big elephants can be tied down with small ropes, we need to realise that sometimes a perceived wall is as strong of a deterrent as a real wall. The GMs ought to be a bit clearer in communicating what is really a wall, the players need to condition themselves to challenge things that aren't walls, and we all need to learn to weave between roleplaying and using Moves / rolls more regularly when we want to accomplish something that is being softly denied with the velvet ropes.

We may often feel crossing those boundaries would be improper, impolite, or transgressive in some other way. We need to unlearn that while still maintaining friendlyness and respect around the table.

Velvet ropes are one of the reasons you can't just leave all social interactions out to pure roleplay - you need some rules the players can always call on to accomplish what they want and fall back on a concrete outcome. Without those, they may be stuck going in circles trying to reason with someone that can't be reasoned with.

Conclusions

Velvet ropes are weak boundaries and challenges meant to gently dissuade characters from crossing them without applying some conviction. They are not meant to be hard boundaries like walls of the game, but they may often feel like that to some players. It is important to communicate the difference between those at the table and encourage players to push against and cross those ropes to get what they really want out of a scene. Knowing you have some tools like mechanics to push aside those velvet ropes when they get in the way is also a way to help players not get stuck.

Equivalent Dice Theorems of RPGs

My group and I have played a good amount of PbtA games (Fellowship, Legacy, Dungeon World, etc.). After getting used to them we did a one shot game of iHunt, which used the FATE system. During the session my GM remarked how FATE is making him roll again to set our difficulty and how he got used to not having to do that in PbtA. This got me thinking - "was that roll even necessary?", which lead me down a math rabbit hole...

Lets back up and start from beginning.

FATE dice rolls

The FATE system uses FATE dice, an alternative set of D6s that can roll +1, 0 and -1:

FATE Dice

To figure out how much you rolled, you take four FATE Dice, roll them, add their results together and add whatever skill modifier your character has. Then that is either compared to a static number determined by the GM for a "passive opposition", or another roll with modifiers for an "active opposition".

The second situation was what my GM remarked about, and when you think about it - you really don't need to have more than one side rolling dice in this system.

FATE Dice are a bit different from the standard dice - their average roll is a "0", and you have both positive and negative 1s on it. The dice is symmetrical - it doesn't matter if you roll a FATE dice or its opposite, the result is the same.

So if you wanted to avoid the GM having to ever roll dice, you would just make the player roll 8 FATE Dice and give them a passive opposition instead and it would be exactly the same roll (4 GM dice turn into the player rolling 4 opposite dice, which in this system is the same as normal dice, therefore 4+4=8 dice total roll).

This got me thinking - could something similar be done in other systems?

Equivalent dice and rolls

After thinking about it, turns out you can do something similar. Here is a more formal explanation of what that entails if you like math, but to summarise it based on D6s:

Rolling a D6 and rolling "7-D6" is the same - you get the same results. Based on this you can turn any versus roll into a single roll by one side that uses all the dice vs a static number.

If you subtract the average of 3.5 from every side of the D6, you get a symmetrical die D6Sym with sides {-2.5, -1.5, -0.5, 0.5, 1.5, 2.5}. Based on that, rolling a D6 and rolling "3.5+D6Sym" is the same. While this doesn't help much by itself, it allows you to easily make a statistical analysis of rolls involving multiple dice (since the average will always be 0, so you can easily compare these binomial distributions).

Based on the last one, I did some programming to figure out the statistics of rolling various amounts of dice...

Dice roll statistics

This part is probably the hardest to understand. Basically, it boils down to this:

The goal was to figure out rolling how many dice is "good enough" - when you don't need to roll more dice to get "random enough" results.

The more dice you roll, the closer the results is to a binomial distribution, but there are some diminishing returns. After you roll about 3-4 dice the results don't get much better.

Size of the dice rolled doesn't change things that much beyond making the results more granular. Rolling 5D4 is comparable to rolling 5D12.

So where does this all lead us?

Conclusions

When designing a system, you don't really need to roll a lot of dice - rolling more than 3-4 gets a bit excessive and doesn't improve the probabilities of the roll too much.

When you have a versus roll, you only need to have one side of the conflict roll, while the other would provide a static difficulty. The exact math of a roll can be a little complicated, but it's mostly fixed for any given amount of dice.

If you don't want to roll a lot of dice, you can instead roll fewer but bigger dice to get a granular enough result (again providing you're rolling those 3-4 dice).

So after all that, I can say that the GM never needs to roll dice in FATE - the 4 FATE dice the player rolls should be good enough of randomness in most situations. The rest would be taken care of by a static difficulty for them to beat based on how challenging the enemy is.

The same principles could be applied to a lot of systems. Maybe not something that involves a lot of dice manipulation and tricks like CORTEX, but others - maybe. There is definitely room for some systems designed from the ground-up to minimise the amount of rolls you make (similarly to how Chronicles of Darkness limited the amount of chain rolls).

Related articles:

• Make every roll impactful

Related links:

• Central Limit Theorem
• Reddit threads 1 & 2

Rainbow shields, damage of the gaps, prescribed and ad lib skills

In a lot of RPGs, players have skills, stats or whatever you want to call them that are well defined. Things like Medicine, Nature, Insight, etc. in D&D, or Occult, Drive, Larceny in Chronicles of Darkness. Then there are some games that are more flexible where the players are asked to fill in their own ad lib skills and stats - games like DOGS, Godbound or Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, where you can pretty much write anything in as a stat - "Memory of my dead brother", "Fastest gun in the west", or "underwater basket weaving".

The problem with the latter is the fuzzy boarders each such statement creates about when a given skill should be used, when it shouldn't apply, and avoiding skills that are too broad or too narrow.

Broad vs narrow skill applications

There are RPGs out there that like to break skills down to minutia. In Burning Wheel there are a lot of skills - under Carpentry alone you have Fence Building, Ditch Digging, Carving, Carpentry, Rude Carpentry, Cooping (making barrels), Boatwright, Shipwright, Cartwright and a few more. This creates a sort of Air-Breathing Mermaid Problem, where the game basically forces the GM's hand to say "sorry, you only have Carpentry, you can't carve and decorate what you build and you can't seem to know how to make a barrel". It can also create traps if characters specialise in some skill that doesn't come up that often - "I know you're a master Cooper, but no matter how great that barrel you make will be it still won't help you sail the sea, you need Boatwright for that".

You can run into similar problems in games where players can define their own ad lib skills, but those also sway in the other direction - they can be too broadly applicable. You could have players put ranks into "underwater basket weaving" only for that to come in handy once or twice in the entire game, while someone else makes a stat called "fast" and they want to use it all the time - "I shoot him, but like, fast", "I read, fast", "I sleep, fast", etc. The boarders where such player-defined skills apply are fuzzy - you can't really tell them that because there is some other skill that also works for the situation theirs might not apply. Moreover, players will often skew the problem in their favour just so they can use their best skills - "I make a basket under water and it's so well crafted I can use it as a raft with a sail to navigate the rough sea. It's all baskets, just different shapes."

City of Mist tried addressing this problem by classifying its tags into "specific" and "broad". Most tags on a character sheet should be specific - only letting the character use them in specific, limited scenarios. One tag could be broad - applicable in wide variety of situations.

Rainbow shields and damage of the gaps

While playing Exalted / Godbound with my group we would often reference a "rainbow shield" defence - a power to negate any kind of incoming damage, no matter whether it's physical, magical, fire, electricity, etc. A system that would allow for such widely-applicable defence to exist wouldn't be too fun to play really. Exalted 2nd edition suffered from something like that from what I heard - someone created an optimal way of playing the game called "paranoia combat" that's all about using perfect defence against the high-lethality rocket-tag and outlast your opponent.

In our first round of playing Godbound we ended up being too generous with defences, letting the players counter most attacks with most power sets - "I use Artifice to instantly build a wall around myself to deflect the incoming blow!". As we later found out, Godbound was not intended to work like that - any given Word should only counter a very narrow range of powers that are thematically linked to it. You could use Sea to counter a Fire power, but not say, Sword.

However, the game had a different problem, one which I'll call "damage of the gaps". The system did not have a specified, finite list of damage types. A number of powers did either give you things you could be immune to, or let you specify said immunity - for example, if you had the Word of Fire you had "an invincible defence against flame and smoke". But since "smoke" was ill-defined, we had an argument about whether that Word would apply against chemical fumes and poisonous gasses. Similarly, in the Ancalia expansion introduced an Incendiary Court - fire-golem-like creatures from outside of reality that while clearly having fire-based attacks nonetheless came with a note that their "flaming powers are not wholly of natural fire, and so enemies with invincible defences against fire still take half damage from them". This was probably to prevent players circumventing a big boss fight entirely, but still felt like a weird way to make a power less useful.

In a similar vein you could start splitting hairs on many things - if you are immune to mental attacks and someone uses music or mean words on you, does that count? Where does mental damage end and emotional damage begin? Is a psychic blow magic, mental or physical? Is a laser attack fire, sunlight, or neither? Can I make some very snowflake-y Word that has its own damage type that none of the statted enemies have defence against?

Because the game had no finite and well-defined list of damage types, you either have to make one yourself before the game starts, or possibly have to argue about this kind of damage of the gaps...

Conclusions

While being able to get creative with skills and powers can be fun, having things that are well-defined and concise can help everyone at the table know when something is applicable and avoid the problems of things being either too narrowly or too broadly useful.

Gaming and solving the fun out of RPG systems

Over the last few years my group and I have played a number of systems that had mechanics you could game to get XP or other advantages, or had some of their mechanics boil down to a solvable math problem. Both of those situations ended up detracting from the experience, either drawing more attention to themselves rather to the game being played, or just being bland mechanics.

RPG mechanics as math problems

The first category of mechanics are essentially math problems - mechanics that for any given situation have a correct solution on what to do to maximise your outcome.

oWoD Automated Fire

First one of these is Automatic Fire from Vampire the Masquerade:

This attack basically gives you a lot of extra dice to a roll, but makes the roll Difficulty higher. It's basically a move you want to use either when you need a hail mary, or the Difficulty is already so low it doesn't matter much. For other scenarios, whether or not to use this move would require running the numbers, but there is still a definitive yes or no answer to whether using it is a good move or not. Figuring it out for certain however requires some complicated math of using your AnyDice-fu.

DOGS Growth

DOGS presented a similar math problem to its players when it came to Growth.

DOGS is a system in which you have stats that take form of multiple dice of a given size - "3D4", "4D6", etc. When you undergo Growth, you get to either increase the number of dice for a given stat, or increase the size of those dice - so from "3D4" you can go into either "4D4" or "3D6". Turns out there is an optimal way of progressing through those dice to get the best result on average:

So for example, 3D6 gives you on average 0.5 higher roll than 4D4, while 5D8 is better than 7D4 by 5 whole points on average. The game doesn't explain those concepts to the players and it's simple and abstract enough that these things shouldn't matter, but for a problem-solving player it's a solvable mechanic.

Mouse Guard and optimal combat

Mouse Guard is a system with its own little combat / conflict engine that relies on picking actions (Attack, Defend, Feint and Manoeuvre) and seeing how they interact with one another. Attack lowers opponent's Disposition (HP essentially), Defend heals your Disposition, Manoeuvre is a way to get an advantage on next rolls, while a Feint is like an Attack with caveats - if played against an Attack, Feint does nothing, but if played against a Defend, Defend does nothing.

During our first game of Mouse Guard we soon learned that this setup creates a simple First Order Optimal Strategy - just always Attack. Attack vs Attack or Defend gets you closer to resolving the conflict, Attack trumps Feint, and Manoeuvre often isn't useful enough to trump dealing damage to an opponent. Attack, Attack, Attack!

FOO (First Order Optimal) Strategy

Towards the end of the game this has ended up being such a simple and optimal strategy that for our next game of Mouse Guard we had to switch the rules to give Attack a hard counter not to devolve every conflict of any type into "press A to win if you press it faster than your enemy".

Cortex and marginally useful SFXs

Recently our group picked up the modular system Cortex. We only played a few sessions of it so far, but one thing that stood out to me was how "starchy" (boring) some of its special powers were.

First of all, Cortex is another mixed-die system that puts a big emphasis on making pool of dice and manipulating your dice. So if you're Iron Man, you can have say, Eccentric Billionaire at D10, Ganius Scientist at D12 and Mk1 Iron Man Suit at D6 and roll those all together to do something.

On top of that, one module you can use in Cortex are Power SFX (special effects). Those are some extra powers your character can use that are tied to a Power Set that can alter the game a bit. So for example you can be Tony Stark with Iron Man Power Set, and one of your SFX could be "Immunity" where you spend a Power Point to negate a specific attack, simple enough.

However, a lot of those SFX are boring dice manipulators. For example - Focus lets you take two dice and turn them into one bigger die. Boost lets you shut down one power to increase the die on another die. Dangerous gives you an extra small die to roll, but changes the size of other dice. Multipower lets you use more than one dice from a given pool but they all are decreased a step or more. Versatile lets you split one die into two or more smaller dice. The list goes on.

I've ran some numbers and a lot of these powers are marginally useful. Say, turning 3D8 into 2D8+2D6 with Versatile gives you an average roll that's 0.42 higher, but gives you 0.45 smaller Effect and 0.2 more Hitches. Without going into what those are, those numbers are marginally useful. Sometimes the numbers increase marginally, sometimes they decrease, but from what I've seen it's not a big effect overall.

Unfortunately to get those numbers I had to spend a few hours programming and debugging a Cortex dice simulator. It's hard to make an informed decision as to whether a power is useful or not without a chart, and trying to play a game well that's filled with unknowable probabilities would just be the case of blind luck.

One way or another - the stat-focused SFX and similar mechanics can be one of two things - either boring because they don't change much about the roll, or having an optimal way to play it, in which case you're not engaging with the mechanics, you're solving a math problem. Either way the mechanics become irrelevant because they're either "use them always", "don't bother with them ever", or "use them under specific circumstances". Since Cortex is based on complex math with no glaringly obvious answer, I honestly can't be bothered to use these SFX.

Honourable mention - Exalted, Paranoia Combat

Honourable mention in this category should also go to Exalted. I won't elaborate much on it since this section is already getting long, but there are two things that are worth mentioning that make this epic game of sword and sandal capital H Heroes boring: Paranoia Combat and Minuscule Incremental Charms.

Paranoia Combat was a strategy from 2nd edition Exalted where the optimal way of winning the Rocket Tag combat was to turtle up and play in the most boring way possible.

Minuscule Incremental Charms were special powers you could buy with XP that would give you just small bonuses to rolls or change tiny things that were rather boring in themselves. Things like Triumph-Forged God-Body that gave you double-9s on Athletic rolls instead of double-10s, or Wyld-Forging Focus that started wyld-shaping at a higher phase. All of those were such small tweaks that they might not be worth the mental load, and weighing their effect vs XP cost would be a small math problem in itself.

Gaming mechanics for profit

Most RPG mechanics that you can game for profit I've come across were focused on being able to farm XP, or at least streamline the way you earn XP. While not a problem in itself (who cares if the party got more XP if they're having fun doing it - you're not competing with anyone), it can start to become a problem when it draws too much attention away from doing things in the game and having fun and onto "brrrr the number goes up"

Chronicles of Darkness - punch me in the face for XP

I've covered this one before in the "Punch me in the face for XP - the failure of CoD beats system" article, so I won't repeat much here. Basically, in Chronicles of Darkness you can basically earn XP by being beaten up a bit at the start of every scene, and some systems like Mage the Awakening 2nd Edition even call out a similar way to farm magic XP.

In a similar vein, the systems also let you earn XP by a number of other ways, like turning fails into botches. This can create some animosity between players when someone is invested in some scene going well, while other players are there to mess things up just to farm up some extra XP - "I failed to impress this character, I opt to botch it instead and make them hate us. Too bad they knew something about your lost sister, guess we'll never find what they knew!".

DOGS - Growth vs Consequences optimisation

Another entry for DOGS, this time about maximising the rate at which your character growths, as opposed to optimising how they grow.

DOGS is a system where you Grow when you suffer Consequences as a result of a conflict you had. To become stronger, you have to get into conflicts, get beaten up a bit, etc. However, Consequences can also have lasting effects if they are bad enough - if you roll too high on them, you may even have to step down your stats, essentially netting you zero, or potentially giving you some net negative sessions. Once again, there is a mathematically optimal way of playing:

Which is basically to get a 3D4 Consequence - it has the best chances of being a net gain. You get such small Consequences by essentially keeping non-violent in conflicts, which to an extent is a "mechanic as a metaphor" for the system.

Mouse Guard and farming Checks

Mouse Guard is a system where you grow your character by practice - aka the more you use a skill, the better you get essentially. As with any such system, the first way of farming it is by doing things all the time, which can encourage you to hog the spotlight. This can be a bit of a problem, but then there is more.

The game is broken up into two parts - the GM turn and the players' turn. During the GM's turn (which lasts about half of the session, not "a turn"...) you can earn "Checks", which you spend during the players' turn to do things and make rolls. You earn those Checks by using your Traits against yourself ("I am Small, therefore I have problems lifting this large log!"). You can use a Trait against yourself once per roll, which means the more you act and roll on GM's turn, the more Checks you can earn to act more during the players' turn.

Moreover, during a conflict you can easily earn a lot of Checks if you play in a very boring way. Essentially, during a conflict you pick actions to take - Attack, Defend, Feint and Manoeuvre. When you Defend, you essentially try to recover your HP. Since the conflict only ends when one of the party's HP goes down to zero, if you turtle up you will be rolling for a long time, letting you earn Checks for every roll. In a lot of cases you can also earn a lot more Checks during a fight under specific circumstances - breaking a tie in enemy's favour or giving an enemy more dice in a vs conflict. So if you play like a turtling asshole and have enough dice, you can in theory earn a lot of Checks.

This strategy has one counter though, Feinting makes you unable to roll Defend. You can try anticipating it though by throwing an Attack that trumps Feint into the mix to make your opponent have to Defend and recover. It's not perfect, but it can work...

While that turtle Defence is an extreme example, I have played in some sessions where a less extreme form of Check farming was involved, which later resulted in pretty neat things being accomplished during the players' turn.

Conclusions

There are a number of games out there that rely on math obscurity to give a sense of depth or agency. However, solving the game mechanic from a mathematical sense is only so fun, and once solved the complexity is replaced with an optimal way to play the game, which isn't fun. Making the math behind it harder is not making the choices more meaningful, just the decisions harder to make informed. Try pruning such mechanics from your game if possible.

Similarly, there are games that can be exploited by players to gain some disproportionate amount of XP and what have you that detract from the game by rewarding boring play.

Or in other words - if you are designing a new game system, try asking a math nerd or a game developer to break it. They might do the math and show you how balanced your system can be, and you can guide your players to playing the game well with that math as well.

Related Articles:

• Categories of XP Systems
• Meat and potatoes of RPG powers
• Manage your game's mental load
• Punch me in the face for XP - the failure of CoD beats system
• Net negative sessions

The game is not about that - iHunt, money, and mechanic as a metaphor

Recently, my group and I ran a one-shot of the iHunt RPG. It's a game about being a monster hunter in the gig economy. You're perpetually poor, and hunting monsters for cash is the preferable alternative to getting evicted. The game requires a bit of a cognitive shift from your traditional games, which is what we are here to talk about today.

This post is based on a preview version of iHunt, so final mechanics might change.

Our interview about the game with Olivia Hill

During our first session, one of the PCs got shot with a bullet and was in need of medical attention (you are playing fragile humans after all). When discussing our options, one of the players started solving the problem by trying to pin down some numbers - "how much did we earn from killing that vampire?", "what's the standard rate for a vampire? Is that even listed in the book?", "how much does a hospital visit cost?", "how much does a street doctor charge?", etc. However, as we found out, the game (at least in its current, preview state) didn't have any of those prices listed, because that's not what the game is about.

iHunt is a game about being a poor person that turns to hunting monsters to make ends meet. Money is always fickle and doesn't stick. You might earn $10k in a day, but that's cash, not wealth, it's a windfall that comes and goes. There is a reason iHunt and FATE in general doesn't have a space on your character sheet to put your gold pieces in - the game is not about that.

Now, this was frustrating for the player. The game is about playing a person that cares about the money, but the game does not care about the money. You may want to get invested in the character getting ahead and lifting themselves out of the rut they're in, but by the dint of what the game is about, your character will never get out of their hole as long as they are a character. Otherwise, they wouldn't have a motivation to go iHunting.

The mechanic of how money is handled (or the lack of said mechanic) is one of those rare "mechanics as a metaphor" moments, where a mechanic exists not only to serve a purpose, but to convey a deeper message - "money is fickle, it comes and goes". Heck, later in episode 2 we came up with something similar - when a player sold some extra stuff they stole for cash, they didn't just add some numbers to their gold coin total (since again, the game does not track that), but instead they receive a temporary bonus in form of a FATE Aspect. The character was now Flushed with Cash, which they could tap into to get a temporary roll bonus in the future, after which the Aspect would fade, just like that extra cash in your wallet.

Both of those mechanical ways of dealing with money conveyed a message that was congruent with what iHunt is about - money is fickle, it comes and goes.

Sometimes playing games like this requires one to unlearn some tropes one picked up from other games. Going from D&D into iHunt (or many other games) one might start asking "what's your alignment?", "how much can I carry?", "where is the gear list?", "what damage bonus does this weapon have?", "what's my AC?", "what are my saving throws?", "how do I level up?", etc. The answers to all of them would be "the game is not about that. Unlearn what you have learned and see the world from a new perspective".

Agree on your game's vision before you start playing

Over the years, my group has learned that it's important to nail one thing down before a game starts - its vision, an agreed vision of what the game is about, what are the core assumptions, etc. Having something like that in place can help a lot when it comes to keeping the game focused.

A game's vision can be something very simple. In our Fellowship - The Deeps it started off as "we want to play a Fellowship game about sailing the ocean". This informed the setting - an archipelago with plenty of water to go about, the characters - all having to have a reason to be on the boat together, etc. Later, as characters got fleshed out the concept evolved further - the game was also about an Heir opposing an evil ruler Overlord to dethrone them and take their place, and other characters whose goals would align with that objective.

The vision will also help you figure out what the game is not about. In the Deeps, we weren't going to turn our sailing ship into a flying ship, because that would go against our goal of sailing the ocean and having ocean adventures. In Heaven For Everyone, our goal was to:

1. Play teenage demigods in the 80s
2. Have no clue what's going on
3. Focus on family life and school life
4. Try to be good people
5. Have our actions have consequences

With such clear goals, you could fall back on them whenever you'd want to do something drastic with your character. Would it be useful for a character to run away from their family and ditch school not to be bogged down? Sure, but that goes against the game's vision, so you won't do it. Would it be easy to declare yourself a living god-king and kill all the other supernaturals? Yes, but that's not what the game is about. Should the GM introduce a character that knows what's going on and explains everything to the players? Probably not, because we're meant to not have a clue of what's going on - it's part of the fun.

Making the vision does not mean you have to reveal everything the game is about. For our Conspiracy at Krezk game, we as players decided to be in the dark as to what would be the mystery of the game, so the GM kept us in the dark about those things. We still agreed what some other constraints about the game were (something along the lines of "you live in Krezk, you want what's best for the town, you're 'adventurers', so you'll put yourself in trouble because it needs to be done, etc."), but we had fun experiencing the mysteries slowly revealing themselves over time.

Of course, your game's vision is not set in stone - over time you ought to revisit it and maybe change it as it suits your game. Maybe some assumptions didn't make sense, or maybe you've gotten all the fun you could've had out of these ideas. For example, after a dozen episodes of Heaven for Everyone, we're pretty much done with our characters doing bits of school life, and we'll probably be transitioning that into some other scenarios, like internships or what have you. Your visions are your game's guiding compass, but it's okay to change course if that's what you want to do consciously.

Our group also has a few good examples of when we didn't nail down a vision in mind and things went a bit awry.

For our Fellowship of Cybertron game the GM wanted us "to be Autobots that fought in the Great War", but didn't state that clearly enough, so our party consisted of two Decepticons, an unaligned character and one Autobot. One character slept through most of the war, one was on a colony for the entirety of it, one was made not so long ago, and only one had some deeper connection with the war. We still had fun in the game and the GM still ran it, but for the follow-up season he made sure to clearly state and enforce the vision.

In our Godbound: Living Years game, we had two characters that were nobles. One of them wanted to restore the land of Ancalia that has been devastated by a zombie plague and give ownership of it back to the mortal nobles, while the other wanted to rule the land himself and do away with a lot of the old ways. The two character concepts were often at odds with one another through the entire game since neither of those goals were clearly stated before the game started, and both character concepts were very focused on bending the setting to their vision. It caused a lot of tension in the party and was very stressful to play through.

So if you are starting a game, consider sitting down together and deciding on what your game's vision will be. Once everyone has agreed on what it is through whatever means, it might be easier to keep the game focused and have something to point to when deciding if a character or story idea fits with the game.

Hopefully this will help you avoid having that one loner evil character in a game where you're all supposed to be heroic good people ;).

Related posts:

• The Doylist choices in role play games

Make every roll impactful

Efficiency in a tabletop system is a nice thing to have. The more systems I try with my group, the more I'm bothered by rolls that don't affect the story on their own - either ones that you need to chain together, or ones that don't carry consequences with them.

Chain rolls

When my group started looking into playing some Exalted vs the World of Darkness, I started getting flashbacks to my old days of playing Vampire the Masquerade and the old mechanics that are still in that system. Of them, the most pertinent to our discussion today are the attack rolls.

To attack someone in Vampire the Masquerade, you roll your Dexterity and say, Melee. If you succeed, you take however many successes over 1 you got, add your Strength and the damage of the weapon you are using, and roll that again. That is the amount of damage you do. Now the enemy makes their soak roll and subtracts the successes from your attack roll. So you roll three times in order to get the result you want (you can also start adding the cost-benefit analysis of various manoeuvres like "if I strafe with my assault weapon and get +10 to hit but +2 difficulty, is that a net gain for me?" but let's keep it simple...).

Now, let's compare that to Vampire the Requiem. You roll Strength + Melee - your opponent's Defence. The amount of successes you roll is how much damage you do. Done. In one roll you accomplish everything you used to in three rolls.

This type of rule design can really speed up how you resolve each action in combat without lowering the depth of character builds. You can still make glass cannons, soak tank and what have you.

Try, try again

A thief walks up to a lock. They roll to pick the lock, and they fail. They roll again, and they fail. Someone else from the party decides to give that same lock a try, they roll, and they fail. Then the thief rolls again, succeeds and the party moves on.

A lot of you could probably think back to something like this happening in your game, probably even the exact same scenario. It's an example of a roll that's not impactful if you fail it. Sure, if you only had one chance to pick that lock, that would be something, but if you're picking a lock that's the only way through to continue your adventure, failure is not really an option.

There are two ways of addressing this issue - either ignore the roll entirely if the characters are skilled and equipped enough for it to not be a challenge, or think of some meaningful consequences for failed rolls.

The first approach can be found for example in the Vampire the Masquerade games - if your dice pool for a roll exceeds the difficulty of the roll, you automatically succeed at the roll (under certain conditions). Even if your system doesn't support it, you can usually tell when some roll is beneath your player's character - just roll with the fiction and move on.

The second approach is very prominent in the Powered by the Apocalypse systems like Fellowship. Each time you fail a roll, either there are set consequences to be had, or the GM can use Cuts against you. Maybe they'll "Show signs of an approaching threat" - you made noise and attracted the guards to your location, or "Use up or take away their resources" - your lock pics gear breaks and now you have to batter the door down, etc.

At any rate, you want the roll to be important, whether it succeeds or fails. If it's not important, it's not necessary.

Conclusions

If you can help it, try making every roll in your game be meaningful and impactful. Sure, sometimes it's fun to ace a roll you're really good at, but you can just as easily narrate how awesome you are when you auto succeed. Try giving your rolls weight for failure beyond "nothing changes" - that outcome is the most boring of them all.

Flat shared XP and Geist's Beats per minute

In the past we have discussed a few topics related to what I'd like to bring up today - how Chronicles of Darkness improved the game experience with small tweaks, how it almost fixed minmaxing, how it failed with some Beat systems, and the general discussion of various ways of handing XP in RPGs.

With that in mind, today I heard Geist The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition was doing away with the choice between Individual and Group Beats you could use in Chronicles of Darkness, instead making Group Beats the only option.

I don't have the PDF, so I'm going off what was mentioned here...

Personally, I think it's a good idea, but the reason for this needs a bit more explanation.

Beats mechanics

In Chronicles of Darkness, XP is awarded to the players in form of Beats. Five Beats make 1 XP. Those are earned in a number of ways - you can get a Beat for fulfilling your aspirations, for dealing with trauma, botching a roll, getting beaten up, and dealing with something that shakes your character's Integrity. All in all, whenever your character faces an important or pivotal moment in a scene, you earn a Beat.

Of course, the system can be gained a bit. You can build characters more for farming Beats, and if you play them right, you can get double the amount of XP other players do, which just can breed resentment at the table - never a good thing.

It becomes less pronounced when you just use the Shared Beats system, but that creates another problem...

Beats per minute

Under the Shared Beats system, whenever a player earns a Beat, it gets put into a shared pool. At the end of the session, you take the Beats and divy them up between all players equally. Everyone advances at the same pace and everyone's fine, right?

Well, there is a small issue with that. Tabletop games are a shared past time - you share the story and the time between a group of friends. However, the groups can be small or big, and that can affect the Shared Beats.

In any game session, you will usually have the flow of the game focus on and spotlight different characters at a different time. With how the Beat system is structured, if your character is in the spotlight you will usually get about a Beat or two per scene. However, it's usually harder to have scenes with multiple characters where everyone gets a Beat, unless you are fighting or facing off some horror (unless everyone starts to have the same encounters, same aspirations and so on, which detracts a bit from the individualism of the characters).

In other words, if this was a TV show, the more characters you have, the less spotlight each gets, and the less character development that is happening. Every session you will usually get a similar amount of story points (and thus Beats) no matter the amount of characters, but the more characters you have the more you have to divide the Shared Beats pool.

This is a similar issue to one discussed under "XP by practice" - there are only so many actions you can take in a scene, so many scenes in a session, so the more players you have the fewer XP you get.

Geist's solution

The solution to this issue is fairly straightforward - don't scale the XP to the number of players, make it more flat. Whether you scale it to "5 Beats and everyone gets 1 XP" (same as Individual Beats), or tweak the number a bit to hit some sweet spot, it's still going to be more enjoyable than "punishing" larger groups of players. This way if you have a scene where only one character is present, working away on their plans or dealing with a personal moment, you can take more time and focus on what's going on than trying to fit some time quota to make sure everyone had time to gain their Beats.

Honestly, I had this idea for this solution and this blog post for awhile, and I'm glad it was put into the system.

Conclusions

Geist's approach to dividing Beats / XP flatly between all the players at the table, without adjusting for character count is an interesting one. It alleviates the pressure to increase the game's "Beats per minute" to compensate for larger number of players at the table, while still keeping a similar per-session character progression for everyone involved.

This puts the game more in-line with systems like Broken Worlds or Fellowship.

Running in place in Godbound

My group and I have played Godbound for a long while now. One thing we noticed while playing this game is that while this game features a fair bit of progression, a lot of it ends up just being running in place or falling behind. This might be a bit emblematic of a few other RPGs.

Basic Attack Bonus vs Armour Class, Health vs Damage, Effort vs Effort

A very emblematic problem of running in place in Godbound can be seen in Basic Attack Bonus vs enemy Armour Class. Every level you add +1 to your BAB, meaning it is easier for you to hit your enemies. However, as you naturally progress through the game, you will be encountering enemies with lower and lower AC. So you might start off with BAB of +1 attacking an enemy with AC of 9 (total +10 to hit) and end the game with BAB of +10 and enemies with AC of 0 (again, total of +10 to hit).

This perhaps ties to the inherent problems with D20 systems - the variance of a roll is really too big, so you can only have a "sort of fair" dice results in the middle of the scale. Rolling +5 to hit feels fundamentally different from +10 or +15, so you can't let the players move too far off the middle of the scale without running into really un-fun scenarios ("both me and the enemy only hit once every 5 rolls, wee...").

It's a similar deal when you're talking about Health vs Damage Output - you scale in how much HP you have, and enemies get more attacks, more Straight Damage and so on. You might be getting stronger, but enemies hit harder too to keep up...

Same deal with the Effort economy - you can power more Gifts the higher level you are, but the main enemies you are facing will usually have a similarly higher Effort pool to wear you down with.

Inverse growth of magical competency

In Godbound, you have a lot of Gifts that let you do some cool things - mind control people, become invisible, etc. However, how competent the character is at doing those things is outside of their control really because they never get to roll - the roll is always made as a Saving Throw by the enemies.

Say, you are the sneakiest sneak thief of all the land. You have a Fact of being from a sneaky race, and another Fact about being a sneaky thief. You have the Word of Deception and you hit your Dexterity cap of 18. How good are you at sneaking? Well, if you use Walking Ghost, enemies roll a Spirit Save and that's how sneaky you are.

Now, what if you were a Godbound of bells and whistles, clad in full plate armour and coming from a race of sentient accordions? Well, if you happen to have the Word of Deception and use Walking Ghost - it's still your enemies' Spirit Save.

There is no way to become more competent at sneaking by your enemies, other than the shifting definition of a "Worthy Foe" (which is based on your level vs enemy hit points). However, as the game would naturally go up in scale, you wouldn't be facing off the same mortal guards with a crappy Spirit Save, but instead progressing towards some supernatural critters with way better Saves.

Non-magical competency might work a bit better, but usually that would involve taking a Fact to get +4 to roll or upping one of your Attributes for a simpler Attribute Check roll.

This means as the game progresses, you are getting proportionally worse and worse at being competent in what you do (in relation to the stronger threats you are facing) and there is no way to boost that.

Falling behind on the treadmill

While it might be bad to be running in place, it can feel even worse when you begin to fall behind because you decide to focus elsewhere. Say, if you are a non-combat character you might be so-so at kicking butt early on, but if you decide to continue focus on building a character that's not meant for combat, you might find it impossible to keep up when the bigger baddies show up.

The game seems to be focused on characters being at least somewhat combat-oriented, with a lot of options for maxing out damage, avoiding damage, or dealing damage in a new way. However, if you go against an opponent that dishes out a lot of hurt and you can't negate that damage like the rest of your party, you might go down in one or two rounds.

If you don't scale at a similar pace in combat as the rest of your Pantheon or the enemies you are facing off against, it can feel pretty bad to fall behind...

Actual character growth - versatility

One area in Godbound where some actual growth happens is the character versatility. Every level you buy more Gifts, which usually means you can use them more readily and more often, allowing you to overcome a more diverse range of problems. This might not translate well into combat, but gets really handy for everything else.

Conclusions

My GM often says something to the effect of "There is no difference between Level 1 and Level 20 dungeon diving in Dungeons and Dragons - the numbers just keep getting bigger", and that seems to pretty much hold true for Godbound as well. The player characters' numbers are getting bigger, the enemy numbers are getting bigger, the scale might be grander, but the game is mostly the same.

Dexterity is King

While playing various RPGs, you sometimes see tropes and patterns emerge. We recently started playing Exalted vs the World of Darkness (a "fan" expansion for Old World of Darkness from a former Exalted and 20th edition oWoD writer), and coming back from playing a fair share of Chronicles of Darkness, we were reminded of an old trope - Dexterity is King.

Dexterity is King means that among all stats a character has, one of them is clearly more important than others. That one stat is usually Dexterity. Here are some examples of why that might be.

Godbound

Godbound is an OSR-based system that uses the well known stats of Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma. You can use any of those stats for rolling checks ("roll vs Charisma to try to persuade someone") and two stats always contribute to a saving throw. However, when it comes to combat, you only use the first three stats.

Constitution gives you HP, and that's all it does. Strength and Dexterity are used when you attack something. If you are doing melee, you use Strength, and if you do ranged, you use Dexterity. Your to-hit is determined by the attribute used, your damage modifier is also determined by the attribute used. In that regard, they are interchangeable. However, on top of that, Dexterity is also used to determine your Armour Class, something that's useful for any combat character.

With all of that, if you are going strictly for optimal play, why wouldn't you always take max Dexterity and dump Strength? Being able to not only hit things at a range but also get better armour while you're at it is clearly a better option. Of course, flavouring your character and the choice of Words will encourage you to pick the other option, but usually you'll never make Dexterity your dump stat in Godbound.

Stars Without Number - Int is king too!

Stars Without Number (looking at the Revised Edition here) is another OSR-based system from the same author. Unsurprisingly, Dexterity is also King here - it still modifies your Armour Class, is used by ranged weapons, etc. On top of that it modifies your Initiative, and can be used for a variety of spaceship rolls.

The system does have a few things going for it though - melee weapons have an additional Shock amount of damage they inflict even on a miss, and there are a few Foci around you can use to make yourself quite viable as a melee or hand-to-hand combatant in a scifi setting with plasma guns.

While running a game in SWN, we came across another interesting quirk however - Intelligence can be King too. My specific character was a True AI and was very starship-focused. As it turned out, the system around using spaceships was built around the concept that some characters might not have Dexterity since they could lack a humanoid, physical body (such as a Virtual Intelligence that is the ship, or an AI that gets plugged into the ship). So now pretty much every starship-related roll can be made with Intelligence - piloting, gunnery, star navigation, ECM jamming, etc. On top of that, True AI use Intelligence modifier to get more Processing (power points used to power their "magic"). Int became such a dominant attribute that I developed a 6 level plan for my character to increase it by 4 ranks just to get that extra +1, which was a more optimal strategy than increasing my skills.

Mouse Guard - Attack is King

Mouse Guard is an RPG set in the comic book setting sharing the same name. In this system, the conflict resolution revolves around picking a series of actions to carry out against your opponent. You can Attack, Defend, Manoeuvre or Feint. Attack trumps Feint, Feint trumps Defend, and the other combinations carry out either independently or based on the difference between successes. Attack and Manoeuvre don't have any hard counters. Manoeuvre lets you gain some advantage over your next action, while Attack directly helps you resolve a conflict.

As such, after playing through an entire season of Mouse Guard, we came to the conclusion that you should "never not be Attacking" - it helps you achieve your goal directly, do it fast (which is always good - you don't want to take too long and be attacked more yourself), and there is no way to directly counter it. If the system even had one hard counter to Attack, this wouldn't be the case, but alas.

Old World of Darkness - Dex for everything

Old World of Darkness, even with its 20th anniversary editions, still uses Dexterity for everything. Rolling to-hit, whether it's with a gun, a thrown rock, a sword or with a fist, is a Dexterity roll with an appropriate skill. Block, Dodge, Parry? That's also Dexterity! Bite, Claw, Disarm, Kick, Sweep? All Dex! Initiative? Dex plus Wits. Moreover, after you roll to-hit, your successes carry over to become damage dice, so even if you are using a Sword that does Strength +2 damage, you can basically add half of your Dexterity on top of that. Since the system is also very minmaxy, if you are not starting the game with Dexterity 4 or 5, you are doing yourself a disservice!

Chronicles of Darkness - the king is mostly dead

With the release of the New World of Darkness, or later the Chronicles of Darkness, we finally have a system where Dexterity has been reigned in. In this system a lot of other stats have been given more usefulness. When you roll to-hit, you use Strength for melee or unarmed, and Dexterity only for ranged. Your to-hit roll is also your damage roll, so there is no weird carry-over. Your Defence is the lower of your Dexterity or Wits plus Athletics skill, so even if you don't have high Dex you can compensate. Initiative is Dexterity and Composure, while Speed is Strength and Dexterity. Your Stamina determines your hit points.

All in all, the many uses for Attributes allow you to build some very interesting characters without making them entirely useless - you can have a high Dexterity character that is hard to hit, but you'll probably be sacrificing Willpower or Stamina. You can have a character that doesn't have any Dexterity but can still brawl like a boss. Or you can have a tank that compensates for his lack of Dexterity, Wits or Strength by hitting the gym to get more Athletics to raise their Defence. And with the system being much more forgiving on the XP costs, you can easily tailor your build to match what is needed.

Conclusions

When designing an RPG system, you should avoid putting too much power into a single attribute or other gameplay element. The game is much more enjoyable when there are multiple "good solutions" rather than one "right solution".

Persona time slots and the three part structure of an RPG session

My group tends to experiment with different systems and techniques. One day we decided to try playing some Chronicles of Darkness, and our GM tried experimenting with a mechanic inspired by Persona - "time slots". The idea boiled down to this - every day was broken into a few time slots, and in each time slot our vampire characters could do one thing - go hunt for some blood, engage with their Touchstones, research something, etc. After one time slot where our PCs each did their own thing we would meet up and usually spend one time slot working out problems from last night, before the final time slot where we'd go out and have "the big set piece" of the session. We didn't realise it at the time, but we did find some pretty neat pacing structure for any session.

When we played through some Mouse Guard, the game came with its own pacing - the GM Turn and the Player Turn. In general, the session would start at the GM Turn, in which we'd be presented a challenge that we'd have to overcome - perhaps we'd be travelling between towns and dealing with a snowstorm, only to find out we needed to venture further into the blizzard to find some missing mice. During that set piece, every player would be accumulating "checks" for overcoming challenges with a hindrance. Finally, after that GM Turn was over, our characters would have some downtime to spend those checks to resupply, heal up and interact with NPCs in a more relaxed manner. In essence, it was a similar structure to what we have done in CoD, but in reverse - you'd first have the big set piece, and then you'd have the smaller stuff.

As it turned out, that pacing felt off - you'd usually start the game off with the action and then peter off at the end with things that didn't seem that meaningful in comparison. You might have the characters having a thousand-yard stare after fighting a band of weasels and expecting the players to have a follow-up. At least having this contrast allowed us to refine our approach.

So all in all, here is our time slot technique for any RPG. First, you start the session off with small, personal things. Let each player take initiative and roleplay some small thing they do during their morning as it were. Keep it light, don't do too many rolls, and keep it small - no more than two players in a scene ideally. After everyone has done their thing, let everyone meet up and make preparations. Discuss whatever needs discussing, figure out a plan of action, maybe do some small follow-up to something. Then, in the third part of the session have your big set piece - do battle, solve mysteries, engage with the world. After the climax of the session, when the big adventure is over, have a short moment for decompression and end the session soon after. Leave on a high note and give players time to formulate their plans for the next cycle.

This structure should help you transition from everyone settling at the table and still talking about things outside of the game, through the light things where people settle into their roles and get maximum focus right where the meat of the game is.

Ships, Shares and Startups

A primer on economics in space mercantilism.

Introduction

This post discusses a few ideas on how to apply real-world economics to handle low-level space mercantilism and distribution of earnings between PCs and NPCs. The baseline discussion will use the concepts introduced in Stars Without Number Revised book, as well as the supplements Suns of Gold, Skyward Steel and Scavenger Fleets.

The discussed scenario focuses on low-end space merchant groups, ones with relatively small amount of crew where you expect to take big risks and get big rewards. On high-end scale, you’d expect the majority of people employed to have a relatively stable income and fixed payouts for whatever loot they gather. On that scale, refer to Skyward Steel, especially section “Prizes and Captures” on page 19.

If you are looking for some high-crunch mechanics around everything related to space trading and trucking, Traveller's Far Trader might have everything you need and more.

The Problem

Say Gaius and Hixon have earned some money together and managed to buy themselves a ship. They both contributed $500k, bought a ship for $900k and have $100k left over to invest in buying cargo for trading. They agree that they both own half of the ship and are contributing equally to running it, so everything is perfectly balanced. Whatever money they earn, they split 50-50.

Now, let’s say after a while Hixon wants to make a monetary contribution to his academy and wants to cash $10k out to do so. How do you handle this withdrawal from the ship’s funds to keep things fair? You could withdraw $20k and give Gaius $10k to spend on whatever he wants, but maybe he doesn’t have anything he’d want to buy and would rather buy more cargo to turn more profit. Keeping track of that cargo separately would be a problem, so maybe we should find a different solution…

Meanwhile, turns out running the ship with two people isn’t enough. The ship needs another crewmember. They want to hire Magnetar for the standard rate, but she knows working on a dinky little ship is a very risky line of work, as well as that if they score a big score she won’t see any of the extra profits. Now the crew has to figure out how to properly integrate Magnetar into the payout structure so as not to make anyone feel cheated…

And here is where we bust out our computers and engage in a bit of Spreadsheets in Space!

Ship Shares, but different from Traveller

Before we talk about a solution to our problem, let’s briefly touch on similar concepts you might be familiar with.

In the Traveller RPG, your character could earn Ship Shares, which represented 1% ownership of the ship you were on. While an interesting concept, it’s a bit too rigid and doesn’t do enough for our needs.

In Scavenger Fleets you had the concept of Cargo Shares, representing a claim to a certain amount of cargo space on a scavver ship. While an interesting concept in itself, it’s also not what we’re looking for. Cargo Shares are more useful for running small-scale trading on the side of a campaign where the PCs are tied to a specific ship, rather than being more in charge of things like what we are looking for.

In our scenario, Ship Shares would represent a proportional claim to the ship, its cargo and everything associated with it. The number of Shares is not fixed, it can increase and decrease as needed. The value of the Shares is also not fixed not to make them a stand-in for Credits. Ship Shares thus are closer to real-world shares in a company.

Practical example 1 - cashing out

To be able to use the Ship Shares, we have to determine their value. We simply start at some point where we’re liquid - when we have a freshly bought ship, all the credits and no cargo. So in our previous example we have a ship worth $900k and $100k in credits:

What is it?	How much is it worth?
Ship	$900k
Cash	$100k
Total:	$1’000k

We decide to create 1000 Ship Shares and divide them equally:

Who?	How many shares do they own?
Gaius	500
Hixon	500
Total:	1’000

So with our simple math, each Ship Share is currently worth $1’000 credits.

Now, if Hixon wants to cash out $10k out of his own pocket, he has to “sell” his Shares. So our adjusted tables look like:

What is it?	How much is it worth?
Ship	$900k
Cash	$90k
Total:	$990k

Who?	How many shares do they own?
Gaius	500
Hixon	490
Total:	990

The value of the Shares is preserved, but their number has decreased. Gaius owns the same number of Shares he used to, but he owns proportionally more than Hixon.

Practical example 2 - paying with shares

Now let’s say we want to hire Magnetar. She wants a cut of the future profits, but also wants a salary at the end. We agree to pay hey $10k and 10 Shares at the end of our trip.

Who?	How many shares do they own?
Gaius	500
Hixon	490
Magnetar	10
Total:	1’000

Practical example 3 - round trip

Everyone is ready and we lock things in. Now we’ll be dealing with a lot of cargo and other things, so cashing out will be really hard. We spend our $80k and get some guns, and we’re off with a bit of liquid cash.

What is it?	How much is it worth?
Ship	$900k
Cash	$10k
Guns, 80 tonnes	$80k?
Total:	$990k?

We don’t really know how much those guns will sell for in the end, so we don’t try to keep their value too closely. We have a few adventures, our ship takes a beating, we trade cargo a few times, and our spreadsheet looks like a bit of a mess:

What is it?	How much is it worth?
Ship, damaged	<$900k? $700k maybe?
Cash	$1k - we’re kind of illiquid
Cats? Why do we have cats? 1 tonne	???
Roses, 30 tonnes	???
Computers, 10 tonnes	???
Total:	Heck if I know...

At this point, if someone wanted to cash out, we couldn’t give them a fair payment since we don’t know what anything is worth. We could try negotiating what would be a fair cat-to-share payout, but let’s keep things simple and assume you can only cash out when everything is liquidated. So at the end of our journey, we cash out our cargo. Now it’s time to cover our costs:

Item	Net amount
Cash balance, starting	$1k
Cats	+$70k
Roses	+$40k
Computers	+$300k
Refuelling fees	-$1k
Ship repair	-$100k
Magnetar’s Salary	-$10k
Final balance	$300k

Okay, our final cash balance ended up being $300k! We turned a profit! Time to update our sheets:

What is it?	How much is it worth?
Ship	$900k
Cash	$300k
Total:	$1’200k

Our final total balance is $1.2M, so we’re up 20% from our starting point. Not bad! We still have 1’000 Ship Shares, but now each of them is worth $1’200! This means Gaius has earned $100k ($500k investment, current shares worth of $600k), Hixon has earned $98k due to cashing out early, and Magnetar has earned $10k in salary and $12k in Ship Shares! Not bad!

Share salaries and investments

There are a few more concepts you should keep in mind when using this system. First, if you intend on paying the ship crewmembers a regular salary in Ship Shares, you shouldn’t forget to pay the important people on the ship as well. In our example, if Gaius and Hixon would keep paying Magnetar 10 Ship Shares per each trip and she wouldn’t cash any of them out, in 50 missions she would own one third of the ship. It might not be the ideal solution to go for.

Instead, you could pay each member of the crew a certain salary in Ship Shares. Say, everyone would be paid 20 Ship Shares, and they could take a smaller amount of Shares in exchange for a fixed salary. This way the final ownership would tend to represent how much everyone contributed to the ship over the whole campaign, etc. You could increase and shrink your crew easily without worrying about the regular crew being edged out completely.

Similarly, you could also allow people to “invest” in the Ship by purchasing Shares with their own money. If you’d invest in the Ship as a whole, you’d put the money in the pile and get new shares proportional to how much you contributed (in our example, investing $60k at $1’200k per share would net you 50 Shares). If you want to purchase someone else’s Shares, they’d get the money and you’d get their Shares - the Ship wouldn’t see the money.

Finally, if you want to kick someone out of the crew in a fair way, you could force-liquidate their Ship Shares at a fair market value (if Magnetar decided to leave, Gaius and Hixon could force pay her $12k from the Ship to buy back her 10 Ship Shares). This could be useful if you don’t want people that aren’t on the ship to be still eating into your future profits. On the other hand, if you’re strapped for cash, you might want to hold off on that…

Everything else

Now that you are basically running your spaceship like a startup, you can open the game up to a whole world of fun stuff you can find in the real world. Angel Investors that invest in new ships to earn a fair bit of money. Doing Seed Rounds to sell Ship Shares and raise money for future endeavours. Multiplying or dividing the number of shares to keep their value within a certain range (say, if 1 Share becomes worth $100k, you can multiply all Share balances by 100 to make the new Share be worth $1k again). Being straddled with debt for owning some Shares that went belly up, or perhaps re-inventing Limited Liability Company. Etc. Etc.

Your only limit is how much do you want to play Spreadsheets in Space, and how many Space Lawyers do you want to include ;).

Useful links

• Stars Without Number, Revised Edition, Free Version
• Suns of Gold
• Skyward Steel
• Scavenger Fleets
• Traveller
• Far Trader
• Actual Play - Stars Without Number, Blackstar (our mercantile SWN campaign)
• SWN XP & Money Table (useful spreadsheet from our game)