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.

Asymmetric character complexity - cardboard cutout NPC stats

A lot of RPGs use the same complexity when describing NPC stats as they do PC stats. It's understandable - you spend a lot of time developing and polishing how PC-facing mechanics work, you write up a lot of cool powers and so on, so why wouldn't you use the same system for your NPCs? On the other hand, there is such a thing as information overload...

Godbound and simplified powers

In Godbound, the players control demigod PCs, complete with a suite of divine Words containing many Gifts. The PCs use these powers to up their damage output, do some cool stunts, synergies and what have you. By mid-game you can easily have 15 different Gifts bound to you and have access to some 15 more, taking a few pages of possible things you can do.

A page like this times three,

that's a rough approximation of the amount

of different things every Godbound PC can do

In contrast, NPCs can usually be described in one paragraph with a few key stats:

Typical Godbound NPC

Some more important NPCs also have access to a handful of divine miracles, but those are usually more limited.

To balance the challenge between PCs having access to a lot of powers and NPCs being a lot more simple, the game just gives the NPCs higher stats. While a PC might use a gift to get low AC, a gift to do 1d10 damage, and another one to attack twice, an NPC just gets low AC, two attacks and a high damage instead. All of the complexity and word count that would normally go into a set of gifts get instead distilled into raw stats. This way the GM doesn't need to internalise 10 different powers, instead they can just hand-wave "this NPCs has powers to support their stats".

What this design approach does is it allows the GM to much quickly introduce new NPCs and throw challenges at the PCs without having to keep too many powers in their head and forgetting half of them.

Similarly, scaling encounters up into battling armies just means giving the enemies more HP and more attacks per round. This way you can introduce 10 or 1000 enemies at once just as easily and not have to worry about tracking individual stats and positions.

Fellowship and simple threats

Fellowship (and many other Powered by the Apocalypse games) follow similar philosophy, only they take it even further. While a player character might have a a few pages of moves they can do, five different stats to roll and a bag of equipment, the NPCs might not even roll, instead being very reactive with what they do.

A PC wizard

An NPC wizard

This can further reduce the complexity of any encounter. Bigger groups of enemies are also rather simple - they just gain one extra stat and one new mechanic.

And honestly, even with this level of simplicity, you can still have interesting encounters and give your enemies unique powers to challenge the players with.

Conclusions

Complexity can be a fun thing, but it can also be a burden. It's fun to have options as a PC to what you can do, so you do want extra complexity on that side of the table. However, if you are a GM and you have to juggle many NPCs and enemies at once, you ideally want something simpler instead so you don't get lost. This way everyone around the table generally operates at a similar information load - players can keep a lot of intricate details about their PCs on their sheets and in their heads, and the GM can instead commit to managing a number of NPCs by themselves. Expecting one person to potentially deal with the same information load as 5 other people can be daunting.

Pointless labour multipliers and time as a resource

My group and I have played a lot of Godbound in the past, and I've always saw one Gift standing out as at the same time particularly useful and useless at the same time - Ten Thousand Tools. It's a "labour multiplier" type of power, where the work put out by your character counts as 1000 labourers per character level. I've come across similar powers in other RPGs, but this one is by far the highest multiplier:

Godbound

Exalted vs World of Darkness Companion

Chronicles of Darkness

On one hand, you can see these kinds of powers as pretty good - you are able to accomplish much more than a normal person could. Having this kind of power in real life would be really cool! However, there are a few problems here as well.

First of all, how do you compare the performance of a normal person to someone that is already supernaturally good at their craft? Do you multiply your supernatural output by 1000, or is your output equivalent to 1000 normal people?

Secondly, what can you do with that labour? Are there some time tables of how much effort it would take to construct a building? A palace? Make a ship? Not really, since generally you don't care about such minutia. Generally, you won't be playing Traveller where you can track how fast you can load cargo into your freighter down to an hour:

Traveller's cargo loading time

Thirdly, even if you had the breakdown, you mostly wouldn't care. I personally find the concept of time in most RPGs to be a bit distorted - what does it mean for our session that a character can finish their day's work in 2 hours if it's still one character out of a party of four? Does it change anything if instead of a month to do something it takes the PC a week? Even with Godbound's 1000+ times multiplier, you are already dealing with demigods working physical labour. A lot of things are generally hand-wave-y, since we usually don't play in a game where a strict deadline matters.

Time as a resource

If such kind of powers are to be useful, time needs to be somehow quantifiable in the game. For example, if a character only has 8 hours to pilfer a library they just broke into in the dead of night and each of their rolls takes an hour, that is a very solid use for the labour multipliers. Maybe every session counts as a week of time passing with something bound to happen in X months unless the characters finish their project. Or it could be as simple as "everyone gets a time slot for their projects, and if you have this power you can take two time slots".

At the same time, most of such scenarios are usually quite specific. I am yet to play in a game where such things would come up on regular basis.

Conclusions

Labour-multiplying powers, while at first glance very useful, end up only really applicable when paired with in-game time being a precious resource, and only for actions that already take a fixed amount of time to perform. Unless a system has both of these, such powers often end up being too nebulous to be useful.

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.

Taste of things to come - Miracles and Improvised Spells

A few times I've found myself in an RPG saying "man, that one power I didn't take could be really useful in this narrow situation we are currently in". It's usually a game with a diverse move / power set, things like Godbound, Mage the Awakening, or even Fellowship. It's not just "I missed the roll by 1, I wish I had that extra +1", but more interesting powers like "being able to transform into someone else" or "being able to trace back emotional resonance of someone being murdered". For most systems, you would be pretty much out of luck, but some games let you have a taste of the powers you can wield before you buy them.

Godbound's Miracles

Godbound is a game where you play as an epic hero empowered with divine Words - portfolios of power like "Dragon", "Sorcery" or "Intoxication". A lot of your powers come in form of Gifts - codified powers you can use easily like breathing fire, or flying. However, the game also encourages you to use Miracles - improvised magic that either copies the power of an existing Gift or creates a new power from your portfolio. So if you had the Word of Dragon, you could miracle breathing fire if you don't have that Gift, or you could, say, spread terrors in the hearts of men at your sight.

All of your magic if fuelled by one resource - Effort. Using Gifts is usually free, or costs you a bit of Effort for the Scene, but Miracles are always more expensive and don't last as long as actual Gifts. Taking a Gift of flight would let you fly forever for free, while a flight Miracle would drain your Effort and you could only do it for a Scene.

Overall, it's a very versatile system that lets you improvise the solution you need whenever the situation comes up while still rewarding you for committing to certain powers.

Mage's Creative Thaumaturgy

Mage is a game where you play as the titular mage - a mortal imbued with the True Magic. Magic is divided into a few Arcana (Life, Matter, Space, etc.), and codified into Rotes (fixed, known spells). You can cast the Rotes pretty easily and often for free, but you can also try Improvising with Creative Thaumaturgy.

An Improvised Spell usually costs a bit more Mana than a Rote, and you have to work harder to get it to work, but you can easily mimic the effect of any Rote or improvise your own and even combine a few Arcana.

For example, calling lightning from the sky is a simple Forces Rote. However, if you want the spell to go off in the future when your target will be walking down the street, you would be combining Forces (lightning), Time (trigger condition) and Space (remotely targeting a specific target).

All in all, Mage allows and encourages you to go wild with its Magic system, while letting you commit some of your favourite spells into Rotes as needed as well.

Conclusions

Mage and Godbound both feature interesting systems that allow you to tap into powers you might not yet have bought, or improvise new powers as needed. Systems like these could be fun in a lot of other RPGs, like Fellowship, Legacy, Stars Without Number, etc. Few people would want to spend their precious XP on a shark repellent, but that one day when you actually do face off a shark, you just might want to pay premium to have it right there and then.

The four voices of RPG writing

When it comes to RPG books, there appear to be four distinct styles to the writing, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. It's good to keep those voices in mind when writing your books.

The In-Universe Voice

The first voice is the voice that's the voice of someone living within the universe of your game. This can take the form of dialogue, diaries, notes, in-universe advertisements, etc. Often, this is reserved for fluff text or intro fiction.

If you want to see a book heavily leaning on the In-Universe Voice, check out Secrets of the Covenants from Vampire the Requiem 2nd edition. It's about 85% written using that voice (even if it features a plethora of individual characters and writing styles):

Long exposition writing, short scribbled notes,
extra tangent side-note, this book has it all!

While this voice can be interesting for establishing the mood of a setting or telling a story, it's not very concise and rarely if ever to the point. Add in the possibility of an unreliable narrator and you can be left extrapolating what is true about a setting, and what is true only from a certain perspective.

The Academic Voice

The second voice in RPG writing is the Academic Voice - a voice of someone compiling a large amount of information to present it in a compact, factual and approachable way. This does away with a lot of fluff while delivering the same information you could've gleaned from the In-Universe Voice in much smaller word count.

For example, here is an excerpt from The Invictus (Vampire the Requiem 1st edition):

The writing is straight and to the point. Everything is presented as facts, no personal opinions, no narration or "talk-like" text. It can be presented as something existing within the universe of the game, but more often than not it will be an outsider's perspective viewing the whole picture.

While the Academic Voice can be a bit dry, it's probably the most effective way of conveying all kinds of information to your reader.

If you want to have a good comparison of the differences between The In-Universe Voice and The Academic Voice, compare Vampire the Requiem 1st and 2nd editions. They are explaining similar concepts but in a much different way, and while I really dig 2nd edition's mechanical changes, I despise it for overusing the In-Universe Voice. Heck, I bought Secrets of the Covenants for the 15% of it that is mechanics and threw away the 85% that was fluff I'd rather read in the 1st edition Covenant books...

The Technical Manual Voice

The third voice is the Technical Manual Voice. It's used when you convey the game mechanics to the reader. You do away with the fiction and roll out dice, tables, numbers and so on. This voice is used to explain how things work on the mechanical level.

For example, here is a page from Vampire the Requiem 2nd Edition explaining how Cruac works:

Tables, dice mechanics, dots, points...

The writing in this Voice is technical and can get to the point of making your eyes glaze over, but it's the only way of conveying the mechanics of how the game works.

The Meta Voice

The final Voice of RPG Writing is the Meta Voice. At the end of the day when you peel off all the fiction, all the descriptions and all of the mechanics you are left with what is implied - a frank conversation between the game writer and you, the reader. While this voice is rarely used in books, when used correctly, it can convey the most amount of meaning with the highest clarity. You are no longer covering what you mean with layers of depth, but instead say exactly what you mean.

Perhaps the best example of this I've seen was in Ravenloft Reincarnated, a fan conversion of Ravenloft into Savage Worlds by Jeremy Puckett:

Talking directly to you, the fans of the setting

Laying the themes and tropes of the setting bare

The Meta Voice is perhaps the only way to clearly talk about the game directly, rather than trying to imply themes and ideas. It's a way for the author of the book to directly turn to the camera and convey what they had in mind when they were writing the book. When used sparingly, it can add the sometimes much needed clarity to what's being described and assure the reader that certain choices were made intentionally.

Comparison

To reiterate the points mentioned and directly contrast the ideas, here is a simple comparison of the same concept described in the four Voices.

The In-Universe Voice:

"You're wondering why that gal recoiled from your touch? Well, that's because you're a walking corpse - room temperature at best. HA! But don't worry, there is a trick for that. First, you have to get your old ticker going. CPR it with your muscles, then concentrate to get the blood burning up inside of you. Then, you have to dilate your capillaries to spread that love around. Give it a few minutes and you should be good to go. Just remember to keep pumping it - you're no longer on automatic."

The Academic Voice:

"Vampires can use Blood to appear more human through the use of Blush of Life. This makes their bodies life-like and warm to the touch."

The Technical Manual Voice:

"Vampires can use 1 Blood Point to activate the Blush of Life. This allows them to pass for humans and negates the usual -2 penalty of social interactions imposed by their corpse-like appearance."

The Meta Voice:

"Blush of Life has been introduced to proof it against silly things like vampire hunters using thermal imaging to pick out vampires from the crowds, vampires having to resort to carrying around heated blankets to keep themselves warm and constantly applying a tonne of make-up just to appear human. This is to make the game focus more on character interactions rather than figuring out the physics of keeping your undead body at 37 degrees Celsius..."

Conclusions

There are four different Voices when it comes to writing RPG books, each with their own application, strength and weaknesses. Figuring out the balance between those voices is important.

Use the In-Universe Voice when you want to convey the fiction and add some character to the writing. Use the Academic Voice when you want to convey a lot of information clearly. Use the Technical Manual Voice when it's time to talk about the mechanics of the game, and use the Meta Voice when you need to convey big ideas and meta-information directly to the reader.

Keep in mind that your readers might have a preference between the In-Universe Voice and the Academic Voice - some people will dig 200 pages of fluff, while others will resent you for it...

Sometimes, the little things make a large difference

I've been a fan of the White Wolf's Vampire line of books for a long while now. I got started with the Vampire the Masquerade Revised Edition, and played through Vampire the Requiem 1st and 2nd edition and are currently playing with the VtM20th edition.

While the newer and newer editions often change the games in big ways, sometimes even the small tweaks and changes can leave a good impression on you. Today I'd like to discuss a few of such things I noticed first reading Vampire the Requiem 2nd Edition.

Sanctity of Merits

In pretty much every White Wolf game, a character has a pool of Merits / Backgrounds / etc. - resources at their disposal that are not necessarily a part of their character. Their money, influence, retainers, etc. In the Old World of Darkness product line, you could purchase them at character creation and then boost them through roleplay. In the New World of Darkness / Chronicles of Darkness, however, you would increase those Merits with XP, just like you'd boost any of your other stats.

This created a small issue. If you spend a hefty amount of XP hiring a high-end Retainer and they happen to die, you felt that blow quite hard. I personally remember that exact scenario happening to one of my characters during an ongoing LARP game, which set me back a few months of XP - not a great thing to be on the receiving end of...

VtR2E had a neat solution for this exact scenario - the concept of Sanctity of Merits. It's a rule printed at the start of the Merit chapter of the book that essentially states "if a character looses a Merit, they get the XP that merit is worth back". While it's a simple change, it makes a lot of sense from a game feel perspective - you are no longer as worried about using your Merits in a risky way, and mechanics that could cost you those Merits are not as harsh.

Obviously, you still have the narrative incentive not to throw your butlers into the meat grinder, and you can't just buy back the Merit without a narrative justification, but at least when your Retainer sacrifices their life to save you, you'll mourn them, instead of the XP they cost you.

Traditions are meant to be broken

Vampiric Traditions have been a staple of the Vampire line of games since its inception AFAIK. They are the basic set of rules to follow in any Vampiric society - "don't break the Masquerade", "don't create too many Vampires", etc.

Maybe it was just me, but for a long while the Traditions were presented as these nigh-immutable laws that would get you into a heap of trouble if you broke them, and no vampire that wanted to keep their unlife would dare to go against them.

VtM Bloodlines intro - break the rules, get the axe

VtR2E once again put their neat spin on that. Right next to the section talking about the Traditions, there is a small box stating what was a small revelation to me - "The Traditions are broken regularly enough that there’s a need for law, but not enough to break down vampire society or the veneer of the ordinary world that the Kindred hide behind. [...] The Traditions are deliberately designed so that vampires have motivation to break them, and so that there will be drama when they do.".

This was an interesting take on things. The rules are meant to be and are broken. It's not an uncommon thing, and since it would be problematic to go around executing Vampires for every transgression, the punishments are not meant to be so dire.

This opens up a very interesting political play - the rule breaker either has to hide the transgressions, or if they come to light, act very apologetic and penitent, to let the judicator carry out the theatre of justice lest they are to be seen as weak. If carried out correctly, the justice appears upheld, and it's up to the political manoeuvring to dictate if something was gained from this. This is much more interesting than "break the rules, get the stake"...

Humanity is about being human

Humanity, another staple of the Vampire games, is a measurement of how "human" the character are. The more horrible things you do, the lower your Humanity gets and the more of a monster your character is.

For a long while, the Humanity stat was revolving around being, well, "a law-abiding person" - don't steal, don't murder, don't hurt people, etc. It was pretty bland, and in the Old World of Darkness, the situation was a bit worse thanks to Roads. A Road was an alternative morality track, mostly introduced to let the more monstrous Vampires of that setting be playable. Road of the Serpent for example was all about hedonism and corrupting mortals, while Road of Metamorphosis was all about fleshcraft.

Vampire the Requiem 1st edition did away with all of the Roads essentially since they often boiled down to "Road of whatever I wanted to do anyways" and Vampires once again would only have Humanity, forcing them to balance their personal horror of slipping and becoming a monster.

The Humanity rules were still a bit bland though:

Vampire the Requiem 1st Edition Humanity

Luckily, VtR2E gave them an interesting spin:

Vampire the Requiem 2nd Edition Humanity

Now, Humanity wasn't just about "not breaking the law", but also about being human, such as interacting with humans (and thus having to relate to them and deal with possible consequences of being a monster), as well as the "mental" consequence living through things humans weren't meant to live through, such as joining a Vampiric society, using your supernatural powers, etc.

These additional things the Vampire characters are supposed to look out for help to highlight how they might struggle to maintain the semblance of being human. This reminds me of a short scene from Interview with the Vampire where Louis and Lestat would pretend-dine with Lestat's mortal father for the company.

Conclusions

Sometimes even small changes and clarifications to game's mechanics or lore can make a large difference to how the game is played. Removing a small pain point, highlighting something that perhaps could've been missed, or adding extra focus on a narrative mechanic can be quite memorable, even if they appear insignificant at first.