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".

Talk about your game and communicate with each other!

In the vein of the last post, let's talk about another important thing that doesn't seem to be hammered in often enough - communication. RPGs are a social activity. It's a shared story you all weave together. It's not something owned by any one person, everyone at the table is contributing (no game, asides the worst case of railroading, is owned by the GM!). So if you have a cool idea about what should happen in the game, here is a magic trick - talk with each other about it.

The GM is not a psychic, they can't read your mind to know exactly what you want out of the game. Better yet, give them wholesale ideas they could use. Telling your GM "hey, I want to get rich" is nice to communicate your character's desires, but giving that GM a plan to heist a bank, complete with some NPC ideas, what security they might have and other plot hooks takes a load off their shoulders. Mind you, you should keep things concise at least in the pitch stage, since few people have the patience to read multiple pages of stuff, but a brief summary to get the ideas across might just do the trick.

Even if you don't give the GM the complete adventure you want to have, sometimes discussing how the session goes might still be helpful. Sure, sometimes you want to be in the dark about some things, and that's a good rule to keep in mind if that's what you're going for, but sometimes knowing a bit of what's coming up can help you strategise and get over bumpy parts of the adventure.

(I know it's not for everyone, but sometimes even if you know what the adventure will be, it can still be fun to play through. Heck, once we ran Storms of Yizhao, didn't like how it turned out, workedhopped a fix for the adventure, and then ran it one more time knowing the ins and out of the module while still having fun)

This can go both ways too - perhaps the GM has prepared an adventure for the players that requires a bit of buy-in ("Hey, I have 'Fane of the Night Serpent' adventure module. Heads up - this module expects you to sell yourself into slavery as the main way of getting in. Everyone cool with that?"). Communicating that clearly up-front can save some cat herding during the actual game itself. And hey, if players have some issues with the premise of the game, you can discuss it ahead of time and think of a solution before investing half a session getting to a point of contention and dropping the adventure altogether due to some disagreements.

Communicating outside of the game can also help you facilitate the Watsonian vs. Doylist decisions. Me as my character might not want to get beaten up and put into jail, but me as the player might be totally on board with that situation because it sounds fun to roleplay.

In general, talking about what you as the player or the GM want out of the game in general and any particular session in particular and agreeing on what's the best plan is can ensure people get the most fun out of the game.

It's good to let people know what you'd like to see happen, and also raise any concerns about some problems you might be seeing. It's good to address those early on before they snowball into something more toxic if left unaddressed. Maybe the party is turning into murderhobos and you don't want to have another one of those games, or maybe they aren't murderhobo enough and you're not having fun with your chaotic evil death knight. Communicate about those issues when they come up, otherwise you might be left stewing for awhile while nothing gets fixed. GMs and players aren't psychic, talk with them.

Similarly, make sure to clear some major twists, reveals and wacky ideas you have with your GM ahead of time if you have any doubts they might work. One fun story about that in our game is when we played AMP Year One. One of the characters was a super strong soccer mom that lost custody of her kid after getting into an accident. Since the PCs started working with a criminal organisation, they decided to pull some strings and surprise the PC with getting her full custody of her child. Spoiler alert, the PC surprised the entire group, GM included, by revealing her character was repressing that her kid died in that accident, so whoever the poor kid was that the NPCs have brought in wasn't her child. It was a fun moment and a fun twist, but yeah, clear such things with the GM ahead of time ;) . Other things that need to be communicated - clearing up any wacky rules / power combos you want to use to some great effect that aren't obvious, or could be interpreted in different ways. You don't want to spend a whole session or two building up to a crescendo that fizzles out because the GM interpreted a rule differently than you.

The same communication advice can be applied in the other direction as well - if a GM has an idea for something interesting to do with a character that might be risque or imposing something about their past or present situation, it might be worthwhile to check with the player ahead of time. Introducing a new relative, some friend, a new detail about their past, putting them in danger seemingly out of the blue etc. would fall into this category. Of course, you don't have to reveal every upcoming twist (one of our favourite examples of a cool twist the player did not see coming was Boundless Jurisdiction checking up on his husband in Gangs of New Gloam, not realising how he has moved on...). How often you check in will depend on your mutual trust and preference in the end, understandably.

So yeah, all in all:

• Nobody is psychic, don't expect people to know something you don't communicate clearly
• Talk about expectations, hangups, problems, etc.
• If buy-ins for adventures or some obtuse adventure moon logic might be an issue, best communicate them ahead of time
• If you have some cool ideas of what could or you'd like to happen, let them be known
• Clear important things with your GM about your character's backstory, important twists, and any weird things you are basing your plans on
• Clear things with your players about new things you want to introduce to their backstory
• In general, communicate with each other!

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

Manage your game's mental load

A concept I don't see discussed often when it comes to RPGs is that of a "mental load". To put it simply, there is a limit to how many things a human mind can keep track of, and the same is true for RPGs. Once that limit is reached, you tend to either forget things you should be doing, or slow down considerably. Ideally, you want your game to work under that limit, where you can reach the flow state.

Lets break things down into a few categories.

First of all, complicated rules take up a lot of our mental limit. Remembering all the rules for something like Contact would take a lot of effort, so you're most likely be going over it step by step each time you engage in combat. Fewer special cases, exceptions and so on are much less strenuous on the players and GMs alike.

Secondly, more rules means more mental strain, understandably. You can either start off with a system that has a lot of rules for everything, or gradually build up as PCs gain more powers and abilities (which often come with their own little special rules as discussed last time). An example of that from our group would be Exalted, where after a few seasons of Princes of the Universe our character sheets turned into character booklets, with everyone having too many incremental charms to use effectively. This problem was solved when we switched to Godbound where powers were bigger in scope, but smaller in number.

Just one of many of Exalted's charm trees.

Most of those nodes are incremental powers, a small rule to remember...

On a similar note, letting players have limited access to a really large pool of powers can also lead to choice paralysis and increased mental load. A good example of this would be the power Brilliant Invention from Godbound. It's a power that lets you mimic any Lesser Gift from almost any Word. That's over 300 different Gifts you can conjure at a moment's notice - good luck trying to remember the best thing to use for any given situation off the top of your head (then again, 90% of the time you just use Purity of Brilliant Law with this one and call it a day)...

You can use 60% of all Gifts.

Hope you remember them all!

Thirdly, GMs have to juggle more things than players, so it's easier for them to reach their limit. When it comes to NPCs, you ideally want them to be much simpler than PCs. Fellowship handles this pretty well - NPCs only have one to two powers that also serve as their HP. They are much simpler than PCs that take up at least two pages of stats, powers and what have you. It's much easier on the GMs.

Fourthly, context switching can help to compartmentalise the rules and alleviate the mental load. While trying to say, hold 50 different powers in mind at one time can be hard, having 5 distinct and separate game systems each with 10 different powers can be much simpler. You don't need to remember rules for investigation or hacking during a shootout, and bulk trading rules don't apply during space combat. Being able to switch context and only consider a smaller subset of rules and powers can let you handle bigger things. For example, in our Stars Without Number game we use the Suns of Gold expansion that features a big trading system. It's not the easiest thing to use, but since when we are doing the trading there isn't anything else going on, everyone can focus on just this one thing and it flows pretty smoothly.

Fifthly, game aides can help a lot. It's much easier to remember rules when you've trimmed off all the fat and put them on a simple cheatsheet. Having all the rules you need for something on one sheet is ideal - you can context switch to that single page whenever you need to use those rules and follow along to make sure you're not missing anything. For example, while playing Mage the Awakening, having a printout of the Spellcasting Quick Reference pages really made the magic flow, rather than getting bogged down whenever we'd try to engage with the core system of the game.

Page 3 of 4 of MtA's Spellcasting Quick Reference

Sixthly, changing numbers doesn't increase the load. As discussed last time, RPGs usually have powers that come with their own little rules, and stats, which just alter the numbers you roll. Changing the stats doesn't really change your mental load for dealing with them (unless you have to deal with some weird dice mechanics). So if you want to balance your own mental load in a point buy system like Chronicles of Darkness, you can do so by buying powers when things are too simple, and stats when you are reaching your own limits. It can be an interesting way to balance the system without hampering character growth.

So all in all, there are many ways a game can manage the mental load of their players - by keeping its rules simple, avoiding too many small extra rules, keeping things simple for the GM, segmenting systems from one another, providing concise game aides, and letting you buy into more powers or stats to adjust your own load.

Meat and potatoes of RPG powers

When it comes to character progression in RPGs, you generally rely on two kinds of upgrades - boosts to stats, and new powers. The first one is simple, you get your +X to some rolls, HP or other things you need. These are your potatoes of the mix - a bit bland, but filling, they get the job done.

The second is a bit more complicated, with each power having its own little rule or condition attached to it. These are your Moves in Fellowship, Charms or even Merits in Exalted, or Foci in Stars Without Number. Those are the meat of things usually - something flavourful and interesting.

However, sometimes those powers are very bland, amounting to nothing more than a to-roll bonus under certain circumstances, essentially turning into conditional stat bonuses. It's important to keep this difference in mind when designing an RPG.

To illustrate this point a bit more, let's talk about some examples.

City of Mist - heavy on the stats

Our first kind of powers are essentially stat boosters - something that modifies some specific roll for your character. They can give flat bonuses to rolls, change the odds of a roll, give some conditional re-roll, or something to that effect.

Stars Without Number's Specialist Focus,

a good example of a bland power.

One of the more prominent examples of a game that is heavy on the stat powers that I've come across is City of Mist. It's a Powered by the Apocalypse game about being a super-powered person in a mysterious city. You build your character by choosing their themes (Mythos - magical powers, and Logos - mundane experiences) and picking power tags from those themes. For example, if you had a Divination Mythos, you could pick "Sense minute earth tremors" and "can hear a pin drop".

Power Tag questions and answers

Now, knowing that this is essentially a Powered by the Apocalypse game about being superheroes, one would expect the characters to have some cool, unique powers to play with. But no, most of the system is just the core moves everyone has access to. If you want to attack someone, you "Hit With All You've Got", roll your dice, and then add +1 for every tag that's appropriate. So if you have "fast as lightning", "predict a foe's next move", "see in complete darkness" and they apply to the situation, you roll with a +3.

The powers you have don't change what you can do, only reflavour how you do it. Someone with an Adaptation Mythos could throw lightnings, one with Mobility Mythos would strike fast, while one with Training Logos would punch them like a boxer, but the roll and the rules are the same in either case. Almost every power you get in the game is just a conditional +1 stat.

There are some other mechanics at play in the game of course, how if you specialise in one Move you can roll well and have some more interesting Dynamite effects, how your powers define who you are and if you neglect some aspects of yourself you get a replacement Mythos / Logos, etc. The core of the game, however, relies on powers that give you just stats.

Chronicles of Darkness - when quantity turns to quality

One asterisk that one could perhaps add to stat-heavy powers is that sometimes given a large enough shift in the stat, the game could feel vastly different. For example, in our Creepy Rashomon Marine Buffet game of Vampire the Requiem, my character had a Dynasty Membership Merit that let them become Tasked and give them an 8-again quality on rolls (basically - you could snowball your successes a lot easier, meaning you were more likely to get exceptional successes). This combined with some high dice pools meant that for a very specific goal my character turned into a hyper-focused, hyper-efficient machine akin to T-1000...

Nothing can stop a Tasked vampire! Exceptional success!

So eventually, given a power that shifts the probabilities of your rolls a lot, or otherwise helps your rolls a lot, even a bland stat boost power can feel amazing for a time.

Magic - mostly powers, few stats

While I couldn't think of a system that relies mostly on unique powers without much in the way of stats, one aspect of games that usually falls in this category is the magic system. Even in D&D a good number of spells each come with their own rules and special systems unique to that spell, and spells themselves take up about 1/3rd of the Player's Handbook.

Even a simple Alarm spell adds something unique to the game

Stats vs powers

So, on one hand of the spectrum we have bonuses to stats (numerical increases or other special but simple modifiers, rerolls, etc.), and on the other we have powers that each come with their unique rules attached. One is not better than the other, however.

Stat powers are easy to add and test. You can predict what changing a stat by +1 would do to a roll.

Powers that come with their own mechanic have to not only be tested by themselves, but also against and in combination with other mechanics and powers. Each is a special use case and an exception, possibly bloating the game (how many "harm someone" or "heal someone" spells do you really need?). Adding more and more special rules can also be a burden when you have to remember to use them, unless they are well segregated into their niches (you don't need to think about special hacking rules during a shootout, and your battle spells aren't needed during a conversation).

Ideally, you'd want a complimentary mix of both in your system - powers that rely on stats to perform better and better, and stats that are varied enough to cover the basic rules without having to resort to powers for everything. Chronicles of Darkness lines are a pretty good example of this.

Manage your "screen time"

I've been listening to stories from various RPG groups, and I've noticed an infrequent trend that hasn't been discussed much - that of managing your session's "screen time".

The situation usually comes up as a player complaining that they aren't having a fun in a game because the GM is describing everything in too great a detail, or the story is getting nowhere due to infinite distractions, or perhaps someone is hogging all the limelight.

An example of GM not respecting players' time

by creating long sidequest with nothing but dead ends

(among many other things...)

The situation can also be caused by the system not respecting players' time with a high crunch:

If each time a combat starts you lose 2-4 hours of game just rolling dice,

this better be a lot of fun, otherwise you might be wasting time...

All of those scenarios are a matter of managing your screen time. Essentially, a good RPG session is like a good episode of a TV show - a balance of action, drama, progressing the story, etc. Also like with a TV show you have to manage how much of your limited screen time you devote to each component - you might have 4 hours of footage you'd want to show, but with a 30 minutes runtime, you have to cut some things down or out.

With that approach, you (both the GM and the players) can start saving and spending that screen time where it suits the story and your game the most. Describing a pretty mosaic on the floor? You probably only need a short establishing shot rather than devote 10 minutes to it. The PC explores a dead end of a side quest lead? You could have a quick montage, rather than spend an episode on it. PC's nemesis shows up? Now it's time to slow things down and focus!

Don't forget that you are also your own audience, so make sure everyone is engaged in at least most of the story. If one character gets a solo scene, either make it short, entertaining to listen to, or be sure to switch to what other people are doing from time to time. Doing 3 solo scenes for 3 characters each lasting half an hour is more manageable if you switch between the plots every 5-10 minutes, rather than leaving someone twiddling their thumbs for an hour waiting for their go. Perhaps borrow a page from Fellowship and try swinging the spotlight between characters on a cliffhanger - when they get into danger, when some big twist happens, or just whenever enough time has passed and you come to a natural "scene cut".

You can apply similar principles when it comes to mechanics. If a player wants to knock out some minor NPC to show off you don't have to bust out the full combat engine - just decide everything in one simple roll, or wave away the need to roll entirely. You can handwave a thief stealing pocket change to pay for their drinks, a fighter roughing someone up, etc. to save screen time when it's not important, giving you more time to spare on the meat of the session.

On a higher level, you can start tailoring your RPG systems for your games. Be critical of the systems and every now and then make sure they work for the story you have at hand. For example, we moved away from Exalted 3rd edition for our Princes of the Universe game because the game would slow down to a crawl whenever combat would start. In our last session that used that system we had a one-on-one combat where one turn would take over an hour of rolling. Not two episodes later when we switched over to Godbound, we had a 5 PCs fight multiple armies and multiple generals and the whole engagement took less than that one duel. By cutting out the grindy mechanics we gave ourselves a lot more screen time to spend elsewhere.

In the end what constitutes a good investment of screen time is up to your group. If you like a grindy combat, by all means, focus on the grindy combat, but make that decision consciously. Have a chat with your group and figure out which parts of the game are fun for you, and which you'd rather hasten up, if any.

Languages in RPGs are never fun

A lot of RPGs, from Dungeons and Dragons, through Chronicles of Darkness to Stars Without Number just to name a handful, feature a language mechanic of some sort. Unfortunately, those mechanics usually don't add much to the game.

How languages usually play out

The main problem with the language mechanics is that they usually clash with two unspoken rules of role play games - keep the plot moving (aka, don't grind the game to a halt because the players can't figure something or don't have something they need, the idea behind concepts like fail forward), and don't be exclusionary to the characters.

Here is how from my experience the language situation usually plays out in-game:

First option - everyone speaks some common language or use some sort of babel fish-like device. Everyone can understand everyone else, the language mechanics are ignored because nobody put their points into it. The plot must move forward, and this is the simplest way of doing it.

Second option - one character translates for everyone. This often ends up being like the first option, except with the added step of one character actually having the correct language skill. You don't want to exclude most of the party from some important NPC, plot or other things, but you also don't want to waste double the time of the linguist in question actually repeating everything being said for the sake of brevity.

Third option - an NPC conveniently knows your language. If the entire party ends up not knowing the local language, the GM will usually introduce an NPC that conveniently knows the party's language to soften the penalty. At best they have their own agenda and will twist the truth to suit their needs (the players won't have any meta knowledge of what the other NPCs would be saying anyway after all...), but at worst they act like an in-between for the party and we go back to option two and one...

Fourth option - language is a barrier. If you don't speak the local language, expect to have to think on your feet. At its worst, this can potentially derail an adventure if at least one PC decide they are bored trying to speak to the locals, start using their goblin brain and start some violence just for the fun of it. Barring that, the GM and the players would have to be clever in how they advance the plot with this approach.

No game is really stuck with one of these options permanently. The situation can shift from one town/country/planet to the next and change as the plot demands it.

All in all, it seems languages mostly exist to punish the players, rather than be a new cool tool for them to use. There might, however, be a few interesting ways to make the situation more interesting.

Interesting ideas for languages

Here are some interesting ideas for using the language mechanics that might spice up some games.

The first and perhaps simplest approach to languages would be to make them a soft punishment, rather than a hard punishment. Everyone could communicate and interact with NPCs just fine, but if you didn't have a given language skill, you would suffer some penalties to all of your social rolls. This is perhaps a simple mechanic, but at least it makes the language skill useful for those that want to take them, without making them a hard punishment to impose on everyone.

On a similar note, as discussed last time, in our game of Fellowship we had a player use the Angel playbook that created an air breathing mermaid problem for our game. That character had explicit powers for being able to be understood by every alien, animal and the like, which meant other characters did not have that universal ability to communicate as was the staple for all of our other games. This shifted our game from option one, to option two essentially, with the Angel being the translator for everyone. However, there is an interesting twist to this playbook - the Angel can only be understood by everyone, they themselves cannot by default understand everyone else. That is, without an extra piece of gear - the Ancient Dictionary. This lets them understand every language, but they can only use this gear if they have time to carefully consult it. This in turn can give the GM opportunities to add twists to the situations - the player can communicate freely when there is no danger, but as soon as there is a time limit and the action picks up, it changes the rules of engagement. Suddenly if you need to decipher some ancient ruins, you can't do it automatically. This perhaps is a neat way of transitioning between how big of an obstacle a language barrier can be.

Another way languages could be an interesting mechanics would be taking a page from Cultist Simulator and how it handled languages.

Cultist Simulator, where languages are a stepping stone to the dark arts

Cultist Simulator is a game about, among other things, learning the dark arts. Those unfortunately are not taught in a cultist school, so you have to consult the books. Old books, ancient books, foul books. The problem with these is that first you have to acquire them through potentially illegal means, and then they are often written in old and obscure languages. You have to translate those text before you can study them, and that takes language skills. The first basic ones like Latin and Greek you can pick up from some tutors and books from your local antiquarian, but eventually you stumble onto dead languages that you have to acquire by finding a Rosetta Stone of sorts (which would let you, say, learn Egyptian by knowing Greek already), and even further still you have to use those ancient languages to speak with spirits to learn even more primordial languages.

As such, the pursuit of languages itself is a project that you use to further your other knowledge. You could build entire campaigns around it. In more practical terms, those kinds of languages would be used as tools in character downtime, rather than being something active that comes up during a chat with an NPC. You could similarly use this during encounters - if characters find an old tome or stumble on an old library without the necessary linguistic knowledge to understand them, they couldn't use the knowledge right there and then, but they could either acquire a tome for later translation, or have to go back once they learn the languages themselves. Alternatively, they could get help from some other linguist, but the NPCs might start asking questions before long if the book they have to translate has a human face on it... Better learn those old tongues yourself and keep a lower profile!

If you want to further complicate the task of learning a language, take a book from Heaven's Vault and make the PCs have to acquire multiple manuscripts in order to even start learning the language ;).

Conclusions

Languages are often a binary system in RPGs - either the players are punished hard by not knowing them, or there is a way to avoid the issue of languages altogether. As simple as those options are, I unfortunately can't think of any system that has iterated much on this approach...

The Air-Breathing Mermaid Problem

Every now and then when playing RPGs you stumble upon a mechanic that solves a problem you didn't know you had. This situation is called the Air-Breathing Mermaid Problem, based on a meme that goes something like this:

A game has mermaids, they are introduced in the core book. The entire book makes you believe mermaids can breathe both air and water - there is nothing to contradict this assumption. However, when a supplement comes, you suddenly discover that you have a new power that lets mermaids breathe air. You were just given a solution to a problem you didn't know you had.

The same problem can manifest itself in different ways. You could have a poorly checked book that only lists offhand penalties to using a weapon in an ambidextrous merit that removes said penalties, or come from a specific character focus that brings a mechanic to a focus that would otherwise have been glossed over by the GM.

In our recent game of Fellowship, we had a character playing the Angel playbook. One of the core powers of that playbook, is that it can speak with the language of all things, and with some equipment, it can also understand any spoken language. Since our game is about exploring space and talking with aliens, was it not for this move, it would be a default that we can communicate with the aliens through some sort of babel fish or what have you, but with the powers that playbook introduces, either only that player can talk to most aliens, they translate for everyone and we mostly ignore that rule, or we ignore that rule and everyone can speak freely.

While this example is pretty specific, it could be similarly applied to any system that features a way to learn languages - if one player invests heavily into being a polyglot, it can either punish everyone else for not speaking the language, or punish the linguist for wasting so many points on languages.

In most other situations, it's rather uncommon to come across the Air-Breathing Mermaid Problem, but it could be a good design decision to try avoiding small mechanics and extra powers that solve very specific problems. Sure, being ambidextrous can be fun, but are offhand penalties important enough to warrant their own exceptions to the rule? Is it important that a mermaid can't breathe air? If the answer is no, maybe it's best not to solve problems nobody is having...

Violence is always an option - a look at player interactions

Sometimes when you play a tabletop RPG, your character may want another character to do or not do something they are dead set on. How do you convince that character to follow your preferred course of action? If you were just playing a pure simulation game, you'd be able to convince them socially, devise some sort of intellectual scheme for them to see your way, or physically stop them. However, many games and players shun the social and mental approaches - "I don't want my character to be mind controlled", "you should roleplay social interactions", "the system doesn't have a roll for making someone change their mind", etc. This, however, leaves you with one approach that will always work. Violence is always an option...

Now of course, threatening another player's character physically is usually seen as bad form, but at the same time if no other option is available to you, a physically stronger character will have better odds of getting their way, whether that means beating another character up, restraining them, or outright killing them. You just need to establish yourself as a credible threat - even if an orc barbarian fails their intimidation roll, it doesn't mean they won't follow through with their threats later. Heck, in one of our old Exalted game of Princes of the Universe, we had a player character (Killer Queen) that on multiple occasions has threatened the party with a button that would release a demon they used as their personal Evangelion to rampage through our city. Luckily it never came to that, but the PCs did fear what Killer Queen could do to us if we crossed her... It was fun!

Killer Queen, in a nutshell ;)

This puts non-combat characters at a disadvantage. If you are a social character and you can't do "social attacks" on other characters, you can't do much. If you are an intellectual character and you can't devise things to match what other characters are doing (build a player-killer mech, enact a convoluted scheme to get your way, etc.), you can't do much. Combat characters always have the option of using violence.

We had a situation like that happen in our recent Godbound game of Evicting Epistle. One of our PCs, Matiel the Pirate Queen, decided to arm a group of NPCs not aligned with our factions with Godwalker Jaegers. Another PC, Thaa, was very much opposed to that. However, while Thaa had a lot of influence as the Godbound of nature and networks, she was physically the weakest of the party and could not match up to Matiel. Since the game of Godbound has zero rules for "social combat" or any sort of mental influence that is not straight up mind control (which the other PC could shrug off almost effortlessly), there was no way for Thaa to stop Matiel. When the NPCs ended up being antagonistic towards us after getting the Jaegers and causing our game to end, Thaa's player asked our GM to always remind her to play a combat character in games like these, so she'd always be able to get her way. Of course, that was meant jokingly, but it's not untrue...

Unfortunately, there isn't much that can be done about the situation unless the RPGs themselves accommodate non-combat player conflict resolutions and players embrace these outcomes as binding. Exalted did have an interesting mechanic for that in form of Intimacies. Those were things and relationships the characters cared about that could be altered by other characters. While you might not be able to use them to stop someone right there and then, you could make them care about things that were important to you and thus making them align with you in the long run. It would also take the buy-in from other players to play into the Intimacies and not just dismiss them as "my character wouldn't care about that", "don't mind control me" or "whatever, I'll do what I want anyway", etc.

Alternatively, you could introduce a PC v PC conflict resolution engine that's entirely flat - you wouldn't get an advantage on it whether you're strong, smart or charismatic, and it would abstract various ways PCs could sway one another in their respective fields. This would only apply when PCs are in conflict with one another. This would be fair to the players, but perhaps not to the characters.

Conclusions

There will always be conflict between characters at the party, and if one kind of conflict is more useful / stronger / more acceptable, whichever character dominates that field will be able to get away with a lot if left unchecked. It would be nice for systems to have a robust conflict resolution method that could be used by any sort of character in the system without a significant disadvantage...

Is Exalted with a different system still Exalted?

Our RPG group plays a lot of Exalted. We have recorded over 120 episodes of our podcast on Exalted, many of which were 4+ hours long. That being said, a lot of Exalted we play these days does not use the Exalted system, so is it fair to still call it Exalted? At least that's a question someone brought up in regards to our content.

Exalted is a game started by White Wolf in 2001, at the tail end of the Old World of Darkness. It was a game of mythological-scale hero adventurers in a world that's a mix between sword-and-sandal and wuxia stories. The world is vast and colourful, the mythology of the world is compelling, and the player's heroes themselves are larger than life. Where D&D games would end, whether it is dealing with gods or forming empires, Exalted starts you off.

We have done Exalted using Exalted 2nd and 3rd edition rules (Princes of the Universe), Exalted using Godbound rules (Princes of the Universe, again), Exalted using Broken Worlds (Skeleton Keys and Gangs of New Gloam), Exalted using Exalted vs World of Darkness (Heaven for Everyone), and are planning on doing Exalted using Fellowship. Each of these had a different focus - Broken Worlds focuses on the wuxia genre (where every conflict and conversation is an excuse to start throwing punches), Godbound focuses on exerting your will on large swaths of the world, while Fellowship is focused on saving communities from a big bad overlord. Each game has a different sorts of mechanics, and those mechanics inform a different style of gameplay. What stays the same in our games though is the core of Exalted - you are the mythic heroes of legend, destined to face off against impossible odds and larger-than-life challenges, in a world filled with threats that need a hero like that.

But is it Exalted though? It depends on what metric you're using. To compare, let's talk about Star Wars. The original trilogy definitely is Star Wars. Are Star Wars novels still Star Wars? They aren't theatrically released movies shot on film. Are Star Wars video games, animated shows, tabletop roleplay games, comics, card games, etc. Star Wars? Is the Christmas Special Star Wars? It is easy to debate what is canon and what is not, but you can't really deny that all of these things are Star Wars. They might be on different media, they might tell different stories, they may contradict one another, but they are still facets of the same franchise, telling the stories of the Jedi and Sith, Empire and Rebellion, and the various people of that universe.

So all in all, Exalted in a different system can still be Exalted. It might be quite far from the original game, it might have different themes and mechanics, it might even be so far removed you personally won't enjoy it, but it's still Exalted nonetheless. And hey, if the original Exalted could also be Battlestar Galactica but in fantasy space as Gunstar Autochtonia, you can probably suffer someone using a different rules to make the space combat more fun ;).

A story of gaming transhumanism in SWN

Awhile back I heard an interesting story in one of the Discords I frequent. One of the GMs ran a campaign of Stars Without Number Revised Edition using the transhumanism rules.

When making a transhumanist character, you star with up to 50 Face (reputation credits essentially) worth of a shell (augmented body that houses your consciousness). However, if you don't start as a transhuman character, you get to spend that 50 Face on gear at highly reduced prices (being in a post-scarcity society gets you that).

So as the story goes, one of the characters decided to be a normie, while everyone else was transhuman. He got to start the game with like, two high-tech hovertanks, and some other military gear to spare, while everyone else had their lab-grown enhanced bodies - someone went for superhuman, someone else for a murder robot, someone else had a flying frame, etc.. The GM wasn't amused by the hovertanks and what have you, but he let that slip.

Not a bad way to start a campaign, being a murder robot

After an adventure, everyone in the group has earned like, 20 Face each, barely enough for the lowest-end replacement body, a crude box design. However, apparently the one normie player has convinced his 4 buddies to pool their payout together and give it to him, which meant he was able to afford the top-of-the-line shell, the Terminus. Max in all physical stats, built-in armour, being able to survive in vacuum for awhile, you name it.

Understandably, the GM was a bit vexed. He didn't expect that played to game the system twice and now be ahead of everyone else that played by the spirit of the game. The GM vented a bit about the situation on Discord, and we commended that player for being clever, and there was a fair bit of story potential created now that he owes so much Face to the rest of the group. We had some good chuckle out of the situation.

Thinking about it, there was a way for the GM to play an interesting trick at the player's expense in that situation. The situation would be a bit like some concepts found in Soma:

So here is how I'd handle it, in hindsight, and if I was the GM. I'd let the player go through the process, and roleplay his transition into being transhuman. Roleplay how he'd go to get his brain digitised so it can be uploaded into his new body. Then the next scene would switch over to the other characters welcoming the new version of their friend. The twist here would be that that version wouldn't be played by the player, but the GM. They'd tell other players that this person is their friend and acts just like him, except he'd still be controlled by the GM.

Then, the GM would let the normie character walk in as himself, and cue the awkwardness as the process is explained. The process is actually copying the original person, doing a "copy and paste", not "cut and paste". The original would then perhaps be allowed to leave, or something else to indicate to the player that that character still has rights and so on. Then the GM could let the players work out what to do next, how to split possessions, who should go with the team and so on. If the normie character would leave the party, the GM could then sternly look at the player and tell them to make a new character. Then finally after a small pause laugh it off and give them their now transhuman character to play as.

With this approach, the GM would deliver on the heavy themes relating to transhumanism, let the players know that playing cheeky can have repercussions, while still not denying the players the rewards for being clever.

Don't punish players for defining their relationships - implications of True Friend

One night before playing with our group, the GM and I had a discussion about Vampire the Requiem that made its way onto discussing the True Friend merit and what it implied.

For those that don't know, True Friend is a merit in Vampire the Requiem 2nd edition that gives the PC a person that they can truly trust. Someone that will under almost no circumstances betray them, one that cannot be killed by the GM for "plot reasons", etc.

While in itself it's a bit of an innocuous merit, its very existence seems to imply a thing or two about how some GMs might be treating their PCs and their relationships.

A lot of the design that went on between Vampire the Masquerade, Vampire the Requiem 1st edition and now the 2nd edition is focused on addressing various issues that came up from actual play. The systems did away with creating multi-splat characters (no more Abominations!), addressed minmaxing, heck, it even massaged out small niggles with things like Sanctity of Merits.

This implies that True Friend was probably a reaction to some GMs crossing the line a few times too many, stuffing PC's loved ones in the fridge or making them betray the PC for the sake of a twist that wasn't even a good story. This of course disproportionately targets players that have gone out of their way to build a backstory, fill it with people their character cares about, engage with the NPCs and get invested in them, etc. In other words - it mostly punishes people that might care to get the most invested in the world, vs "Joe the Orphan" that has no family, no one to care about, etc.

So here is my request to all GMs that care:

1. Talk with your players about potential boundaries and what are they comfortable with happening to their character. Some players might be on-board with being betrayed and stabbed in the back, but others won't.
2. Foster trust in your group. Respect what the players are putting forward, and talk with them if something doesn't fit - don't just kill off some player's NPC because they don't fit in with the story.
3. Be mindful when you aim to kill off or hurt NPCs important to the players. It might not sit well with everyone if they are not on-board with it.
4. Don't punish your players for getting invested in your story, your world and your NPCs. You want them to get invested, so you should reward that behaviour, not punish it.

The Goblin Brain in RPGs

Every now and then, each tabletop RPG group will come up with a solution to an issue so bizarre and appalling that will leave the GM gobsmacked in horror or in laughter. Not sure if there is a proper term for this, but my group calls it the Goblin Brain.

Goblin Brain

Goblins don't think like people. They are ruthless, direct, and have no moral qualms about anything. Finding the simplest, most direct solution to a problem, consequences be damned, is the way of the Goblin, and this frame of mind is the Goblin Brain.

There are many stories out there about Goblin Brain's way of thinking, some are even cannon to the RPG sourcebooks. Let me tell you a few of them.

Puffin Forest's goblin brain in action - a student figuring out a peculiar way to solve an issue...

Heists, fire and heads on sticks

Recently, my group has decided to play a one shot using San Jenaro Co-op's The Roleplayer's Guide To Heists preview. We were playing a scenario about stealing a priceless movie reel from a cinema event. The theatre was heavily guarded by mob goons, the display was under constant surveillance by 4 guards, under a bulletproof glass dome and secured by an electronic security system that locks the entire room down instantly. We had only two players playing the game, so we had to punch way above our pay grade in order to have a chance of pulling off this hit.

In preparation for this scenario, our Goblin Brains kicked in. Some of our plans included burning the place down, chloroforming the entire room, kidnapping people, killing all the guards and anyone else who might be in the room, locking the cinema down and smoking people to death, etc. All very direct and horrible methods of solving the issue. In the end, we figured out some less gruesome way of solving the issue, but some fire was still involved...

We glanced at another scenario in the preview - one where you have to steal a space shuttle. After figuring out that pretending to be the astronauts with visors down would be suspicious the Goblin Brains kicked back in and said "what if we kill them, put their heads on a stick and walk in their suits holding their heads up so nobody would notice?". That's when we knew we had to stop ;) .

Exalted and Dragonblooded Breeding Camps

Exalted is a game about playing mythic sword and sandal heroes. There are two main types of Exalted heroes in the setting, Celestial Exalted (Solars, Lunars, Sidereals) which are directly empowered by gods, and Terrestrial Exalted, aka the Dragonblooded, which derive their power from the five elements and a strong lineage. The former have a fixed, limited number to them, the latter don't - hence why they are called the Ten Thousand Dragons.

So, how do you make an army of Dragonblooded, heroes that are born from a strong lineage? Well, the Goblin Brain kicks in and your answer is "breeding camps!" - make the strong blood multiply and create more Dragonblooded this way. You can bet this idea came about soon after the first Exalted book was published and has remained an infamous meme in the community ever since...

Vampire the Requiem and the Hungarian Marriage

In Vampire the Requiem there is a vampiric Covenant called Ordo Dracul. They are essentially transhumanist vampires looking for ways of overcoming their vampiric weaknesses. Rites of the Dragon even describes how two weaknesses are pitted against one weakness to overcome it. With this practice, they have developed the Coils of the Dragon, rituals that transform the vampiric bodies. In the 1st edition specifically, under the Coil of Blood you had the power "Perspicacious Blood", which let you gain more blood points than you drank from someone else (you get 3 points per 2 blood you drink from a mortal, or 2 per 1 for vampire blood). The power is simple enough, letting you feed more efficiently, but then the Goblin Brain kicks in...

In the Ordo Dracul book the writers describe a practice known as the Hungarian Marriage. You would have a pair of vampires with the power feeding from one another to produce infinite blood points. However, those that know their Requiem already realise there are two problems with this - Vinculum and blood addiction. Blood addiction means that a vampire drinking other vampire blood gets addicted to the sensation and may crave it more and more. Vinculum on the other hand is a blood bond forming in someone that has drank from the same vampire repeatedly, making them a thrall to the vampire. This would result in a lot of strong, conflicting feelings in those two vampires that may cause problems to a lot of other people around them. Needless to say, this practice can be severely punished, such as by throwing the two "lovers" in a metal coffin into the sea while they remain awake and able to feed off one another in perpetuity...

Slave worship and making your own followers

Once again in Exalted - in the setting, gods derive their power and wealth from being venerated. The bigger the god's cult the more prominent figure they become and the more money they have to bribe other celestial bureaucrats with. On the flip side, a god that doesn't get any prayers loses power and can even go insane.

Here is where the entrepreneurial Guild comes in. As any world-spanning merchant organisation it seems, they deal with slaves. So their Goblin Brain says - what simpler way of making easy money than to sell the gods the service of being worshipped by the slaves? Coincidentally, a player's Goblin Brain might also chip in analysing how much money can you make laundering prayers and conclude that a person worshipping for a whole day produces more wealth than one working all day, hence all the economy is a sham.

On a similar note, in our Godbound game, Evicting Epistle, we had a god of Artifice and Fertility. Since in that system you get more Dominion points each month based on the amount of people that worship your character, the simplest Goblin Brain solution was to make more followers. So the character went ahead and created a race of Units, smallest creatures capable of having a soul and producing worship, then putting them in a life-sustaining cell where they could worship them all day, every day for the rest of their lives. The cells were self-replicating too!

Rick and Morty's Microverse Battery, used as a literal prototype document for the Units' enclosure

I could be going on and on about more Goblin Brain examples, but I think you get the point by now...

Conclusions

When players come up with the most blunt, straightforward solution to a problem that would be appalling to a normal human being, you know they were thinking with their Goblin Brain. It can be fun to theorise, sometimes it can be fun to actually carry out, but keep in mind that a Goblin Brain might not be thematically fitting for all sorts of games. 

Unstable combat systems - taking wargaming out of RPGs

As everyone knows, D&D has roots in wargaming. Combat is an important part of D&D as well as many other RPGs. However, after playing a lot of different games, it seems most of them suffer from an "unstable combat system".

What do I mean by unstable? Balancing encounters usually feels like trying to balance a ball on top of a hill - it tends to fall one way or the other with ease, while keeping it in balance is a feat. In RPG terms, you either end up throwing something way too easy at the players and they end up roflstomping it, or the encounter is too hard and the player characters end up dying. Ideally, you want the characters to pull through but at a cost.

For example, in our most recent Godbound game, Evicting Epistle, in 24 sessions of playing we had about 2 good encounters - one army v army, and one 3v1 brawl. A lot of other battles were either PCs wiping the floor with the enemies, or running with their tails between their legs not to get murdered.

So what issues contribute to a combat system being unstable?

High numbers with high variance

Humans are not machines, they have problems conceptualising large numbers and doing two digit arithmetic on the fly. How much longer a 65HP character will survive against an opponent that deals 8 damage than a 47HP one? Hard to tell when you have to make up an encounter on the spot.

This issue gets compounded when there is a high variance between the results (the possible range of numbers and how probable they are to appear). If an enemy does 1D10 damage, you can kill your 50HP character in 5 hits, or 10, or 37, etc. One or two bad rolls and you are out of there, or you can still be around 20 crappy rolls later, who knows? Prey to your luck deity of choice.

Having low, somewhat predictable numbers is generally better. For example, in Fellowship, characters usually have 5 levels of health and possibly a few points of armour and healing items. Enemies usually deal 1 damage. You can roughly prepare an encounter based on such small numbers easily, and players can see ahead of time if their actions will expose them to the danger of getting taken out or not.

Similarly, in Chronicles of Darkness, health and damage output of characters is usually in single digits, so you know that "this enemy that can deal 5 damage" will kill you in about two successful hits. The variance is a bit higher, but the outcomes are usually somewhat predictable and still small enough to wrap your head around.

Action economy and focusing

A lot of RPG combat revolves around everyone taking turns to perform actions. Usually the side that can take more actions (by say, having more characters) is at an advantage. If you compound this by focusing many actions against a single character (remember to always "cap the pointy hat" and go for the wizard...), you can start unbalancing the action economy more and more by removing characters from the equation. This feels particularly cheap if used against PCs since it's a cheap yet effective tactic, and it feels as if the GM has a gripe with them in particular.

In general, a lot of Powered by the Apocalypse avoid this issue by making the enemies act when a PC fails. This means enemies don't have an action economy at all, so there isn't much to unbalance, beyond figuring out how much health / damage the players have in total vs how much health / damage the enemies have, in aggregate. Five players have five times the health to soak with after all!

High lethality

Another contributing factor to unstable combat is the high lethality of said system. If a character or enemy can go down in one or two hits, you are not only throwing the action economy out of balance, but you can potentially upset a lot of players by killing their characters unceremoniously.

Sure, some systems can embrace and run with it. Cyberpunk's firefights usually were one hit one death scenarios where the players knew what they sign up for whenever they drew their guns. 

If you move away from "losing combat means losing a character" systems, you can open up new roleplaying opportunities - perhaps the PCs get captured / put in prison and now they have to escape, instead of just rolling up new characters.

AoE and force multipliers

Area of Effect damage dealing abilities and other force multipliers can further throw things out of whack. Instead of fighting 1-on-1 you have to deal with someone potentially hitting a group of enemies and applying the same damage multiple times. Suddenly the you have someone taking on 5 enemies and killing them off while the rest of the group gangs up on the remaining straggler.

I have ranted about this before, how in Godbound you can have a character that wipes out entire armies with a single attack, but most of the characters there can tap into an AoE smite that becomes quite powerful at higher levels. Not only that, but you can easily bring a small army with you to combat and have them attack everyone, etc.

Setup time and iterating

A perhaps less obvious factor contributing to unbalanced combat is how much time it takes to set up and how easily you can iterate on it. This somewhat ties to asymmetric character complexity. If it takes 10-20 minutes to prepare an encounter and it's over in 5 minutes, something's probably wrong. Same if it goes on for two hours, then it becomes a slog.

Ideally, you'd figure out what worked for a given encounter and try iterating on it as time goes on - "3 guards weren't a challenge, maybe 5 will work better next time". However, if your next encounter uses completely different set of enemies that rely on completely different mechanics ("2 beholders!"), you may not get to iterate on the encounters too much.

If this gets compounded, you may not get too many encounters per session due to how long they take, and you may not iterate on the same encounters too much due to wildly disparate enemies, you may never perfect your encounters.

Fellowship generally has an easy time with this - most enemies have the same amount of health points and their powers mostly differ in flavour. So encounter to encounter a similar amount of enemies will usually be a similar challenge, and encounters themselves take a few minutes to set up at most, so you can easily iterate and tweak things to get pretty much what you'd expect out of it.

Combat vs non-combat PCs

Party composition can also affect combat stability. If you have some PCs that are very combat-focused and some that are very much the opposite, it's hard to have combat encounters that challenge one group and don't outright kill the next. This is further exaggerated if characters can grow to multiply their effectiveness, while others fall behind on the treadmill.

Godbound and Stars Without Number have pretty much been like that for us - having one or two characters that are all about combat, and then inevitably you'd have someone that can't hit enemies and does nominal amount of damage, getting frustrated in the process.

On the other hand, Fellowship once again shines by making playbooks that always have some offensive capabilities, as well as having a system that is versatile enough for everyone to be able to contribute ("I may not be able to kill them, but I can run around screaming to distract them while someone else takes them down!").

Conclusions

To make a somewhat stable combat system for an RPG, you generally want to:

1. Operate on small numbers for health and damage that are easy to comprehend
2. Keep damage somewhat predictable
3. Minimise the effect of action economy on balance
4. Manage the lethality of combat
5. Avoid AoE attacks
6. Make encounters quick to set up and somewhat consistent (be it point-wise, challenge-wise or something else)
7. Give options for everyone to contribute or do something meaningful, even if they didn't build the character for combat

Now, not all of those are always necessary and sometimes you will want to create some conscious exceptions, but they are good to keep in mind when designing a fun combat system.

Wargames might be all about besting your opponent and winning at all cost, but that may not always make for a good tabletop combat. You want to challenge your players, not outright kill their characters.

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.