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.

Running in place in Godbound

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inverse growth of magical competency

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

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

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

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

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

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

Falling behind on the treadmill

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

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

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

Actual character growth - versatility

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

Conclusions

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

Nitpicks about RPG PDFs

My group and I play a lot of RPGs. While some groups prefer to stick to traditional printed books and paper character sheets, we are pretty comfortable all sitting on our laptops, have our Google Drive character sheets open and a PDF of the rulebook handy. Unfortunately, we have seen our share of bad PDF rulebooks out there, which can make the process of running a game all the more frustrating. Below are some of our gripes and nitpicks around various PDFs we had to deal with over the years.

A number of the examples below may come off a bit harsh especially against small, self-published RPGs. This article is not meant to be an attack against anyone, or a criticism of the RPGs themselves, but it merely uses various RPG PDFs as an example of various mistakes you can make. Most of the RPGs used as examples are things we really enjoy playing - hence why we notice those problems in the first place - by being exposed to them through regular play. With that out of the way...

Good Index is important

First thing that is a must for a PDF or physical books is the Index. When you need to search a 300 something book to find a section explaining a specific topic, you naturally check the Index. Well, it seems that some people may have forgotten that. For example - Mage the Awakening 2nd Edition, a book with almost 100 pages of spells, released their PDF without an Index. Good luck finding Sympathetic Names out of the blue if you don't remember them being described under Space Arcanum.

Luckily, the second version of the PDF did come with an Index. It wasn't Bookmarked, but at least it was there. And it was a pretty exhaustive Index too, listing all the important pages something is discussed and highlighting the primary definition of something:

Now, if you want to earn your final brownie points for a good Index, look at what Broken Worlds did and hyperlink every page number, so that you can click on it and be taken straight into that page. Really solid work!

Speaking of Broken Worlds...

Hyperlink your PDF

This one might take some extra effort, but it is REALLY nice to have - hyperlinks everywhere. Whenever you refer to a specific concept, rule, power, spell or anything that has rules attached to it, make it a hyperlink. It really helps with navigating the PDF. At least do it for key concepts.

Broken Worlds does this pretty well. Take this part of the page from Character Creation section:

It links you to the Train Move, as well as rules for damage, armour, wounds and stamina. The PDF is pretty good when it comes to linking the core rules you might be interested in while reading certain sections and it really works.

Make your PDF copy friendly

Obviously, when you have a PDF, you will want to be able to copy parts of it for your own reference. I personally like making my own character sheets that have a copy of all the relevant powers my character has access to. There are a few things that make the process harder unfortunately.

Have a look at this Elven power from Fellowship playbook PDF

Looks pretty simple, has some bolds, italics and so on, but should be a simple thing to copy, right? Well, this is how it looks when you actually try to copy it:

enchanting performance (grace)
When you perform an Elven art for an attentive
audienceL roll (GraceE On a 10KL you may Forge a Bond with
as many audience members as you6d likeE The Bond should
relate to how much they adore and appreciate youE On a 7U9L
you may only Forge a Bond with a single listenerE On a 6UL no
one caresE

For some reason, every non-alphanumerical character is a special character or something. This means you have to manually correct anything you copy as some sort of copy protection mechanism or something. Luckily, this sort of thing is quite rare (although I have a bad luck with headers / power names...).

Other than that, you have a small issue of the power name being all lowercase, and then using hard breaks on every line rather than making the PDF format itself. The latter means if you want to make something into an actual paragraph, you have to delete every newline and add a space instead. Can get a bit tedious on bigger chunks of text.

But that's generally something you have to deal with infrequently, now let's talk about probably our favourite pet peeve - Bookmarks!

Bookmarks are important!

Having a good Index is crucial for having a good, accessible book. Having Bookmarks is crucial for having a good PDF. There are so many ways we have seen Bookmarks messed up it's not even funny. So let's start going over some things one by one.

So first, here is what you'd ideally see when you first open up the Bookmarks bar:

Clear, top-level categories, everything collapsed and visible on one page. You can instantly tell where to look. This would be an ideal version, but this example comes from Stars Without Number Revised, which has a few problems with its Bookmarks.

First of all, you shouldn't ever Bookmark trife. For example, the PDF has bookmarks to individual Backgrounds (which are irrelevant once you make your character) and individual Foci (which are only relevant during levelling up). Things that are so small you can fit 8 of them on a single page, yet you devote Bookmark real estate to each of them individually:

On top of that, that neat, top-level set of Bookmarks is all open when you load the PDF up, meaning this is what you see every time:

So if you want to use those Bookmarks, you have to devote a few extra clicks on closing the categories down one by one.

On a similar note, the same publisher has released Lexicon of the Throne which had some new problem with its Bookmarks:

Where some items in the Bookmarks turned into categories (Birds, Cities and Dance should be on the same level, but they aren't).

As nit-picky I might be about Sine Nomine while still enjoying it, at least the Bookmarks themselves are generally readable and usable. The same can't be said for Werewolf the Forsaken 2nd Edition:

First of all, the custom colour scheme looks awful in Acrobat Reader under dark mode. Something you'd expect a fair number of people to be using, but apparently nobody checked against. Similarly, the book itself uses flowery chapter names, which are pretty useless when it comes to quick navigation. Where would you look for character creation rules? "A Wolf I Am"? Wrong! That's where the lore is. "Laws of the Kill" is where you have those rules. Now you open up that tab and what do you see?

Sections like the Soul, Body and Spirit of the Wolf. What do those reference? Soul of the Wolf talks about the basic character concepts, creating your character and the pack. Body of the Wolf talks about various tricks you can do and transformations. Spirit of the Wolf describes various powers you have, Triggers is a half-page panel in the middle of the previous section, and Spirit Magic talks about even more powers you have but of a different variety. In general, a lot of flowery language that doesn't tell you much beyond a hint of what's present.

Vampire the Requiem 2nd Edition suffers from similar mistakes, except they also bookmarked the fiction that comes between all of the chapters:

Honestly, looking at the various PDFs we used in our games recently, I think Broken Worlds hits the mark again with a pretty decent set of Bookmarks that aren't immediately a mess when you open the PDF:

They tend to unfurl a bit on the lower levels, but it's still better than a lot of the other examples used (especially a few systems that didn't bother putting in any Bookmarks at all).

Quick reference rules

Explaining rules in detail is fine, but when you play the same game over and over, you only want to have some quick reference rules. So either offer some free / low cost GM screen with all of the core rules on it, or at the very least stick a few extra pages at the end of the book with only the core rules and dice modifiers. For example, Mage did it pretty well with their Spellcasting Quick Reference:

While we're at it...

While we're talking nitpicks, here are some other, small tips to keep in mind when creating the PDF / book as a whole:

Avoid homonyms. In The Veil you can pierce the veil to gain information from the Veil. First veil is the name of the game, second is a phrase for a Move, third is the in-universe name for the Internet. You wonder how many times "veil" is used in the book? A lot. Good luck finding the correct information if you want to know about anything besides talking about what you can do in The Veil the game.

Be unambiguous. Again in The Veil, you have a Playbook The Dying that is dying from a disease.

The Disease's symptoms progress and will eventually kill the Dying (Prognosis). The Dying Special allows you to spend hold to keep the symptoms at bay when the Disease triggers. Now, does that refer to the things under the Prognosis section, or the move Trigger? Initially when we played, we thought it was the former, but turns it was the latter. Generally, when you use some common words for names of powers or moves, you should make them distinct - make them bold, or use capital letters. "when your disease would trigger" is ambiguous, "when your Disease would Trigger" is less so. Fellowship is pretty good at this in comparison.

Offer low-weight PDFs. Sometimes all you care for in a PDF is being able to quickly flip through it on your phone. It would be useful to have some low-weight PDFs for that reason, and they could double as printer-friendly PDFs.

Conclusions

Offering a high-quality PDF experience can mean a lot of work, but in the end you will be saving your players a lot time and effort. So please, if you can, put the effort in to make the lives of us players that use PDFs a little less grating.

Mechanics inform the playstyle

My group and I tend to play a lot of different RPGs and get exposed to a lot of different ways of handling the same design problems. How do you represent health? What do you roll for deception? How do you handle combat? How do you differentiate between different character types? How do you handle XP? How a given system handles these things and how much space is devoted to various things informs what game you will be playing.

Combat vs talking and the Edge system from Savage Worlds

We started running our Ravenloft game (Conspiracy at Krezk) using Savage Worlds system, mostly to test the waters before we delved deep with Savage Rifts and Rifts vs Star Wars. We aimed to create some more down-to-earth characters that aren't just some combat-focused adventurers. We hoped to find a lot of interesting options due to the large amount of books in the Savage Worlds roster and the system's popularity for making an interesting range of characters. As it turns out, a lot of the areas I wanted to take my character were severely limited.

In Savage Worlds, the system revolves around Skills and Edges. The first just inform what die you roll. The second are some more unique perks your character can take to augment a given playstyle.

I was thinking about making a character that could talk well to people. The options for that were being Attractive, being Very Attractive, being a Noble, or being Charismatic. All except Noble just give you +2 to roll, which is the blandest thing you can get from an Edge.

Now, what are my options if I want to be a combat character? Block, Improved Block, Brawler, Bruiser, Combat Reflexes, Counterattack, Improved Counterattack, Dodge, Improved Dodge, Elan, Extraction, Improved Extraction, First Strike, Improved First Strike, Florentine, Frenzy, Improved Frenzy, Giant Killer, Hard to Kill, Harder to Kill, Improvisational Fighter, Killer Instinct, Level Headed, Improved Level Headed, Marksman, Martial Artist, Improved Martial Artist, Nerves of Steel, Improved Nerves of Steel, No Mercy, Quick Draw, Rock and Roll, Steady Hands, Sweep, Improved Sweep, Trademark Weapon, Improved Trademark Weapon and Two-Fisted.

Similarly, there is a lot of emphasis and page count devoted to armour, weapons, combat vehicles, combat manoeuvres, healing, movement rate, as well as different monsters and burst templates you can apply. Talking to people is 1 page in this 161 page book.

Unsurprisingly, the system was only useful when we engaged in combat and didn't do much for us in other situations. After a few sessions our characters that didn't want to specialise in combat have ran out of Edges to buy that would be meaningful to them. In the end, this wasn't the best engine for the game we were trying to run - one focused around mysteries, exploring the unknown and people getting in over their heads. For that, we had to switch to...

The Lovecraftian horror of Chronicles of Darkness

Chronicles of Darkness is the second edition to the New World of Darkness line, which itself is a successor to the Old World of Darkness line. While the old systems used to be very min-maxy, the new one is less so.

We switched from Savage Worlds into Chronicles of Darkness after one season of our game and the game turned from being an eclectic group of adventurers into a more Lovecraftian tale. The Humanity system forced us to deal with facing off against horrors, dealing with slow erosion of mental sanity, dealing with lingering wounds and so on. On the flip side we also had characters that could persuade people by leaving themselves vulnerable to favours, foster a network of contacts among the militia, or even a character that just built themselves a safe library to study the occult. And all of that felt great!

All of these were natively supported by the system. While in Savage Worlds we most likely wouldn't be using any of these since the rules did not cover them, in Chronicles of Darkness we embraced them since they were right there, and our playstyle changed.

Violence as language in Broken Worlds

Broken Worlds is an RPG set in the Kill Six Billion Demons world. The system is heavily inspired by the Wuxia genre of fiction, and as such, the game revolves around martial arts and thus combat. We gave this game a try and the expectation pretty much matched reality - it was a system where you were expected to engage in combat, let your fists do the talking and communicate via violence. So if you'd go in and expect to have an adventure in the vein of Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, you would be in the right place. If, however, you'd try to use this system for say, our above example of a more down-to-earth Lovecraftian story with mystery and intrigue, you would be sorely disappointed.

Monopoly and selfishness

Mechanics inform not only the playstyle in RPGs, but the same could be said about board games. And what better example to use than Monopoly:

In Monopoly, the rules incentivise you to be ruthless and cut-throat to win. Even if a player is a nice person in real life, when you start the game, you will inevitably turn into a jerk, because that's how you win. Mechanics inform the playstyle.

Conclusions 

The mechanics of a system inform the playstyle of the players. A system with a heavy emphasis and page count dedicated to combat will inevitably work better if you focus on said combat. If you want your players to engage with your story using something other than their weapons, you should use a system that incentivises non-combat solutions. While you can always pull the "just roleplay it out" card, everyone will often try to resort to the path of least resistance and go with the listed mechanics with predictable outcomes rather than more nebulous "I think this should work but the rules don't say anything about it".

If you are a game designer, keep those things in mind - don't just grab one system of mechanics and expect it to make your game play the way you intended. Look at what you want the players to experience and roleplay while they play your game and then either find a system that caters to that, or make one yourself.