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.