Some insight into FitD Action Roll difficulty

With Blades in the Dark and the other Forged in the Dark games being so much more straightforward and conventional looking than Apocalypse World, I often forget how its entire internal logic is still very difficult from traditional and neo-trad game systems. While reading through Scum and Villainy again in preparation to finally taking it out for a campaign, one peculiar thing I realized only on the third or fourth pass is that getting circumstantial advantages, like optimal equipment for the task or great numerical superiority, can only improve your Effect for the Action Roll, but not affect the odds whether the roll will actually be a success or a failure.

Which coming from a traditional approach to RPGs just feels somehow wrong. Stacking the odds of success and failure in your own favor is the main objective in the gameplay loop of most games. But here it’s very important to understand that PbtA games are  fundamentally different in what the action resolution mechanic is supposed to accomplish in the first place.

In classic and traditional games, an adventure consists of a number of opposing NPCs and obstacles that the GM has put between the players and their goal. The regular action is one PC facing an NPC or environmental obstacle, and making a roll whose odds are based on the PCs abilities and equipment compared against the NPCs abilities and equipment, or the obstacles static difficulty. If the roll is a success, the NPC or obstacle is either removed from the player’s path, or partial progress is made towards removing it. Sometimes it takes two or three successful rolls to drain the NPCs health to zero, but it’s the same idea.

PbtA games don’t do anything like that. In FitD games, the players initiate an adventure by deciding what they want to ultimately accomplish. And instead of the players controlling their characters to remove the obstacles in the path to their goal, the players and the GM are taking turns in taking control of a story about the characters. Apocalypse World tried to make this very explicit by calling everything that a player or GM does a Move. Unfortunately, the very peculiar presentation of the game left a lot of people very confused. Blades in the Dark tried to make the text of the rules more accessible by using more conventional language, but for me personally, that makes it much easier to forget how fundamentally different the gameplay structure of the game is.

An FitD adventure starts by the GM describing the first obstacle that the PCs encounter on their way to their goal. Then one player takes control of the story by describing how one of the PCs is removing that obstacle. If the roll is a success (one 6) or critical success (two or more 6s), then the PCs removed that obstacle. If the roll is a partial success (4-5) or a failure (1-3), then the GM takes control of the story by introducing a new obstacle. Any scene in a PbtA game consists of the players removing obstacles from the scene, and the GM adding new obstacles to the scene. This loop continues until the players have removed all the obstacles. Then they move on to the next scene, and the whole process repeats again. Like a GM in a classic dungeon crawling adventure deciding on the number of rooms and floors in a dungeon, it is up to the GM in a PbtA game to decide how many scenes the players will have to go through before they reach the goal of their adventure. This is always an arbitrary judgement call by the GM, regardless of the style of game structure, based on a personal estimate of what would make a fun adventure for the players.

And this loop of removing obstacles from a scene and adding new ones to a scene, is the reason why the PCs having advantages or disadvantages in any given situation does not affect the probability whether any given Action Roll will be a success, partial success, or failure. If the players had the ability to stack up really big dice pools for any of their rolls, they would just keep getting successes and critical successes all the time, and most scenes would be resolved in just one or two action rolls. The whole point of the PbtA games is to enjoy the wild rollercoaster of things constantly escalating into more and more chaos and panic. We want scenes to go on for a good while, but we also don’t want them to drag on forever. That’s why the ways in which dies can be added or removed from the dice pool are very limited.

But players do still have other ways to stack things in their favor by establishing and setting up situational advantages for themselves. Trading Position for Effect becomes a critical mechanic here. Somehow establishing an advantage that give the PC Great Effect, or at least going from Lesser Effect to Standard Effect for the planned action is not that hard. That’s exactly what Flashbacks are for, and I think generally most GMs are quite generous when players want to have some kind of not yet mentioned environment feature that would help them. Or you can just Push Yourself to get +1 Effect for 2 Stress. (Though then you can’t push yourself to also get +1 die to the roll.) By Trading Effect for Position, players have the option to improve the position for their action to Risky or even Controlled. And in a Controlled Position, a failed action roll can’t really do any further harm. Even on a failure, you can always just accept that it didn’t work, and no new problems are added to the scene. If things are going terrible and you are getting tired and frustrated with the scene and your character is drowning in Stress and Harm, get that increased Effect and trade it for Controlled Position. Otherwise, enjoy the wild ride.

Where did I come from? Where do I go?

Part of the reason I went all in about videogame design and dropped RPGs entire was as always ADHD. But another big part was that I had been having some ambitious goals about what I wanted to do next with RPGs and never actually getting anywhere. As it turned out, after a few weeks of learning a lot about retro-style CRPG and ImSim design, and thinking about what kind of game I could be working on using either my Kaendor or Iridium Moons settings, I found myself back in pretty much the same circular loop.

Which, I think, I finally found a way out off this winter. With the realization that, *gasp*, I don’t actually like High Fantasy storytelling.

That stuff with the big monsters, the demons, and the evil wizards, and the heroes claiming ancient artifacts and casting magic spells. I don’t find the kinds of stories revolving around these things very interesting. I think I used to, 20 or maybe even still 10 years ago. But not anymore. And that’s why I never manged to turn Kaendor into a campaign that was living up to what I wished it could be. And why I could never come up with even a general outline for a Kaendor videogame. What I was still deeply in love with was the aesthetic idea of environments. I could always very clearly imagine what the world looks like, but never what’s actually happening in it. And correspondingly, what player characters would do in it. Resulting in campaigns and adventures that even when they were going really well, always felt rather generic to me.

In contrast, I have all kinds of storytelling ideas for Space Opera. Endless ideas for NPCs, great conflicts, and adventure hooks. But I never felt good about leaving those fantasy environment aesthetics behind.

For a very, very long time, I was always extremely averse to mixing sci-fi elements with fantasy, even though I have of course always been a giant Star Wars fan. But I only worked out recently that my problem really is with adding little pieces of sci-fi tech into an otherwise self-consistent High Fantasy world. An elf-wizard with a laser gun just feels wrong! They don’t fit together. But what I realized is that the reason magic and space tech work perfectly fine together in Star Wars is that this is a world where both are part of a single whole. The sword and the gun are not opposites in Star Wars. They are not the weapons of two normally fully separates worlds. They are part of the same arsenal used throughout the whole setting. Fairy tale princesses have their own space ships. People get out of the saddle of their taun-taun and jump onto a hoverbike. Without having any thought that they are transitioning between their familiar native world and an exotic alien world. This approach has always worked flawlessly for me in Star Wars, and I have realized I am totally fine with this way of mixing fantasy and sci-fi elements in my own work as well.

Funnily enough, I had noticed many years ago that my deeply cherished environmental aesthetic actually comes mostly from works with space settings rather than from High Fantasy Settings. The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, the 80s Dune movie, Albion, and Knights of the Old Republic. These are all works already set in this kind of Space Fantasy, but somehow it never occured to me to pursue worldbuilding in this direction as well.

When I came up with the first draft for Iridium Moons in 2021, my direct inspirations were the new Dune movie, Cyberpunk 2077, and Boardwalk Empire, with the specific worldbuilding guided by the Space Opera RPG standards and conventions of Traveller, Scum and Villainy, and Coriolis. But that original version of Iridium Moons was mostly a world of space ships, factories, big cities, and corporations. In a pen and paper RPGs, wilderness environments are not really that relevant unless the adventure is specifically about navigating natural obstacles. Almost everything important is happening in city streets or indoors. But in a videogame, particularly first person 3D games, elaborate landscapes are something that can really shine and contribute in a major way to setting the tone of the story. Which gave me the idea to slightly retool the Iridium Moons setting to something less Space Opera and more like Planetary Romance, by reducing the presence of space travel and instead put more work in having multiple important locations located on the same planet. With travel between them through the landscape. (Which would be just a two sentence scene transition in a campaign.) Trying to use all the 12 different original planets in a videogame would also have been a major problem, as they would need strong variations in architecture, vegetation, and wildlife. Which is a nonissue for a GM. Instead relocating all the locations and factions to only four planets makes everything much more technically feasible. In the spirit of fully embracing the space fantasy approach, and being a big fan of A Princess of Mars, I also decided to step away from the industrialists and factories theme I originally had in mind, and lean more towards nobles in old-fashioned palaces. But other than that, it’s still largely the same setting I came up with four years ago. Just in a different sector of space. Possibly a few centuries earlier.

My attempts to make an Iridium Moons game in the Godot engine remains my main focus, and further worldbuilding for the setting will continue to be in that context. But with a rules-light game system like Scum and Villainy, that is very much about making things up as you go and doesn’t require preparing any stats for NPCs, loot, and encounters, running a campaign at the side is much more easily done than with other games I’ve run in the past. And since I’m already doing the worldbuilding for my game, Iridium Moons is making for just the right setting to use in a campaign.

TK-421, do you copy?

Has been quite a while since I’ve done anything RPG related.

For the last year, I’ve been learning about videogame design and using Godot and Blender. Something that is still ongoing and I expect for a long while, but no, there is nothing I have to show yet.

Last week I started playing in Geoffrey’s Old School Star Wars campaign on Grenzland, because I was only going to be a player and it’s a rules light system, so nothing was required of me other than show up for a few hours. Which is a very different kind of activity than preparing and running a campaign in a game like modern D&D. It was an immediate blast. Even though my only die roll was a single shot at a stormtrooper. (Which missed.)

And of course it had me right away thinking that running a rules-light system in an open-ended swashbuckling campaign wouldn’t actually be much more work and a time commitment. For the last months, I’ve been more or less settling on working on a small videogame set in a new incarnation of my Iridium Moons space opera setting, and happened to be browsing the Scum and Villainy rulebook for ideas and inspirations. Right now, a Scum and Villainy campaign in the new Iridium Moons in the not so distant future might be a real possibility, as it wouldn’t really conflict with my videogame hobby.

While cleaning out the spam comments that had build up over the last year (most were tracksbacks that didn’t get caught by Antispam-Bee), I also saw that there’s been 19 actual comments here on older posts since the last time I wrote something. Really cool.

I also noticed that I never actually updated the link to my Mastodon profile. I’ve not been using the old for a year now. It’s fixed now.

The Economy Engine, v0.2

I made a thing.

For D&D 3rd edition, so it might not be that interesting to a lot of people. But I made it and I think it’s cool.

The 3rd edition Dungeon Masters Guides has a system to determine various traits of any randomly generated town or village. The rules for making a list of all NPCs that live in a city by class and level are pretty silly, as they easily produce considerable numbers of level 20 commoners in every major city. But the guidelines for what kind of equipment and other things are available for sale in a random village that the party might come through, and how much of their treasure hauls they will be able to sell there always seemed like an interesting idea to me. You can’t sell off a dragon’s hoard in some remote village, and you won’t be able to quickly recruit a hundred mercenaries and have them decked out with plate armor in a small town, even if you have the money to pay for all of that.

I am currently working on a West Marches inspired campaign concept in which the players would grow the local frontier economy with the treasures they haul up from ancient ruins, and in the process more rare and specialized items and services would become available in the growing villages in the area. Since the plan is to make it a D&D 3rd edition campaign, using the DMG’s guidelines is as good a start as any. To make tracking of how much of the local stocks of various items the players have already bought up, and how much of their treasures they will be able to sell before they might have to make a trip to the big city where the major buyers are, I put together a spreadsheet that automatically does all the calculations that the DMG suggests.

Economy Engine v0.2 (.0ds)

Economy Engine v0.2 (.xlsx)

The only thing you have to do to get the entire store inventory list for any settlement is to enter the population size at the top. It then automatically sets the correct gp limit and calculates the asset values, and then uses those to determine which items are available for sale and how many of them are in stock.

Because I want to use this for an open table campaign where players might have several characters and there might be a number of different parties going on their separate adventures at different times, which might have very different uses for certain items, I made the Economy Engine with an option to keep track of how many items of a type are currently on stock, based on what players have bought, as well as what they have sold. And the sheet also calculates how this makes the cash reserves of the local businesses go up and down.

I’ve put all the equipment lists from the Player’s Handbook into the sheet, but I would recommend to either delete or just hide all the rows with items that are not produced in the setting of a campaign. New rows can be added to the list and nothing should be caused to break from this. You just have to enter the name of the item and its price in gp. The other rows look empty, but will automatically be filled in once you have the price typed into the B column. The formatting goes down to row 1000, and even with just the most very basic spreadsheet skills you can extend the formatting further down as much as you want if you should need it.

I really don’t know if anyone still has any use for this tool 17 years after the game ceased publication. But I made it for myself, it’s really easy to use, and it doesn’t take up space. So have it.

I updated the files to v0.2 because the code for tracking current stock was completely borked. This is also now properly attributed with a Creative Commons Do Whatever You Want License.

The Game of my Imagination

As far as I am able to tell, I started working on a concept for a fantasy setting that eventually developed into Kaendor in its current state at least 15 years ago. For most of these years, it’s been my primary hobby and I surely must have spend well over 10,000 hours on it by now. I’ve run five different campaigns in various versions of the world so far, but I always felt like the things that make the world so special to me did not really come through in the adventures that the player’s got to experience. From what I remember, I always fell back on well established, conventional D&D adventure setups, and the players probably did not see much of a difference.

I have come to think that one probable cause of this might be the fact that the mental images that I am dreaming up about Kaendor are not exactly gameable content. What I am seeing when I am thinking about what my perfect fantasy world would be like are primarily stunning environments, but also fantastic creatures and interesting cultures. But what I am not really seeing in my imagination are stories, characters, or events. Amazing lairs for great monsters or villains perhaps, and even really cool setups for exciting fight scenes. But I never really had any success coming up with interesting people, hidden plots, grand designs, or escalating conflicts.

The world that is emerging from my imagination and creativity is one that would be stunning to behold, and perhaps fascinating to read travel guides about. But that’s not exactly gameable content. Not if the kind of gameplay I am interested in is about descending into dark and dangerous places and facing off against strange and terrifying beasts. Gazing out over a magnificent landscape from the porch of your comfortable little hut is not a game or an adventure.

I think if I would ever get bored with this RPG stuff, I would make a much better fantasy painter than a fantasy writer.

This has been my desktop background for most of the last 20 years, on at least six different computers.

However, I’ve been thinking last week that perhaps there could be forms of fun and exciting adventure play that still draw upon those aesthetics and sensibilities that are fueling my imagination. And I was quite surprised by the amount of engagement that my idle thoughts on the subject got on Mastodon. And so here we are, with a more in depth explanation of the general ideas I have been entertaining.

A Campaign Aesthetic

The core sensibility that is underlying the entire worldbuilding for Kaendor is the idea of being in this vast world of barely explored and largely uninhabited wilderness, which is full of amazing and alien creatures that are different from the generic European and North American wildlife of typical fantasy worlds. The forests and mountains are covered in grand ancient ruins that hold great magical wonders and mysteries. The world is wild and rugged and dominated by powerful natural forces, but also quiet, timeless, and pleasant. I guess you could say, romantic. A fantasy of a world that is simultaneously exciting and peaceful.

This is not an aesthetic that lends itself to complex intrigues or sprawling conflicts that cover the world in war and threaten it with destruction. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be exploring treacherous ruins and battling with leathal monsters. Taking stupid risks to discover something magical, and to take on great tasks to establish a place of quiet comfort in the middle of a rugged wilderness are spot on for the core ideals of Romanticism.

And I have in fact come across at least two cases where people have managed successfully to create engaging games that are catering to these very sentiments. The survival sandbox videogames Conan Exiles and Kenshi. Yes, the world of Conan is hyper violent and filled with manly men doing manly things. And manly women doing manly things. And the planet Kenshi is violent post-apocalyptic wasteland. But even with all the blood and grime, Sword & Sorcery and Wasteland Fiction are still fundamentally expressions of Romanticism.

Now both of these games gain a lot of their aesthetic payout from their visual presentation. Even though their graphics aren’t anything special, their visual design can often be gorgeous. This is something that obviously doesn’t translate to the medium of roleplaying games. No matter how much GMs might want to indulge in flowery environmental descriptions. But I think one of the key gameplay elements of both Conan Exiles and Kenshi that appeals to the romantic ideal is the construction of completely custom build home bases in nearly any spot you might want to pick. It’s the fantasy of carving out your own little corner of the world where you can shape everything exactly to your personal ideal. But for that you first have to acquire the resources that are needed to construct those buildings, and to neutralize the threat of dangerous creatures and hostile neighbors that also roam the area. And it’s in these encounters with the other actors that stand in your way of having the house of your dreams and enjoying it in peace that you can have the most amazing adventures. Adventures that are not scripted stories about uncovering the cool things some of the GM’s NPCs have already done, but instead constantly evolving sequences of making choices and dealing with the consequences of those choices. The kind of emerging stories that RPGs are uniquely capable of telling. The kind of adventures where RPGs as a medium can really shine.

I could talk for hours about my earliest adventures in Kenshi, which are some of the greatest experiences I ever had in any kinds of games. How two of my guys got separated from the rest in a bandit ambush and were spending the entire night hiding in a ditch with broken legs, only meters away from where the bandits had set up their campfires, blocking the narrow mountain pass to the stronghold where their friends had found safety. Or how the gang was desperately trying to finish the wall around their first compound before a group of approaching raiders reached them, only for the concrete mixer refusing to work because the previously constant winds had completely died down and the lone wind turbine refused to spin. Or how the compound later changed hands between my gang and bandits seven times, as each side was able to kick out the current occupants and chase them into the desert, but then was too beaten up to hold it when the next assault came.

And those are just the ones that happened from random encounters with the lowest level enemy type in the game, still within site of the starting town.

Dungeons & Dragons has toyed many times throughout its history with the idea of higher level PCs establishing their own stronghold in the wilderness. While a very cool sounding idea, from what I heard from people who played a lot when this mode of play was featured prominently in the rulebooks, this apprently saw only very little actual play. Many reasons have been hypothesized for this, but the most compelling sounding ones focus on the fact that the idea was to switch play from dungeon crawling to domain management, and that this was a switch that would be rather sudden, but also only very late in a campaign. And I think it wasn’t helped either by the rules for running a domain being a single player undertaking rather than a group activity as the dungeon crawling play.

A Campaign Structure

A good home base system should become part of the gameplay fairly early on in the campaign. It should supplement rather than replace the expeditions into the strange and dangerous wilderness, and it shouldn’t mean the end of the players playing together as a party. But I also think that the idea of becoming a ruler and dealing with government work and managing taxes doesn’t really appeal to the romantic fantasy of establishing your personal dream house overlooking the landscape.

So I am proposing a different kind of campaign structure that might work better to accomodate and evoke the themes I outlined above:

The PCs are individuals who for one reason or another chose to leave behind their old homes to seek their fortune in the borderlands, on the very edges of the lands that are explored and settled. These borderlands are a fairly conventional sandbox with a lot of old ruins and monster lairs scattered around. Theres both gold and silver to be found and ancient magic items and forgotten spells. New magic items can be made, but the process is complicated, slow, and expensive, which makes the dangerous activity of recovering lost items a worthwhile undertaking. Searching for magic items should be the main premise of the campaign, and the default activity for players to engage in if they don’t have anything else that is demanding their attention right now.

So far, so ordinary. But what I am thinking is to set things up in a way that establishing a permanent home base, and perhaps aditional base camps, somewhere in the sandbox would make the searches much more efficient. Places to store supplies. To safely lock away your money. Where you can produce the tools and other equipment that you’ll be using on your expedition. Where you can stable your pack animals and house your hirelings.

Exploring ruins in the wilderness is the main hook. But establishing a base should become a highly attractive measure to pursue that primary goal. Typically, that base is assumed to be a small castle staffed by the PCs’ hirelings. With settlers being recruited to set up farms nearby, whose tax payments will support the castle’s expenses. But you can really only have one lord who rules the domain, and theb you’re also required to deal with administration.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Instead, the home base could also be a village. Potentially a quite dispersed one. Simply by making the surrounding area more secure, the players could make the village more attractive to new settlers. And as the settlement grows in size, new services become available that the players can use. Animal breeders to increase the amount of pack animals that can be bought in any given time period. Potion makers who sell potions. Sages who can help deciphering clues about undiscovered treasure hoards. And of course an increasing stream of hirelings that can be recruited. Players can then each pick individually if they want their PCs to build some grand villa, or instead live in a shack half an hour away from the village square.

And that’s about all that I got so far. Not terribly much yet, but I think it’s a direction that might be interesting to explore.

A Game for Noobs

I just saw a post by Xaosseed about the ongoing GM shortage crisis in RPGs, and immediately thought that this shortage has now been going on for probably 50 years.

My view has been for quite some time that the biggest barrier to entry for learning how to run an RPG is the fact that you first need to have mastered the majority of the rules before you can start giving it your first try. And I think most people who are looking at the prospect of running a game themselves are having Dungeons & Dragons before their eyes. The game with the three big tomes that I think come out as about 1000 pages in total. One of the games that doesn’t really have a game structure or any procedures to follow. D&D is an awful game to first try learning gamemastering with.

I think one thing that the RPG world could really use would be a simple system that is specifically designed to be easy to run for new GMs who have never run a an RPG before, and maybe even never played an RPG before. Which also would be a game that is easy to learn for players. And it should be specifically marketed as such.

The first priority would be for it to be a system that has relatively few rules and mechanics that GMs and players would have to know. It should be a short rulebook, simply on the virtue of not looking daunting to people who feel they have no clue what they are signing up for. But also, we would want to minimize situations where the new learning GMs have to interrupt the play to look up the rules for how something works. What we would want to teach is not how to manage mechanics, but how to conduct play. Which is the skills that we would want them to learn and that they could transfer to whatever game of choice they want to switch to later.

The game should have a very clear adventure structure and procedures for play. Instead of a game where players can play anything and do anything they can image, limit it to a clearly defined scope in which the overall goals are clear to both players and GMs. Provide templates for how adventures can be prepared and set up that GMs can fill in with their own content.

Also the game would have to be designed to work best for fairly short campaigns. Assume that a campaign might run for three or four adventures and that will be it. That might be enough for a lot of people completely new to RPGs to feel like they have a basic hang of how to play and run an RPG, which then will make it much less daunting to start a new campaign with a much bigger and more complex game. And again, it should be presented as such. It does not have to be a cool game that experienced players need to feel excited about to play it. If it is clear from the start that the goal of playing the game is not to be start of a great new campaign, but to help a new GM get some practice at the basics of running the game over the course of just a month or so, I think a lot of longtime players would be totally up for it. Even if that noob game is not what they actually want to play as their own game of choice.

As a consequence, the game would not need to have much replay value. If you’ve seen anything the game has to offer after four adventures, that would be fine. It would be perfectly okay to get bored with it very quickly.

I don’t have any clue how to make such a game. But I think it could be really great to have something like that. It wouldn’t even have to compete with D&D. It could simply be very successful as the thing you play to prepare for playing D&D.