Friday 28 March 2008

How to Make Friends and Influence Dice Rolls

I was, as I wrote the first draft of my RPG system, at a loss as to whether social skills should be included within the skills list. An omission would be possible though I eventually decided against it, knowing my group prefers to roll dice than spend time being verbose like a college drama class.

That said it can be argued that social skills (diplomacy, streetwise, haggle etc) do detract from the role playing element of an RPG by reducing something that could quite adequately be negotiated between a good player and GM to a random dice roll. Many systems emphasis a compromise, granting bonuses to well spoken players who enjoy getting into character and engaging with wordy banter, and this is entirely adequate for most games.

However when running a ‘role play’ I would be tempted to disregard the dice altogether, look across the table at the player and let them show me what they can do. A good group will often have a designated talker and they will come to the fore, typically I find talkers (bards usually) come to the fore naturally whilst the damage soaking fighters sit back and occasionally chirp in when the subject turns to swords and the like.

A group concerned with role playing will usually have already divided themselves up into the roles they want to serve and have chosen classes or skills appropriately, so this option becomes feasible. However if you do decide to do away with social skills be sure to reimburse the character appropriately, nobody deserves to spend levels on skills that can’t be used.

Alignment and Roleplaying

Since the early days of Dungeons & Dragons alignment has been a key factor in the creation of characters, it can define classes, alter people's perceptions and change the way players play the game.

Is this a good thing?

As a mechanic alignment is at once, like many things, a useful tool and a terrible limitation. At a pinch it gives a good indication of those parties opposed to the player characters, a chaotic good character might be opposed by the evil wizard whose plans he meddles with, and the lawful constabulary who cannot abide his methods. As a games master it gives me an instant touchstone where I can set up oppositions and tensions before the character has even really acted. That having been said it also binds the player into acting a certain way, and whilst alignment can be changed it does bear with it some penalties, especially Paladins, for example, who lose all of their class abilities if they stray from their alignment.

Having no alignment system allows characters to act based upon their own intuition, acting in character or simply as they themselves would act. The problem with this is that without any guiding factor it also allows players to act arbitrarily, saving lives at one moment and torturing and killing at another. Whilst this might have a place in some campaigns (with an interesting, well played character) in most it just serves to break the illusion of the game world.

So is there a happy medium?

One option is reward based roleplaying, although this comes with its own caveats. In such a model we reward the players for acting in character, perhaps giving them certain qualities that they can aspire to (I believe many White Wolf games do this) and rewarding them with experience or new skill dice for consistant roleplaying or character progression. The problem with this idea is that it artificially manufactures roleplaying, players start acting in character in a way that is noticable in the hopes of scoring that precious experience that will give them the edge.

In the end alignment and roleplaying is always a contentious issue and it's about knowing what your party want. If they enjoy the smash and grab gameplay of a dungeon crawl then giving them an alignment is not such a sin since they are already treating the game mechanically, playing to win rather than for a narrative. This is entirely fine, but if your party wants some involved roleplaying then let them play their characters as they want and their commitment to the story will make them act accordingly.

Tuesday 25 March 2008

Ammunition and Thin Ice

My friends seem to universally hate ammunition, and I find it difficult to disagree with them. Tracking numbers on a sheet, especially with something as oft used as a bow becomes a chore that will frequently get forgotten in the heat of battle or a particularly heated discussion of exactly how much that shot missed that troll by. To this end using a similar dice rolling mechanic used elsewhere in the system (in an effort to unify the process so the only thing my players need to ask is 'how many dice am I rolling?') I have attempted to give an abstract system for tracking ammunition for arrows, charges left in a wand or even days worth of rations left.

The concept is simple, each item such as a quiver of arrows has a number of dice assosciated with it when it is found/created between 1 and 5. At the end of any encounter or roleplaying phase (in the case of rations you would only have to roll after resting and making camp, which would constitute a phase of roleplaying) the owning player must roll the dice assosciated with the object, if there are any failures (1-2 on the d6) then the player must subtract 1 die permanently from the object. If this is the last die then the object has 'run out' of uses or ammunition and is destroyed or otherwise rendered useless.

For Example.
Terence the archer has been busy fighting a Deep Crow with his party, opening fire with his bow to fend of the deep lord of Power Dome A. Once the Deep Crow has been driven back into the dark crevice within the mantle of the world that it calls its home the Games Master decides that the encounter is over. Terence has a quiver with 3D worth of arrows within, so he rolls 3d6 and gets a 5, 1 and a 2. Since the 1 and 2 are failures Terence is forced to amend his character sheet where his 3D arrows lose a dice becoming 2D arrows.

However this is not the only way the system can be used to represent something other than character skills. Consider a river of thin ice that a party must cross thats thickness is defined by a number of dice and its durability by a Hp total. Each turn the ice must roll a test to see if it can endure the weight upon it, with a difficulty equal to the number of people currently crossing, ie a party of 4 crossing means difficulty 4. If it passes the test then it holds but if it fails it takes a point of damage, if it reaches 0 Hp then the ice buckles and anybody left on the ice falls into the water, most likely taking damage from the freezing damage and possibly being inflicted with hypothermia (to be discussed in a later article about status changing effects).

With a little bit of creativity the basic mechanics of the system can be adapted to work in a variety of situations which is pleasing as a single universal mechanic is much more memorable than several necissary to control several niché situations that might only come up once a campaign.

Monday 24 March 2008

The System - Point Buy vs. Character Levels

After my previous post I've been playing around with the system of allocating Skill dice to characters. Initially I had favoured the 'Point Buy' system as detailed below, however upon further consideration I've altered this in favour of the more abstract system of 'levels' as favoured by Dungeons & Dragons and the like, allow me to explain why.

The 'Point Buy' system is mechanically more fluid than using levels to simply allocate dice, points can be gained instead of experience and 'spent' for training in skills whenever the character has enough points (and depending upon the preferences of the Games Master; access to the materials and instruction) to advance. This makes more sense realistically than waiting for an arbitrary marker before being able to improve oneself.

On the flip side of the coin levels are useful mechanically for gauging the strength of an opponant and what items are appropriate for characters of a certain level. Furthermore if constructing a class based system it becomes easier to define the roles of characters with classes. Some classes, such as the Paladin for example, traditional possess the abilities of another class but only later in their careers. Under a point buy system it is much more difficult to regulate this without making some abilities prohibitivly expensive, and artificially inflating this price for some characters is almost as much a concession to gameplay over realism as levels themselves.

Levels are by no means a perfect system, their artificial nature offends those players who want a more fluid system in which they can freely gain skills and are not limited by some arbitrary measure. However as my own group consists of people who have grown up on a diet of Dungeons & Dragons and Final Fantasy the level seems like a natural component of any game system.