On "Clashing"

I realized that the work I do on my world and my rules is a form of research - it uses exactly the same mental muscles as my graduate Musicology program. Hence, after a long day of reading academic articles and looking up sources for seminar papers, those muscles I want to use for my game are exactly the ones most fatigued. So, my work has come in fits and bursts.

I'm at a conference right now, so I don't have the time to flesh this out fully, but I wanted to share the bones for a better combat system, based upon a comment on an earlier post of mine. From a combat perspective, the "roll to attack" thing has always bugged me. The roll represents a series of attacks between two individuals, and usually we get one roll per direction of the attacks (Jane->Mercedes and Mercedes ->Jane or Jane->Mercedes and Mercedes->Balpreet and Balpreet->Mercedes). But the conflation of roll to directionality encourages players of thinking of each attack action as a single strike - this is encouraged when we give more martially-skilled players multiple attack rolls in a single turn. While I understand from a mechanical standpoint why this works the way it does, it has always kind of irked me.

This morning, as I sat in the speaker ready room working on the paper I'm presenting tomorrow, a much more elegant solution came to me. I jotted some notes down and will run some tests later (in my copious free time...) to see how they actually play out. As a reminder, I have a custom skill system that I use to adjudicate character-skill-based interactions (like combat)

"Clashing"

Characters can move to engage or disengage w/ other combatants

If folks are engaged, player rolls

Success, target takes damage

Failure, player takes damage

Ties go to side w/ more combatants

Or side that engaged first, if combatant numbers equal

1 roll per clash

If multiple players, use best combatant skill

And player w/ best skill chooses who takes the damage if their team loses

If not wielding melee weapon, can't deal damage

On success, just avoid taking any

Ranged weapons - don't engage, just target somebody and fire (like D&D combat)

Once engaged, can't disengage without roll

Can run away, but gives attacker major bonus

Weapons each have engage range (usually 1 hex)

When engage ranges intersect, characters clash

Still have team-based initiative

Movement

Can move where you want, up to movement speed (jogging, running, cartwheeling, whatever also fine)

When engagement ranges overlap, can choose to clash or not

If yes, movement stops

If not, can keep moving

Clashes w/ more than 2 combatants

If n v 1, defending combatant takes penalty based upon max angle between combatants

Minor for pi/3-2pi/3

Major for pi

If tree, treat every person engaged with more than 1 combatant as a separate clash

On Experience

When everything your character does improves on level-up, earning experience gets a little funky. Because experience is a single pool which drives leveling up, the question of what activities provide experience becomes crucially important.

The general desire is to restrict experience-gaining activities to ones that are related to the bulk of what improves. This is how we get OD&D's gp=xp system (but only coin gained from "adventuring" activities) or Alexis' ruling that only combat provides experience. The squiggly bit enters as soon as characters are able to perform actions that do not directly contribute towards experience acquisition, like fishing or cobbling, or whatever. How are these skills improved? If tied to level, as most games do, then it seems a little strange (although explainable) that one's battle prowess (or personal wealth) directly improves one's ability to fish or make shoes, but it also would be strange for making shoes to improve either one's fishing abilities or one's combat prowess. On the other hand, if fishing is not tied to level, we've added in a secondary progression mechanic orthogonal to everything else in the game, and now a lot of the skills previously lumped into the old xp framework might better fit into the secondary one, which certainly makes the previously elegant level system much clunkier. Some people like clunk, others don't: YMMV.

One of the goals of my discipline system was to try and clean this up, providing a single mechanic that can reasonably account for both types of experience. As I've now personally seen in Alexis' games, having recourse to Sage Abilities (and the huge implications of choosing one's initial specialization on overall character development) is a huge part of having a fully-fleshed-out character.

I've discussed this before, but I'll summarize. Each discipline (skill) has its own xp track, measured in notches. Certain amounts of notches correlate to significant leaps in ability (rolling 1d4+1d6 instead of 1d6, for example). Notches are gained in one of two ways.

The simplest way is through training: characters pay some amount of money and spend 6 months to gain a notch, with the idea being that after a successful adventure characters will spend their winnings on training and equipment, taking on another adventure in a year's time.

The second way comes from using the discipline in-game: whenever the player rolls a critical result (critical success or critical failure), the player marks it on their sheet.  When the number of these marks equals the number of notches possessed in that discipline, the character gains a notch. There is one problem with this rule: currently, characters require 1 notch to progress from Novice (untrained) to Apprentice (a little trained). Consequently, a player has a 2/6 chance (rolling a 1 or 6 on a d6) to jump a tier and significantly improve the character. I don't like this for two reasons: the first is that this negates much of the advantage of skill-heavy classes - since most characters enter play with perhaps one or two Journeyman disciplines (the tier above Apprentice), some Apprentice, and mostly Novice, the general expertise that I want these skill-heavy trades to have is quickly (and easily) matched by everyone else at the table. The second reason is that the in-world logic doesn't make a ton of sense - it’s the same as saying that someone can, after playing a single game of soccer,  be on equal footing with someone of equal physical ability who has been playing for 6 months - while also removing the usefulness of training.

Because of this, I have ruled that gaining notches in this way cannot allow the character to increase that discipline's tier - criticals still tally, so that after the final notch is gained and the tier is improved the character might gain an additional notch or two, but the actual mechanical benefits do not manifest until the character has trained. While I don't think my players (when I get some…) will like this very much, I do think that they will understand it and not whine too terribly much.

Trades and Disciplines

Maxwell, from 21st Century D&D commented on my last post about quickly creating NPCs, asking about my breakdown of potential character abilities.

I previously wrote on my frustrations with how classes worked in level-based systems.  My solution was to throw out my previously-held ideas about class and create a new game construct, something I call a trade.

A trade is a grouping of disciplines with which the character gains some skill, along with a particular benefit.  They require a certain number of years to complete and also give the character membership in one of the factions in my world.  They come in two groups:

The core trades, which roughly map to Ranger, Mage, Fighter, and Thief,

Title	Membership or Faith	Benefit	Funds	Time	Disciplines
Hinterlander	Any or none	Have a wilderness hideaway.  Gain 1 ranged weapon and 10 ammunition.	1d3+1 bronze	8	Athlete, Beast-Speaker, Combatant (any), Footpad, Gymnast, Hunter, Tinker, Wrangler
Researcher	Adept’s College or University of Reyjadin	Gain 1 notch in 2 more disciplines.  Gain shard if Mage chosen.	1d3+1 bronze	9	Arcanist or Mage (any), Ascetic, Combatant (Magician), Herbalist, Mechanist, Orator, and Scholar
Soldier	Any Military Group; Pirates of Korg	Gain 1 weapon set (total price less than 2 silver).	1d3+1 bronze	6	Athlete, Beast-Speaker, Combatant (3 different types), and choice between Sailor and Wrangler
Thief	Any Fringe Group; Tarluskani Military	Know a safe place to lay low and a fence in 1d4+1 cities.	3d6+1 bronze	4	Footpad, Gymnast, and two of: Grokist, Mechanist, Mountebank, Pickpocket, and Tinker

and the culture-specific trades, which feature at least one option for every faith tradition in my world.

Title	Membership or Faith	Benefit	Funds	Time	Disciplines
Arbiter	Twin Gods of Left and Right	Can usually detect lies.	1d6+2 bronze	4	Ascetic, Athlete, Grokist, and Thaumaturge
Artist	Brass Orchids, Nithya tribe, Minstrel's Guild.	Gain tools necessary for art form.	1d3+1 bronze	3	Artist, Ascetic, Orator
Conduit	Splendour of Sahargeen	Can talk to trees.	1d6+2 bronze	6	Ascetic, Athlete, Beast-Speaker, Herbalist, Hunter, and Thaumaturge
Druid	Adjraysh	Can contact a specific Sidh.	1d6+2 bronze	5	Ascetic, Beast-Speaker, Herbalist, Orator, and Sorcerer
Monk	The Order	Gain cloak of Tobias and monk's staff.	1d6+2 bronze	5	Ascetic, Grokist, Herbalist, Orator, and Thaumaturge
Muhaddi	Myths of Fiája	Can attract attention with a mystic chant	1d6+2 bronze	3	Ascetic, Orator, and Thaumaturge
Ognemuo	Ancestor Spirits	Can touch spirits.	1d4+1 bronze	4	Ascetic, Combatant (Ognemuo), Grokist, and Herbalist
Priest	Devotees of the One True God	Gain an extra Gift.	1d6+2 bronze	4	Ascetic, Athlete, Orator, and Thaumaturge
Sohei	The Order	Gain an eiku and cloak of Tobias	1d3+1 bronze	4	Ascetic, Athlete, Combatant (Sohei), and Grokist
Thanatphanaios	Ancestor Spirits	Can touch spirits.	1d6+2 bronze	4	Ascetic, Scholar, Orator, and Thaumaturge,

The list of disciplines are as follows:

Aptitude	Disciplines Governed
Strength	Athlete, Combatant, Sailor
Dexterity	Artist, Combatant, Footpad, Gymnast, Pickpocket
Cognition	Arcanist, Artist, Herbalist, Mage, Mechanic, Scholar
Communication	Artist, Beast-Speaker, Mountebank, Orator, Sorcerer
Mindfulness	Ascetic, Grokist, Hunter, Thaumaturge, Tinker, Wrangler

While most of the discipline names are self-evident, a couple hold specific meaning in my world.

Athlete reflects a character's physical endurance and bodily health.  Skilled athletes can fight for longer in combat, take more damage before suffering injuries (the only way to improve health in my game), run and hold their breath longer, and better resist poison and disease.

Combatant is the fighting discipline.  I have a list of 15 or so fighting styles based the different cultures, and each fighting style grants proficiency with several sets of weapons (because learning how to fight with two swords is very different from learning how to fight with one) and a couple of extra abilities based upon the specialties of the fighting style (the Arein Constabulary style can knock people out more easily, for example).  It is also used for defensive purposes as well.

Artist represents a character's skill with a particular artistic medium, incorporating the Bardic Art posts I worked on earlier this summer.

Arcanist is used for ritual magic, a type of magic that uses small fragments of solid magic to power magical ceremonies with specific requirements and limitations.

Mage is used for shard magic, power gained by embedding a large piece of solid magic within the body and harnessing its particular energies.

Beast-Speaker is used to understand and communicate with wild animals.  At high levels the degree of understanding increases such that the character is able to take the form of an animal.

Sorcerer allows the character to use sorcery, the magic of the Sidh which specializes in affecting the mind (illusions, charms, that sort of thing).

Grokist allows the character to understand sapient, sentient creatures.

Thaumaturge allows the character to channel miracles, specific blessings granted by their particular faith (each faith has a different set of 3-5 miracles).

Wrangler governs the taming, training, and riding of mountable animals as well as teaching others how to ride.

Creating NPCs

Because my game uses a central mechanic based on a skill system, creating NPCs out of whole cloth was originally rather challenging as I needed to think through how much training the individual might have received and in what context in order to evaluate what skills they had.  I had a revelation while refining the Bard tables for my world (I'll post the revised tables when I'm done) that I'd like to share here.

As you may recall, my discipline system has 6 tiers of skill: novice, apprentice, journeyman, specialist, master, and grandmaster.  If I were to translate them to a 20-level system, I might do the following: apprentice is 1st level, journeyman 3rd, specialist 7th, master 12th, and grandmaster 18th, and the number of people of each skill level drops dramatically with each tier.

I'm representing that by rolling 5d10 for each discipline (or, if I'm low on time, for clusters of disciplines based on the NPC's trade).  Each 10 rolled increases the tier by one, with a resulting 1/100,000 odds for a grandmaster skill level.

I have a wide list of trades (I've edited the list since I last talked about them) and by placing the NPC into one of them, I can determine their general skill of competency in all the affiliate disciplines of that trade by reducing their tier by one: if I get a Master soldier, then one of their disciplines will be master tier and the rest will be specialist.

This gives me a handful of dice to roll for any character and quickly determine their abilities.  For NPCs that I know will be more powerful, I might raise the base level of their skills to Apprentice and see how much better they are on top of that with the same roll.

A New Skill System

Prodigy, like GURPS and Runequest, is a fully skill-based system, using the same skill mechanic for almost every mechanical test undertaken by the players.

There are four skill systems that I've seen used - d20, 3d6, %, and dice pools.  The d20 system works by rolling 1d20, adding modifiers, and then checking the modified result against a target number determined by the task itself.  What's nice about this system is that the difficulty of the task is directly incorporated into the check, as is the character's skill.  However, the d20 roll is hugely variable, and the chance of critical failure and success are the same no matter one's level of skill.

The 3d6 system (and OD&D's ability score checks work the same way) require rolling your dice (3d6 or d20) under a number determined by the character's proficiency with the skill: so a GURPS character with an 11 Merchant skill would need to roll an 11 or less with 3d6 to succeed a given check.    The bell curve provided by the 3d6 means that results are generated much more reliably.  However, the mechanic does not provide a transparent way of incorporating the difficulty of the task into the check itself - you can add modifiers to the character's skill, but it is a very ad-hoc way to do this.

The percentile system combines some of both of the previous two approaches: characters' skills are ranked 1 to 100.  To test a skill, percentile dice are rolled, and the check succeeds if the dice roll under the character's skill level.  There are some cool number games that can be done here, like special effects on doubles rolled under or over a character's skill level and so on, but it combines the wide variability of the d20 with the fixed difficulty of the 3d6, and so has the aspect from each previous system I most dislike.

The dice pool system gives the player a number of dice equal to their level in the skill, and assigns a strict possibility of success (say 8, 9, or 10 on a d10 or 6 on a d6), with more beneficial results occurring when more successes are rolled.  Thus, a player rolling three d10s might think they have a fairly good chance of getting at least one success.  The odds of success, though, are deceptive (rolling three d10s with success on an 8, 9, or 10 conveys only a 65% chance of any successes, with 4 dice bringing the chance only to 75%), and the system has the highest degree of variability of all the systems, since dice that don't succeed are either merely useless or actively bad (if they roll a failure).

Now, I feel that as one becomes more accomplished with a skill, not only can they accomplish more difficult tasks, but they can also accomplish all tasks more consistently.  I also want my system to be able to concretely incorporate the difficulty of whatever task a player attempts - I want challenging tasks to be challenging and easy tasks to be easy, and I want both of those things to happen with a minimum of ad-hoc adjustments.  I also want it to be fairly uncomplicated - no involved table lookups or complicated math.

The way I've accomplished this is by combining many of the approaches together.  As I've said before, I rank a character's level of skill in one of 6 tiers: Novice, Apprentice, Journeyman, Specialist, Master, and Grandmaster.

Skill tier	Dice Rolled	Difficulty Value
Novice	1d6	6
Apprentice	1d6+1d4	9
Journeyman	1d6+2d4	12
Specialist	2d6+2d4	15
Master	2d6+3d4	18
Grandmaster	3d6+3d4	22

This approach borrows from the dice pool system in that as more skill is obtained more dice are rolled.  However, unlike the dice pool system, all dice matter - they are summed together and checked against the task's difficulty value.  Because more dice produce a stronger bell curve effect, the expected value of each die roll is 3 less than the difficulty value of a task of equal tier (because of adding in aptitudes, which are scaled from 1 to 6), which means that increasing skill not only increases the overall total, but it also increases consistency when performing tasks.  Lastly, by assigning difficulty values for targets, the task attempted by the character now absolutely factors into the test.

Moreover, when circumstances change, I can alter the difficulty of the test in one of two ways: I can add or subtract 1 to the DV for minor things or I can change the tier of challenge for larger difficulties.  My options for changing the circumstances of the die roll are restricted because of this tiered system.

While I've yet to run a real game with these rules, I've run several oneshots and combat scenarios, and the mechanic has worked exactly as I like it to, but I'd welcome any thoughts folks have on it.