Called Shots

One of the things I love about many action video games (Monster Hunter being the best example) is that where you aim significantly affects how much damage you deal. I've always wanted to figure out a way to incorporate that into tabletop RPGs that is manageable at the table without giving me the ability to easily decapitate my players' characters, and I think I've finally cracked it.

As a reminder, creatures in Prodigy have both health and a maximum number of injuries. Health is depleted by incoming attacks, and when it reaches 0 the character gains an injury and refills their health to full (damage does roll over). When a character reaches their max injury count, they fall unconscious, and they die upon suffering 1 further injury. While health can be increased through character advancement, a character's body mass determines their max number of injuries (1 or 2).

Creatures with 3 or more injuries are substantially larger than most player characters and thus afford more choices when it comes to attacking them, enabling the following rules.

Arrange the creature's injuries into a pyramid with 1 injury at the top such that each successive row has more injuries than the row above it. This injury tree is public knowledge (although the damage that must be dealt to give the creature the injury is kept secret). When attacking the creature, the player must choose a particular injury in the pyramid. Selecting an injury in the bottom row is a normal attack. Selecting an injury above the bottom row makes the combat test harder for every injury below it. When an injury receives its full damage capacity, remove it from the table and give it to the creature. When the top injury is removed, the creature falls unconscious.

Let me walk through an example. A griffon has 10 health and 4 max injuries, which gives us a pyramid like so:

The parenthetical numbers are the gryphon's health distributed per injury, which would be kept secret from the players. When the characters attack, they may select any of the 4 injuries in the pyramid. Attacking the bottom 3 would be a regular attack against the griffon, a Professional-difficulty test (requiring a 12 or better), but attacking the top injury would be 3 steps harder, a Sage-difficulty test (requiring a 22 or better). To make targeting the top injury a little easier, players could target one of the lower injuries. After dealing 10 or more damage to any one of them, the table looks like this:

Attacking the bottom 2 is still a Professional-difficulty test, but the top injury is now only a Master-difficulty test (requiring a 18 or better).

Depending upon the specifics of the monster, I could rule that certain kinds of combat maneuvers make it easier to attack injuries higher up on the pyramid - climbing on top of a monster or tripping it might provide easier access to their vitals - or rearrange the pyramid slightly (a multiheaded creature might have one injury on the top row per head).

Tonics: the Medicinal Side of Herblore

Making characters who can make things in-game has been one of my few recurring interests since I began playing tabletop rpgs 14ish years ago. The desire to find rules that could accommodate crafting complicated things like traps and alchemical substances led me to first realize that the rules as published by WOTC were grossly underdeveloped.

To make good, robust rules for this kind of thing, I needed to have a really good, robust understanding of all the pieces involved. Trapmaking is based on navigating the very tenuous edge between physics and gaming statistics, something I am still attempting to navigate. D&D alchemy rests on the heritage of Western occultism and witchcraft, which in turn appropriates and amalgamates a number of practices (most significantly, Jewish mysticism).

Within the world of Prodigy, druids (the Sidh-observing practitioners of Adjraysh) are heavily influenced by witchcraft, and as I do more research their presentation and abilities may need to change; we'll see how that goes.

The following rules are a subset of larger collection of herblore rules and abilities that I'd like to implement, depending on how my research progresses. The expanded abilities would only be available to characters with notches in both Chemist and Thaumaturge (Adjraysh), which is one of the reasons I am not discussing them here.


Herbs possess a number of unique magickal properties and affinities accessible to those with the necessary knowledge. While most chemists are able to harness an herb's primary effects, harnessing an herb's hidden abilities requires greater skill. Using herbs with the same or similar properties in conjunction with each other allows for a more powerful effect, however doing so without finesse can easily lead to failure. In general, a chemist may use one herb per skill rank past Novice.

Chemists may use herbs to create a preparation, a stored effect that remains potent for 10 days. Preparations are created in a stillroom, with a character able to spend 1 day to create a number of ounces of the preparation equal to the number of Chemist notches possessed.

A Tonic is a preparation whose effects only manifest after being ingested. Because tonics are imbibed, dosage strongly affects the outcome: the number of doses is optimally equal to the user's weight class. If the dose is too weak, it may fail to have any effect. If the dose is too strong, the intended effect may rebound in unpleasant ways. Dosage depends upon the parts of the plant used.

Primarily, tonics are used for love potions, healing salves, and poison. Healing tonics require herbs associated with healing (such as catnip or cayenne), whereas poisons use herbs with toxic properties (such as atropa belladonna or mistletoe). If the dosage is correct, the chemist makes a Chemist/Athlete test when the target consumes the tonic. On success, the benefits of the effect will manifest in 1d3 days. Poisons give the target 1 injury per herb used in the poison. Healed targets will recover from their injuries a number of days sooner equal to twice the number of herbs used in the tonic.

Long-term Care is an option for chemists in a safe, stable environment looking to heal injured individuals. By spending a week and 14 doses of a chosen herbal combination administering to a single patient, the chemist reduces their recovery time by 1 week per herb used. Chemists may tend to a number of patients equal to their Chemist notches, assuming enough supplies are available.

Herb Examples:
Atropa Belladonna
Effects: poison, curses
Dosage: cherries (3oz), leaves (.02oz)

Catnip
Effects: healing, other
Dosage: leaves (.38oz)

Getting Some Help

One of the downsides I did not foresee in allowing each skill to develop individually is that there is now a great deal less incentive for squishier party members to support their comrades-in-arms. In most games, combat is one of the few ways to gain that precious experience commodity (and usually leads to treasure), but combat in Prodigy does not directly offer players rewards. Because of this, the player playing the party's soldier expressed an interest in hiring a pirate goon squad as support.

When I started playing in Alexis's online game, I was surprised that so many of our characters came into the game with people who would fight with us but were not player-characters. I had never seen followers in any other game, period. Our game would be almost impossible without Willa, Valda, Fjall, and Bergthora (RIP, Petar), and acquiring three porters has helped the party quite recently out of a sticky situation. It's inspired a lot of how I think about the role(s) and challenges that player characters can take on, and I'm glad to now have a player prompting me to formulate the rules describing how my players can seek help.


Two skills impact finding and retaining hirelings and followers: Caravanner and Leadership. The Caravanner skill allows the character to find and employ hirelings more effectively, while the Leader skill attracts followers.

Hirelings are people following a character initially because the character is paying them. More highly-skilled individuals command higher rates. Followers, on the other hand, follow a character initially because they feel the leader is worth following. They do not require a monthly stipend, but they also have a lower morale.

Characters seeking to find a hireling will spend at least one day in a city or town looking for candidates. They spend the day(s) talking to their friends, contacts, and others who might know someone looking for a job. At the beginning of this period, the player will need to specify the kind of person(s) they seek. Followers cannot be discovered through this process.

Any character may search for a candidate in the following ways:
Each 1 day spent searching yields 1 person with 3 notches in randomly-determined skills.
Each pair of days spent searching yields 1 person with 3 notches, one of which is guaranteed to be in a specified type of skill (Mental, Physical, or Social)
Every 3 days spent searching yields 1 person with 3 notches, one of whom is guaranteed to have at least 1 notch in a selected skill and 1 notch in another skill of the same type.
A character who is at least an Apprentice Caravanner finds more success: instead of finding a single applicant, they will find an additional number of applicants per 2 notches, rounding down.

Additionally, Apprentice Caravanners may also search for Professionally-skilled people. These will have 2 notches in 2 skills of the same type or different type, determined randomly.
Each week spent searching yields 1 person who is a Professional in a skill of the specified type.
Every two weeks spent searching yields 1 person who is a Professional in the specified skill.
For every 3 notches the character possesses of Caravanner, an additional applicant appears at the end of the search period.

Caravanners with a higher rank will have more options when it comes to selecting applicants and will be able to mitigate hiring limitations (such as looking for folks while not in a major city), but I'll work on those rules later.


Leaders have the opportunity to gain followers whenever they gain a notch. When a character has gained a notch, the next time they spend at least a week in a city or other densely-populated area, they roll 1d3 per notch possessed. If that total is greater than the number of followers they currently possess, they gain followers equal to that difference.


Follower and hirelings expect that their employers will provide for food and lodging. Usually, they will act under the control of the hiring character's player, but they will refuse orders that appear nonsensical or suicidal. I use Alexis' morale rules because they are really good, with the slight alteration that 'combat training' refers to a notch in the Combatant skill.

Gambling

Since my players now have a strong incentive to visit arenas, theatres, and casinos, I need to price out accessing each block. I'm still working on ticket price rules for performances, but for arenas and casinos, I need gambling rules. Furthermore, arenas and casinos offer very different gambling experiences, and I want gambling at each type of establishment to feel very different.

For casinos, I think blackjack works just fine as a game mechanic. Most know how to play, the casino player runs on autopilot, the betting possibilities are fairly simple, the odds are minimally in the players' favor, and the players are able to collaborate against the casino player. While adapting your favorite casino game is fine, I like that blackjack has fairly simple choices for the player each round and that the players are gambling on the same team.

Arenas offer a very different set of circumstances. I want to offer odds that adjust for multiple fighters with different levels of fighting ability, durability, and equipment that I can quickly output at the table. I do this by converting turning each of these parameters into numbers for a given fighter and then combining fighters' numbers to give the payout for a given type of bet. Right now, this only supports win/lose bets, but with time and player interest I can probably expand it to cover different types of winning conditions.

Fighting Ability: combatant notches * attribute
While I need to post my revised combat rules (since my outline here is legible probably only to me), I'll summarize the relevant aspects as needed. A character's combat ability is represented by their Combatant skill, which comes in three flavors: Strength, Dexterity, and Mindfulness. Each flavor is trained separately, uses the appropriate attribute, and controls a different group of weapons. Skills are ranked descriptively (Novice, Apprentice, Professional, Expert, Master, Sage) based upon the number of notches possessed (0, 1, 3, 6, 10, and 15 respectively). Thus, the product of the character's Combatant notches multiplied by the appropriate attribute (Strength, Dexterity, or Mindfulness) is a rough approximation of their overall fighting ability. This gives me a number ranging from 0 (treat as .5) to 90.

Durability: health * wagered injuries
Also relevant is the character's physical endurance, which I measure in two ways: health and injuries. Health represents the character's level of endurance, while injuries measure their bodily integrity. Damage taken is removed from the character's health total, and when that total reaches 0 they gain an injury and refresh back to full health. Death occurs when taking an injury past their normal bodily maximum. Most creatures have 1 or 2 injuries, and this number can never improve. In a fight to the death, a fighter will wager every injury they can safely take, but in a friendly skin brawl, a fighter will bow out after taking 1. We multiply the number of wagered injuries by the character's health to get a rough estimate of their fighting fitness. This number will reasonably range from 1 to 14.

Equipment: weapon damage / (1+ opponent's DR) * weapon reach / opponent's weapon reach
Lastly, I want to account for what the fighters are wielding. Unlike combat ability or fitness, gear is only beneficial in the context of the other gear on the table. Since armor provides damage reduction, we can divide the base damage of the chosen weapon by 1+ the damage reduction of the opponent's armor to get a baseline for how effective that weapon is. Weapon damage ranges from 0 (treat as .5) to 6, while fighters can have a damage reduction of 0 to 3.

The range of that weapon is also critically important. Clashing occurs whenever the weapons of two opponents overlap. I use 1-yard hexes, so a clash normally happens when fighters are 1 hex removed from each other (as their weapons occupy the hex in between). Long weapons like spears or claymores have a longer range and can engage a foe at a greater distance, possibly 2 or 3 hexes. If the opponent has a shorter weapon, they can't deal damage while clashing, and, since mobility is limited during the clash, it will take them time to get close enough to actually threaten their opponent. I am interested in the comparison, so I divide the reach of the fighter's weapon by the reach of their opponent's. The maximum reach of a melee weapon 3, while some weapons have a reach of 0 (treat as .5).

Combat Number
The product of each of these three terms gives us the combat number, with one modification. Zeroes are no good because I need each of these numbers to be invertible. I don't want to set the value of the whole term to 1, either. Instead, I treat all zeroes as .5 except for damage reduction. The range of these combat numbers is quite large: 0.0834 to 45,360 (although I'd never put someone in an arena with a combat number less than 1). Because of this, take the geometric mean of all three terms (raise the product to the 1/3rd power), which reduces the range considerably: 0.4369 to 36.

If two fighters are on the same side, add their combat numbers together.

For a bet on side A, divide the combat numbers of side A by the combat numbers of side B to get the combat ratio, the numerical representation of the two sides compared against each other. This equals the amount necessary to bet in order to return a payout of 1 gold.

Skin Fighting
Most arena-style fights are just two fighters using only their fists and no armor to the first injury, which obviates a lot of the rules above. This lets us ignore the equipment term entirely and simplifies the durability term to just the character's health.

EDIT - forgot to post arena fight resolution rules
If no player character is fighting, each side will make a Combatant test (both sides rolling), resolving damage as normal. The first side to take an injury loses.
If a player character is fighting, treat as a normal combat.

Uses for Entertainment Blocks

In Alexis' block model, each block needs to have some benefit for characters who spend the day there. Some of these benefits are fairly straightforward, such as healing faster by the beach. Some are perhaps less so. Entertainment blocks, those centered around arenas, casinos, or theatres, don't obviously provide a function not shared with relaxing blocks like the careenage or a bathhouse. If we combine them with Alexis' rules for art, something pops out rather immediately: spending a day in an entertainment block grants experience of some sort.

As I don't use traditional leveling and experience totals, preferring my own system, I need a little more specificity.

In case you didn't click the link, each skill in Prodigy has its own experience track, measured in notches. Proficiency with a skill increases based upon the number of notches possessed. Characters normally gain notches through training, by they can also gain them in the heat of the moment via a 'Flash of Insight'. Each critical (success or failure) gives the character one tally. When the number of tallies exceeds the number of notches, the character gains a notch (although this cannot be how the character gains their first notch in the skill).

Each skill has at least one descriptor, mental, physical, or social, based upon the way(s) it is used - fighting skills are physical, speechcraft is social, etc. Spending a day in an entertainment block grants a tally in a random skill with the appropriate descriptor. Places like arenas, sporting fields, or the construction sites of large buildings grant physical skill tallies. Casinos grant social skill tallies, while theatres and music venues might grant either social or mental skill tallies. Storytellers and libraries grant mental tallies. Traveling jongleur troop performances (akin to stereotypical Roma shows) offer a flash of insight in any skill.

It is important that the tally gained is random, but I'd allow players to pick the descriptor if more than one is available.

Thinking about Blocks and Neighborhoods

Alexis' recent series of posts on urban game structures has got me all abuzz. I love running games in cities. Since starting to work on my world, I've begun every game in some city that has played a huge part in whatever the players do. I also am aware that I don't do nearly as good a job of creating functioning cities, that is, cities that offer the kind of depth Alexis describes.

The metaphor that has got me all excited is the 'block,' a contiguous area within a town or city that:

• The block should provide some specific purpose for the players' use.  The beach is a source for transport across the sea; it accumulates fish which can be purchased.  It is a place where boats are repaired.
• The block's residents should have a character, based on what they do and what they respect.  The people of the beach respect people who can do for themselves; who can fish or sail; who can do a hard day's work; who don't consider themselves superior because they possess wealth, status or intelligence.
• The block should be a source for adventure.  The beach offers the opportunity for smuggling.  Or to block smuggling.  It is the natural entry point for raiders who come from under the water.
• The block should provide an advantage for the player's well-being.  The beach is a good place to rest; swimming is a restorative, relaxing activity; so resting there heals hit points faster.

[text from here]

where the beach is Alexis' example of a block, outlined here.

Prior to Alexis' posts, I'd been using the idea of neighborhoods, something from Zak Sabbath's Vornheim game supplement. Boiling the concept down to what I'd actually been using, a neighborhood is a large region of a city with a distinct character. The key difference between neighborhoods and blocks is size. Traditionally, I've been using somewhere between 3 and 6 neighborhoods per large city.

Additionally, each neighborhood is geographically amorphous - what is relevant to me at the table is not how big each neighborhood is but how the neighborhoods connect. If my players antagonize a group of people prevalent in one neighborhood, they need to be careful how they move through that neighborhood and that may restrict access to other parts of the city. Over time, the party needs to cultivate people and places that give them safe access through different parts of the city, something like knowing which house at the edge of town has a cellar that opens beyond the gate checkpoints or having a friend in the guard who will let the party join patrols through a nastier area of town.

My challenge with working with neighborhoods was a question of scale - what exactly should be in each neighborhood, and how do I manage them, a.k.a. how "big" is a neighborhood. Thinking of a neighborhood as a self-sufficient collection of blocks neatly fixes this problem. So, to describe how I want to be thinking about cities going forward, I've adapted Alexis' bullet points from above.

• Each city is divided into a small number (2-6) of neighborhoods roughly separated by sociopolitical power. A town consists of 1-2 neighborhoods.
• Each neighborhood is a self-sufficient urban entity, which means that there are places to shop, eat, sleep, and relax in each neighborhood. Typically, only one group of people exerts control over a neighborhood, and if the same organization controls multiple neighborhoods, each neighborhood is run by a separate chapter of that organization.
• Each neighborhood is comprised of a number of blocks.
• Each block provides a function that is self-evident to the players, has a distinct type of inhabitant with a defined set of norms and values, offers easy potential for adventure, and affords access to some kind of benefit for the players.
• While neighborhoods may have similar blocks, each neighborhood has at least one unique block that is only accessible in that neighborhood.

As I look to getting my game back on its feet this coming Monday, I am excited to apply this framework to our current location and see how well it works.

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