Critical Nit

Critical hits, fumbles, hit location, bleeding, wounds, conditions, weapon damage, armor damage, and a host of other things are bad for PCs.  Feel it intuitively?  Take my word for it?  Perhaps.  Or, I can try to explain why.

One thing I think it takes time for people to realize, and it helps immensely to GM to see it, is that PCs and antagonists don’t have a symmetric relationship to combat.  This manifests in a number of ways.  One way is that PCs will usually be designed for greater efficiency in combat, eschewing certain weapon choices, armor choices, fighting styles, or whatever because they are suboptimal.  On the other hand, “people antagonists” in worlds where stuff outside of combat matters are usually much more focused on combat than an equivalent experience PC.

For example:  In Conan, a dagger is pretty much useless.  Can add poison, can have a bunch of Sneak Attack damage, but you can just substitute some other weapon and be better off.  The thief’s weapon of choice for a PC, assuming you go with some low damage weapon, is a shortsword.  There are examples in Conan of how a PC will go for more well-roundedness with Feat slots or whatever, but a really good example of how NPCs focus on combat was when I played in the battle event at Gen Con for HoR, where rank 2 Bayushi Bushi we fought all had 9k4 attack rolls as compared to my 6k3.  I might not get up to Kenjutsu 5 by rank 3(!!) at the rate things are going due to wanting a high Intelligence and putting points into noncombat skills, neither of which were relevant for one-shot antagonists.

Most of the asymmetry between protagonists and antagonists comes out of the typical fate we look for from each.  All players care about with regards to antagonists is removing the threat of them.  Usually, that means depriving them of life.  Don’t remotely care whether they have all of their limbs, whether they will never be able to breed again, how dented their shields are, etc.  They must be incapacitated, preferably permanently.

Meanwhile, lasting wounds, especially permanent ones, are a resource hit to a PC.  Weapon damage and armor damage – resource hit.  Even if it just takes money to fix something, if the money required rises to the level of significant, then resource hit.  Even survival can be a resource, as various systems have resurrection, usually at a great wealth cost.  Of course, survival can be even more important with the lack of resurrection.

Okay, all this seems obvious.  But, what about crits, fumbles, conditions, bleeding, and hit locations?

Bleeding, and what I really mean by bleeding is not someone in their death throes but someone who can start bleeding from lesser attacks, should be obvious.  Rules for bleeding from casual wounds force PCs to take noncombat actions or to put PCs on a clock.  Who cares whether the goblin bleeds?  The goblin is going to die or I am.

One thing about crits and fumbles is how often they occur and what the results are.  You can build these mechanics in such a way that they favor PCs.  For instance, you can say that fumbles only occur if you suck and make sure PCs never suck.  You can have fumbles reduce the amount of damage or attack percentage when PCs have a huge advantage with either.  Crits don’t tend to be so bad for PCs when PCs have far more hit points than their opponents and all crits do is increase damage.  And, so forth.

Yet, in all likelihood, these two mechanics will punish PCs.  There’s a crucial principle when it comes to RPG combat.  The principle is that PCs want combat to have less variance.  The more predictable combat is, the more reliably the PCs win.

But, you say, what about when the opposition is stronger than the party?  Of course that can occur, but why should it?  Why would the party be favored to lose?  Because … all sorts of reasons, you say.

Sure, there are legitimate reasons to put a party into a losing fight.  Parties choosing to bite off more than they can chew should be at a disadvantage.  Not every fight is supposed to be winnable.  In fact, if you are doing videogame roll-playing, like old school D&D dungeon crawling, the idea is that you go as far as you can as long as you believe you have the advantage and run/hide when you no longer think you can continue.  Though, if you were engaging in this sort of thing, you would expect every first combat in an adventure to be in the party’s favor, otherwise, the party will never get anywhere.

So, back to crits and fumbles.  They increase variance.  But, there are also other imbalances that normally occur.  For crits, antagonists usually make more attacks than PCs.  While this can vary, being outnumbered is a common combat setup for a party.  Even when not outnumbered, monsters often have more attacks than PCs.  There are plenty of RPGs where an animal would get both a bite and claw attacks or a bite and two claw attacks, while a PC will get a single attack.  Everything else being equal, which admittedly isn’t often the case, the increased number of attacks by antagonists leads to more crits.

But, you say, doesn’t this apply equally to fumbles?  Sure, volumewise, can tilt towards PCs.  Fumbles are primarily a screwjob on PCs because of the effects of fumbles.  For instance, if a possibility is to attack a friend or oneself, it’s rather normal for PCs to do more damage than their opponents.  Or, if the fumble is drop weapon, a PC will typically be highly dependent upon a particular weapon where some lizardman or whatever just switches to natural weaponry.  Actually, it doesn’t even need to be that complicated.  PC attacks are more valuable than antagonist attacks, if for no other reason than that the PC perspective is that PCs must win, where antagonists winning is … problematic.

It may seem like too many of my “typical” scenarios would be ones where the party is fighting a larger, but less skilled, force.  It’s also common to fight a single big bad or two badasses.  In these cases, if fumbles are just as likely and the effects of fumbles are normally things like losing attacks, losing defenses, attacking allies, or whatever, then fumbles can be worse for the antagonists.  At the same time, fewer opposition tends to go with more skilled opposition, so in theory, they will fumble less often, depending upon the system.

Again, though, we run into the idea of asymmetry.  If a party gets an easy fight because the opposition rolls badly, then the party is inclined to seek out more fights, to the extent such things are possible within an adventure, balancing out the results, or the party will be more successful, which, as long as it isn’t the norm that combats are easy, is likely not to make the players sad.  Meanwhile, a fight that goes badly because of unexpected results can either prevent the party from continuing on towards a goal or can result in permanent losses, which somehow seems sadder to the players.

As I’ve pointed out in the past, not even that long ago, while GMs can establish that the costs of failure be measured in things like lost reputation, prevention of story goals, being captured, and whatnot, the norm with FRPGs is death or other results that are of a similar severity.  Losing out on treasure, for instance, can be just as bad as dying in systems where stuff/wealth is critical to success.  I stopped playing my first RuneQuest character in part because he lost a bunch of Intelligence, reducing his skills to where I became more inept than I was at initial character creation.

Conditions are more nebulous.  What are conditions?  L5R 4e has a list that I recall fairly well that includes, among others:  Dazed, Fatigued, Blinded, Prone.  Pritnear every system has rules for being poisoned.  Attribute loss would be similar to a condition.  Some systems make these more permanent than others.  Permanent conditions, of course, are a major screwjob on PCs.  We played for over a year with a blind character in Conan.  There were unusual reasons why it worked at all.  In most cases, any sort of permanent injury means retiring or suiciding your character to get one that is whole.

But, what about temporary conditions?  Much less clear how they punish PCs.  Still, predictability.  That’s what we look for.  Dazed is an interesting condition in L5R.  It tends to be extremely bad in a fight, unless the one Dazed has nonattack combat abilities.  For instance, while not great for a shugenja to get Dazed, a shugenja can still cast spells.  A badass bushi Dazed is essentially useless, same with the vast majority of creatures.  I’ve GMed where a PC could Daze enemies, and it made fights insipid, in the favor of the party.

So, why bring up conditions?  Because conditions are more commonly inflicted on the party than inflicted by the party.  The whole point of supplements like the Monster Manual is to throw different stuff at parties and “different” often comes with special abilities that do weird things to enemies.  Also, an easy victory by the party due to blinding the enemy dragon tends not to be as problematic as an easy PC kill when your tank or spellcaster or whoever goes blind.  Anyway, that conditions are more commonly relevant to a PC than to an antagonist means having to deal with something outside of the norm, greatly increasing the reduction of efficiency of the party.

Conditions are things that have more impact the fewer combatants on a side.  If you kill a mook a turn, then you don’t really care if one of those mooks is also stunned.

Hit locations is interesting in that I see them being a PC screwjob whether the PCs are outnumbered or whether the party outnumbers the enemy.  While the Conan forums may have always given the impression that PCs fight similarly built NPCs, I have rarely played any RPGs where the antagonists were often built like the PCs.  Feng Shui, with named characters, comes to mind as a case where antagonists were akin to PCs, but usually, you either have a horde of mooks or a small number of big bads.

Obviously, if fighting your doppelgangers (not the monster but identical builds), hit locations would be fair.  But, when fighting inferior opposition, do you really care whether you hack off an arm or a leg when the enemy is dead either way?  Then, hit locations usually go with spreading damage around, i.e. the target can potentially receive more damage than a straight hit point system.  Even in RuneQuest, there’s some truth to this for PCs in that taking out a limb caps damage from a single attack.  I would argue that RQ is a good example of how this screws PCs on the other side – the big bad side.  If you spread damage around on a big bad, all that ends up happening is you end up taking far longer to kill the big bad.

But, you say, RQ has pretty severe penalties for losing a limb, so doesn’t this suck that much more for big bads, which are being outnumbered by the party?  No.  Hit points in systems with hit locations don’t tend to follow a “balanced” scale.  If you take a RQ character and give it 10 more hit points with the normal increases in each hit location, it becomes far, far more resilient.  How do I know?  I had such a character for a time.  One of my characters had roughly a 50% increase in hit points, and he became ridiculously more resilient to damage.  A big bad is not only going to have these defensive benefits but also improvements in offense to justify being a party challenge.  But, even ignoring the offensive side of the game, spreading damage on a high hit point target is awful for a party.

Note that one of the most played systems, if not a FRPG, which uses hit locations is BattleTech.  While BT is its own thing and lacks a lot of similarities to hit location systems in FRPGs, it is interesting to note just how resilient spreading damage can end up being in BT, something I think is a good thing in the game.  Of course, where limbs come off all of the time in BT and the player can not be too displeased, limb loss at the humanoid PC level is something I equate with a dead PC, displaying a way in which I find hit locations to be a screwjob to PCs – you would rather take generic damage and live or not live than lose the use of part of a body even if you do live.

Okay, you say, I get it – you just want PCs to never be threatened, for adventures to lack any sort of challenge, any sort of adventure.  Free XP and gold for all.

Actually, several of these mechanics I’m fine with, if handled in a reasonable way.  The ones I’m never fine with are bleeding, hit locations, and equipment damage; not specifically because they screw PCs but because they generate a bunch of accounting hassles while punishing PCs in ways I don’t see any benefit in.

Yes, I do realize that not having bleeding makes for some undramatic situations where you can just leave a horribly wounded person lying around forever.  Actually, let me make an exception or modifier to my feelings on bleeding.  Bleeding from any sort of damaging attack is annoying since it generally requires being taken out of a fight to deal with, which is crippling to parties.  Bleeding to death from something like being in negative hit points might be fine, preferable even if the alternative is you just die when you hit negative hit points (or the equivalent).  Conan, for instance, has bleeding to death rules that I’m fine with.

I’m generally anti-fumbles not because I have no sense of humor and hate variance but because too many fumble systems are disproportionately brutal to a PC, and it’s not often funny if fumbling directly leads to dying.  Maybe, it’s the systems I’ve played recently that have colored my thinking.  In the past, when I played less gamist systems, fumbles were more entertaining.  Immortal saw a 10% chance of fumbling every single time you used your magical powers (that everyone pretty much had); it even seemed like the intent was that you would fumble so that you got weird disadvantages from being tainted.

Really, more my point is that GMs/groups need to be aware of how these sorts of mechanics affect party results.  In particular, the more of these mechanics, the greater difficulty PCs have in being functional, a major takeaway from my RuneQuest experiences.

Maybe this is another case of my being inconsistent or having a hard time articulating a point of view that hits a sweet spot on a spectrum, but I’m hardly in favor of predictable combat.  If I know success is inevitable, I’m inclined to not fight it out at all.  At the same time, I have no interest in combat just being a randomfest of randomness, where anything can happen.

Why?  Because high levels of randomness undermines strategy and tactics, as well as undermining character building.  Decisions should matter.  If I want to attack the enemy but just end up shooting my commander in the back every time due to fumbles (this basically happened in a Mekton game I played in for our party), then I have no attack strategy/tactic left.  Why does my build matter if combat is highly unpredictable?  I might know next to nothing about first aid and be an aggro character, only to find myself repeatedly being removed from combat to stop bleeding.  Or, maybe I’m the tank healer who just sucks up attacks and keeps everyone else alive … who gets critted repeatedly or who fumbles parries repeatedly or who takes a head shot and gets immediately knocked out.

Fan-tizzy

I’ve been thinking about fantasy RPG systems.  In particular, it’s the age old question of what FRPG system I would want to use.  Hardly exciting.  Can already predict talking about L5R’s sweet spot with mechanics and flawed world.  But, I started thinking about some specifics.

First of all, what games are FRPGs?  I don’t mean so much whether Shadowrun counts as fantasy or whether mixed genre games should go in their own, though this is relevant.  I mean more that there’s a particular subtype of fantasy role-playing that I have in mind.

Conan d20 is certainly a FRPG, but it isn’t what I’m concerned with at the moment.  Conan simulates swords and sorcery, a genre with limited magic and where supernatural elements are typically rooted in the “bad”, the enemy.  Or, if “good”, only show up to counter evil.

What I’m wondering about these days is what system would I play something like Wheel of Time in or Spellsinger or Young Kingdoms – worlds where magic is in the hands of the heroes.  There is a Wheel of Time d20 supplement, yet there’s no way I would want to use d20 as a base.  Young Kingdoms is covered by the Chaosium model, which I have no interest in either.

Why not these systems, though?

d20

Too mechanical.  Too much accounting.  I feel like I’m playing a MMORPG, which should give an idea of how pointless I view 4e D&D, which is an obvious MMO ripoff.

Starting characters are too weak.  Experience benefits are too slow and awkward.  Feats are boring.  The only thing I actually like about d20 is the skill system and “improvements” on d20 keep trying to “fix” the skill system.  I don’t even like how d20 or any D&D version does attributes, even though it’s the 3-18 system that I was first introduced to and has been used extensively in RPGs.  I hate using a d20 for resolution as to me it produces far too much variance and too many dull rolls.

I can’t speak to how well the magic system works for D&D d20, too little experience too long ago.

Chaosium

RuneQuest, Stormbringer/Elric, Call of Cthulhu, Basic Role-Playing, etc.  d100 resolution has the same problem as d20 resolution, only providing more “empty” values – rolls that don’t interest me in any way.

All of these games are far too crippling to PCs in my experience.  In our RuneQuest play, I just figure that a limb will be lost every fight, that death is two or three hits, that combat doesn’t really work unless you are superior to the enemy, have a bunch of potions (mainly Heal 6′s to restore limbs), and enough PCs know Healing 2 or Xenohealing 2 for recovery and stopping bleeding.

It’s RQ that inspired me to about a few things.  The first is the usual problem I have with features such as hit location, bleeding, fumble charts that screw over PCs.  Other than building the “there’s no symmetry between PCs and what they fight” arguments for why these things suck, which is kind of interesting when you think about just how much difference there is and how that impacts game design, there’s not much gained from this line of thinking.

The more interesting line of thinking for me that got me on this kick was two-fold:  what sort of magic system I want to see when the PCs are expected to be spellcasters; how games should handle recovery.

The more I’ve come to participate in RQ’s magic system, the less it makes sense to me from a marketing standpoint.  Much like Vampire: The Masquerade made a mistake by having variety of abilities at discipline dot levels PCs wouldn’t have and not at the levels that players care about, RQ is all about having this giant world of magic that PCs barely touch.

Even Battle Magic, which is readily attainable, depletes power points in a death spiral way and the costs of learning it are absurd relative to our income.  My recollection is that, in fact, the intention is to limit each PC to a few spells.  Unfortunately, that rules out the focused spellcaster and just causes everyone to look the same, which is the number one thing that I complain about.

Then, there’s Rune Magic, which seems like it would be important.  It’s laughable how poor the incentives are.  Sure, we are dumb and don’t sacrifice to learn Rune Magic every chance we get, which seems to be the way the game is supposed to be played.  But, even so, when I knew a Rune Spell, I never wanted to cast it, just like any one-shot effect that seems good is something no one wants to ever use.  Even at Rune Lord, every spell is a one-shot.  To actually play the game they talk about requires a bunch of Rune Priests, which I’ve been told shouldn’t be adventuring, anyway.

So, what should a “PC magic” system look like?  Daily spell slots?  It might get tiresome to hear, but I do think it works with L5R, though maybe only because the need to cast is relatively rare.  I actually have found, in my not so recent experiences, that D&D spell slots work okay.

Power points?  I don’t find this to work.  It’s all about replenishment rate.  In games with this mechanic, I find someone blows their wad out in a fight and, then, can’t do anything forever.  In Conan, sorcery is better suited to bad guys as they can replenish with human sacrifices.  But, then, Conan isn’t a “PC magic” system.

Fantasy Hero

Which brings us to Fantasy Hero.  The Hero engine was intended for Champions, and it often shows in how the system often doesn’t capture the flavor of genres without a lot of work under the hood.  On the plus side, the engine is so customizable from a power standpoint (the skill system blows), that you can eventually find a particular flavor.

Anyway, if you play it without a bunch of limitations, casting a spell is pretty much just a factor of making a skill roll (which blows) and spending END.  Rechargability is easy, so you can produce consistent effects (depending upon making skill rolls) each and every fight.  This is more what I’ve been thinking of when it comes to recovery.

I find that recovery can be a huge problem.  In Conan, sure, you will get your hit points back after three days of rest, but fighting back to back major fights is crippling.  L5R is not remotely designed for multiple battles in a row – shugenja will run out of Water slots for healing fast and possibly all slots; Void Points will be gone by the second fight.  Another case of how D&D does things better, as the whole engine was built around the idea of multiple fights.

Take an extreme example.  You fight a major battle with everyone a mess and half your offensive spells gone.  Clerics replace enough hit points and the other half of the offensive spells enable a second engagement of the same level.  When tapped out (spellwise), you are done for the day.  Now, of course, D&D’s dungeon crawling philosophy is predicated upon the idea that you can secure a part of the dungeon long enough to refresh, which is not different from other situations where you know when you have to stop and you stop.

With Fantasy Hero, if you want to enable an easily recharged battery, it’s simple to have that recharged battery.  Can take five phases, or whatever, to replenish END every fight.  I think a lot of people are opposed to this.  I’m not sure if they’ve thought it through or not, but I can see how it sounds wrong.

If you can instantly recover (heal, have full spell options, etc.) after every fight, then what’s the real cost of a fight?  Preventing death could be, though death is not a viable option in some worlds, like worlds that make any sense.  A lot of adventures don’t have a viable alternative to winning a fight.  In fiction, you would just get captured or you would fail some mission critical objective, like preventing the damsel from being whisked away or a village being burned to the ground.

Being captured has often been considered worse than death in the hack and slash world.  After all, can get resurrected, but being captured means losing stuff, and stuff is the game’s god.

Precious

Okay, I forgot to mention earlier another thing that always bothers me in FRPGs that I’m choosing to dredge up.  I hate stuff.  I hate external power.  To me, characters and not just fantasy characters should be defined by what makes the character special and not how special their stuff is.

Admittedly, in certain cases, a character is tied to stuff.  Elric is tied to Stormbringer, even if he is special without it.  There’s a certain allowance that can be given to a character, though only when the stuff is unique.

I particularly hate armor.  I quickly got tired of AD&D’s armor system where you always chose the heaviest armor you could.  RuneQuest is exactly the same way.  I don’t care if it’s realistic or not.  It has terrible flavor, and again, it makes everyone the same.  I find that in RQ, every single one of my characters gets exactly the same armor because any other choice is moronic.  For a variety of reasons, Conan has grown in my esteem, but one thing I always credited it with was that armor was something to be minimized.  Sure, it’s hecka useful to have some, more so than I thought for quite a long time, but in a world where the outdoors matter, anything above light armor is suicidal.

So, what system succeeds in the stuff department?  Conan does a very good job, even though some weapons are much better.  L5R does well enough, though 4e is a step back with how powerful armor turns out to be.

None Of The Above

And, so it goes.  I may really like L5R at the moment, but I have major questions as to how adaptable it is to more generic fantasy with even just the system.  I suppose anything can be house ruled, with house ruling the closest system being more sensible than another.  I could change basic healing in L5R to something where you pretty much restore all your wounds after every fight without Path to Inner Peace.

But, I wonder.  I wonder if I’m overcomplicating things and missing an obvious choice if all I wanted to do was dungeon crawl or reflect a specific fantasy genre where magic resided heavily in the party.  AD&D or oD&D would probably be fine for dungeon crawling.  As for high fantasy, I’ve already argued that the nature of it is antithetical to mechanics.  Medium fantasy, for lack of a better term, is not even something I have a clear grasp on.  Maybe Spellsinger would fall into it.  Maybe when you cross swords and sorcery with high fantasy, as Moorcock does, you get a balance rather than two different genres.

Maybe if I understood Ars Magica better.  Maybe if I went to the trouble of playing around with Fantasy Hero (and just ignore how much I hate skills in Hero).  Savage Worlds isn’t going to do it – I never developed a good sense of the mechanics.  RQ, in theory, could be made more palatable to me, but it would completely change the nature of the game, and it would likely be less palatable to others.

Delicate

I seem to be in the mode to review recent gaming.

Delicate threat balance – Tuesday, I ran City of the Lost.  The mod is very strange in one particular way:  if you do what you should do, it’s absurdly easy; if you don’t, it seems brutal.  Now, deciding to do things the easy way is easy.  My table (as a player) had much the same experience that my players had – things were stunningly easy.  Sure, I could have increased encounters, made it more likely the players would fight enemies in the mod, or do anything so that they were truly threatened rather than just in a state of expecting doom.  But, should I have?  While Shadowlands mods in general aren’t as nasty as players expect them to be, the ease of this mod may give the incorrect idea that the others are not particularly dangerous.  Still, because of the rewards, the story, and the acclimation advantage, it’s the obvious Shadowlands mod to run first.

Delicate party composition – Friday, I got my first taste of a RuneQuest campaign that has been running for a while.  I wasn’t terribly surprised at the incredible levels of metagaming, in this case, in terms of the focus on profit.  It is my nature to try to have a coherent world view with my characters and my concept’s world view has a hard time integrating with the greediness.  Does that mean creating a new character?  Probably means getting killed early on since the others lack any sort of desire to have someone with different ethics around.  I could cave, of course, and just be a spearchucker in the party with no personal interests or goals, much like how I play my Conan character almost all of the time after I realized the Conan group was very metagamey, if not nearly as much over money/stuff, more so on whatever sounded like action or the direction the GM expected, even if other (more logical) choices ended up with the same level of action and the GM didn’t care what direction the party decided upon.

Delicate Negotiations – That would be the name of mod SoB07 of HoR3, which I played Saturday.  I keep getting reminded of how I don’t like using Skype for audible, vastly preferring Ventrilo.  That aside, this was easily my favorite mod of the new campaign.  It had way more structure.  Personal efforts mattered for more than just personal side stories.  There was logic to how things worked and plenty of possibilities for doing different things.  While I couldn’t really accomplish anything that wasn’t written into the mod with my efforts at furthering personal interests (I guess fictions will have to be done to further my personal interests), my character was highly successful at achieving mod goals, mostly because he was suited to the mod’s requirements but also because I found what I was doing interesting.  Even the rewards, which is something I often complain about as seeming arbitrary, made sense to me and didn’t offend me even though in a minor respect they could be highly unfair.

Delicate deck desirability – I built a new deck, today, for our V:TES session.  It’s of a very different style from my norm in that it’s fairly focused.  I can see the deck being interesting in a deck matchup sense, but it was fairly boring to play.  Sure, that I could annihilate people with Lightning Reflexes is something so different from my norm of passivity in all things that it has amusement value, but the random combat nature of, say, my Dem/Vic deck is so much more appealing.  Even my !Nos fight/vote deck that plays lame cards like Carrion Crows and Immortal Grapple has been more interesting than “I hit for 2.  Do I want to nuke you?  Yes.  I hit for 2 a lot more times.”  I played my Greatest Fall deck with some tweaks and that was much more interesting though I didn’t do much that the deck was supposed to do.  When the deck was borrowed for the third game, it did almost everything it was supposed to, which was amusing to watch … for a while.  I really need more decks like my Dem/Vic deck where random cards just appear and, while the card quality is decent and its strategic play is somewhat coherent, it’s unknown at the detail level how it will play from turn to turn and game to game.

Games are delicate.  Usually, one can speak of the delicate balance that either exists or doesn’t in a game.  Try to fix one thing and likely create just as big a problem elsewhere.  But, there’s also a delicate element to flavor.  It’s harder to demonstrate, of course, but some games, particularly RPGs, can suffer a lot if the flavor lacks the right feel.  I’d argue that the Scorpion Clan in L5R has a huge concern with capturing the right balance between being “official” bad guys, not really being bad guys, and being competent at dirty tricks without being grossly overpowered because they get to use tactics no one else does.