Thoughts on game progression, and roleplay rules

 I'm a big fan of granular rules, yet over time, they get boring. So, I think, games should progressively obfuscate the simpler forms of the game, as you level up.

Game Progression as a mechanic.

Imagine you've never trekked, never strapped a backpack on, hiking boots, and gone for a walk. Those first few hours are going to be painful, difficult, full of mistakes, hardships, and things that you just can't help avoid.

But then imagine how different it will be after a month, 6 months or several years of trekking. 

After a month, the simplest issues will be worked out. the basics of packing a bag, how to put on your boots for better comfort, making sure you don't pack weird shaped items against your back.

After 6 months, ensuring you put on dry socks, and lace the boots against the grain so water flows away, and not into your boot, packing your bags for the most long term comfort, but also quick access to certain items, and packing in under 10 minutes, instead of an hour,

After several years, you'll still be learning small tricks, maybe less often maybe barely a change, but tiny incremental changes that give you extra crucial minutes of travel each day. 

My System Ideas.,

Its one of the reasons I developed the 2d12 bell curved results system, it starts of being harder, 1st level characters, you roll 2d12 and attempt to get your number under the low numbers, and while pass or fail, you gain some experience in the skill, those first few experience will be vital. You'll learn a lot, and your score will rise quickly.

Once you've gained a basic score of 20, there is no longer the need to roll for the simple stuff, this might be dealing with the minutiae or just getting the basics right. We as adults don't think about walking, talking, turning door handles or all the simple things we mastered as children, so why should your character think about any skill they've pretty much covered. The player says they do it, its a straight forward task, so they do it. If they don't KNOW its difficult, you don't tell them, (and secretly roll for that difficulty)

You do need to roll, every single time, someone says something, and ignore 99% of those rolls, so the times when its actually a roll, your players don't know the difference. The key is, does the player THINK they might fail? 

The rulebook says, if the player has a score of 20 (or more), the GM rolls, and if there are no modifiers, ignores this dice roll, unless a 12 is rolled, and the GM has a story reason to do something.

Only if there are modifiers, does this become important. 

If the player suspects its going to be difficult, let them roll, let them apply other skills for bonuses, it shows they are thinking, being creative in solving the problem. rolls = experience. 

But if the player thinks this is going to be a walk in the park, and it might be, then you roll, openly to put players on edge.

The key here is, players will get used to your rolls, and will ignore all the 'probably passed' and like real life, get into a false sense of security, Until its a fail, and then, that world of pain will teach them a lesson.

Rolling dice is barely a second, a glance, not a 12, ok, lets proceed.. but the moment on the persons face when they are so assured they'll swing across the chasm with that worn old vine as a rope, and that vine snaps, with a cloud of dust.. and they drop.. 

and their friends cast a spell, or a prayer or a quick thinking rope & hook, and they're safe, or.. a speedy healing ward as they slam into the ground almost dying.

NOTE: casting healing ward, is 1 HP to a location and 1 HP in general, it can be cast on a person as they hit the ground, and prevent death. Provided no further insta damage occurs (like falling in acid/lava/poison/fire etc) 

But, slowly, as players progress, they'll notice, they're not doing rolls for things, they're not seeing any negatives happen for simple stuff, and consciously or subconsciously they'll feel like they're getting better. This is what you want to achieve as gamemaster, getting players to feel confidence about their character. Feel like they 'Earned' it.

Careful what you say you may ruins someones play.

This blog goes into a few different topics, I'll try to break it up with headings.Mostly its about GMing

Pro GMs Chatting with Casual GMs

Sometimes when your talking to someone that seems to understand what your saying, is on the same page as you, you might get a bit deeper into the topic, but if the other person wasn't really there on the same page, and they have a different world view on the topic, your deeper thoughts can trigger negative thoughts. 

I belong to several RPG chat groups. Its quite common to engage in discussions about new rules. Its as common to me that people pull the strings of rules to see if they are knotted well, or robust enough, so that players won't pull said strings in the middle of the game.

When describing how the players can or might pull at the strings, examples are given.

So, when I saw a fellow community member mention a new rule, I did what I thought was normal and pulled some of the strings of the rule, presenting ways in which a player or a situation could ruin the rule.

Instead I offended the guy, he got extremely defensive of his rule, politely attacked me and when I apologised, politely slapped my face. I was of course miffed, I had too late realised it was a public post, not a group post, so I was likely jumping into his realm and just rambling on about his rule having holes.

Facepalm: Meaning, Oh, Oh sorry, I made a mistake, my bad.. lets look at this differently.

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Player Agency: This was my point in the pulling of strings. And brevity was my downfall.

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I have often forgotten that I'm not thinking about things like others do, and I often don't want to write a paragraph of explanation to get people onto the same page as myself. So I'll often not bother, but when I think that I'm talking to a fellow games master / games designer, I just jump straight in, and I'll talk at the person, like they know exactly what I'm talking about. which often gets mis-interpreted.

Gamesmastering is not simple or easy

Case in point: Story Telling is an Art, not just in that its artistic, but that it requires an artist, to get it right. One key factor that many casual GMs will quote "its just a game". The problem is that regardless if they think its a game or not, Its also an exercise of the mind, it teaches us things, about ourselves, our players, and the world in which we live.

If you present your players with a cliff, and they talk about how to scale UP this cliff, they spend minutes talking about pitons, rope, how far up is it, your players are engaing in player agency, you've given them a chance to shine, for them to solve the problem in a creative way. Do they have pitons, do they have rope, does anyone have the climb skill, do we have spells that can break the laws of gravity, can we go around? Is there anyone nearby that can supply us with tools for scaling? should we actual scale it? is it a good idea. The discussion of how to solve the problem is players engaging in the game. Its part and parcel of roleplay.

You know what it also does? it teaches players, regardless if you want it to or not, it teaches them to be creative in their ability to solve problems. It makes them better people.

Its one of the reasons why Roleplay IS such a great medium. The Agency of creative thought.

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Two ways you can destroy this part of a roleplay experience, either directly or indirectly, is to take away this agency, the players choice in what solution should they use. Because players will often, if not always, take the path of least resistance.

The First, is why the above disagreement happened: Give players an out. Give them the choice to teleport the simple material objects, pitons and rope, to their characters, without any consequence.

If players can, teleport or retroactively buy components, tools, arrows and the like directly to their character, they will always do so. No need to ask around town before leaving, 'what kind of terrain will we cross' and pre-buy the goods needed, No need to worry about packmules for the goods, nor the path chosen, to get to the quest, not even a care, if the character steps on a weight based trap.. his back pack is now empty, but later, it'll be retroactively full, breaking the immersion of the game.. 

The Second, slightly less common, is when the solution is so impossible to solve, that the players, having 0 agency in the situation can only give up, a frustrated GM can't understand why the players can't see the forest for the trees, and the frustrated players can't understand how the GM can think they CAN see the forest, since they're in a desert.

As an example, back at our cliff, no material objects and the instructions clearly say they need to walk this direction, but the players are being chased by a dragon. They cannot think how to solve it, the GM keeps saying he's given them all the hints, and yet the dragon arrives, the GM has to fudge the encounter (the players gain too much XP and become OP for the rest of the campaign) change the plot (the big nasty dragon is actually goblins in disguise, but if that's so.. then how did the goblins manage to enact all those creature powers & fly & breathe fire?) or stick to the reality and kill off the party with a single flame of the dragon.

Face Palm.

The GM points out after killing off the players, that they needed to 'walk' up the cliff, its enchanted. The quote "walk this direction" was so obvious.. was it not? 

Well, unless the players had ANY experience that walking up the side of the cliff was even possible.. this is 0 agency.. they can't make the choice, because they can't foresee it being possible.

The Problem is that Casual GMs might see that arriving at the cliff without pre-purchasing pitons and rope, as 0 player agency, so giving them a retroactive purchase seems like a good idea.

But its not. because you made the choice for the players: You will need equipment, I want you to use equipment, but I know you won't buy the right stuff, so I'll let you buy it retroactively. you took away their agency.

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Player Agency, Don't take away choices

I had a player, who wove elven nets into his clothes, and carried a ball of string. He'd tie objects to his body as A) access easy items and B) crude armour. When in town, he'd buy up sets of things that he felt were needed by the group. often he was asked "why are you buying a fishing hook? we're going to a dungeon!

I had another player who would guide the group on regular outings to find rare and curious material components for spell casting. Each and every time, he'd end up with something curious, and as often as not, the group would encounter some creature, guarding its lair or out hunting or protecting its territory. Not often so horrible, but always a welcome side quest, with XP.

Another player, loved to try out different woods to craft arrows, sharpening his skills as a fletcher. At one point he managed to craft a masterwork redwood sapling arrow with a crystal holder head, allowing a crystal of ice to create his +6 distance +3 armour penetration +6 ice damage arrow , which helped take down a malicious fire demon. 

If I played any of those games where arrows, spell components or mundane equipment and or backpack arrangement was cast to the side by the game or the GM, those players would not still be talking about those events, to this day.

Player Agency allows players to choose to create interesting games, They can do things, without needing to change the plot or rules or interfere with the world building.

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Yet.. for all that's said and done.. players need choice.. so if your players are new.. get them used to the nitty gritty to start with, get them experienced with how it 'can' be done.. then after 5-10 sessions, let them relax on those rules, and present them with faster approaches to do the same thing.

in Dungeonworld, we have a thing called "down time" between adventures, Its done instantaneously for us, but takes weeks in game: Often while the warrior is healing, the mage gathers components, the rogue brews up potions, the archer crafts arrows and the merchant straps all these crazy things to his next set of armour.. Facepalm. 

Levelling your Race

A thought occurred while discussing races with my group.. can you level up your race?

I'm a 5th level elf

If classes or professions are a 'set' of bonuses that are applied as you level up, why can't we have a set of 'racial' bonuses that we can choose to 'level up' as well?

I'm curious as to if any other game systems do this too, One that seems closest to the bill is Legend, but its not exactly a specific "level up" so much as just getting Boon bonus's to your race skills.

For the d20 fans, It would essentially be a set of skills, feats and increasing bonuses such as night vision or will save. A decent DM/Games designer could probably come up with a decent list, but the questions for such a system would be, why bother to level up my elf, when I could level up my class?

Maybe if DMs were a little more restrictive with their classes, then this would be a viable idea. i.e. Elves are not allowed to take rogue classes normally (alignment, disdain for such a career), yet elves are stealthy, especially in a forest, so maybe an 'Elven build' with stealth skills, ref saves and the like, Evasion, Uncanny dodge, but none of the Sneak attack, Backstab, Pickpocket skills.

For full Dungeonworld rules, there would be no real point, all skills are able to be increased, and only your motivations to increase them hamper or help this. I already have background skills lists, so this too serves its purpose and you may choose to practice and improve your background skills as you choose..

Yet, Dungeon Delvers Twelve, the simplified version rules, relies on the tropey level up sets of bonuses, pre-chosen to help newer players in understanding their characters better, guiding them. 

This, would be useful to have a 'levelling system' for your race, it would represent the players choice in increasing their background skills.. it could be an interesting set of bonuses, traits (and or flaws) skills and racial goals.. as you think more of your culture, your family and your race, as you return year after year to continue your racial training, you learn more of the racial divide between certain cultures, possibly racial hatreds, which give you combat advantages when fighting the 'enemy'

Just a few thoughts at this stage.. we'll see if I introduce it or not.

The Lists

In the endeavours of my system, my best friend Craig, had joined me in the idea of creating this awesome system. He introduced me to rolemaster, Wow, I thought my game was complex... I am curious how modern gamer kids view it, or if they even come across it..

But what we did back then was to grab all the systems we had access to and write out this big lists..

All the Skills, All the Spells, All The Traits, Flaws, Statistics, Modifier charts, Everything.. including all double-ups.. until we had this big BIG set of lists..

Early on, we check for things that were similar duplicates, but also, different duplicates.. wrote notes about how or why they were different.

Skills were broken into three groups.. easy medium and hard.

Spells were left in a big pile for much later.

While things changed, we always came back to these lists to check if we missed something.. sometimes it was a tweak of an idea, where we had the concept wrong from the start.. other times it needed to be scratched out.. too many skills based on the same thing, just because English language has two words for it, doesn't make it separate skills (but often it does)

The Original Stats: Warrior

For the Longest Time, The DW stats were just the same as Dragon Warrior Stats, with the addition of Ranged Attack...

But we had some problems..

Dragon Warriors Stats are: Attack, defence, Evasion, Stealth, Perception, Magical Attack, Magical Defence.

But how do you compare a Monks attack skill to a knights defence? Monks use Hand fighting.. so.. a knight has a defence modifier? or Monk has attack modifier?

Again I was kitting this wall of 'modifiers' Sure sure, it makes your charactersheet look cleaner to have one stat, then your GM has a table of modifiers to play with.. but either I was too lazy or my players wanted to have more information, we decided that this wasn't good enough..

So we had to have Melee Attack, Melee Defence, Weapon Attack and Weapon Defence.. which was sorta cool..

Then there were some great skills in Warhammer.. Strike Mighty blow, Strike to Stun, Strike to Injure. Some of the other game system had more skills of combat.. always there was a modifier.. -7, -5, -6.. when looking at what they did.. it seemed that they were just the same values, just different to what they actually did.. so why have 3 skills.. 5 skills.. 100 skills.. so we spoke to some Combat Simulations Experts, and for the most part what we got was, a strike, no matter what type.. was a kind of moment when you felt that your opponent had left themselves open, and you took advantage of that to get in a decent blow.. be it harder, faster, or to incapacitate.

So, this Damaging strike.. it was really a kind of regular skill, which in many systems were just Statistics..

Thats really what a Stat is.. its a skill thats used so regularly, by so many classes that you need its value on the front page. So thats where we put it..

Of course, the names needed a change.. Melee, Weapon Skill, Damage Strike, Block, Parry .. but sometimes you just need to get out of the way.. so.. Dodge.

Warrior Stats Down.. what next  Archer..

[DWDev]Statistics Part 2

In Part 1, I discussed how I got to this place.. now what I did about it.

Skills, and how it affected the decisions on stats:

'96 was the Year I really ripped apart the system I had and started again. My Mate Craig and I grabbed a whole slew of skills from all the systems, correlated them into one big list of skills. Crossed out all the double ups, so many systems have skills that are just pointless. Light Lantern! in comparison to Climb. Its all about balance, if a skill is worth a 'slot' of your game, and players can spend X time learning a skill and one give you access to the +Dex/Ref bonus to all climb skills/checks and the other allows you to light a lantern..

The Skill system has pretty much had the same core mechanic from the beginning, but changes the dice used. The Idea was instead of a flat "pass/fail" I'd just recenly seen Vampires 'number of success' system, which made far more sense.. Alot of D&D stories involve some incredibly exotic and mind bending events,.. but give than you have a 5% chance of exotic death, or exotic success in any given roll.. I'm not so surprised. 

My core mechanic was.. each time you roll, you had a chance of gaining experience in that skill.. when the skill experience is equal to or greater than the skill, your skill score increases. 

In Examples below.. I've quickly done the maths to show how much XP would be required to get the skill to that score. i.e. score of 5 = 15 or 1+2+3+4+5xp

back to the story...

We then took a big look at how the rolls were being made.. the first thing to start on was the Mathematics of a flat d20.

The Beginning of it all .. 

In most systems, the d20 for example, is a flat rate of advancement. each point is worth exactly the same as any other point. It matches the human mind as much as a ruler can be a balloon. Other systems were using piles of dice, while I'm ok with maths, adding up 16d6 to determine values every single combat.. slows things to a crawl.. I wanted a clean and quick system like a flat d20, but with more realism...All the literature I was reading at the time suggested that the human mind took 4 stages of learning.. so I looked into that first.

The first, the stage where you know nothing, struggle with everything, have to think about what your doing & fail constantly. You are Unaware of how Ineffective you are.. you just keep trying. So I needed characters to take an amount of time, that was fairly quick to get to a stage whereby they could sometimes perform the skill, but still have a large chance of failure...

Next, you are aware of how bad you are, you study under some master or something, and you become better faster. only showing a slight slowing in the speed of learning.

Then you begin to become pretty good at the skill, showing aptitude at performing the task.. you are aware of how good you're becoming, and are still improving, but less noticeably as you progress.

Finally, you are very very good, almost natural, but it takes months and months of effort at this stage to become just that tiny bit better. 

How to Represent that with numbers.

So, we all know that the d20 system uses 3d6 to start stats, it always had that little problem of the 1/2 and 19/20.. it felt uneven to me. The Maths of 4d6 sorta looked nice, and matched this 4 stages thing I just learnt.. but 4 dice was still clunky.. Then Shogun happened..

My Cousin and I used to play shogun, Japanese medieval warfare.. used d12s.. something majestic about the dice, I just sorta looked at it and said.. wow.. that's what I'm looking for.

The first thing that was so noticeable was the bell curve. the plain straight forward understanding that while mid point 13, is a 50/50 chance.. 1 single point of difference, up or down, is approx 9%. its the real deal, its worth far more than any other edge of the spectrum. The next point is around 7-8% (remember I'm doing this from memory, sure I could go look it up, but its the idea, not the pure maths of it) so now if you are 2 points higher than someone.. you are almost 20% better to hit them.. Its the sweet spot..

Why is it? 

I wanted players to find a 'zone' kinda like if you think about it, it many swashbuckling movies.. they dispatch the npcs pretty fast, swash here, buckle there, and you're done with the guards and fighting the mini-boss.. He's a bit of a fight.. and then you face off against the boss.. now comes the hard and drawn out battle, all your skills are pressed into this one.. until you finally defeat him..

to d20 this.. you'd need to be rolling above Thac0 1's for the guards, but 1's wouldn't be fails, they'd just be a miss for that one attack.. then the mini boss would need to be a 10, a crit couldn't be a crit, it'd just be a booster, otherwise you'd spoil the scene.. and the final boss, you'd need 20's to hit him, and only when his HP are at their last, a critical would be needed to finish him off.. 

to get such values in a D&D game, (or pathfinder these days) you'd need all the guards to be 2nd levels.. the mini boss to be 10th, and the final boss to be 18th! that'd be the most imbalanced module ever...

worse yet.. the 1st 1 against a guard would result in being flatfooted, and he'd have a chance to injure you and knock you down a peg, then the mini boss would screw through your remaining HP if you fumbled any further.. you'd critical him as a splat into the wall.. and finally the big boss would be impossible to hit, and you'd all be there roll after roll after roll.. no story.. just waiting for the dice to finally get the 20 to...

ok I'm being melodramatic.. it'd be fudged by the GM to make it more playable.. and if you have a nice GM, that's ok.. but a evil GM.. well sorry.. your evening of fun became a TPK to tell your friends.

No, I wanted something that would get those 'edges' and give more scope to play. I needed this 7th level mission to have 5th/6th level guards, a 7th level mini boss and an 8th level boss.. to ensure the right balance of enemies.. with the aforementioned variances in combat..

With 2d12.. less than 10 has a 25% chance to hit.. while less than 16 is 75% chance to hit, that's only 6 levels of difference between bad guys.. more believable that a 16th level BBG has a 13th level 2nd in command, and hires 10th level guards and I get my mathematical variance with very little shift in numbers.

Will it still work with the skill system:

So, that learning chart.. Stage #1, don't know how, or how to improve. At this stage of a skill, your score is less than 8, It took 36 xp to get to an 8.. in those days you got an xp every time you rolled, + bonuses for rolling a double 1 when you didn't need it. so you only needed to try the skill 36 times to get fairly much out of the first stage. 

Stage #2, you have 20% chance of success.. your a beginner. but you're getting better. It now takes 63 more xp to get to the mid point.. little less than double.. but that's a quick progression to get to 50% success.

by Stage #3, each point progresses you further and further into higher chances of success, +8%, +7%, +6%, +6%, +5%. by a score of 19, you have 90% chance of success, sure it took you 99xp more to get here, but with barely a 10% chance of fail, you're on the home stretch.

The Last Stage #4, you know your skill, and you know its going to take ages to get further.. Later we added in the ruling that A) if the modifier took the 'roll' above 24, you didn't get to roll, you just 'did' it. No rolling meant no xp, so the last 90 xp took much longer.. the standard 'this is easy' task was a +3 and a very easy task +6, so it became obvious to the players that an 18-21 was the point when skills needed a 'challenge' if they wanted to progress further. 

The last thing we used, was the idea of 'pass by'.. but more on that later...

So that was the start.. a nice balanced 2d12 system for Chats, Stats and skills, which had a balanced progression system, matched the reality of how we learn skills, a nice progression from zero to hero, and a set of easy pointers on how to roleplay the game for far more player friendly balance, swashbuckling adventure and a way to put the rules to one side and just play the game.  

Later, much later, I would discover how the number 12 just came to make everything in my system

Resources:

https://psygrammer.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/learning.png