System Review: Mage: the Awakening, Part 3

Miscellaneous Rules

Welcome to Paradox

Earlier, I described this game as “Mages in Trenchcoats” with the intention that this game has a far lower gonzoness cap than old Mage. Superficially, it’s set up so starting characters don’t have access to the really exciting spells until quite a while into progression, and Paradox is easier to come by. The tone indicates that you’re meant to really try to keep all this stuff secret.

But then one might look more closely at the rules and realize that Highlander was big on trenchcoats, too: gonzo swordfights in trenchcoats. In particular, Paradox isn’t nearly as bad in this game as it was in old Mage. There are several ways to mitigate it outright (from magical tools to spending mana), and when you do take it you still have options. The first is to take it as backlash and soak up a couple of points of bashing damage; it can’t be healed with magic, but it will be gone on its own pretty quickly. IIRC, Paradox damage in old Mage lasted a lot longer. Even if you choose to let the Paradox flow into the world and cause havoc, it’s more on the order of cool special effects like electrical storms, temporary insanity to roleplay, and scary eyes than real drawbacks. For most characters, they only last for a scene. Eventually you start summoning antagonistic spirits, but the lower order effects aren’t actually that terrible.

So behind the surface caveat to avoid going vulgar whenever you can, because it will cause Paradox, there’s an actual realization that it probably won’t be too bad until you do it a lot. I’m not sure whether this is a case of the rules not supporting the intended feel of the game, or just the intended feel of the game being unclear from a superficial reading.

One Permanent Willpower

One thing the game does, just as an aside, that really bugs me is rely on “spend a permanent dot of Willpower” for anything that needs to be lasting. In particular, making a spell permanent or creating a magic item is based on this cost, as are other things like inducting apprentices into your magical legacy. This reminds me of the old joke from 2nd Edition D&D about the poor foolish wizard that used up all his permanent Constitution to make a bag of +1 sling stones: the enchant an item spell consumed a permanent resource there as well. Since restoring an expended Willpower is a fixed and fairly expensive experience cost, this system pretty much implicitly makes permanent items or effects not worth it unless they’re incredibly powerful. Cool little magical doo dads that perform one minor function can’t cost less to make than world-shaking items of power, so PCs are unlikely to fiddle with them. Which makes me sad.

Rituals, Durations, and Spell Limits

An area where new Mage has a pretty significant leg up on old is structure for non-instant casting. Old Mage likes to talk a lot about rituals, but I can’t recall much support for them since there wasn’t a real limitation against making an extended casting in regular combat rounds rather than over hours. The newer game has a fixed divide: if you want to make more than one roll toward a spell, you have to go to a ritual casting mode with some fixed timing (hours rather than seconds).

Even with the greater focus on the difficulty of a ritual, you could still build up a lot of successes with an extended casting. In particular, it’s not hard to make any spell with a base duration of a scene last a long time. To counter this, the game makes a big deal about how many active spells you can have at all, and how many buffs you can have on yourself before taking major penalties. To be fair, old Mage didn’t make having a lot of buffs nearly as attractive as new, but it was pretty easy to stack stuff up if you had a mind to, and that could have been troublesome. I still remember a rote concept of mine that I think would have been legal that would have allowed ritually building up a pretty obnoxious pool of aggravated damage blasts to be used at will. New Mage at least puts some structure on that kind of game breakage.

Organization

On reading back though the rulebook for these reviews, I have to admit that part of my problem with the game is just that there’s a lot of cool stuff that you may never notice if you don’t make a concentrated effort to read the book cover to cover again once you have a firm grasp on the basics. Old Mage, as I’ve noted before, had some teething pains for new players, particularly with grokking paradigms, but once you got over a few conceptual hurdles you’d have players operating at a pretty high effectiveness as far as being able to make full use of the available rules options. New Mage has a lot of cool stuff that’s just buried in the text. You can chant in the language of magic to make spells more potent. You can bind spells to sigils to make them last longer. You can weave spells together to cast a multi-purpose effect or have multiple minor buffs only count as one for spell limits. All of these are cool things that will probably drastically change how I interface with the game system now that I’ve found them, and they’re all mixed arbitrarily throughout a pretty dense rules chapter.

A large part of the problem is that the headings are in a hard-to-read cursive font in reflective bronze ink (and the sidebars are often in the same ink). But even were the text easy to read, the information is not at all organized well. There are several pages of charts for modifications to spells that are mostly a complete reprint (one’s for fast cast spells and one’s for rituals, but the only difference is that “drop 2 more dice” is replaced with “spend 1 more success” all the way across). Some things are called out in sidebars that break weirdly across pages. The spell effects listings are in three columns with minimal column breaks (the text wraps as it will for the most part).

If this game had been given to an editor and/or layout designer more focused on making a whole raft of fiddly but interesting rules easily accessible, rather than going for graphical style and dense prose, this could have been a better game. Even if it would have been technically the same game… layout is more important than a lot of people seem to realize.

Musing: Grappling

I went to see Haywire yesterday, starring MMA celebrity Gina Carano*. Apparently, these days Mixed Martial Arts is all about various forms of grappling, and the movie features quite a lot of it. It got me thinking.

Grappling is historically one of the most difficult-to-implement combat systems in RPGs (famously so in the case of D&D 3.x). People naturally look at all the crazy stuff that goes on and want to make sure it’s accurate. But accurate wrestling is not necessarily cinematic wrestling. In the movies, when two characters wrestle, the language of the fight requires that there is a constant shift in control of the grapple. In a lot of grappling systems, it’s pretty hard to lose dominance if you’re even a couple points better at it than the opponent. Making a system to account for frequent turnover could wind up being even more complicated.

But do most players that want to initiate a grapple really want a dedicated and complex ruleset? Or do they just want to accomplish a few of the things that grappling gets used for in the movies, namely:

• Keep the target from getting away
• Keep the target from using a deadly weapon on you
• Disarm the target of said deadly weapon or other carried item

Anything else that goes on in a grapple is probably something that can just be played out with the normal combat system and different descriptions. The back and forth of control of a grapple is pretty easily handled by the normal back and forth of attacks during a fight. Theoretically, in any given system, you could model grappling mechanics much more simply if you just came up with an easy way to accomplish the above three tasks.

So my main questions are:

• Am I missing any other important reasons why a player might want to start a grapple?
• How much additional complexity do those important reasons above justify in the grappling rules? That is, is the advantage of locking down a target and control of wielded weapons significant, or could it just be something that a grappling-focused martial artist is just allowed to do?

 

* The way Soderbergh cuts movies is weird, so I’m still digesting how much I liked it. But the action was pretty good, as you might expect when casting an actual martial artist as your lead. If you’d like to see more women in action movies that aren’t 100 pound models using waif-fu, there are probably worse things you could do than see this so Hollywood’s more willing to look to female leads like Carano.

System Review: Mage: the Awakening, Part 2

Magic Basics

For those that haven’t played old or new Mage, a brief primer: all spellcasting revolves around a collection of nine or ten conceptual groupings of magic (“Spheres” in old, “Arcana” in new). You raise these elements in a similar fashion to any other power group in WoD: by spending character points to fill in dots. The groupings are:

• Correspondence/Space: Teleportation, scrying, and more strange manipulations of positions
• Entropy/Fate & Death: Manipulating probability and decay (this is two arcana in new Mage, splitting Entropy in half and each gaining a few new tricks)
• Forces: Manipulation of physics, particularly fire, cold, light, sound, and electricity
• Life: Manipulation of biology, including transformations and healing
• Mind: Anything having to do with mind reading or control
• Matter: Manipulation of chemistry, letting you affect basically any non-living matter
• Prime: Tricks to let you get more mileage out of the quintessence/mana resource of the game
• Time: Speeding up time, precognition, postcognition, and trying to time travel if you’re really powerful
• Spirit: Interacting with and summoning the spirit world (both nature spirits and ghosts in old Mage, but ghosts moved to Death in new)

These are conceptually sound, and basically survived intact through two revisions of old Mage and into the new edition. The important thing to consider is that they do strongly define how mages break down in specialization. The guy with Correspondence is going to scry and teleport all the time. The girl with Life is going to focus on buffing herself physically and healing. In typical WoD style, it will be a long time before you have a broad base of competency, so often the game breaks down to using your “hammer” of specialized magic type to turn your problems into nails.

The other major similarity across both editions is the idea of Paradox. Effectively, reality thinks magic is wrong, and punishes mages in various ways for using it in an obvious fashion. If you throw a fireball or teleport across town, you’re going to take Paradox as either damage or other nasty results. So you can’t go all out very often. Instead, magic is meant to be subtle (“coincidental” in old, “covert” in new): magic that would either go completely unnoticed or could be justified easily as something weird but possible.

While I’ll probably talk later about how there’s actually a pretty big difference in how the two editions handle this, the takeaway is that it sets a pretty strong limitation on player character behavior. Mages will spend a lot of their time doing research (sensory magic is usually totally fine) and building up subtle buffs, and may never get to flinging around fireballs unless things have gotten very dangerous. In either edition, a player that attempts to walk in and play a classic fantasy mage is going to quickly be beaten down by Paradox.

Rote Learning

Perhaps the biggest surprise transitioning to new Mage from old is the rotes. Old Mage always toyed around with the idea of a rote—a predefined “spell” that you could use more easily than making it up as you went—but the mechanical support for them was always somewhat incomplete. The thing was, the rules at their base level really wanted you to be coming up with crazy things to do with your magic on the fly, so you weren’t really punished in any way for doing so. You could say, “Hey, can I combine Life and Time to lock onto that guy and rewind to see where he’s been?” and if your GM bought it, you could do it. If you wound up doing that a lot, you might buy it as a rote and get a small bonus for using it, but the watchword was experimentation.

New Mage still allows this, but there are much more extensive breakdowns of what can be done at each level of each arcana, and they’re pre-packaged as rotes. Each of these often has a special case rule: this effect gives you armor equal to X for Y duration, that effect allows you to generate strength equal to X and dexterity equal to Y for concentration duration. In old Mage, the spheres would often give you several big ideas of what you could do, but they weren’t broken down with as much granularity and, more importantly, they generally referred you back to a single chart for things you could do with a given result (as far as damage, duration, range, targets, etc.).

It used to be a big learning curve for players to figure out how to interface with the system. Old Mage was daunting. The inclusion of extensive lists of predefined cool things you can do and exactly how you do them is almost certainly a boon to new players. I do wonder if it’s ultimately a limitation to experienced players, however: in old Mage, you could very quickly memorize the conceptual space available to your spheres and then you only needed the two page global chart to basically figure out the results for anything you wanted to do (and even that was pretty easy to remember for simple things). Nearly twenty sessions in with new Mage and we’re still having to look up the particular effect description to figure out how it works.

But what really bothers me about these rotes is that they’re very arbitrary. The proudest nail on that front is mana costs. Some rotes require you to spend mana to use them or allow you to spend mana for a special effect. Others are completely free. In almost every case, this seems to be purely a game balance decision without any real justification in the world fiction. Armor spells let you spend mana to raise the duration to a day so they can be fire and forget and you don’t have to work out the successes to duration chart. Invisibility requires you to spend mana to use it, even though every other effect at that level is free to use, probably because GMs don’t want their PCs to be invisible all the time. Fireballs are free (at least as often as you want to suck up the Paradox), even though in that case you’re actually creating energy such that spending mana might be justified.

Further, the rotes listed in the book use the arbitrary skill combinations that I disliked so much in Fading Suns and original Changeling: when you don’t have a rote written on your sheet, you just roll your arcana rating plus your Gnosis (your central magical “level” stat), but when you do have a rote you replace the Gnosis with an attribute plus ability. This attribute plus ability is usually very arbitrary: though they do try to make the ability one of the ones that is the specialty of the mystical order that invented the rote, each effect is seemingly randomly assigned to an order. Manipulating light has a rote combo used by group X, but manipulating sound (at the same level of Forces) uses group Y’s justification. And even if the ability is germane to the order, the attribute is almost completely arbitrary: one of the players in our group was annoyed that his magical archetype told him not to worry about mental attributes, but then all of the effects for that archetype’s favored arcana used mental attributes in their rotes.

Even if you happen to find a rote where the combo is something you’re decent at (or the GM is nice enough to let you find a custom rote that deliberately plays to your strength), the benefit is often marginal. Given that characters start with fairly limited points and spend the same experience pool on arcana, attributes, abilities, and rotes, but have a secondary experience pool that’s used to raise Gnosis, replacing Gnosis for an effect with an attribute plus ability is often going to be a fairly minor improvement unless it happens to be something you’ve focused on. With similar rates of increase between my normal and Gnosis exp, my character is very close to getting four dice from Gnosis, but still has only a small handful of attribute plus ability combinations that are better than four dice. So there’s a huge part of the game that I’m unlikely to interact with very much beyond the rotes I got as a bonus at character creation unless the GM keeps ignoring the book and letting us learn rotes tailored to our focus traits. Which isn’t really ideal.

The Worst Adventurer’s Guild in Town

This system for Pathfinder outlines a method for creating an Adventurer’s Guild as a shared character (in the style of a Song of Ice and Fire noble house, Nobilis Chancel, etc.). It’s inspired in large part by the house upgrades in Skyrim.

The player characters are the core members of an Adventurer’s Guild in a large city that sees enough income from treasure-seekers to have such a thing (think Ptolus). They’re either starting a brand new charter or are a previously decent guild that’s fallen on hard times. It’s up to the PCs to build the guild up to a political entity within the city and really get those dues flowing in.

Unless the GM starts the guild at higher level, this is intended to present a fairly farcical take on D&D: the players don’t just start at first level, but as first level commoners with classic 3d6 stats. They’re going to die. A lot. However, with each unlikely victory, they bring dues and prestige back to the guild, leveling it up and allowing it to attract a better class of adventurer. Eventually, new characters come in with a much better chance of survival and the game might transition to a more traditional style with a strong core of a guild with high player investment… and who knows how many of the earlier PCs might have gotten lucky more often than expected and still be kicking around?

Basics

The players should collaborate with the GM on a name for the guild and a location for the guild hall. Everyone will also collaborate on a floorplan for the hall: it should start out at roughly 40 five foot tiles (1000 square feet). The living accommodations in the hall are Poor for those PCs that choose to bunk there.

The guild is treated in many ways like an extra player character. It has a level and experience total, special abilities, skills, and feats. When the guild chooses feats and skills, the players collaborate on the decision of what to buy.

Experience to level for the guild is on the same scale as for the PCs (e.g., if they’re on the medium progression track, so is the guild). When the guild gets enough exp, it levels up, but the guild’s total exp cannot exceed that of the highest-exp PC currently in the group (except in the case of the death of said PC, in which case the guild can’t get any more exp until a PC again equals or exceeds its total). A guild gets exp from:

• Player Character Dues: Each gold piece a player character pays into the guild vault counts as a point of exp. PCs are expected to donate 10% of treasure earned from adventures, but can donate more if they feel the level of the guild is falling behind.
• Prestigious Accomplishments: Whenever the PCs get a quest award of exp in a way that would reflect well on the guild, the guild gets an equal award (e.g., if all PCs get 100 exp for rescuing the baron’s child, the guild also gets 100 exp).

In general, the guild should be about a level or two lower than the average party level if the PCs contribute only 10%.

Level Progression

The guild gets 2 skill ranks per level and 1 feat each odd level (including one at first level). It gets the following special abilities that influence PC creation and advancement:

1. -1 Point Buy Commoners
2. NPC Classes
3. 3 Point Buy
4. Basic Adventuring Classes
5. 7 Point Buy
6. Core Adventuring Classes
7. 11 Point Buy
8. Advanced Adventuring Classes
9. 15 Point Buy
10. Prestige Classes
11. 19 Point Buy
12. 23 Point Buy
13. 27 Point Buy

The Guild Vault

All dues donated by the PCs are stored in the guild vault and effectively tracked as another score on the guild sheet. Gold pieces removed from the vault should be tracked as experience debt (new dues or quest rewards must erase this debt before the guild gains exp again); they’re assumed to be used as investments to maintain guild benefits. Any feats that have a prerequisite of a GP minimum in the vault become inactive if the vault drops below this level. Malevolent GMs may choose to threaten the guild vault with theft or taxes.

The PCs may choose to track on the guild sheet a “non-exp” pool of shared GP, and players can also donate equipment to the guild (generally hand-me-down or otherwise unusable gear) that is not tracked as exp. Some feats generate additional GP revenue that can be tracked here as well.

New player characters can be equipped out of these vaults.

PC Creation and Advancement

The level of the guild determines available player character build methods and advancement as outlined above. A PC is generally locked into his talents upon entering into the guild (e.g., a Commoner made at the guild’s first level can’t begin taking Fighter levels if he survives until the guild’s fourth level), but the GM may extend the option of respecialization in this circumstance (i.e., replace all of the levels or former ability scores with newly available options). However, in the case of a respec, the player forfeits the experience bonus (described below).

New PCs start at the level of the guild with the minimum exp necessary to meet that level. They have 10% of their suggested Wealth by Level (they might raid the vault for additional gear or funds). Replacement PCs might be elevated NPCs that were previously second tier guild members or might be completely new faces that come highly recommended to the guild from allies.

Point Buy

PCs can be made with the player’s choice of a point buy using a particular size pool or a corresponding dice generation method:

• -1 Points: Roll 3d6 six times and keep the results in order (old school generation)
• 3 Points: Roll 3d6 six times and rearrange the results to taste
• 7 Points: Roll 3d6 four times and 4d6 (drop lowest die) two times
• 11 Points: Roll 3d6 two times and 4d6 (drop lowest die) four times
• 15 Points: Roll 4d6 six times (standard method)
• 19 Points: Roll 4d6 four times and 2d6+6 two times
• 23 Points: Roll 4d6 two times and 2d6+6 four times
• 27 Points: Roll 2d6+6 six times (heroic method)

PCs gain a 5% bonus to all experience gained for each step in between their ability method and the current maximum available (e.g., a -1 Point Buy character gains +10% to all exp once the guild is level 5 and 7 Point Buy is available). New PCs can use a worse ability score method to gain this bonus.

Class Access

PCs can choose from certain available class options based on the level of the guild:

• Commoners: PCs can only be of the Commoner NPC class. They will probably die a lot.
• NPC Classes: PCs can choose from Adept, Expert, and Warrior (and multiclass between them). Commoner PCs gain a +10% bonus to all exp gained.
• Basic Adventuring Classes: PCs can choose from the adventuring classes the GM thinks should be most common (typically Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, Wizard). If the GM wants to make all core classes available at this level, the next tier should open the option of the alternate class builds (e.g., from the Advanced Player’s Guide). Commoner PCs gain a +20% exp bonus and other NPC classes gain a +10% bonus.
• Advanced Adventuring Classes: PCs can choose from the non-core basic classes in expanded material, as approved by the GM. The bonus remains the same for NPC classes and Commoners.
• Prestige Classes: PCs can take GM-approved prestige classes if they meet the other prerequisites. Characters made before this tier (even NPC classes) can take prestige classes if they meet the other requirements.

Guild Skills

The guild gets 2 skill ranks per level. No skill can be raised to two ranks until the guild is at least level 5, and no skill can ever exceed two ranks. The guild can buy any Craft or Knowledge skill. With sufficient justification, the GM might allow the purchase of non-Craft or Knowledge skills.

• One Rank: The guild hall includes the basic tools to practice the craft or a small reference library for the knowledge.
• Two Ranks: The guild hall includes masterwork tools for the craft or a large reference library for the knowledge, sufficient to impart a +2 bonus to rolls of the associated skill made at the hall.

Guild Feats

The guild gets 1 feat at each odd level. Example feats are:

• Alliance*: The guild is allied with another guild or organization in the city. In addition to the political benefits, all PCs gain +2 to Charisma-based rolls when socially engaged with members of the ally organization. This can be taken multiple times for different allies. The GM may require the PCs to justify the alliance in play before purchasing this feat.
• Armory: The guild keeps basic equipment in stock for a nominal fee, and has a good relationship with local suppliers for crafting. Mundane weapons and armor can be purchased for half cost (or materials for crafting purchased at half the already discounted price). These items would be sold at half value as well by any guild entrepreneurs, as the guild keeps a cut to maintain the relationship.
• Security: The guild has improved the locks and fortifications. Locks on all doors are DC 15 to pick, and defenders of the hall gain +1 AC.
• Enhanced Security (requires Security): Locks are DC 20 to pick and defenders gain +2 AC.
• Magic Security (requires Enhanced Security): Locks are DC 25 and defenders gain +3 AC. Alarm spells can be assumed to protect the vault from theft and residents from assassination.
• Average Accommodations (requires 600 gp in the guild vault): The guild hall has been decorated, keeps a decent larder, and is a comfortable place to sleep (PCs staying in the guild hall can assume the Average Cost of Living for free).
• Wealthy Accommodations (requires 6,000 gp in the guild vault and Average Accommodations): The guild hall is lavishly appointed (PCs staying in the guild hall can assume the Wealthy Cost of Living for free).
• Expanded Space (requires 2,000 gp in the guild vault): The guild hall has built out or taken over nearby propery. It now has 3,000 square feet (120 tiles).
• Huge Space (requires 20,000 gp in the guild vault and Expanded Space): The guild hall is now effectively a mansion in size, with 9,000 square feet (360 tiles).
• Known (requires level 4): The guild has recruited non-PC members of some significance. Assume 2d10 such members at any time (max level of the guild’s level -3). For every donation to the guild vault made by the PCs, add +2% from these members.
• Popular (requires level 7 and Known): The guild now has 5d10 relevant NPC members at any time (max level of the guild -2). The PCs’ donations now earn +5% to the guild vault from these NPCs.
• Famous (requires level 10 and Popular): The guild now has 10d10 relevant NPC members at any time (max level of the guild -1). The PCs’ donations now earn +10% to the guild vault.
• Specialist* (requires level 4): The guild employs an Expert to provide a particular skill set (such as a smith, sage, entertainer, or chef). The character is built as an NPC Expert with a level equal to the guild’s -3 and 7 point buy, and should be designed with high ranks and possible skill focuses in the relevant skills. This specialist can use any relevant bonuses from guild skills, and will use his or her skills for the party’s benefit as if they were PC skills (i.e., will not charge extra). The feat can be purchased multiple times for multiple specialists.
• Guards (requires level 4): The guild has 1d6 NPC Warriors hanging out at any given time (day or night) who will come to the defense of the guild hall if necessary. They are built at guild level -3 with 7 point buy.

System Review: Mage: the Awakening, Part 1

The Sun Is Out for Another Day

The accounting is difficult, particularly over a decade later and including crossover games, but I think I wound up running or playing in more sessions of Mage: the Ascension back in the day than any of the other World of Darkness line. Vampire is up there, given a particularly long Giovanni Chronicles run in college, and Changeling probably stands out as the game I’ve run most, but it’s hard to compete with Mage for player buy-in. Distilling all the narrative power of Hackers, The Matrix, Kiss of the Dragon, and more into a single RPG where you get to play modern-day wizards was pretty much like crack for a late-1990s gamer.

So when Harbinger started running the new WoD version, Mage: the Awakening, earlier this year, I was down. We’re nearly twenty sessions in at this point, and I’ve mostly reached the point where I’m not constantly wrong about my expectations about how a rule should work. Awakening is a pretty different game than Ascension, despite significant shared terminology and rules structure. A lot of the differences are in the setting, of course, as the game is clearly shooting for a low key mages in trenchcoats feel as advertised in the pre-1993 products, rather than the sometimes gonzo Matrix-esque battle of occult misfits vs. their technological overlords that was Ascension. But rules follow fiction pretty heavily in this edition, so the impact of the setting has had a pretty profound effect on the rules.

I’m a huge fan of Ascension, but I understand that it had its own problems. I’ll do my best to take off the rose colored lenses and give Awakening a fair shake. Will I succeed? I guess we’ll find out.

Core Mechanics

The very basic dice mechanic for new WoD is the same as old WoD: combine attribute and ability into a big fistful of dice and let fly. Then count dice that meet or exceed a target number and consider those successes. Use those successes to produce a result.

Most significant is that, like some of the older non-WoD games like the Aeon-verse, the dice go up against a fixed difficulty rather than the GM altering the target number based on the situation. For most of the older fixed-target games, that target was 7. For new WoD, it’s 8.

I didn’t really understand how much a normal DC of 6 had made on my old assumptions about White Wolf’s dice engine. A fixed difficulty of 8 makes a pretty profound difference in the probability of success. To wit, even without a “1s cancel successes” rule, even a big handful of dice is likely to roll few successes. You’re still statistically likely to get at least one success on 3-4 dice, but additional successes are more elusive. We have a common quote at the table: “look at all those 7s.”

This creates the first profound difference between old Mage and new Mage. In the previous game, at least the way I always saw it played, there was a huge meta game for spellcasting rolls of always trying to scrape together enough situational modifiers to lower the target to the minimum difficulty of 3. This was balanced by the fact that you usually weren’t going to be rolling many dice for your casting rolls. Awakening has to turn this on its head: the new mini-game is trying to roll as many dice as possible for an effect you want to succeed.

The dovetails directly into the next major mechanic difference between old and new WoD: dice penalties. Difficulty in the game is now only rarely a success threshold (because getting more than one success isn’t reliable even for large pools), and never a change to the target number (except maybe in extremely rare circumstances). Instead, difficulty is often in the form of a penalty to your dice pool (e.g., “-4 dice to try this because it’s hard”). This is another pretty significant change: dropping dice against a target number of 8 is far more likely to produce completely failure than raising difficulty to 9 or 10 ever could in old WoD: 10 dice still had a 90% chance of success against difficulty 9, but a steep enough die penalty can reduce an expert to unreliable pretty quickly.

Finally, the least significant but perhaps most exciting difference in the two dice engines is rolling 10s. In old WoD, you could often reroll 10s for extra successes on your best attributes or abilities. In the new system, every 10 explodes in this way. This is exciting when it happens, but does have the downside of making successes periodically very swingy. I’ve frequently seen two players roll for a task and the one with a lot of dice gets a success or two while the one with only a couple gets a series of 10s and lots of successes. Does the excitement balance the reduced predictability of the results? Probably, but mostly because I doubt there are many GMs banking on “he only has 5 dice, so he can only get 5 successes.”

Musing: Hit Roll vs. Hit Points

A perhaps divisive assertation: The use of hit points has always been one of the chief stumbling blocks between D&D and true genre emulation. They’re a rough and ready way to make combat something that is desirable rather than extremely risky (as it often is in systems that attempt to model health more realistically), but fantasy isn’t exactly full of statements like, “Aragorn saw that the orcs were wielding swords, so he knew he could withstand at least three blows, even with their strength, before his life would be in jeopardy.” Particularly at the rate hit points inflate as you increase in level, the use of them tends to either force you to use them as a complete abstraction or bend heavily the physics of your world. I’m thinking, in particular, of a scene a module I’m running expected me to narrate where a luminary that’s known to be at least of mid level doesn’t die when struck with a crossbow fired by a non-assassin attacker, and that’s supposed to be surprising to the players.

The classic attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too is to consider hit points to mostly be an abstraction of not only health, but agility and luck as well. That is, high level characters aren’t necessarily much tougher than lower level characters, but they’re much better at getting out of the way of attacks and turning a serious blow into a negligible one. The classic argument against this tactic is that it still doesn’t account for why a Cure Light Wounds spell that can bring a first level character from the brink of death to full health can only salve a few scratches on a high level character. However, that moves the genre emulation stumbling blocks to the healing spells, so in my mind it’s not a problem inherent to considering HP to represent ability to avoid or reduce damage.

Instead, my new concern is the attack roll. If HP represent, in large part, getting out of the way of an attack or otherwise reducing it to harmlessness, what’s AC? Isn’t it a little redundant to score a lucky hit against an elusive (high AC) opponent only to describe that he still dodged most of the way out of the way, only this time it cost him something? Straight up damage reduction is one of the hardest things to get in the game, but To Hit vs. AC is effectively a total DR that has a random chance to fire every round. Could we, in fact, make combat somewhat less swingy if we eliminated the attack roll entirely and moved its rules elements directly into the damage system?

Obviously, doing this to D&D itself is a bear of a project with a whole periphery of externalities to handle even if you could find players that don’t balk because they dislike such sweeping revisions to D&D. However, consider a system designed from the ground up to have only a damage roll: characters always “hit,” with the actual effects of such a hit managed by the hit point system (as opposed to a lot of non-HP systems that add attack MoS to a flat damage number and functionally have only an attack roll). In a straight up fight, eventually an opponent gets worn out from dodging/blocking and is struck by a vital hit, or is gradually worn down as powerful hits connect lightly.

In my mind, the benefit of such a system is that it allows a steeply-inflating “HP” pool with a more realistic set of wounds that can be used to represent real damage and be taken by attrition or surprise attack (similar to the Star Wars d20 Vitality system). It also reduces the chance that bad rolls or high defenses will make it feel like no progress is being made (as even a bad roll will generally take away a few points of the HP pool).

My major question is whether the complexity and time saved by going to a single-roll solution justifies increasing complexity on the division of damage. To wit, is it worthwhile to implement dodge and armor traits that establish how much damage can go to the HP pool vs. rolling over onto the core wounds?

System Review: Smallville, Conclusion

The World Has Folded in Your Heart

“Author Stance” is a term I hear bandied around the indie-sphere. Based on this article, I’m not completely positive I’m using it correctly, but in my head it’s the kind of RP summarized in the Smallville examples of play: the players talk about their characters in third person and are free to hand wave and summarize things that don’t seem germane to the narrative. “‘You’re such an idiot!’ Sam says to Trevor, and then proceeds to lay into him about his drinking.” Someone correct me if I’m over summarizing or getting it wrong.

Regardless of whether I’m using the terminology correctly, it’s something I seem to recall seeing pretty frequently in examples of play in various indie-spectrum games. And I can never tell whether it’s an accurate example of how that game would play at the table, or whether it’s a simplification to make it easier to explain the game’s concepts clearly and in the space allotted. None of my gaming groups have ever really played that way: “I hit it with my axe” is far more common than “My character hits it with his axe” and it’s pretty unusual not to roleplay out the entirety of any important conversation. If my character and Harbinger’s character are at odds, you can bet that there’s going to be a fully in character argument at the table. Hopefully fully in character, at least.

I say all that to point out that I believe that my group’s experience with the game is probably not indicative of actual flaws in the system. It may be indicative that the designers took for granted that players would automatically be in Author Stance for the game. The game really might have benefited from having a big disclaimer at the front saying something along the lines of, “This game will make your character hate other player characters a lot of the time, so you should try to describe your actions in such a way that you’re not necessarily truly immersed in your character’s feelings. And a play contract for how far you’re willing to stymie one another might be a good idea.” Or we might be atypical and most groups have no problem keeping their in character actions from bleeding OOC.

All that said, I absolutely love that the game is a salvo of pure innovation shot directly into the mass market. The sheer courage involved in letting respected indie designers have an option to put some of their ideas into a slickly produced book obviously designed to reach gamers (and non gamers) that follow a popular show is commendable. Even if you don’t want to play it as written, there are a bunch of concepts that can be usefully grafted into other games. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the character creation system, which is likely to see play in pretty much any game I run from now on.

So even though my group had some difficulties with the system, I can suggest that yours might not if you go into prepared with a play contract and/or a comfortable distance between you and your character’s emotions. And, even if you can’t overcome these issues, the system is modular and doesn’t obfuscate any of it’s design: you could take it down for parts or just fix what doesn’t work for you really easily.

I’d highly recommend it to anyone interested in modern game design: even if you’re not going to play it, you owe it to yourself to be aware of what it’s doing and why.

Richter’s Resources

This system is intended to be a middle ground between D&D-style resource systems that expect the player to track every individual bit of cash and WoD-style systems that completely abstract income and its fluctuations. It’s set up to easily convert from D&D and create a function for less specific accounting (and eventually not worrying about small purchases) while still providing a benefit to earning treasure. It might also be of use to other genres of games that want to make earning and/or managing wealth to be part of the experience.

Basics

All characters have a Resources trait which is an indication of their total wealth in cash and fungible property. It represents cash, investments, and miscellaneous items like homes, art, and furnishings that are basically unimportant system-wise to the game except to indicate the PC’s lifestyle. Items that are useful from a game perspective are removed from the Resources total until the character sells them.

For bookkeeping purposes, a player may choose to track multiple Resources traits. Typically the largest is the real total and the smaller ones are incidental stashes. For example, a traveling character may only take a small portion of his wealth and, consequently, “break off” a smaller Resources trait to avoid making the larger amount vulnerable to theft. Meanwhile, another character may be tracking a Resources trait earned from the sale of an item that was not big enough to affect the main Resources trait, but she’s saving it until other small sales add up to a potential increase.

Resources 1 is essentially the amount a person might need to scrape by during a day. For D&D, it’s more or less 1 gp. For modern games, it’s about $10.

Each additional level of resources is 10 times the previous level. So Resources 2 is 10 gp/$100, Resources 3 is 100 gp/$1,000, etc. If more granularity is required, the decimal places can be used to track multiples (and, yes, this isn’t exactly the same as the Richter Scale for ease of conversion at the table). For example, Resources 2.5 would be 50 gp/$500 (essentially reading 2.5 as “5 x Resources 2). The player’s total Resources shouldn’t be tracked on a decimal level (for ease of hand waving away how minor purchases aren’t lowering the rating), even if profits and expenses often are.

Using Resources

The Resources total can be used to estimate the character’s total net worth (e.g., Resources 6 is a millionaire), and allows the purchasing of useful goods.

When a character wants to make a purchase, figure the estimated Resource value of it (e.g., a 1,000 gp magic item is a Resources 4/4.1 purchase, while a 2,000 gp item is a 4.2 purchase). If the item is more than the character’s Resources, it is too expensive. If it is three or more less, it can be purchased essentially “for free” (a character with Resources 7, and, consequently, 1,000,000 gp, isn’t going to notice a few thousand here or there); if players want to abuse this and make more than the GM feels is reasonable, feel free to total the expenditures (e.g., a character making a “free” purchase 100 times is actually making that purchase at +2 Resource levels).

If the purchase is within 2 levels of the character’s Resources total, it becomes important whether the character depletes ready funds and drops a rank.

• If the purchase was one Resource lower (e.g., a 4.5 purchase for someone with 5 Resources), roll a d10: if the result is equal or less than the decimal of the expenditure, the character’s total lowers (e.g., 5 buying a 4.5 drops down to 4 on a roll of 5 or less). If the purchase doesn’t have a decimal, treat it as a .1 (e.g., an expenditure of 4 is the same as 4.1 and lowers the Resources trait on a roll of 1). Obviously, a purchase of exactly equal the character’s Resources automatically drops them by one level (the character is assumed to have at least 10% in “change” so he doesn’t just drop to Resources 0 with such a purchase).
• If the purchase was two Resources lower (e.g., a 3.6 purchase for someone with 5 Resources), roll a d10: if the result was a 1, treat the expense as one higher and then roll again (e.g., 5 buying a 3.6 rolls and gets a 1, meaning he has to roll again and a 6 or less will lower Resources to 4).

If Resources did not lower, that’s the end of the transaction: the character managed to have enough free cash on hand that she’s still closer to the higher Resource mark than the lower.

Income within two Resource levels works in reverse (except only income either of equal resources or one lower is applied); income of a greater Resource level simply replaces the old one automatically (e.g., a character with only 3 Resources that gets a 5 Resource reward now just has 5 Resources, but might want to track the original 3 separately until it adds up to more).

• Income of the same level of Resources (e.g., 4.3 when the character has 4) has a chance to raise Resources equal to its decimal place (i.e., roll a d10 and try to get equal or less to the decimal to raise Resources).
• Income of one Resource level less (e.g., 3.6 when the character has 4) rolls twice: if the first roll is a 1, treat the income as one greater for a second roll (e.g., the Resources 4 character rolls 1 and then 3, going to Resources 5 with a 3.6 profit).

Hirelings

This system may be particularly useful in allowing higher-Resource characters to maintain hired NPCs for various purposes. For reference, the following are approximately the rates for such NPCs:

1. Pauper for a day, Commoner for an hour
2. Pauper for a week, Commoner for a day, Artisan for 5 hours, Merchant for 3 hours, Specialist for 1 hour
3. Pauper for a season, Commoner for 2 weeks, Artisan for 1 week, Merchant for 3 days, Specialist for 1 day, Luminary for 1 hour
4. Commoner for 6 months, Artisan for a season, Merchant for 2 months, Specialist for 2 weeks, Luminary for 1 day
5. Specialist for 6 months, Luminary for 2 weeks
6. Luminary for 6 months (having a noble work exclusively for you is very expensive)

System Review: Smallville, Part 4

Trouble

As mentioned in part 2, NPCs are pretty easy in Smallville, insofar as they don’t have a lot of stats and the ones they do have include descriptive phrases to help you roleplay them at the table. While you’re encouraged to go through the same chargen for NPCs as for PCs, it’s pretty easy to eyeball it when you’re not trying to give them very specific connections (i.e., you just want them for a one-off). So, by and large, NPCs are very easy to create for the table.

But if you’re like me, the best NPC is one you don’t even have to think about statting at all until the players have given enough of a damn at the table. Smallville has you covered, and I’m actually shocked more games don’t do something similar. The GM has a resource called the Trouble Pool, which starts small but grows from various things throughout the session. Not only can the GM spend this pool in ways comparable to players and their Plot Points, it can also be rolled for any situation that doesn’t have its own character sheet (and used to augment NPCs that do have one). Further, if you want to take the single step of saying “This NPC is a 2dX Extra,” you can use those Extra dice to assist the Trouble Pool when the NPC is on screen.

The main way the Trouble Pool increases is that the GM can “buy” a player’s die that rolls a 1 to add a Complication and also add that die to the pool. So if the player rolls a 1 on a d6 (even on an otherwise successful roll), the GM can toss that player a Plot Point, describe something that complicates the action, and add a d6 to the Trouble Pool. Since players will often be rolling several dice, at least one of them turning up a 1 is likely, so the Trouble Pool basically grows faster the more the players are making rolls.

This is very intimidating to players. And, honestly, that’s really its major benefit as a system: because smaller dice are more likely to roll 1, the Trouble Pool is likely to mostly be made of small dice that aren’t much of a threat against any PC rolling any d10s or d12s. I stopped buying d4s altogether unless I had something interesting to add as a story complication because the value of a Plot Point to the player was generally more than that of a d4 to the Trouble Pool. But players do eventually roll 1s on big dice, and toward the end of the session, the players seriously need to worry that their troubles are going to be rolling several high dice with a lot of low dice to use similarly to Plot Points.

Pacing wise, the Trouble Pool mechanic has a very similar effect to Exhaustion in Don’t Rest Your Head: it creates a natural curve over the course of a session where players eventually realize they need to start dealing with their problems before they become insurmountable.

Distinctions

Smallville handles the concept of “merits and flaws” in a very interesting way that captures many of the advantages of Fate‘s Aspects while retaining a level of crunchiness that’s easier to use for new players. Distinctions are additional traits that players can buy during chargen, and, as mentioned, they wind up filling out a lot of the “skills and attributes” mindspace that a more traditional system would have. So, for example, the “Athletic” Distinction fulfills a lot of functions that a Strength attribute or Athletics skill would cover. But Distinctions can be more traditional-style advantages/disadvantages as well: see “Impulsive” and “Family Reputation.”

In addition to providing an extra die to any roll in which the trait applies, as a player increases the die size of a Distinction, he or she gains access to new thematic special abilities. The cool thing about these is that they’re built with a very specific language of system modifiers. Every special ability gives you one of a few types of bonuses in exchange for one of a few types of costs (such as spending a Plot Point, giving a bonus die to your opponent, or adding a die to Trouble). There are enough of each side of the equation that, coupled with the theme lent by the Distinction name, there are a lot of variations, but it’s easy to understand and simply phrase how they work by virtue of the consistent list. They synergize pretty well too: see Pyro’s three Plot Points for 3d6 added to Trouble trifecta of “Impulsive,” “Willful,” and “In Over My Head.”

Distinctions are a very clever way of hooking advantages to the system rather than making each one an exception that must be remembered. Many other games could probably do something similar with the positive and negative components of their own core rules.

Complications

It bears mentioning again, that Complications (i.e., the GM buying a “1″ with a Plot Point to get a Trouble die and describe a problem) are a very cool aspect of the system. I’ve never seen players so happy to “take their medicine” and accept the bad consequences of a roll as when they knew they’d immediately receive compensation in the form of Plot Points for the inconvenience. Someday, I might have to try an old school WoD game with the punitive botching rules and see if giving the players back Willpower every time they botch increases the enjoyment of the system.

Don’t Lower Your Auctoritas

So of course, when Fred asks for DRYH hacks that don’t use existing IP, that’s all my game design muse wants to give me. Here’s one for Nobilis. Note that I don’t have the new edition yet, so it works off of 2nd edition’s assumptions.

Enchancelment

It’s all over the news. There’s been another bizarre death. There’s been one every day. What the news doesn’t say is, with each one, the city gets a little weirder. Most people haven’t yet noticed that it’s getting harder and harder to get out, but they will. The roads are turning in on themselves. The ties to the rest of the world are slipping away. Somehow, you’re one of the few that have noticed. There’s something behind it all, something far more than human. And it’s watching you. It’s judging you. It’s changing you.

You’ve started to notice that you can do things. Things not human. Things not even superhuman. And with the powers of a god come the trials of one. You’re being challenged. Threats are seeking you out. But nobody will tell you the rules. Your powers grow the more you use them. What are you getting yourself into? What happens if you pass these tests? Even worse, what happens if you fail?

Growing Power

This system serves as a way to play out the Empowerment of Nobilis PCs. It postulates a situation where an Imperator is gradually determining which of the citizens of a new Chancel will be its Powers by slowly extending them capabilities during the 100 day ritual to make the Chancel. If they prove competent, they’ll be awarded soul shards… if they don’t, dementia animus is possibly the best case scenario for a mortal that tasted the powers of creation and then had them taken away.

Players have three types of dice: Competence, Passion, and Miracles.

• Competence is similar to Discipline. Every PC starts with 3 dice in the Competence pool. It represents anything that a pure mortal could do, if only in movies with a very liberal view of physics and other sciences. When Competence dominates:
• The success or failure plays out with the precision and order of the truly skilled.
• The player should make a mark next to Aspect.
• Passion is similar to Exhaustion, but represents the power of the character’s will and soul. It starts at 0 dice, but a player can take on one die of Passion before each roll. As the Passion pool increases, the character becomes increasingly “real” and noticeable, giving all the impression of a colored image against a desaturated background. When Passion dominates:
• The success or failure is strongly influenced by the character’s overwhelming emotions or force of personality. If the result was a success, and any kind of supernatural effect was in play, onlookers will notice a “bubble” around the character, about the diameter of her own height, where her own reality is imposed on the world.
• The player should make a mark next to Spirit and reduce the Passion pool by 2 dice (to a minimum of 0). Passion has no technical cap, but will become increasingly likely to dominate and reduce itself the higher it gets.
• Miracles is similar to Madness, in that it is a fast surge pool where the player can add from 0 to 6 dice on any roll. Adding these dice represents warping local reality to produce a result, and the player should describe what is being attempted. When Miracles dominates:
• The result of the miracle is very obvious, and may cause mortal onlookers to go mad.
• The player should make a mark next to Realm (unless using her Affinity, as described below, in which case make a mark next to Domain).

Players also have a Skill and a Domain.

• Skill represents an area of mortal concern that the character is particularly skilled at. It is mechanically about as broad as an Exhaustion Talent. Whenever using the Skill, the player may choose to turn any or all Competence dice into 6s after rolling (i.e., the player can all but ensure that Competence dominates).
• Affinity is the miraculous concept with which the character is becoming increasingly associated. It is a single word that will eventually become the character’s Domain. Whenever Miracles dominates, if the result is within this affinity, it increases Domain instead of Realm.

GMs roll two types of dice:

• Tribulation dice are rolled when the GM believes that the situation the players are dealing with was engineered by the Imperator to challenge the characters. This might be an overt manifestation of the Imperator’s domains and operatives or may be a situation that was socially engineered (e.g., clues that lead the PCs to a tight spot). Tribulation ranges from a minimum of 1 die (to some extent, everything the characters encounter is being monitored and allowed to happen by the Imperator) up to 10 or more, and should generally increase over the course of the 100 days as the Imperator tests the PCs more thoroughly. When Tribulation dominates:
• The seams of the challenges become obvious: it is metaphorically like a trap suddenly springing shut.
• Mark whether the PC succeeded or failed on such a roll, and record a mark next to Approval or Disappointment for that Imperator’s subsequent dealings with that PC.
• Bane dice are rolled whenever the situation involves dangerous elements that aren’t directly under the Imperator’s control. That is, the PCs are in more danger than just failing their future master’s tests. This can be anything from conflict with citizens of the soon-to-be-Chancel, to environmental difficulties, to the involvement of supernatural elements beyond the Imperator (rival Powers, future Chancel Banes, or even Excrucians). Bane dice range from 0 to 6 based on the severity of the situation. When Bane dominates:
• The PC is injured in some way; if the roll was a success for the player, this injury is superficial, but failure can bring actual life-threatening problems.
• It is up to the GM and players whether death is on the table from too many failed Bane dominations.

Questions

In addition to choosing a Skill and an Affinity, each player should answer the following questions for her character:

• What is your name?
• Why is this happening to you?
• Who do you love most and why?
• Who do you hate most and why?
• Why should you have power?
• What just happened to you?

Ennoblement

Once the group is ready to proceed to their characters becoming Powers (everyone agrees that they’ve been sufficiently challenged for the Imperator’s satisfaction or the 100 days run out), convert the characters to Nobilis rules via the following method:

1. Total all marks made across the four scores for each player (e.g., 5 Aspect, 6 Domain, 2 Realm, 7 Spirit is 20 total).
2. Divide the game’s character creation point total by this number to create a multiplier (e.g., in a 30 point game, 20 marks means a 1.5 multiplier).
3. Apply the multiplier to each individual category so the marks turn into character points with as similar a ratio as possible to the original marks (e.g., in the above examples, the player would have 7-8 Aspect, 9 Domain, 3 Realm, and 10-11 Spirit).
4. Spend each category to buy the related trait levels, bonus miracle points, or Gifts related to that category (e.g., 9 Domain points buys 3 levels of the Domain trait, 9 bonus Domain Miracle Points, 9 points worth of Domain-related Gifts, or some combination of the three).