AWW: Magic As Your Ally

A lot of roleplaying games have rules that allow for characters to have a companion character who is in some ways an extension of the player character. They take up resources you would otherwise use for your character’s own abilities (points, slots, build choices) but more or less belong to you and act more or less at your direction, though sometimes they are under the game runner’s control.

The approach I’m taking to defining broad character qualities in A Wilder World encourages you to think of your character’s main defining qualities as a bit like a Green Lantern power ring to begin with. You still have to figure out which of your qualities best addresses the problem, and figure out how it addresses the problem, but the limits are the intersection of your imagination and the skepticism of the Storyweaver or group at large.

Magic takes that up a notch, in that there’s much less of a clearly defined line where “Okay, that’s just impossible.” Whether or not it’s possible to acrobat so hard you break down a reinforced stone wall is a matter of the game’s tone; if it’s at all realistic, then no, you can’t. Whether or not it’s possible to grow and animate plants with plant magic to take it down is more a matter of opinion, since “realism” and “verisimilitude” aren’t concepts that apply to high fantasy magic.

So magic needs to find its limitations elsewhere. I was talking about this back in June, and while I like the ideas I came up with there for different “magical prices”, I feel like they’re way overly mechanical in the way I imagined them being applied.

But while thinking about how to refine the idea of “low control” magic made me think of a general approach that I really like, and that is: treat magic the way you would treat an “ally” ability, one ultimately under the control of the Storyteller:

It shows up when the player character calls it, mostly.

It does what the player directs it to, mostly.

It does only what the player asks it to, mostly.

It’s the “mostlies” that matter, that make it interesting and that serve as a limitation. And the thing is, they all hinge on the idea that the magic use is successful.

Under this model, the use of magic would consist of three acts, which we might call summoning, directing, and dispersing. Each of them would have a chance for success or failure. If you fail to summon magic, nothing happens, or nothing significant. You might get a rustle of leaves when you wanted a gale of wind. You might get a brief patch of discolored air where you tried to form an illusion. You’re not left with any more problems than you started with, though.

When you direct the magic, you tell it what to do. Success means it does more or less that, but with the possibility of “wild” results built into the result mechanism. Failure would generally mean it does not do what you want it to do, with any significant negative downsides also coming from the play of cards.

You could continue to direct the magic as long as you maintain concentration on it, without having to draw or disperse it in between. This would be the normal state of affairs when a wizard is dueling or doing battle, or using magic to accomplish a large task that is actually many smaller ones.

When you’re done, though, you’d have to attempt to disperse the magic. Success signifies a clean ending. Failure would not mean your magic lasts forever, just that the magical forces you unleashed linger a bit longer and do some damage on their way out the door.

Even when magic is operating under your control, though, it would be like a charmed minion or a familiar or beast companion or cohort or point-bought ally, in the sense that you can tell the Storyteller “I have my magic do this”, but the Storyteller can interject, or interpret things a little differently according to the nature of the forces involved.

Making the equivalent of three checks to do anything with magic might be a little excessive. The concept of “trivial magic” (cantrips, roleplaying special effects, “I’m a wizard” demonstration) still exists. It’s only when you’re trying to achieve something that magic accumulates risk and price. Character gimmicks that take the form of specialized spells your character has mastered removes the need to summon magic before and disperse it after for that single very specific application, leaving only the control roll.

All this doesn’t completely supplant the idea of different “magic prices” I described back in June, but I think it makes for a better baseline approach. As always, my central idea when it comes to magic is to create an experience more like how powerful magic works in fiction than how it works in roleplaying games.

 

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

AWW: Allies As Your Allies

The ideas in the last post spiraled out of thoughts about handling things like character pets, beast companions, et cetera, that I’d also like to take the time to thresh out in blog format.

One of the things I really liked in D&D 4E was the way familiars worked. Specifically, the fact that instead of being limited to a very small range of very small animals, they ran with the idea that a familiar is not *quite* an animal to begin with and defined it as basically a meta class of creature that fits a certain size and has certain limitations in interacting with the environment, but can be just about anything, then defined exception-based templates for many different types, with an invitation to flesh out your specific familiar’s “fluff” in ways that fit your character (crackling elemental energy auras, metallic skin, demonic or fey appearance, etc.)

The original choices were mostly limited to the familiar animal fare, but the expanded offerings included everything from pet slimes to gear-driven automata to disembodied eyes and hands.

The basic problem with such an embarrassment of wealth when it comes to choices, though, is that you have to either define everything you can think of (the 4E approach), or you have to give players a reasonably balanced set of tools to build their own definitions (the GURPS approach), and both approaches tend towards bloat over time.

Jack in particular liked the idea of a roguish character with a disembodied hand as his accomplice, so making sure this is an option has been added to my General System Benchmarking Standards along with “can do all the character archetypes D&D players would look for”. Not in the sense that any system I design would have disembodied hands added to it in order to please Jack, but in the sense that “Can it handle a player who wants to do this?” is a pretty good question given that it’s reasonably specific, reasonably limited, and interesting.

The last major draft of AWW tried to do a compact point based approach to building companion figures, and I don’t think was terrible but was out of place next to the define-by-archetypes system for player characters. Figuring out how to work them out under the Strong Points/Qualities system I’m working with now helped me refine my understanding of exactly what the system is and how it works, which is why I’m going to use the idea of animal companions and similar abilities as an example of how it all hangs together.

Your character’s major features are sketched out by choosing a number of Qualities. Each Quality has its own level. These are the only “levels” in the game. Your character does not go up a level, except within the scope of a Quality.

Your level in a Quality basically means your ability to Get Stuff Done using it. What stuff? Whatever stuff that Quality applies to. All Qualities work on the same level scale, which when applied to Qualities representing a personal attribute like strength or speed or a particular skill set looks something like this:

1. Would be considered outstanding in a small village.
2. Outstanding in a good-sized town.
3. Outstanding in a large city.
4. Outstanding in a kingdom.
5. Outstanding in a vast land.
6. Outstanding in the world.
7. Outstanding in history.

This is “outstanding” in the sense of “tending to stand out”. Only outstanding abilities register as Qualities; they are the things about you that people tell stories about.

All Qualities have the same basic effect: they give you better results when you try to do something, and shift the upper bound of what you can do. Again, the “something” varies from Quality to Quality. This is referred to as the Quality’s scope, and while some will have definite exceptions, what is part of the Quality’s scope is a matter of interpretation and negotiation.

Personal Qualities like Strength, Speed, Influence, or Perception have a fairly obvious scope.  Archetypal Qualities like Alchemist and Thief, slightly less so. What about Companion Qualities, though? What does it mean to have a Level 1 Wolf, Cat, Horse, or Raven? Or a Disembodied Hand? Or Slime? Or Bottle Imp? Or Gear Thing?

Well, your level of a Quality determines how reliably you can do the things that Quality does, and how impressive the things you can do with it are. So if you have a Level 1 Raven, you can do anything you could reasonably (with dramatically flexible definitions of “reasonable”, as this is heroic fantasy fiction) expect a hero’s raven companion to do, with the same facility as if you were using Level 1 in your own abilities. Same thing with a Level 1 Wolf, or Cat, or Hand.

“So basically,” some people reading this will be saying, “you should put everything into animal companions, because a level in your companion is the same thing as a level of everything.”

Not so!

Your raven is still a raven. It’s scope is defined as things that the person across from the table hears and says, “I could see a raven doing that.” That person also gets to decide how easily a raven could do that. Having more levels of raven cancels out the added difficulty of things the person across the table thinks are kind of a stretch, but your raven remains a raven.

It’s also an autonomous creature with a will outside your own, even if we’re constructing our character in a way that suggests a mystical bond, which means anything more complicated than having your companion follow you or perform a simple trick may call for a draw, which means possible complications. Even stuff that is automatic when you do it yourself involves an element of chance when you send your monkey or imp to do it, because it’s not you doing it.

“Allowing players to define the scope by the type of creature would be seriously unbalanced, because obviously a panther is more useful than a house cat.”

It’s not obvious to me. I’d rather have a panther who was attuned to my wishes in a tactical wargame, but in terms of actual problem solving the domestic feline seems to bring a lot more versatility to the table. I mean, in real life, I would rather have the cat familiar than the panther ranger companion simply because the cat would be more of a pure bonus whereas living (to say nothing of traveling) with a panther complicates things.

Once you get your head around the idea that the Quality itself suggests a scope of things that can be done/problems that can be addressed and the level determines how often you succeed at that, I think the possibilities for creativity become apparent. Balance can be addressed on the fly.

“So why can’t players define a deity as their companion? Level 1, scope: everything.”

Actually, being a character who benefits from direct divine intervention can basically work this way. You just have to add in some limiting assumptions that puts it down to a similar level of usefulness. I mean, it’s easier to imagine a character having access to the full resources and entire attention of a dog than of a god.

While the system would encourage players to define their own Qualities, I am planning on having a list of several specific animal companion/familiar types and a few off-the-wall ones with their scope sketched out, to give people a starting point and an idea of how to keep things on a more or less even keel. As a holdover from the previous version, specific capabilities (full combat, mount, flight, articulated hands, et cetera) are mechanically limited in a way separate from scope, so you can have a Wolf (combat!), Horse (mount!), Raven (flying!), or Monkey (hands!) more easily than you can have a Warhorse or Flying Monkey, and a simple animal familiar with none of the above more easily than them.

That disembodied hand? It would be a companion with the “handy” feature (letting it do anything a human hand could do). Its scope would be “anything you can do with your hand without exerting a lot of leverage by moving your arm” (because it doesn’t have any), with some wiggle room to represent the fact that the “handy” trait normally would give you two hands. So it could work thieves’ tools in a lock, even though that’s normally a two-hand job and it only has/is one hand.

Fairly easy to define, fairly limited in scope, but useful and cool.

To sum up: the scope of a Quality is not an exhaustive list of what special abilities you have under a Quality, but a general understanding of what it can be used for. When it comes to Personal Qualities, these are basically attributes. For Magic Qualities, they’re the type of magic you can wield. For Companion Qualities, it’s, “What kind of things could I see this critter doing in a story?”

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

AWW: “Cards are hard, you guys.”

In case you can’t tell, today I’m taking all the positive creative energy I have and threshing out my game design ideas. So, as much as I like the DORC (Deck of Results Card) system I have previously described, I see several obstacles.

1. Producing a deck of cards takes greater resources than a set of game rules playable with common dice does.
2. Purchasing a deck of cards takes greater resources than purchasing a set of game rules.
3. Playing over the internet is more complicated.
4. Managing a ~50 deck of cards that’s used for the resolution of every action could also get cumbersome.
5. Shuffling cards well is a specialized skill requiring greater dexterity than rolling dice.

With that in mind… I’m going to proceed with the development of AWW using a dice model, but with the same basic ideas I liked behind the result cards. This does mean–in the absence of specialty dice, which are still easier to produce than a specialty deck of cards–that there’s going to be a die roll chart. But so long as all the results can fit in one easy access reference thing and there’s no need to dive through books, I think this is an acceptable compromise given that it better fits my goals re: accessibility, affordability, and online portability, with developing a “Deck of Result Cards” as an optional replacement/supplement for the dice as a future goal if the demand develops.

So, here are the things to be kept from the card idea:

• The player is the one making the roll for any interaction their character has a stake in: players make stealth rolls to sneak past NPCs; perception rolls when they’re on guard against NPCs sneaking past them. Players roll to see if their spells affect another; roll to see if they resist being affected by another’s spells.
• The results are not just success/fail, but have a chance of being “wild” in some fashion.
• The player produces a number of “extra” results based on the combination of their ability level in the area and the difficulty of the task. If the player has a net advantage, they pick their favorite result. If they have a net penalty, the Storyweaver picks.

What I’m leaning towards is a result chart that has a 6×6 grid of results, with the rows being numbered according to the player’s result die (chosen from the dice rolled, as described above) and the columns being numbered according to a separately rolled (perhaps by the Storyweaver) “wild” or “fate” die. So you’d look at the wild die, find its column, look at the results you have available and take the best one. Generally, “best” would mean “highest numbered” for the player and “lowest numbered” for the Storyweaver, but there will be the odd edge cases.

It would be very generally the case that a result die of 1-3 fails and a result die of 4-6 succeeds, though the whole point of the wilding system is to make things more interesting than success or failure. For both sets of numbers, higher is better, so 1×1 would be critical failure, 6×6 would be critical success; each would require one more die roll on a separate table/line to determine the nature/magnitude, but other that, the table would give you everything you need to figure out what happened without a subsequent die roll.

I think this would be a reasonably quick playing alternative to cards, and easy enough to translate into a more flexible card system later on. The same element of greater ability level = more ability to control the outcome is still there.

 

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.