My Worlds

There's a thread on RPG.net right now, 'This setting feels like home.' It talks about how game-masters have different kinds of worlds and settings that they just feel more natural and comfortable with.

Here were my thoughts:

I think for me...

The sort of 'generic' fantasy setting. The sort of world you put together when you want to run an old-style D&D game but you're not really sure about all this politics and realism and such.

Endless plains or grass stretching under the world's slightly alien sky. A scattering of lonely, walled towns in a wide-open wilderness. Isolated little farms where the farmers struggle to survive, and are sometimes wiped out without warning by rampaging monsters or strangely lovecraftian crop diseases. Forests with trees of impossible size. Sometimes stranger places: deserts of glittering silver sand, wastelands covered in strange crystal growths, vast moss-floored mushroom forests in incomprehensibly huge caverns. Dungeons and monuments and ruins dot the landscape. Some from from fallen kingdoms, some the sewers or catacombs of long-abandoned towns, some the towers of wizards. Some just go entirely unexplained; perhaps there's a reason they exist, but it's nothing the players or the locals know.

No real long range communication. Each kingdom or settlement has only barely heard stories of the next one over. Politics and intrigue limited to the occasional monster-disguised-as-a-royal-vizier, or usurping anti-paladin that kills the wise ancient king. And Kings are just people with castles in charge of fielding a military to protect and control the handful of towns in their little corner of the world. Adventurers as a profession. Maybe even the silliness of a Thieves' Guild in some towns.

I can run that kind of thing.

Give me something like Exalted, though, and while I absolutely love the setting, my brain starts to injure itself under the strain of trying to figure out the motives of so ungodly many different factions and events, as well as deciding what else is happening all over the world at any given moment that will have some significant impact.

Basic Combat

Later on, I intend to have a slightly more in-depth combat system for Rul-Skaath, but I don't really intend fighting to be a huge focus.

Anyway.

Attacking

To make an attack, the attacker rolls Personal Prowess versus the defender's Personal Prowess. If he succeeds, the attack hits, and for every full 2 points by which he succeeds he adds +1 to his effective Might for determining the effects of the hit, to a maximum of +4.

Integrity

Each character and physical object has an Integrity rating, which is simply a percentage signifying how damaged they are (100 points of Integrity is 100% Integrity; full health.)
A character at or below 50% integrity has a -2 penalty to rolls and totals. A character at or below 10% integrity has a -4 penalty to rolls and totals. A character that is reduced to 0% integrity is disabled.

Damage

The damage dealt by an attack is (1d8+6+Personal+Might+Level minus the target's Personal+Might+Level) > value. The target's Integrity is reduced by that amount.

(note to self: that is math, and ugly math at that; is there a way to get a similar effect in a more intuitive manner? Hm.)

Simple Conflict Resolution

Every RPG needs a conflict resolution system of some sort; it's what distinguished it from the 'I shot you!' 'no, you missed!' 'nuh-uh!' ad nauseum of childhood games of 'pretend'.

In general, when taking an action, you roll an octahedral die (1d8 using the commonly accepted notation), and add the result to the sum of two attributes plus any modifiers and possibly level, and compare the results to a Difficulty.

If the result of your roll is less than or equal to the Difficulty, you fail.

If the result of your roll is higher than the Difficulty, you succeed.

For opposed actions, the Difficulty is usually two of the opponent's attributes, plus modifiers and possibly level, plus 4. This addition of 4 means that when a character is opposed by an exactly equal opponent, his chance of success or failure is 50/50.

Standard Roll

1d8 + attribute + attribute + modifiers + level?

vs.

Difficulty

4 + attribute + attribute + modifiers + level?

Getting an RPG Moving

Running and playing various Roleplaying games, I've encountered one really annoying recurrent problem: players simply talking about the game, rather than playing it. This seems especially true in sandbox-style games, and especially games where players have lots of options.

Players sort of go off on daydreams... 'I could go on quests until I have enough money to start my own village, and then set myself up as the local ruler, and train my villagers in martial arts, and...' And an hour goes by, of the player considering options. Meanwhile, the character is still a peasant with a rusty sword inherited from his father, or whatever. Because for all those thought-exercises and dreams, nothing has actually happened in-game.

And with those players, sometimes if you press them... make them decide to do something, they go 'Okay, uh. I look for a quest.' A sort of noncommittal, general declaration. That doesn't help me much, because then not only do I have to do my job as the game master (deciding the world's reaction to your actions and such), I have to do the player's job too (deciding what your actions actually are), with the player only contributing vague goals.

That's no fun.

If you're a player in a 'sandbox' situation, I suggest taking matters into your own hands. Don't paint your actions in broad, vague strokes. Give active details, to make it feel like something is happening in the game and to give the GM something to play with. Rather than, 'I go look around town', have your character actually walk out of the team's base, mount his horse, and ride into town. Tie the horse to a post somewhere and go into the local tavern. Buy a round of drinks for everyone if you need to. Just... do stuff.

White Wolf is trying, but...

... their support for fansites isn't sufficient.

I was looking into their 'Dark Pack' agreement thing, but...

Well. I can tell they mean well, but it's just not practical to work with this stuff.

This other blog post summarizes it better than I could.

Distractions!

I've been meaning to work on Rul-Skaath, but I keep getting sidetracked. Between trying to get a real job, keeping up with aikido, and running a World of Darkness campaign, I've just not had the mental focus to work on it.

Mostly, all my creative energy has been going into house-rules for Changeling and Geist, recently, and sadly I think there are copyright issues related to posting those.

xkcd is an interesting webcomic I've been following for a few years. I thought this one was worth pointing out, though. I've been seeing a lot of this kind of logic when reading up on blogging, and it's sort of depressing.

Well, I'm working on it. For now I'm just putting up posts daily or more, often just little things... but I'm trying to get used to this and get better at it. Hopefully one day I'll have an audience and sufficient writing talent to be able to hold their interest.

Avatar, Second Half

Well, sometimes I'm wrong.

I watched the second half of Avatar today, and it really was better than I initially thought. Most notably, a lot of the characters I had originally simply not cared about became a lot more likable and interesting as the end of the movie approached.

I still got the Fern Gully vibe from the whole thing (especially when the bulldozer showed up!), but it's not a carbon-copy of that story, nor of the other stories it seems similar to. The story's still pretty shallow, but it's good enough to make the movie work.

All that said, I think one of the major criticisms of the movie is valid: the whole 'mighty whitey' thing. I wish it didn't. It would have been interesting to see it break from that stereotype. But if you can bear that one flaw and the slow pacing of the first half of the movie, the rest of the movie's at least worth the rental price, and I do regret not seeing it in theaters.

Avatar, First Half

I missed out on Avatar when it was new in theaters, but I finally have a chance to watch it. Having to rent it means I don't get the full experience, though; no 3D, and watching a much tinier, lower quality image on my television.

So far it seems kind of like a slow-paced version of Fern Gully with giant blue aliens instead of little fairies. The special effects are very pretty, but I think they lose some of their power when they're being watched on a small television screen.

I don't actually like it all that much. I felt like I would, so I'm sort of disappointed. I can't really put my finger on what's missing. It could be any of the things I've already mentioned, or something else entirely.

I'll put up more of a review tomorrow, probably, after I finish watching it.

The Extra Changeling Books

The line for Changeling: The Lost was supposed to be completed with Equinox Road, and it really already had enough to be amazingly complete at that point. Apparently sales were phenomenal, so White Wolf went back and added two books to the line: Dancers in the Dusk, and Swords at Dawn.

My initial reaction was irritation that they had added books. I had bought the game and supplements for Changeling on the basis that I would only have to buy a finite number, so it wouldn't become yet another game for which I buy another book every couple months forever. When I heard that they had gone back on their word and were adding new books, I was actually pretty annoyed; granted it's just good business on their part, but they told us, their customers, that they weren't doing any more Changeling books, and then they did!

After waiting quite a while, though, there's no evidence that they're adding any more. Since it looks like the line is honestly complete, I went to the local gaming store and picked up copies of the two books. Turns out they're actually pretty good!

I'm not sure I would recommend one over the other. As their names sort of suggest, they seem designed to fit together in some ways -- for instance, discussion of Fate is in one book, but Talecrafting (Changeling manipulation of Fate) is mechanically defined in the other, so to get a good overview of Fate in general and how it influences the Lost, you really would want both books.

I'm happy with both books so far. The fluff is good, but that's White Wolf for you. That's really what they're good at.

As far as mechanics...

...if you have a player interested in talecrafting it might be a good idea to lighten or even remove the 'addiction/madness' effect of using it, or at least make it so that if the character doesn't use it for a while his accumulated susceptibility to the addiction cools down. The suggestions in the back part of the Dusk book about how to tweak the game all seem to be mechanically terrible and poorly thought-out, so you'll probably want to just ignore those. Other than those two minor issues, which amount to only a few paragraphs that need to be tweaked or ignored, the books seem pretty solid.

Measurement

Everything in the game is, by default, simply measured in 'units'. These don't properly convert to any real-world measures, since nothing in Rul-Skaath is real and objects and beings can exist on all sorts of scales.

A character's avatar is Personal Might > value units in height, by default.

On his turn, he can move to and/or interact with anything within Personal Domain > value units that isn't protected by some sort of barrier. He can't move or act through barriers, but he can through mid-air. If his turn ends off the ground and he can't fly, however, he falls.

This movement is somewhat abstract; during your turn (both before and after you take any other actions) you can move around all you like within the radius of your movement, you just have to pick some specific point at which to end your movement at when your turn ends.

Attributes Revisited

Every character in Rul-Skaath has the following Attributes:

Personal (PS) -- inherent capabilities of the character's avatar

Wondrous (WN) -- the character's ability to use powers

Sovereign (SV) -- the character's ability to create and manipulate terrain and other characters


Might (MT) -- direct power and influence and resistance to the same

Domain (DM) -- range and area of effects

Prowess (PW) -- chance of success in action and ability to evade the actions of others


Level (LV) -- a general scale of power

By default, LV begins at 0 and every other Attribute begins at 5. Starting characters must then choose one non-LV Attribute to subtract 2 from, and two others to add 2 to.

In play, these attributes are usually used by adding one together one from each category, referring to them by the names from the first two categories. For instance, PS+MT+LV is referred to as Personal Might, and SV+DM+LV is referred to as Sovereign Domain. If the word 'basic' is included, this means LV is not added, so for instance Basic Personal Might is merely PS+MT.

The Table

# > type
Whenever something in these rules is written as # > value, that means find the closest rating '#' on the table and use the value listed with it. Similarly, # > rating means find the closest value to '#' on the table and use the rating listed with it. # can be a simple equation, usually adding a few numbers together. For instance, 20 + 5 > value should be read as 25 > value, which is 1,792.

Close Enough?
During actual gameplay, numbers from the table may be unnecessarily precise. The Game Master should feel free to fudge numbers by a few percent; that is, pretty much everything but the first two digits of a number can be ignored. The resultant error is generally so minor as to be insignificant to gameplay.

You're Above Average

There's a statistic floating around that gets quoted sometimes, that on average, most people believe themselves to be above average intelligence. It's true that some people tend to think more highly of themselves than they probably should. But... I think there's some validity to thinking your intelligence is above average.

The logic goes like this:

We don't have a good and proper definition of intelligence. There are all sorts of kinds of intelligence. Since there are so many, odds are any given person is pretty good at some kind of intelligence.

Everyone gets to pick what matters to them. As any RPG min-maxer knows, you can usually find a way to bend the situation to suit your greatest attribute. So... most people will look at the world, and live in the world, through the lens of whatever they're best at. And they're probably above average in whatever that thing is.

So.

The 'everyone thinks they're above average' statistic often gets used as an example of rampant delusion. I think there's some truth to it, sure (some people are simply delusional), but I don't think it's a completely fair assumption.

In the way that matters to you, you probably are better than most people. And if you're not... well, examine yourself. Figure out your strengths. Because odds are you have an untapped advantage of some sort.

The Octahedron

I think my dice mechanic will be a simple d8 + modifiers, with the main modifiers being the relevant attribute. In contested rolls, the defender automatically gets a 4 instead of rolling, and ties go to the defender.

This allows a decent range, and means that on an average difficulty (where you need a roll of 4 to succeed), +2 (remember, this means a doubling of your attribute's value) halves your chance of failure, and -2 (halving your attribute's value) halves your chance of success.

Without adding some kind of way to get extra bonuses or something, though, this does mean that a character can, for instance, never hit someone in a fight that is four times as skilled as him. While that kind of makes sense, I wonder if there should be some sort of low probability of automatic success.

Or some kind of 'luck point' resource players can spend to add to their rolls or something, for the one-time-only dramatic success type events.

A Matter of Scale

I want to go with a logarithmic scaling for attributes, a bit like the stats in Blood of Heroes or the Speed/Distance table in GURPS. Annoyingly, this necessitates adding a table to my game (the bane of immersive RPGs!) but I think it might be okay, being really the only table that's part of the game mechanics.

I think I'll set it so that +2 to an attribute represents a doubling of its value, and an odd-numbered attribute is 1.4 times the value of the even-numbered attribute before it. So...

Attr..Val
8.......5
9.......7
10.....10
11.....14
12.....20
13.....28
14.....40
15.....56
16.....80

...That's the basic idea, assuming I center the attributes on 10.

Characters and Attributes

So, what is a player character in Rul-Skaath?

The idea is that one day you awaken in this strange, semi-abstract world with your memories fragmented and broken. What happened? Who knows? Perhaps this is the afterlife. Perhaps mankind reached the technological singularity and you're in a virtual world. Perhaps you've simply gone insane. I intend these various beliefs to form the basis of many of the religions and political factions of Rul-Skaath, so I don't want to give a single absolute answer to this.

Characters retain their memory and personality from when they were human, generally, but disorientation and delusion are common, and various people may have contradictory memories. It should be possible to step into the game as yourself, any of your previous role-playing characters, or even a blank slate.

Once in Rul-Skaath, characters are no longer human, however. They aren't so strictly bound by the laws of physics, geometry, or biology, but instead are bound by this universe's set of dreamlike rules.

Their attributes should reflect that. Here is what I currently have:

Might (MT) -- A character's Might is how solidly real he is; how much of an influence he can have on his surroundings and how much he can resist the influence his surroundings exert upon him. Might is roughly analogous to Strength and Stamina in other roleplaying games, but also determines things like how hot a fireball thrown by the character is or how much punishment a conjured barrier can take.

Domain (DM) -- A character's Domain is the reach of his influence. This includes perception, range, movement, and the radius of area effects.

Prowess (PR) -- The finesse trait, basically. To affect another being, Prowess is pitted against Prowess, with the defender's success meaning he has somehow evaded the influence.

So far it doesn't look like I need other skills, though I've had some thoughts about adding a second axis: Personal, Sovereign, and Wondrous. These would be added to the base traits to determine hybrid traits of a sort, so you'd use (for example) Personal Domain to determine movement distance, Wondrous Might to determine the power of a conjured lightning bolt, and Sovereign Prowess to successfully trick, misdirect, or manipulate others socially.

Rul-Skaath

Part of what drove me to begin this blog is as a tool to organize my thoughts. I like to fiddle with RPG mechanics and I'd like to try my hand at an amateur RPG of my own, but so often I just let the ideas sit in the back of my mind until they're forgotten again. I've found that having to explain my reasoning and ideas to people helps me work. And here I do have an audience of sorts.

So, my game...

It will be called Rul-Skaath, possibly with a sub-title made of actual words. The name comes from a location I made for an RPG I ran years ago, which will be the central hub and starting location of this game.

The inspiration for this game comes from a number of sources.

Blood of Heroes (RPG) -- Ideally, I want this system to have that sense of scale, where the rules function both for meaningless goblin minions all the way up to planet-crushing gods. This game shouldn't simply assume a character is human-sized, with human-average traits.

Exalted: The Fair Folk (RPG) -- The premise of this game is similar to a wyld-only Fair Folk game, in that the characters should wield some direct control over their reality and surroundings, potentially building entire worlds and nations for themselves out of the ether.

Second Life (MMOG) -- For similar reasons to the above; I want to incorporate some of the 'sandbox' feel of Second Life into my game. If a player wants his character to have a house, it should be possible for him to actually mystically construct one, possibly constructing the surrounding fairy-tale forest as well if he has the inclination and sufficient power and skill.

Various MU*s (PC games) -- Again, this is for the sandbox 'you can build anything' feel, especially present in Social MUSHes. I'm also thinking the game world itself should be structured similarly, with stuff divided into rooms (places you can be), exits (ways to get between places you can be), and objects (things that can be in places). Exalted's wyld functions similarly with its waypoints and journeys, so I'll have to put some thought into how to differentiate my game so I'm not simply playing follow the leader, but this method works so much better than trying to apply euclidean geometry to such a malleable, free-form setting.

dot Hack (various media) -- In my mind, the visual style of this game is similar to the .hack series: all the terrain should have a sort of bigness to it. Vast, sweeping plains; thick and ancient forests; blasted nightmare-lands of ash and tar; all dotted with inexplicable dungeons and strange terrain features, and with an air of loneliness and dream around it all.

Introduction

So...

This is my first foray into the world of blogging.

In theory, this blog is about whatever happens to be on my mind at the time, but since my primary hobby is roleplaying games and especially fiddling with roleplaying game systems, there's a good chance the majority of my posts will be on similar topics. I don't know how often I'll be writing, but I'll be trying to get something out every day or two even if it's just a few paragraphs.