RPG Systems

Archived Posts from this Category

April 1, 2024

Post-poverty SF: Some Reflections on the Vast Inequality in the Star Wars Universe

Posted by faustusnotes under game reports, Gaming material, Metashit, Movies, RPG cosmology, RPG Systems, Science Fiction, Space Opera | Tags: books, movies, return of the jedi, sci-fi, star wars, stars in my pocket like grains of sand |
Leave a Comment

I have been playing Star Wars recently with my regular group, first using the Genesys rules and (since yesterday) using a port of the Coriolis rules, because we’re all sick of Genesys. The Star Wars universe is fun and, like D&D or Lord of the Rings, has that particular positive quality that you can settle into it without knowing anything about it – it just feels familiar. Plus, running around on missions for the Hutts is fun, what could go wrong? However, it is beginning to feel like the Star Wars universe suffers the same problem I have identified with the Harry Potter universe – it is fine so long as it is kept within a very specific and narrow narrative framework but once you try exploring it freely as an adult outside its original confines it falls apart fast. I want to try examining how in particular the Star Wars universe is weird, first from the perspective of the weird inconsistencies in the amount of energy available to its denizens, then through a discussion of how we should interpret the inequality of the rim relative to the core in light of these calculations and what we know of its history, and then through some specific examples of how this affects e.g. energy weapons and the existence and behavior of Hutt space.

How Many Dyson Spheres do You Need?

First let’s do some energy and energy density calculations, and introduce some reference values, by way of setting the context[1]. First, from this Forbes article (?) we can establish that the amount of energy required to destroy a planet like Alderaan is about 2e32 Joules[2]. That is, 2×10^32 Joules. Some quick online searches tell me that the sun outputs 4×10^26 Joules. So the Death Star is, to all intents and purposes, a Dyson Sphere wrapped around an artificially-created star, and because we know from the three original movies what the time frames are, it takes the Empire about 3 years to build one.

From a random and quite wild blog post we can estimate the death star to have a mass of about 2e18 kg, meaning that it has an energy density of an astounding 10^14 Joules per kg, if the whole thing was a giant battery. We will return to this information a little later. Here are some other random bits of information about energy:

The population of the earth consumes about 2×10^20 Joules of energy per year, meaning that if we assume most of that energy is consumed by 100 million rich people, the average energy consumption of the richest societies on earth is about 10^12 Joules in one year
If we assume an X-wing fighter weighs about 20tons, the energy required to accelerate this thing to 10000 x the speed of light (10k C) in one second would be about 10^4x3x10^8x2x10^4 (using energy required as mass times the final speed obtained, i.e. the change in momentum) which is, essentially 6×10^16, let’s say 10^17 Joules
Apparently a star destroyer weighs 40 million tons, which means it would take 10^20 Joules to get to the same speed[3]
A typical nuclear reactor produces a GW of power, which is 10^9 Joules
The original steam engine, the Watt engine, invented 250 years ago, generates 6 horsepower or about 4200 Joules, 4×10^3 Joules. So over 250 years we have improved our energy generation capacity by a factor of a million. But note that nobody in the modern world uses a Watt Engine to do anything!
A modern LIthium-ion battery has an energy density of about 750000 Joules, that is 7.5×10^5 Joules.
A lead-acid car battery has an energy density of about 150000 Joules, which is 1.5×10^5 Joules. I think this means that energy technology has developed much more slowly than energy generation – let’s say at the ln() of the rate of energy generation[4]
The Star Wars galaxy has a population of one hundred quadrillion sentient beings (10^17 people) over 1 billion (10^9) planets. I call bullshit on the latter number, since I’ve seen the map, but let’s go with it
A typical nuclear reactor has a 30-70% energy efficiency, with the rest of the power escaping as waste heat. If this profile applied to the Death Star it would be as hot as the sun, so we have to assume that it has almost perfect efficiency in power generation

So let’s look at how some of those numbers work out. Dividing the energy in the Death Star by the population of the galaxy, we find that every time the Death Star is fired it generates enough energy to enable everyone in the galaxy to have a standard of living 1000 times better than the richest people on earth. During the battle of Yavin the Death Star was fired multiple times. Just to be clear I’m going to put this in quotes:

Every time the Death Star is fired it uses enough energy to maintain the entire sentient population of the galaxy at the standard of living of the richest people on earth for a millenium

So over the 3 years of the original 3 movies the Empire generated and wasted enough energy to maintain the entire population of the galaxy for about five aeons. By way of contrast, the Republic presided over an era of peace for a thousand years.

That’s a lot of energy! Another way to think of this is to imagine that the Death Star has an energy system that is 99.9999999% efficient, that is only 0.0000001% of the energy generated is lost during the firing process. This is obviously necessary, to ensure that the waste heat generated is orders of magnitude less than the temperature of the sun. That number is 10^-8%, or as a decimal, 10^-10. If an enterprising engineer on the Death Star noted this waste, they might be able to tap it, and would thus be able to drain off 10^22 Joules of energy – enough energy to maintain their home planet’s population for 100 years if their planet was as populous as earth. This is very similar to the situation in Harry Potter, where the magical world’s rubbish is valuable enough to muggles that they can use that rubbish to change their entire lives.

Another way to think about the energy differentials involved here is to contemplate the scale of energy required from an X-wing to a star destroyer to the Death Star: we go from 10^16 J for the X-Wing through 10^20 J for the Star Destroyer to 10^32 J for the Death Star, a factor of 10^16. Compare with the ratio of energy generation from the nuclear reactor to the Watt Engine, of 10^6. We are seeing people living in and working with devices with energy density that is so far below that of the peak technology that it is as if people living on earth were using windmills to power every aspect of their lives, as if every day we saw Watt Engines alongside nuclear reactors – but three orders of magnitude greater in difference. More like if there were people living in urban Tokyo who could barely produce fire, while the rest of us cruise by in nuclear-powered cars.

Post-poverty Science Fiction

The implication of this is first and foremost that the Star Wars galaxy has levels of inequality that are staggering by even the worst standards of earth. Every three years the society of Star Wars is able to build a Dyson Sphere wrapped around an artificial sun, and fly it almost instantly to anywhere in the galaxy, where they can casually blow off enough energy to maintain the entire population of the galaxy at elite standards of living for a millenium, but Luke’s Uncle Owen is struggling to get by on Tatooine as a moisture farmer, pawning broken-down droids off of passing Jawa who live in conditions little better than those of a 19th-century gypsy. Tatooine isn’t the only planet where we see this poverty: the forest-moon of Endor, the planet where we first meet Rei, Jah-Jah Binks’s planet, and pretty much every planet we see in Star Wars is living in conditions little better than or a lot worse than a typical rural area in 1970s earth. In a sense this is similar to how there are people in rural Nigeria who have modern smartphones and a TV but no access to modern health care and unreliable electricity. But the difference is that those of us in the Imperial core on earth do not have access to energy sources 10^16 times better than those people living in Nigeria. In fact the World Population Review suggests a maximum of eight-fold difference in energy use between poorest and richest regions (though it has limited data on Africa). The inequality in the Star Wars universe is staggering, so great that is essentially unmeasurable with any meaningful metric.

And it’s not like this is the fault of the Empire, either. We don’t see any evidence anywhere in the first movie that Tatooine is a once-great, super-rich society reduced to poverty by Imperial neglect or mistreatment – in fact in that movie the Empire has only been around a couple of years (a decade?) and the Republic “presided over a thousand years of peace.” All that inequality and ruin on the edge of the empire is the fault of the Republic, and nothing is presented anywhere to suggest otherwise. Now it could be argued that the Empire has been wastefully using resources on building mobile Dyson Spheres for war, which fair enough, but why wasn’t the Republic investing in these backwaters?

They deserved to be overthrown, didn’t they?

How small can a blaster be?

This also has consequences for in-game mechanics, which could be interesting or alarming depending on how you approach the fantastic scale of energy generation in the galaxy. While converting our system to Coriolis rules we have been discussing the damage blasters do, and trying to distinguish between blaster pistols and blaster rifles – Coriolis and Genesys both have low damage settings, which makes it difficult to easily distinguish weapons from one another since a sword might do 2 damage and a dagger 1. But I noticed, based on the scale of these energy values, that the ridiculous energy densities of the machines in the universe suggest that any blaster of any size would contain so much energy that it could effectively disintegrate a human being with a single shot, and the form and function of any blaster pistol or rifle in the universe is essentially aesthetic. Consider the X-wing, which weighs 20,000 kg and can generate 10^16J of energy. That’s 10^12J per kg, and much higher if you look at just the engines. Or a light saber, which can run forever on a battery the size of the palm of your hand with enough energy to cut through steel or humans. There’s no reason to suppose that a blaster pistol and a blaster rifle would have any noticeable difference in damage from each other. The battery required to provide essentially infinite shots of plasma capable of eviscerating a human would probably weigh a gram in the Star Wars galaxy. It’s entirely possible that a blaster rifle that actually had the Cumbersome-3 quality would have enough energy to collapse skyscrapers. I suggested we price blaster pistols and blaster rifles only by damage done, and that the difference between them was that the greater stability of a rifle configuration allows it to fire at longer range and to use the aim action. If we don’t do that then we are essentially working in a setting where our weapons are the equivalent of police in our own world carrying nothing more effective than pebbles, to fight gangsters driving tanks. If you look even superficially at the energies involved in the Star Wars universe you start to notice a lot of things are wrong!

How much effort is too little?

This stupendous inequality also has implications for the entire concept of Hutt space. In the original movies we don’t see any background information about the Hutts, except to know that Jabba is a notorious gangster lording it over at least one section of a backwater desert planet. But in the games (and I assume the broader canon) Hutt space is a sprawling zone of the galaxy that covers a pretty big wedge of the galaxy and spills over onto at least one major trade route (the Corellan route). This is an area that is supposedly only nominally under Imperial control, a situation that existed before the Empire, and is controlled by competing clans of Hutts who are essentially gangsters, who the Empire attempts to cooperate with but has been “unable” or “unwilling” to completely dominate.

But why? Why would an empire that can build two Dyson spheres in three years give a flying fuck what the Hutts think? Why would an empire that can mobilize soldiers from a population of a hundred quadrillion people, deliver them anywhere in the blink of an eye with spaceships that can generate more energy than most planetary economies, let this happen? One of my fellow players suggested that this is because controlling the Hutts is “too much effort”. But what is “too much effort” to a society that can fire off a millenium of luxury energy in a second, an economy so powerful that the waste energy from one of its flagships could fuel the industrial revolutions of a thousand planets? What, they get tired? It would take them a week to invest every planetary HQ of every Hutt clan, and when the leaders had all fled to Nal Shaddaa it would be the work of a couple of minutes to rock up and vapourize all of them. Or, if your Death Star is out of commission, you blockade that planet and wait 3 years to build another one, then rock up and vapourize them.

The mere thought or conception of rebellion is not even possible in a galaxy where your leaders can rock up with a Death Star on a moment’s notice. It’s not like ancient Rome where you get warning that the bastards are coming months ahead, as they cross rivers and ride over mountains. They just turn up, a couple of minutes or hours or days after they left their last system, riding on a Dyson Sphere wrapped around a star that they built, and you have precisely five seconds to pledge your allegiance, hand over the traitors or get turned to cosmic dust. And all you have in reply is the galactic equivalent of a pen knife.

Another argument for the Hutts is that the resources they ship to the empire in exchange for their nominal independence are a reward in and of themselves, but this makes no sense in a galaxy where you can build a Dyson Sphere wrapped around an artificial star, that is a weapon. Who is going to deny you anything? And what could you possibly need? The answer of course is Kyber crystals (which are apparently needed for your artificial stars) but what is an easier way to get them? Collaborating with a large criminal network, or rolling out so much energy and luxury goods that the entire galaxy is 100 million times better off than it was just 3 years ago, and everyone is happy to go along with your plans? If they stopped building star destroyers and Death Stars for just one year they would have so much energy that everyone in the galaxy could live in luxury like the Hutts. Who would be a gangster then? It’s inconceivable that the Hutts have anything the Empire would want that they cannot buy or take.

SF’s imaginary failures

It’s very easy when you are developing visions for new worlds to have them be incoherent and inconsistent on closer inspection. Almost all of them are. But it’s very interesting to me when they are incoherent in a way that suggests either that the fundamental social structure of the world is evil, as in Harry Potter, or the game designers really didn’t know much about how the real world works, as in Feng Shui. In this case the broader Star Wars universe seems to reflect both of these properties – I feel like people who understood how the real world works might have noticed the massive inequalities in their imagined world, and I also think they should have noticed that almost all of the social problems we see in the Star Wars galaxy are the Republic’s fault. Apparently George Lucas envisioned the rebellion as the Vietnamese and the Empire as the USA, but I think that’s a flawed vision since the rebellion is happening within the Empire, while the Vietnam war happened outside it (say what you want about the USA’s many bad geo-political practices, but Vietnam was not part of US territory before they started the war). And the inequality between the USA and Vietnam in the 1960s was not in the same order as the inequality between, say, Tatooine (not part of the rebellion!) and Coruscant in the Star Wars galaxy. In fact I would guess that the inequality between the life of a Roman Patrician and the poorest heathen resident of Britannia just by Hadrian’s Wall would have been smaller than the gap between Admiral Ozzel and Luke Skywalker. George Lucas didn’t have to think about this much, just as he didn’t have to waste much time on the structure of Hutt space, because we just got glimpses of all this stuff, fragmentary visions of a world of good and evil laid out before us as we romped through it. Was Jabba the Hutt even a planetary-level gang boss? Who knows! But once you develop the extended universe you have to figure this out, you have to systematize these ideas. I personally think it would have been much better to have the Hutts not be gangsters overall, not have a concept of Hutt space, and have Jabba the Hutt be a unique gangster in command of a single planet’s underworld, as others of other races are in other isolated parts of the edge of the empire. But no amount of careful world-building can overcome the enormous, staggering inequality at the heart of the galaxy, because it’s there in the original canon.

Better examples of how to handle these problems are shown by Iain M. Banks’s Culture series, or in Firefly. In the Culture series we see a society that might be capable of building a Dyson Sphere (they probably would consider it too trashy a thing to bother with), but they don’t hoard the tech – they distribute all energy and wealth freely to whoever wants it, and nobody lacks for anything except by choice. This is the only logical endpoint for a society that has so much spare energy floating around that it can build its own stars and wrap a Dyson Sphere around them every 3 years[5]. There’s no rebellion from within the Culture because nobody needs anything from anyone, there is no inequality or even money. It’s luxury space communism!

In contrast, Firefly also takes place on the edge of the empire, in outlying colonies living in grinding poverty, lawless planets and systems where gangsters control the lives of poor and desperate people while the elites in the centre look the other way or send punitive expeditions to meddle in the lives of these people on the edge who they see as trouble-makers and scoundrels. But the society of Firefly doesn’t have infinite resources, can’t build Dyson Spheres, doesn’t have the power to blow up planets, in fact can’t even properly run a randomized clinical trial of a happiness drug. There is still inequality but it is believable in its magnitude, exists for explicitly social reasons and is the central friction driving the plot. In contrast, in Star Wars we never really find out why there is a rebellion. They don’t like the Empire, something about freedom etc, but we don’t see anything about the material or political structures underlying this rebellion. All we know is that the location of the secret rebel base is in the hands of a Princess. It kind of stands to reason that there would be staggering inequality in a Republic run by Princesses, doesn’t it? But we don’t get to ask any of those questions.

To be clear, it’s fine to me that this happens in the original three movies, I’m down with the Rebellion as soon as the show starts and I don’t need any motivation to be on Luke’s side, I know how to watch a movie. Blowing up Alderaan confirms for me that the Empire are the bad guys, even though I don’t know what the Republic did to people. That’s okay in the movies, but now my character Dita Voss is doing these jobs for the Hutts and I’m having to figure out why in this galaxy we even have Hutts and gangsters and human trafficking and poverty and contract workers in the shadow of a Dyson Sphere. Once I start exploring the broader galaxy of the expanded universe, and thinking about things like how smuggling works, why the Hutts run this system, why these planets are so poor, who I should really be trying to kill, I begin to run into big inconsistencies in the way it’s all laid out. And given the recency of the Empire, and the obvious persistence of these problems, I am starting to think I need to look further back in time to find someone to blame. And Dita Voss is starting to wonder if there is a Quelchrist Falconer she can turn to, who might have a better plan for the future, in which the Death Stars get turned on all the ruling houses, then melted down into ploughshares.

We will need something, after all, to plough all that blood and bone into the soil of our new utopia, once those distant star lords have been dragged out of their towers of infinite energy and down into the dust beside us.

fn1: A word of warning, it has been 30 years since I studied thermodynamics and electromagnetism so I may confuse some measures of total energy and flow of energy. Be patient with me!

fn2: I think that article suggests we can lower the amount if we assume it uses the planets gravitational dynamics against it, but this is inconsistent with the use of the Death Star’s main weapon in Return of the Jedi to blow up spaceships, which have no meaningful gravitational effects.

fn3: Here I’m assuming no special amount of energy required to break the light barrier or do the weird physics of hyperspeed, and assuming that the punch to light speed takes about a second. I chose 10,000 so that an X-wing can travel about 10 light years in half a day, which is consistent with the amount of time it took the pilots in Episode IV to get to the Death Star from their rebel base. An alternative method is to imagine that the hyperdrive converts their mass to energy and then transfers it, in which case the formula would be mass x 10^16 (E=mc^2, a formula originally identified by Chewbacca); in that case an X-wing requires 10^20 J and a star destroyer 10^24. But note if this is the case that the Death Star would require ~10^34 Joules to enter hyperspeed, which is more than is required to blow up Alderaan and is the energy of 100 million suns. I can’t abide those numbers! But feel free to update the wildness of this post with higher figures for hyperspeed if you want.

fn4: You could argue that this is unreasonable since batteries didn’t exist when the Watt Engine was invented, and that in a galaxy a long way away and a long time ago they just have different battery tech. The light saber certainly seems to suggest so

fn5: And remember, once you’ve built one of these bastards the next one is easier. You now have the energy of a million suns at your disposal in one mobile platform that moves faster than the speed of light, you can do anything, build anything. Need resources? Rock up to an inhabitable planet and turn it to rocks, then send in the mining drones …

January 6, 2022

Nobi Nobi TRPG: A Unique, Cute and Chaotic way to Role-play in your lunch break

Posted by faustusnotes under Game reviews, Gaming material, Japan, Reviews, RPG Systems, Steampunk | Tags: Nobi Nobi TRPG |
[2] Comments

While digging around in Amazon recently I stumbled on a cute 1-5 person card-based role-playing game called “Novice Novice Table Talk Role-playing game [steampunk]”, pictured here. In Japanese it is shortened to “Nobi Nobi TRPG”. The game is a simple and relaxed system in which every player (including the GM) picks a PC, and every player takes turns being GM and PC. In each turn the setting is determined by a “scene” card, picked randomly by the GM. The player describes the scene, their PC’s reaction, and how they resolve the challenge. This goes around the table three times, and the game is complete, with some small complications I will describe here. It is a simple, streamlined and very effective way to run a quick, randomly generated RPG.

PC Choices

The PCs are described by cards, two of which are pictured above. Each PC has a special ability and two attributes: Power and skill. In the picture above you can see the Automaton PC, which has power 2 and skill 0, and the special ability that it adds 1 die to all skill checks. The cards are two sided, with one side being a boy and one a girl, except in two cases. Sometimes the skills on each side of the card differ, though they have a shared principle. For example the Teacher can intervene to change the result of another PC’s dice roll, but the way in which the intervention happens differs depending on whether the teacher is male or female. Two PCs, the boy and the girl, don’t have a gendered back face – instead they can swap the card over at any time to become Prince or Princess, at which point their special ability changes.

Skill checks are handled by rolling 2d6 and adding the corresponding skill. Success occurs if you roll above a target number, which is determined by the Scene Card. Available PCs are:

Automaton
Maid/Butler
Phantom Thief
Diva/Musician
Doctor/Teacher
Detective
Girl/princess
Adventurer
Gunner
Mechanic
Pilot
Boy/Prince

In some cases (like musician/diva) the change in gender changes the role name, but their abilities, power and skill follow similar principles and values. The pictures are, of course, adorable.

Introduction and Climax

The game flows in turns, with one turn finishing after every player has had a chance to be GM (and thus every player has also had a chance to be PC). Each turn begins with the GM drawing a Scene card. However, the entire story has a theme, which is determined before the turns begin by drawing an Introduction card. This card sets up the story by introducing the PCs to a conflict, involving an adversary and an overall situation. For example the Introduction card Conspiracy of a Secret Society (秘密結社の陰謀) tells the characters that there is a plot by a secret society to undermine or destroy their world, and when the adventure starts they are pledged to stop it. This introduction sets a theme that runs through the entire adventure, and is expected to influence the scenes that follow.

After three turns of play have elapsed and the GM role returns to the person who was GM In the first hand, the gameplay ends and the game enters a Climax. In the Climax there is no GM or players, and everyone faces a common threat. This Climax is determined by the Climax card, which is drawn randomly at this point. This climax card sets up a final challenge, which the PCs as a group need to overcome, and also sets out the rules by which they must do this. For example the Climax card Countdown to Destruction (爆発カウントダウン) tells the PCs that someone has a set up a timer to a huge explosion that they need to stop, and gives the players each one chance to try and beat the timer using a skill check. The principle of this card, though, is that when the PCs resolve the climax the players describe it in such a way that it draws the entire story back to the introduction, and whether the group fails or succeeds in the final resolution of the adventure, the whole story ends up tying back to the original Introduction card.

There are 12 introduction cards and 12 climax cards. The introduction cards are topics such as:

A girl from the sky!
A maze in a mysterious town
An adventure story that starts with a key

The climax cards with topics such as:

Invasion from Mars
Big chase
Night of revolution

The latter needs to be somehow tied back to the former, and they are all linked by the Scene cards.

Drawing the Scenes

There are 64 Scene cards, which will be drawn randomly by each player 3 times in their role as GM. This means that in a group of 5 players there will be a total of 15 scenes, with each player GMing 3, playing 3, and watching 9. Each scene has a block of text describing the setting, and a small boxed text explaining what skill check the PC needs to make to resolve the challenge. For example, the Idol Contest card describes how the PC is caught up in … well, in an idol contest, on a huge stage in front of a giant crowd. The inset text explains that the PC can win the contest by either a) rolling a power check with a target number of 15 or b) beating a skill check with a target number of 13 or c) the player can perform a song – i.e. actually sing something – and if the GM likes it they can pass the test. For most scenes the player can choose to either do a skill check or role-play their way through the challenge. If they choose the role-play option, the GM decides whether they succeed. There are some scene cards where the GM’s judgment affects how the challenge is resolved, and there are some special abilities which require the PC’s player to convince the GM that their ability can apply. For example the Musician’s special ability grants them a +2 on skill checks that involve “people”, but they have to convince the GM that the rules for this particular scene card involve people, so that their special ability applies. Thus the GM plays the arbitration role for a single skill check or role-playing scene, before the task is handed on, and that GM becomes a player.

Success or failure in the Scene is immaterial to the progression of the game: whether or not the player succeeds, the action passes to the next GM/Player pair. Rather, there are a set of Darkness and Light cards (30 each), and at the end of the scene the PC receives a light card if they succeeded, and a dark card if they failed. These cards typically grant the PC a new special ability, which they can apply in subsequent skill checks. Light cards are positive and happy powers, while dark cards are negative or dark powers. For example the light card Patron grants the PC a protector or patron, and all subsequent skill checks will get a +1 bonus; while the darkness card Comms Device gives the PC the latest radio with which they can call for help in subsequent skill checks. Some of these cards are permanent bonuses and some are one-time effects. None are genuinely negative, and they all serve to build up a sense of who the PC is and how they overcome challenges on their way to the final confrontation.

The flow of the game means that by the time the PCs reach the Climax, each of them will have gone through 3 scenes, been a GM 3 times, gained a total of 3 darkness/light cards (with associated bonus) and had a chance to contribute 6 times (either as player or GM) to the story as a whole. Finally, they will all work together to resolve the climax, tying everything back to the Introduction and finally resolving the whole story. It’s an excellent way to construct a quick, light story that everyone can enjoy.

Final thoughts

The whole game takes, with 2-3 players, about an hour to play. The scene cards are cute, crazy little moments that seem to tie in really nicely to the climax and introduction cards, which also seem carefully balanced to be always able to relate to each other. There is no failure, really, since you’re guaranteed to get to the end, and the climax cards have relatively gentle conditions for success – though it doesn’t really matter if you fail. The game creates cute, chaotic and crazy steampunk stories that are fun to generate and genuinely unique. If there is one problem with this game I would say that it is a combination of typeface – the cards can be a little hard to read – and Japanese: the Japanese is reasonably complicated, and sometimes a little vague (a common problem with Japanese) so that non-native speakers and non-nerds playing the game will be a little challenged to figure out exactly what’s going on in some of the nuances. This is typical of fantasy/sci-fi/steampunk storytelling – there are a lot of quite genre-specific phrases that are really hard for non-native speakers to understand, and a lot of genre-specific vocabulary, phrases and concepts – but this is obviously something you can overcome if you have a good dictionary, patience and/or a native speaker as a player. Other than that, the game is a really fun, simple way to play an RPG, even with complete beginners to the hobby, anywhere and at any time.

In a subsequent blogpost I will provide an AAR of a recent run-through, and hopefully the sense and style of the game will become clear. There is no English translation, but I hope in future the game will become more widely available, and this cute and entertaining TRPG style can be experienced outside of Japan.

May 9, 2021

My Campaigns are Combat-lite: The “You’re not like other girls” of GMing

Posted by faustusnotes under DMing, Fantasy, Gaming material, Nerd Culture, Role-playing styles, RPG Systems
[21] Comments

I recently posted some of my criticisms of the Genesys combat system to a forum for Genesys-related material, and received a surprising amount of resistance to the idea of making any changes to the rules. In amongst the resistance there were a large number of people telling me “you shouldn’t be doing that much combat anyway” and “if you like combat so much, just play D&D”. There was a strong theme of “people who play Genesys don’t like combat-heavy gaming” with the general assumption that combat-heavy gaming is somehow bad.

I have been GMing and playing RPGs for just over 30 years, and over that time I have repeatedly run into this idea that combat-heavy gaming is wrong, in various manifestations. You see adverts from gaming groups looking for members that say “we don’t focus on combat”, you meet GMs who tell you “yeah my campaigns tend to avoid combat”, and the ever-disdainful “yeah it’s not like D&D, it’s not all about combat.” Here is an example from the forum where I posted my suggested rules changes:

This entire post seems to me to be a misunderstanding of what Gensys is. If you want combat play 5e. If you want and narrative game that’s interactive between players and GM, then you’re on the right page.

This really pisses me off for a lot of reasons, and reflecting on it over the past week has triggered me to write this rant. To me, this “We don’t run games that are combat heavy” routine is like the idea that “you’re not like other girls“. Men pull this sometimes, and what they mean is they don’t respect basic aspects of modern femininity, which at the same time they really want their girl to have. It’s a shitty, self-deluding and mean-spirited approach, and most sensible girls list it as one of their basic red flags for exiting from a date. In the case of RPG talk, this “my games aren’t combat heavy” routine is bullshit for several reasons:

Every game group I’ve ever joined that has advertised itself this way has been just as combat-heavy as the ones that don’t
Combat is fun, and most people enjoy it, so when you set yourself apart from it like this you’re saying you’re a killjoy with a weird approach to gaming and probably a boring GM
It’s almost always based on separating yourself from D&D, just as “you’re not like other girls” is meant to separate the girl you’re talking to from a lumpen mass of boring, shallow selfie-taking girls who actually only exist as a stereotype in the speaker’s mind

In fact D&D isn’t any more combat-focused than any other system, and when people compare themselves with it they’re setting up a false equivalency which shows they either know nothing about the world of RPGs, or are an arsehole with too much brand loyalty to some other system. I want to attack each of these issues in turn.

Most groups have the same levels of combat

I’ve GMd and played in many groups in many systems over many years in several countries, in multiple cities, in two languages, and in my experience most gaming groups have about the same amount of combat. There is almost no such thing as a gaming group that doesn’t do much fighting. Regardless of the system and the setting, most campaigns involve a fair amount of good quality savagery. There will be sessions of investigation and negotiation, and sessions of shopping and planning, but these will inevitably lead up to combat or flow from combat, and players are always happy when the shit hits the fan and the dice come out.

I think there is a secondary reason for this besides that combat is fun, which is that the players often are working on limited information and don’t know the full story of the situations they’re dealing with, or what they need to do, and often they misunderstand or have forgotten key bits of information (which they invariably didn’t write down). But they can sail through these complexities because they know ultimately they can beat someone up and force the information out of them (or steal it) and if their primary pathway through the story gets lost the GM will save them by having their adversaries play their hand – usually with a weapon in it. Combat is very helpful for resolving story impasses, and GMs and players alike use it for that purpose.

It should also be noted that even though combat makes up a large chunk of time in a typical session, it isn’t actually that much of the story. Consider session 22 of my Genesys campaign, for example: The PCs visited a bar to get a job, sailed overnight on a ship where they did some planning and investigatory magic, walked for a day along a beach, checking carefully for signs of lurking dangers or evidence of wrecking, investigated a shipwreck by examining several bodies and finding and opening a chest, scouted a cliff face to find two men of dubious purpose, scouted a cave entrance looking for signs of fake signal lights, triggered a trap, and had a fight with some selkies. In actual game time the fight probably took as long as two or three of the other activities in the session, but it was only a tiny part of the total story. Combat takes up an out-sized part of the action and people’s perception of the balance of things in a game because rules are clunky and fights take a long time to resolve, not because they’re necessarily a large part of the activities of a typical adventure.

So frankly, I don’t believe people when they say they’re not really into combat in their games, because every time someone says that the empirical evidence shows the lie. Don’t get judgy with me about how you’re not that into it, and don’t pretend your level of combat in your games is special. It’s not, trust me. You’re not special.

Combat is fun

This is why every rule system has a section on fighting, and why popular gaming podcasts are called things like “I hit it with my axe” and not “I talk calmly with it to resolve the conflict.” There are several reasons for this, and they’re all perfectly good reasons:

It’s the time your PC faces the most risk and it’s also the time when things are least like the world you’re actually in
Most of the settings we play in are designed for conflict, because we want worlds where there are big evil and dangerous threats, and we especially like magic and demons and monsters, which inevitably bring violence
We spend most of our lives compromising with shitty people who have more power than us and negotiating and talking our way out of trouble, often with little success, and being able to smash your way out of problems – especially if the person you’re smashing is a bully or evil – is real escapism, and we don’t play these games to replicate the shitty interactions we have with shitty people in our shitty real world

If players didn’t enjoy fighting, and if people who wanted low-combat games were common, game designers would give combat the same amount of attention they currently give to social encounters or stronghold building: almost none. The reason it is a large part of gaming is that people enjoy it, which might also be the reason D&D 5e is so popular … except that D&D 5e isn’t an especially combat-heavy system.

D&D is not combat heavy

This idea that D&D is a combat-focused game is very old and very shitty. It wasn’t true 30 years ago and it’s not true now. First let’s consider some canonical examples of this idea, which I hear all the time. Consider for example this 9 year old post on stack overflow asking how to reduce combat in a D&D game, where respondents say things like this:

Well, for starters, I’d say don’t use D&D. It is a game tailored towards violent conflicts, which is exactly what you’re avoiding, it seems. Mind you, I said “violent conflicts”. No story, thus no game, can exist without any conflict whatsoever. I’m not also saying it’s completely undoable with D&D, just mainly… a waste of its design and practical goals.

I don’t know how to put this finely, so I’ll just say it: this is utter bullshit. D&D was never designed entirely towards violent conflicts, and this idea that it was is based on an unpleasant retrofitting of the nature of these games. Very early D&D lacked a skill system, so compared to games like Traveller and Warhammer that were around at the same time it looks like it was intended to be entirely combat focused, but it was never seen this way at the time. It was understood that the players and GM would resolve all non-combat stuff between themselves using negotiation and discussion and role-playing, and the rules were there to make fighting coherent – not that the game was only about fighting. You can see this in many of the classic early modules, which set out huge amounts of non-combat role playing in the social context of the game, without any particular mechanism for resolving those parts of the adventure. Later versions of the game introduced skills because of the popularity of skill systems and the recognition that without structured rules for non-combat encounters it became too much of a GM’s kimagure about how these matters would be resolved.

It should also be noted that compared to some other fantasy RPGs like Tunnels and Trolls, D&D led the way in finding ways to introduce non-combat themes. D&D invented the thief, a character class originally intended to be weak in combat but very useful outside of it, and also is responsible for the development (or at least popularization) of the much-maligned bard class, which is the Platonic ideal of non-combat role-playing. And what do we find in the 20 years since its inception? The bard is the routinely most-hated character class. Why would that be I wonder?

This idea about D&D being combat heavy is also empirically verifiably not true. Let us compare systems I have on hand! The D&D 5e rulebook has 200 pages of rules, excluding spells, of which 10 are devoted to combat, 2 are devoted to social interaction, 6 to skills, and 5 to weapons and armour. Among the spells 6/11 Bard cantrips are non-combat, 10/18 2nd level Druid spells are non-combat, and 7/15 7th level wizard spells are non-combat. (This is treating healing and restoration as combat-focused). So perhaps 10% of the rules and 50% of the spells are for combat. Compare with Genesys, our supposedly narrative/non-combat game, where in 136 pages of basic rules 7 are devoted to social encounters, 23 to combat and 3 to weapons and armour. Almost all of the spell section is devoted to combat spells, and no real guidance offered for non-combat spells, which are entirely up to the GM and players to figure out. Warhammer 2 has 140 pages of rules, of which 16 are devoted to combat, 6 to weapons and armour, and two of the PCs’ basic attributes are combat-only! (Weapon Skill and Ballistic Skill). In the spells, 5/8 of the lesser magic spells are non-combatant. The game Limnal, a modern fantasy based around things like Rivers of London and the Dresden Files, has 88 pages of rules among which 8 pages are for combat. So even definitively combat-light games like Limnal that are set in the modern mundane world where you can’t just shoot people still reserve nearly 10% of their rules for combat. D&D is far from special in this regard!

Not only do people enjoy combat, D&D isn’t especially combat heavy and it never was. I bet this pernicious lie was started by the Vampire the Masquerade poseurs, who needed an excuse for the fact that their much-loved and very popular game had shit combat rules and really boring magic. But games like Vampire, which explicitly tried to frame themselves as more social, had another problem that D&D and other “combat-heavy” games had less of: They were a target-rich environment for bullies and abusers.

Combat-free gaming and bullying GMs

I played a year-long World of Darkness game, followed up by a very short stint in the standard Vampire world, and I have never experienced so much bullying and abuse by a GM in my life. The setting is designed to make your GM a bully, and the lack of structured rules and the insane power differentials that make combat impossible also mean that almost everything becomes a case of begging your GM for a break. This old Reddit thread in response to someone asking whether to take up VTM is a good example of its kind, with comments like this:

VtM, in my opinion, tends to be bogged down by the lore, politics, and hierarchy of the system. Instead of doing cool vampire things, you mostly skulk around talking to other vampires who are all more powerful than you and will most likely execute you if you try to do anything interesting. Most of the time even having a character sheet was pointless because it seemed like using your powers in any way would get you on the Most Wanted list.

This was my experience exactly: having a character sheet was pointless because any conflict you entered (whether combat or social) was against people so powerful that your skills didn’t matter, or against mundane people who you could always beat. It was completely narrative, effectively, and the problem with narrative styles like this is that you end up entirely at the mercy of the GM, with no clear cues as to how to deal with his goals and desires, and no frame of reference to determine whether he is being unreasonable. In VTM, if a GM puts you into conflict with some god-awful ancient elder vampire, you won’t necessarily know what you’re up against and you won’t be able to resolve this situation unless you know what the GM wants to get out of the encounter; but you also won’t have any framework within which to argue your GM is being unreasonable, since the whole stupid game is designed this way. In contrast if your D&D GM throws your first level group against a lich you know there and then that you can just walk away because the GM is an arsehole and a bully.

VTM is basically high school cliques turned into an RPG, and it’s just as much fun: none. It’s also ripe ground for bullies precisely because systems without clear rules or guidelines for conflict, and without the option for you to hack and stab your way out of trouble, put too much power and privilege in the hands of the GM. It’s no surprise to me then that in amongst the last two years’ metoo reckoning within the gaming industry, a lot of the people being exposed turn out to have worked on VTM. It’s a game designed by bullies for bullies.

When you put a lot of power in the hands of one person, you need a strong and robust institutional structure to control that power. In the case of role-playing the institutional structure is the rules, and well designed rules not only provide the players with a good structure for how to handle any situation, but also provide a clear set of boundaries for the GM, so that everyone can tell when he or she is stepping out of line. This is another reason they’re combat heavy: because combat is naturally a time when everything is structured, and when everything is structured then everything is fair, and players want the game to be fair. There are a couple of clear red flags pointing to a bullying GM, and the clearest one is that he or she simply doesn’t bother to follow rules. If (as in my World of Darkness campaign), your GM doesn’t really care about character sheets and character development, ignores rules, arbitrarily forces you to change your PC, puts you into situations where using your powers or engaging in combat will inevitably be lethal, or repeatedly forces you to back down from your own plans by revealing highly powerful enemies, then you need to run. And chances are, if your GM prides themselves on not doing combat, they’re also doing one or all of those things.

Why any of this matters

I think a lot of people enter role-playing out of a genuine and deep interest in the idea, because role-playing is awesome, and I think a lot of them leave very quickly because of their experience of hard-core gaming nerds, who can be really unpleasant. If you want to grow the hobby it’s really important to recognize why people come to the game, what they really want from it, and what behavior and principles will destroy their fun and our hobby. It’s a cliche in this hobby that there’s no right way to do it, and that you should just have fun, but it’s also a truism that you never see people who enjoy combat-heavy games sneering at people who don’t, and you never hear people who enjoy D&D griping about how other games don’t have enough fighting. This sneering all goes one way, and I think there’s a reason for that: a small minority of people in our hobby want to set themselves up as special and rarified masters of the game, and in order to do that they need to disparage one of its most central, universal elements in favour of much vaguer, much less structured parts of the experience which people enjoy less and which make the game much more dependent on successfully negotiating real-world social interactions which are often, sadly, toxic. Don’t fall for it! And don’t become part of some weird system of cliques in which people who play a certain way are better than people who don’t. We’re not in high school anymore, and we don’t have to pretend to be cool. So kill as many orcs as you want, and steal their treasure from their still-warm bodies with joy in your heart and no guilt in your soul!

May 2, 2021

Brawn vs Agility in Genesys: An example

Posted by faustusnotes under Game planning, Game reviews, Gaming material, RPG aids, RPG Systems | Tags: Genesys |
Leave a Comment

A commenter at a Genesys community group online has made the following comment about my criticisms of the role Brawn plays in the Genesys combat rules:

One rule that stands out to me relates to party composition in combat and I haven’t seen it mentioned here. If an ally is engaged with the target of a ranged attack (magical or mundane) the attack must upgrade the difficulty once and any despair causes the attack to instead strike the ally. This, combined with setback from the cover rules causes allied melee fighters to either risk causing their ranged allies to miss, hit them instead, or, as is most often the case, choose to shoot something else.

This is true, but I think it doesn’t fully encapsulate how much of a difference brawn makes even to situations where we choose party composition. So let’s consider two scenarios involving combatants maximized for combat and melee.

Introducing the combatants

First let’s introduce our melee combatant, Gruumsh the Bastard, pulled out of retirement from the pathfinder epidemiology project[1] to do his duty as an experimental subject in our battlegrounds. Gruumsh has a brawn of 4, all other attributes at 2, 2 skill ranks in melee, 1 rank in ranged, no stealth (who needs that?!), a greatsword, a bow and chainmail armour. He thus has a melee defense of 1, 14 wounds, soak 6, does 8 damage when he hits you, and 7 damage if he decides to shoot you. For the purpose of this experiment (to retain fairness) Gruumsh has been dragged from Pathfinder to the Realms of Terrinoth in a human form.

Ranged (haha) against Gruumsh the Bastard is Elegant Eddie. Elegant Eddie has an agility of 4, all other attributes at 2, 2 skill ranks in ranged, 1 rank in melee, 2 ranks in stealth, a sword, a longbow and chainmail armour. He thus has a defense of 1 when in melee, 12 wounds, soak 4, does 8 damage when he shoots you and 5 damage when he stabs you. Eddie is also a human, though a miserable example of his kind as far as Gruumsh is concerned.

Now let’s try two scenarios.

Scenario 1: Firing into melee

We suppose first that Gruumsh has an ally like Eddie, who is nameless. He is attacking Eddie’s ally, who is like Gruumsh, in melee. We don’t care how this melee turns out in detail, but what we want to investigate is the consequence of Gruumsh being engaged while his nameless ally fires into melee. The specific rules of this state that we upgrade the difficulty of the shot by 1, so let’s put Gruumsh’s ally at short range and have him thus use a single red dice for difficulty. If he rolls a despair then he will hit Gruumsh. There is a 1/12 chance of a despair on the ally’s dice pool, so about an 8% chance he’ll hit Gruumsh. The maximum damage he can do in this situation with a truly ridiculous roll is 15 damage, of which Gruumsh can absorb 6, taking 9. A more realistic roll would see the attack do 11 damage, of which Gruumsh takes 5. So realistically this can happen 3 times before Gruumsh goes down. There is a scenario in which Gruumsh’s ally rolls despairs and triumphs, and thus does a critical on Gruumsh, but the chance of this is very low – my calculations put it at about 1% – and any GM who ruled in the extraordinary case of rolling 2 triumphs and 1 despair that the triumphs and the despair don’t cancel would likely not survive the session.

It’s worth noting in this case that the final probability of missing the enemy is similar with or without the upgrade, so if Gruumsh doesn’t engage this enemy and leaves it to his ally to shoot, the party is not significantly improving the chances of the ally doing damage on the enemy – and what is going to happen if Gruumsh doesn’t engage? Which brings us to scenario 2: Gruumsh and Eddie at range.

Scenario 2: A ranged stand off

Let’s suppose that Elegant Eddie and Gruumsh the bastard face off at medium range. Here the difficulty for Elegant Eddie to hit Gruumsh is two purple dice. Let’s suppose they shoot each other, so Gruumsh is not using his best skill. In this case if Elegant Eddie gets one success against Gruumsh he does 9 points of damage, which is 3 net; if Gruumsh gets one success on Elegant Eddie he does 8 points of damage, which is 4 net. For Elegant Eddie to do more damage than Gruumsh in this ranged stand off he needs 2 more successes than Gruumsh! Now each ability die is equivalent on average to 0.625 successes, and each skill die 0.83 successes, so this deficit is the equivalent of Elegant Eddie having two less ability dice and one less skill die – so basically the equivalent of Gruumsh’s agility and skill, but for the slightly elevated chance of a critical[2]. Also note that if they’re dealing approximately the same damage to each other after soak, Gruumsh will kill Elegant Eddie first, because Gruumsh has more wounds. So unless Elegant Eddie gets lucky with criticals there is a chance that he will lose this battle even though he is fighting it with his best ability and Gruumsh the bastard is not.

Now let’s suppose that instead of shooting Gruumsh decides to charge Elegant Eddie. He needs to close from meidum range to engaged, which will take him two manoeuvres: one from medium to short, one from short to engaged. This means that he can spend two strain and gets one attack against Elegant Eddie. Note that even though Elegant Eddie has better agility he doesn’t have better initiative chances, so it’s possible that he’ll never get a chance to shoot Gruumsh, but just in case, let’s assume he does. The maximum damage he can do is 16, of which Gruumsh will take 10, so Gruumsh is guaranteed to reach melee this round. There is a small chance that Elegant Eddie will get a critical, in which case there are a couple of criticals he can roll up (11-20, 41-45, 71-75, 81-85, and 96 – 105 if we are going to be generous to Eddie) that could stop Gruumsh from closing range. My estimation of probabilities puts the chance of this chain of events happening at less than 3%. So there is a 97% chance that Gruumsh is going to close range and get an attack in one round.

The maximum damage Gruumsh can do is the same as Elegant Eddie: 16. But Elegant Eddie has 4 soak and 12 wounds, so Gruumsh can knock him out in one round. The chance of this is low obviously, but note that the minimum damage Gruumsh can do on a successful hit is 9, which translates to 5 for Elegant Eddie, so there is almost zero chance that Elegant Eddie is going to survive two hits – and next round he’s going to need to use his free manoeuvre (assuming he gets one) to get his sword out. Once his sword is out there is actually a chance he’ll do zero damage against Gruumsh even on a successful hit!

A note on cover

Let us suppose that Gruumsh the Bastard wins the initiative and sees that Elegant Eddie has a ranged weapon. Suppose that there is some cover at short range that gives him two defense. He could use his free manoeuvre to get there, dive into cover, then next turn use another free manoeuvre to close to engaged, thus saving two strain. Is this worth it? Each point of defense has a 1/3 chance of reducing Elegant Eddie’s dice pool result by one success, so the two dice in total could reduce the dice pool by two successes at most, some of the time. But Gruumsh the Bastard has two extra points of soak than Elegant Eddie, so this cover is less effective than his brawn advantage in protecting him. The rule book says that two cover dice is equivalent to a trench or blockhouse. Gruumsh’s brawn advantage is better than putting him in a pillbox! If Gruumsh opts to run to cover he would be offering his opponent a chance at a shot at reduced difficulty, with almost no benefit, even if that cover were a blockhouse! Unless Gruumsh is already down to his last two strain, the simple fact is that there is no benefit to him in pausing – he should just rush to melee. Note that if the cover were at medium range and the battle started at long range, he would probably be better off waiting for Elegant Eddie to shoot, rather than running to cover, because the benefit to him of gaining the two cover dice does not out weigh the benefit to Elegant Eddie of the range improvement, given his brawn. He is better off just pausing his run, standing at long range, waiting for Elegant Eddie to shoot him, and then closing to cover. And if Elegant Eddie uses his free manoeuvre to maintain the range so that they have to turn this into a shooting match, Gruumsh’s brawn will neutralize Eddie’s extra skill anyway!

Conclusion

Truly Gruumsh is a bastard. His brawn acts as a dampener on ranged attacks, so that PCs who have chosen to maximize this skill are effectively no better at it than Gruumsh himself (and Gruumsh obviously disdains such petty strategies). Although it is true that firing into a combat in which Gruumsh is engaged slightly increases the risk of harm to him, this risk is small and not worth foregoing Gruumsh’s rush into combat. Worse still, if Gruumsh and a ranged fighter enter an encounter at medium range there is almost no chance that the ranged fighter will survive, even though the engagement has started in a way that should heavily favour the ranged combatant. There is no reason for Gruumsh to seek cover if he wins the initiative, since his brawn effectively acts as if he were hiding in a bunkhouse anyway. None of this is an issue if brawn does not affect soak, and note that things become even more catastrophically difficult for Gruumsh if agility determines combat skill – then Gruumsh would be better off with 3 brawn and 3 agility, and all his calculations would change. Just as in my original experiments in Pathfinder, being able to kill someone quickly outweighs fancy considerations of style, and the doubling up of brawn to both defense and offense means that brawn-focused characters are more dangerous than better-armed opponents even in ranged combat!

Some arguments in the online community where this debate unfolded suggested that Genesys was developed for ranged combat, because it was developed for Star Wars, where blasters are the core weapon. First, this isn’t true – the Star Wars system was developed from Warhammer 3rd Edition, which was developed for a world of Grim Fantasy. Secondly, it’s also wrong. This analysis shows that the system clearly disadvantages ranged fighters heavily.

One small limitation of my analysis here is that I have not considered the cost of completely missing (or the benefits of being completely missed) in scenario 2. This might slightly readjust the balance of risks, but is complicated to calculate for Genesys dice pools. But overall I don’t think that nuance significantly changes the basic finding, which is that brawn serves to neutralize ranged attacks through soak to such a degree that it completely distorts the balance of combat. Brawn should not be applied to soak, or if it is, melee attacks should all be agility based.

fn1: Incidentally, it’s interesting to compare the generally positive response of the Pathfinder community to my rules suggestions there back in 2015, with the negativity and criticism of the Genesys community.

fn2: I am using this approximation because calculating precise probabilities for dice pools in Genesys is tough and I can’t be bothered writing the R code to do it.

May 1, 2021

Is Brawn Overpowered in the Genesys System?

Posted by faustusnotes under Game planning, Gaming material, RPG Systems | Tags: Genesys |
Leave a Comment

In the Genesys system brawn determines your wound threshold, the damage your melee weapon does, how much you can carry, whether you can use a cumbersome weapon, your resilience skill, and how much damage you take. Its role in determining wound threshold and soak means it is double-counted in survival: if my brawn is 1 higher than your brawn I start with 1 more wound than you and take 1 less every time someone hits me. Its use in determining weapon damage means it is also double-counted in combat: being used as the base attribute for the skill, it determines how many successes you get (and thus the damage); and this is added on again because brawn also determines the damage of the weapon.

I think this makes brawn overpowered, and it certainly means that no combat-focused character need care about any other attribute. This is particularly true if one uses the rules as written for determining combat difficulties, since the difficulty of hitting someone is not affected by any attribute of theirs. So to be a good fighter you just need a good brawn. Every other character type needs at least two good attributes (e.g. wizards, who usually rely on a different attribute for spell casting vs. strain), but a fighter type can survive with just brawn.

This level of overpowered attribute is also seen in D&D 5th Edition, where dexterity determines how hard you are to hit, your attack bonus, and your damage. Strength becomes irrelevant to a fighter in D&D, and perversely if you really want to a lot of damage you’re better off being a rogue. The role of a fighter in D&D 5 is to give the rogue a chance to flank their opponent (also a terrible rule), not to deal out damage. This is perverse and frustrating, and one of the first changes anyone who plays D&D should make is to revert to strength for weapon damage (at least!)

D&D and Genesys aren’t alone in having over-powered attributes, which is a problem going back to the 1980s and Cyberpunk, which has a suite of attributes of which only two matter. These kinds of rules can be very frustrating because whenever a combat comes up they leave all the other players just watching as a single player does everything for the whole group. Whether it’s realistic or not that a certain attribute entirely determines who is best at something, it’s no fun in a game, and to my mind (and that of most players I’ve ever gamed with) good character design should require that the PC needs two good attributes and can afford to get away with one bad one. It’s not like this in Genesys at the moment.

Brawn and agility in actual combat

The focus on Brawn in Genesys is also not really realistic, and in particular the soak thing is quite weird. I’ve been kickboxing for years and I know what it’s like to be punched and kicked in the head (and the ribs and the leg and …), and in general one’s ability to resist damage is primarily a quirk of fate. Obviously size determines how much damage you can take (your wound threshold) but most people aren’t especially good at resisting damage. It’s true you see a good boxer taking body shots and wearing them but this isn’t just about brawn – it’s also experience, and most of all timing to turn the body away and tense the muscles at the right time. The classic modern example of this is the much-maligned calf kick, which is becoming very popular in mixed martial arts precisely because no human body seems to be able to ignore it. Whether you absorb that damage or suffer it depends entirely on whether you can shift your leg in time – which is also the entire point of the leg check, which exists to protect your leg (brawn) by absorbing the blow on a bone (using agility to put the bone in the way of the soft part).

The model of the quirky damage-resister in modern fighting is Rodtang (pictured above left), who can actually wear punches, shake his head and keep fighting. He was what the pundits would call an iron chin, but this is highly unusual. Almost all fighters avoid being knocked out by not getting hit, or by rolling with the punches. Obviously much bigger men are harder to knock out for smaller men, but generally, within broad ranges of size, most people can’t resist damage just by being hard. People who think they have this ability are, usually, people who’ve never been really seriously punched.

So, I think Genesys needs to be reformed to reduce the role of Brawn. I think this requires:

Make agility the primary attribute for melee attacks
Eliminate soak, and either increase armour soak ratings to compensate, or slightly reduce weapon damage
Use my reformed combat rules to ensure agility can affect how hard you are to hit, but give brawn some role
Introduce some special talents to enable fighters to choose to focus on brawn as a combat component if they want

With this reform, brawn still affects wound threshold and weapon damage, but does not double-count in either. It also means that a good fighter needs to have two strong attributes (at least), and that other types of fighters (who are fast, or use talents) can also hold their own on the battlefield.

Iron chin talent tree

Here I propose a few talents for players who want to develop a PC who fights entirely with brawn. They assume my revised combat rules, which a) assume that skills affect how hard you are to hit and b) ensure that you take a point of strain whenever your armour and soak fully absorbs damage.

Hardened fighter (Tier 1): For every rank of hardened fighter, increase your soak by 1
Shrug it off (Tier 2): (Requires hardened fighter) Whenever you suffer a rank 1 critical, make a resilience check against your current wounded state. If you succeed, the critical does not affect you
Taste for blood (Tier 3): (Requires shrug it off) Once you have been hit once in combat, you no longer suffer strain if your armour absorbs all the damage from future hits
Physical bravery (Tier 4): (Requires taste for blood) When you reach your wound threshold, make a resilience check against your current wounded state. If you succeed, you do not go unconscious: keep fighting until someone hits you again (when you need to make this check again)
Stalwart (Tier 5): (Requires physical bravery) As shrug it off, but you make the resilience check for any critical injury, against the critical rating, upgraded once if you are already critically injured.

These are just example talents, I’m not sure how unbalancing they might be in combat (and Shrug it off might be underpowered). In my campaign orcs already have the physical bravery talent, and it’s a lot of fun.

Choosing your melee and soak attributes

Another idea that could be considered, though I haven’t put much thought into it, is to allow PCs to choose the attribute they use for soak at the beginning of the campaign. Perhaps the list could be brawn, agility, willpower or presence. Thus you could have a wizard who is hard to hurt because of their sheer force of will, or a bard who refuses to show their pain to an audience.

It’s also possible that weapons could be reformed so different weapons use different attributes, or the brawl, light and heavy melee skills are reformed to use agility, cunning and brawn respectively (in general I think cunning is not a very useful attribute in Genesys). This makes a clear distinction between fast fighters, smart fighters, and tough fighters, something I think most players want to see in a nuanced rule system but which I have shown before often falls apart in practice.

In any case, the key thing here, whatever method one uses, is to reduce the oversized influence of brawn on combat effectiveness, and force fighter characters to be less one dimensional, as well as give other PCs more options and effectiveness in combat. I am not sure if I am going to introduce this reform to my system – at the moment we have only one heavy fighter anyway, and we’ve just gone through a round of rules changes so another set at this point might be pushing the limits of my players’ patience – but I hope the Genesys creators will consider this issue in future iterations of the game.

Addendum: Overpowered stats and role diversity

Some people on the Genesys facebook group have made the point that combat is about more than striking and running, and other characters with other attributes can contribute by doing other things. This is true, but it’s not enough for two reasons. First of all, every critique of every system always gets this response that “role-playing is about creativity, you can find ways to do things that don’t involve violence,” but this is not really fair. First of all, over 30 years of gaming I have never played in any group that didn’t have a heavy focus on violence, and secondly if creativity is so important, why do we have rules at all? We have rules because they’re an important support for our creativity, and the nature of rules changes the way our creativity works. This “oh just be creative in combat” response is always frustrating!

Secondly, however, this response misses an important point about overpowered stats. If one stat is overpowered, then PCs whose primary role depends on that stat will have more choices to be creative in character development than others. Rather than being one-dimensional tanks, brawn-based fighters have more choices to flesh out their PCs. This is because they can excel at their main role with just one attribute, while other PCs need two. Compare, for example, a wizard character that uses presence to cast spells. They will need brawn to stay alive in combat and willpower for their strain threshold. Even if they decide to be fragile, in order to be good at their role they need two attributes. This means that they have less attributes to throw around in secondary character development. It is likely, therefore, that such a PC will choose social skills based on presence – so most such wizards will be leaders or seducers, rather than say kids who ran with gangs (cunning) or acrobats (agility). In contrast, a PC that is primarily a fighter needs only one attribute to be good at what they primarily do, so they have more attributes to throw around. So a fighter-type character can choose to be a leader (presence), a stoic grave-robber whose seen things you wouldn’t believe (willpower), someone who grew up on the streets before they joined the army (cunning) and so on. This PC, rather than being more one-dimensional than those others, will be more flexible! He or she will be able to fight like a monster and be the party’s go-to character for negotiation and perception (for example), while other PCs cannot fit the same diversity of roles because they have sunk all their attributes onto their main role.

A really good example of this problem is the D&D 5E rogue, who is great in combat but also a good archer and has a wide array of super useful crime-style skills. Much of a D&D 5E adventure involves the other PCs waiting for the rogue: they send the rogue ahead to scout the enemy, they set the combat up to ensure the rogue can flank, after the combat they wait for the rogue to check the chest for traps, then the rogue unlocks the chest, and so on. Far from being one-dimensional, the rogue is a more diverse character than any of the others.

So, for a system to fairly encourage role-sharing and ensure that all PCs can contribute to combat, paradoxically, it needs to ensure that the primary fighter characters depend on the same number of attributes to be good at their role as every other PC. Otherwise, rather than only enjoying the combat and being a one-dimensional brawler, they will be the only PC that can enjoy combat and contribute to everything else. And that makes other players bored and frustrated, which is not the point of these games!

February 14, 2021

House Rules for Combat in Genesys

Posted by faustusnotes under Fantasy, Game planning, Gaming material, RPG Systems | Tags: Archipelago campaign, Genesys |
1 Comment

Chapter 1 of my Genesys campaign is drawing to a close with our “heroes” slinking out of the mountains with their bloodied tails between their legs, and I am considering some refinements to the rules for the second chapter. In particular, I want to refine some of the rules for combat based on my experience of changing combat rules for Warhammer 3. Here I explain why and what the rule changes will be.

What is wrong with Genesys combat now?

There are several problems with the way combat checks are resolved in Genesys now, which arise from the decision to give the attack check a fixed difficulty (two) and have modifications in difficulty depend primarily on the target’s armour and other boosts. This means that currently the pool of challenge dice will typically be something like two blue dice and 3-4 setback dice, regardless of how good the combatant is. If I stick Calim (a cleric with no combat skill) and Kyansei (a barbarian with good brawn and fighting skill) in the same armour, they’re equally easy to hit, and the only difference between them is that Kyansei has a talent that she can use to burn strain to reduce damage. What does this mean in combat?

Very little chaos: The only way we can add red dice is by using story points to upgrade pools, which my players don’t do much because they’re terrified of giving me any (blame this on Coriolis). This means that there are few despair effects, and therefore very few mishaps, in what should be the craziest and way out part of the game, and also stops people from being able to prevent criticals
Way too many dice: All those black dice are annoying to calculate and throw around. I have to ask the player their character’s defense, then figure out if Itzel has cast a blur spell, and then consider any left over setback dice from past enemies’ good rolls
Too many limits on defense: Basically if you’re wearing Lamellar armour (defense 2), carrying a shield (defense 1) and have Itzel’s blur spell you have hit the 4 dice limit on defense. This means that often cover, situational advantages and past good luck make little difference to someone’s defense. Basically when Kyansei is in the front line with a blur on her, nothing anyone else does will help her, and she has no benefit from cover when people are shooting her. All those threats, advantages and tactics go to waste.
Limited combat styles: Genesys has lots of dice and is designed for the advantages, threats, triumphs and despairs to produce special results but the part of the game that is richest in possibility for ways to use them is lacking in any distinctive rules about how they might apply, and lacks any special paths for fighter type characters to go down to benefit from them.
Lack of consistency: In every other part of the game we do opposed skill checks by setting the skill of the defender as purple and red dice, but in combat we don’t. Why this inconsistency? It irks me.
Too much power in armour: Since armour is the main way you don’t get hit and the main way you avoid damage, good armour becomes way too valuable in this game. Nobody yet has magical armour but my assumption is that it will have better defense, so then basically one suit of magic armour and a shield and you don’t need to worry about tactics or anything. Annoying! I might as well be playing Cyberpunk, where armour is completely borked.

So, given these flaws, I have decided to introduce a set of house rules that reduce the influence of armour and open up the possibility of multiple different schools of combat. I’m hoping that these house rules will make combat a little more tactical and reduce the importance of armour for defense, while increasing its impact on damage and thus further swinging combat in favour of the skilled people with the big weapons.

Combining talents and skills to set attack difficulty

In these house rules, the basic difficulty of an attack is set at two, just as before, but now armour offers no defense benefits, instead having slightly increased soak. Now, if a PC wants to upgrade the difficulty of the attack – that is, if someone wants to defend themselves – they have to sink 5xp on one of three possible talents, which then enable the PC to use a skill to set the difficulty of the attack provided they meet the conditions of the talent. The talents are listed here.

Dodge: The PC uses their acrobatics skill to set the difficulty of the attack, provided they are aware of the attack, are able to move freely and are wearing light armour. Later levels of the dodge talent enable the PC to take strain to reduce the damage of missile attacks, to escape from combat, or to reduce the damage from spell attacks.
Parry: The PC uses their melee skill to set the difficulty of the attack, provided they are carrying a weapon with the defensive quality or a shield, and are aware of the attack. Later levels of the talent enable them to disarm their enemy, take strain to reduce the damage from missile attacks (provided they have a shield) or do counter attacks.
Block: The PC uses their resilience skill to set the difficulty of the attack, provided they are wearing heavy medium or heavy armour. Later levels of this talent allow them to knock an attacker over, to reduce damage from melee or missile attacks by taking strain, to grapple someone’s weapon hand, or to reduce the damage from spell attacks.

So for example, a PC with agility 3 and two ranks of acrobatics skill who takes the dodge talent will be able to change the difficulty of the attack from two purple to one purple and two red, provided they can move, know they’re being attacked and are wearing light armour. This is approximately the same difficulty to hit as if they had a defense of three in the old rules, so it means that this highly skilled acrobat is as hard to hit as if they were wearing lamellar armour and carrying a shield – but has much less soak. In contrast, someone wearing chainmail armour who has three brawn and resilience of two will offer the same difficulty to hit as this acrobat, though they will have much greater soak. These talents also offer three pathways in combat: either light and mobile, aggressively hitting people, or tanky.

The primary benefits of this system are:

It rewards people who sink a lot of xp into combat-related talents with interesting things to do
It offers people the chance to avoid critical hits by using skill
It increases the range of options to gain defense from magic, cover and tactics (setback dice can still be added to the difficulty like this)
It means I don’t have to ask people their defense and wait an hour as they add up 1 and 2, but instead everyone knows exactly how hard they are to hit
It frees up story points from the defensive part of combat

This also means that your classic cleric lumbering around combat without many talents or much training but wearing heavy armour will be easy to hit and hard to hurt. That’s good! To make up for the problem of extra soak on armour I also introduce some favoured weapon talents that increase damage and also give the opportunity to gain automatic advantages. I have also introduced a set of knife fighter talents that give people using this weapon the chance to use cunning instead of brawn to attack, and some tricks for getting inside weapon range and staying there.

Other benefits of armour

Of course this system raises the possibility that armour becomes boring and there is no reason to choose any one kind of armour over another. I have added some spice to the armour by giving different kinds of armour different sorts of resistance against elemental (spell) attacks. In the magic rules I am using every element has its own special properties: lightning, for example, is stun 2 and pierce 1; dark, the form used by deepfolk, is disorient 1 and vicious 2. But now some armour types offer immunity to some elemental types. Table 1 shows these benefits: Lamellar, for example, is immune to the special effects of force, dark, ice and acid.

Type	Type	Soak	Enc	Resistance	Price	Rarity
Robes	Light	+1	1	Lightning, acid, ice	20	0
Cloth/padded	Light	+2	2	Lightning, ice	40	1
Leather	Light	+2	2	Lightning, dark	80	2
Lamellar / studded	Light	+2	3	Force, dark, ice, acid	150	3
Scale	Medium	+3	4	Force, fire, ice, dark	200	2
Chainmail	Medium	+3	3	Fire, earth	400	6
Half plate	Heavy	+4	4	Fire, ice	1500	8
Full plate	Heavy	+5	5	Fire, ice, force	2000	8

Table 1: Revised armour soak ratings and elemental resistances

This means that PCs will need to make some hard choices about whether they want to be resistance to deepfolk magic as well as physical attacks. Note also that removing defense from armour means that magic armour now has many benefits: when (if) the PCs get their first suit of magic armour, even the lowest level of magic armour will be hugely valuable because it will be their first chance to gain a point of constant defense.

Is this system too complicated?

This is a kind of a silly question in Genesys, since the entire system is ridiculously complicated, but in answer I don’t think it is, because every single round my players need to be told how many purple and black dice to add, and it changes every turn because of the consequences of past rolls. And I have to ask them constantly what their defense is, or refer to a table, so what changes really? This system will, however, more clearly delineate between dedicated fighters and non-fighters, and between minions and rivals. At the moment we have a stormcaller (Bao Tap) and a wandering blacksmith (Quangbae) who have no special talents but by dint of their brawn and skills are just as good in combat as Kyansei. In this revised system they might be as good at hitting people as Kyansei but, since she sinks her xp into combat talents, they’re highly unlikely to be as good at defending themselves. This means that if all three of them are constantly running into combat, it’s going to be Quangbae and Bao Tap coming out with the crits, not Kyansei.

It also helps to distinguish between minions, rivals and nemeses. Genesys even has a Rival talent that is intended to increase the difficulty of hitting rivals, who are otherwise too easy to hit. With this system we can make it simple: minions have no special combat talents, but rivals can draw from the same tree as PCs to become very hard to hit. So instead of a dragon with brawn 8 and 3 ranks of resilience skill being as hard to hit as a wizard, we can give them the block talent and only truly stupendous fighters will be able to hurt them.

Finally, the system shifts the balance a little more to missile weapons, since none of the talents applies to them, so seasoned warriors will always be easier to hit with crossbows. That should also force some difficult decisions, since it will mean that weak archer minions are genuinely dangerous.

I will introduce this system from chapter 2 and see how it goes. Hopefully it will shift the balance of combat towards the skilled fighters and the minion archers, force more use of cover and tactics, and increase the levels of chaos and skullduggery in battle. Let’s go, warriors, let’s go!

August 17, 2020

Which Parts of Online Role-playing will you Transplant to Physical Gaming?

Posted by faustusnotes under computer games, DMing, Game planning, Gaming material, Maps, Nerd Culture, Old Campaigns, Role-playing styles, RPG aids, RPG Systems
[4] Comments

Yesterday I wrote a post about the ways in which online teaching and supervision can be superior to physical teaching and supervision, and today I want to follow up with a short post about what aspects of online gaming can be transferred to physical gaming. I finished my Coriolis campaign online, and we have started the Archipelago campaign online too. Gaming online at this time has been necessary to avoid a physical TPK[1], but it has had several advantages:

We were able to include a former Coriolis player who moved overseas in the final part of that campaign, which was a good way to end the campaign and reconnect with an old player
One of our players is managing a very young child and another is living a large part of their time outside of Tokyo, so we’ve been able to include them in sessions
We’ve been able to meet more regularly because we can set weekday evenings without having to worry about commuting or finding a convenient venue

In Tokyo there are lots of venues you can hire on weekday evenings for gaming, so we can find a mutually agreeable location, but the physical meetings are short and interrupted by eating, commuting and so on. When we game online during the week we can start later – 8pm to enable children to settle – and have already eaten and relaxed after the day. I also don’t have to lug my gaming material through the summer heat, and if we finish at 11 with a solid 3 hours’ gaming done, we can still be to bed early without worrying about commuting. We usually start an hour earlier for socialization, and people just join when they can.

For Coriolis we used roll20, and for the Archipelago campaign we are using a system called RPG Sessions for characters and dice, run partly through discord, and roll20 for mapping[2]. As the number of coronavirus cases stabilizes in Tokyo and maybe begins to curve down, we’re thinking about returning to physical gaming sometime in September, but I think we are going to continue with some online sessions permanently, because it’s difficult to gather the whole group regularly on weekends and easy to gather them on a weekday night. Also I think when we do game physically we will retain a few aspects of online gaming.

In particular I aim to keep using roll20 for mapping. There is this constant problem with maps and tabletop RPGs that they have to be put in the centre of the table, where there is usually a huge pile of snacks, and some people always have to stand to look at them, and then also the map is oriented towards half the group and upside down to the rest. I think we can get around this by having each person see the map on their own tablet, and also have it on a big screen at the end of the table (I have a tv in my kitchen that I can share with chromecast). Thus we will all be able to see the map but have a shared map at the same time. Players can move their own PCs on the map, and we can maintain the sense of physical space without having to invest in horrific things like miniatures and the like[3].

Using roll20 for mapping also avoids the annoying situation where players are supposed to navigate their way around a physical map based entirely on my descriptions, when I can just use the fog of war on a map software to immediately reveal the rooms they can see, and the monsters they can see, when they see them. This is a vast improvement over physical maps or – worst of all – the horrible 1980s tradition of having a “mapper” who mapped out the dungeon as you explored it and always got it wrong. Having virtual maps also enables us to flick between them quickly, to have pictures of enemies and so on. Why go back to printed stuff?!

I think we will also continue to use RPG sessions for character sheets. It is very nicely integrated with the Genesys system so that for example it even records criticals, which is great. Instead of having my PCs note down the name of the critical and its details they just hit a button and roll one up and it gets added directly to their character sheet. I am using onenote to track campaign sessions, so now we just put the date of the crit into the character sheet and we know exactly when to attempt crit recovery, etc. There is also no risk anyone will ever forget a character sheet, since there’s zero chance they’ll leave home without a phone.

I have recently subscribed to the new Twilight 2000 kickstarter (and I suggest you do too!) which funded in 7 minutes, and is now up to its 9 billionth stretch goal. One of those stretch goals was the development of virtual tabletop tools for all the major applications, so that when you receive the game it is ready out of the box to be played online. I hope all new RPGs will do this in future, so that we can have a fully integrated virtual mapping, gaming and dice rolling system all in one. Of course some players like to roll dice (even though they’re shit at it[5]), which they will still be able to do, but the availability of ubiquitous online gaming platforms also opens the possibility of arbitrarily complex dice systems, since there’s no reason to physically assemble them or calculate the results. Who needs ideal polygonal forms for your dice when you can just roll d73? We could have dice systems based entirely on prime numbers! Or just go straight to arbitrary probability distributions … why go back?

This pandemic has forced the world to deal with the fact that the internet is no longer an ersatz reality. It’s no longer the case that things done online are not relevant to or close to real life. We should accept this, and instead of seeing online experiences as inferior to physical experiences, things we were forced to compromise on for our health, we should see them as ways to improve our past physical experiences to make them better. Rather than going back to how things used to be, let’s use the improvisations we had to make during this time to improve our physical lives when we are able to reconnect. I am trying to do this with my teaching, and I aim to do it for my gaming too!

fn1: Touch wood none of our players have got coronavirus, though two have been through some health scares, but some of us are older and some of us overweight, so we’re in the risk group for getting it badly if it does happen, and a gaming group is a perfect scenario for a cluster

fn2: Roll20 supposedly has an api for genesys dice but it is completely broken so I had to give up on using it. This was frustrating!

fn3: I’ve never been a great fan of miniatures for gaming, because I can’t paint them and they’re an absolute bastard to lug around, and for the first 15 or so years of my gaming experience they were only available in lead[4], which was heavy and ugly

fn4: Yes in the 1980s parents willingly allowed their still-developing children to participate in a hobby that involved casting lead, and playing with things made of lead. WTF

fn5: Jesus christ people, have some dice discipline will you!

June 30, 2020

Some House Rules for Coriolis

Posted by faustusnotes under Coriolis, Game planning, RPG aids, RPG Systems, Science Fiction, Space Opera
[4] Comments

I have been running a Coriolis campaign for 39 sessions now, with the PCs having accrued a lot of experience and a large number of talents and skills. The Coriolis rules are generally very tight and have been very easy to work with (except perhaps the space combat rules), but some parts of the basic rules lack a little depth as you gain levels, and there have been some ways in which my group and I have worked together to enhance the rules and in some ways to change them. Here I list some of those changes, and one change I should have implemented but didn’t.

Talent tiers

Pretty early on we realized that talents should have tiers, with more powerful and versatile effects at higher tiers. So we have made some additional talents that apply beyond the first tier. They still only cost 5xp to buy, but they require the previous talent in the tier first. Here are three examples of these tiers in action.

Tenth life: This is absolutely fundamental to enjoying this game. Once you’ve invested 50 xp in your pc you want some way to cheat death, and this is it. It’s the second tier of Nine Lives, and it has one purpose: you burn the talent to nullify a critical roll of 66. This is the game’s only one use talent, meaning you have to buy it again every time you used it. In our most recent session the PC Al Hamra used this to nullify a 66, and then got hit later in the same battle with another 66, which he could not nullify, and two other PCs (I think) have been forced to use their Tenth Life (then immediately bought it again). This talent is tier 2, with Nine Lives at Tier 1, but I think actually Nine Lives is a massively over-powered talent and should itself be Tier 2 – Tier 1 of this talent tree should be something like rerolling a crit and being forced to take the second roll, or being able to use Nine Lives only once a combat or something. But given how lethal this game is we haven’t quibbled with it: Nine Lives is basically a mandatory talent.

Machine gunner: The Machine Gunner talent now has two additional tiers. The first enables the PC to ignore the bulky quality of weapons (enabling them to carry vulcan machine guns as if they were carbines) and the second to fire full auto using 2AP. Adam has all three tiers, which means he can ignore an extra 1 when he fires his machine gun, he can carry a full vulcan machine gun as if it were a normal weapon, and can reload and fire in one round (he has rapid reload too). This makes Adam absolutely lethal when he rolls well, since he can ignore the first two 1s in an auto fire attack and do it every round even if he exhausts his ammunition. This is just as well since Adam’s player always rolls really badly.

Executioner: Tier 2 of the executioner allows the player to roll a second critical and choose the best one before reversing the dice. It partially nullifies Nine Lives and is used by Siladan, who is a melee fighter and consistently suffers the disadvantage of having to charge through a round of missile fire before he can engage. This is a very bad disadvantage in melee! I suspect that if combined with machine gunner this talent would be horrific.

Combat medic: Tier 2 of the combat medic talent enables the PC to heal damage when stabilizing a crit (but only when stabilizing a crit) so that each additional success grants one wound. Until we expanded mystic powers this was the only way that the PCs could recover damage during combat if they weren’t broken, and avoided this weird and unholy ping pong in which Dr Delekta had to wait for a player to be broken, heal them up a few wounds, and then let them be broken again (I think this ping pong happened in the first few sessions because we misunderstood the healing rules). In any case it’s super important because things spiral down the tube really fast if you can’t heal wounds along with stabilizing criticals. I think this system is far more lethal than even Rolemaster and a lot of our house rules were developed to make it survivable[1].

Expanded mystic powers

These have been described before but I include them here for completeness. In particular the higher levels of the Stop power (which give domination ability with almost no resistance) and the healing powers have been very useful. One of our mystics, Saqr, usually keeps an action point spare for a reaction that increases his armour. Another PC, Kaarlina, has all the levels of technomage and has found them very useful in a lot of situations, and of course Al Hamra loves both the second tier of the mind reading power and his domination abilities. I haven’t really deployed these powers to great effect against the PCs yet but I feel this will come soon.

Enhanced minion powers

I have been following the rule that minions add one die to their attack for each extra member of the group, but I have further enhanced the rules to make them a little more dangerous, enabling extra dice in additional situations.

Observation checks: Obviously with more people looking the chance of success should increase
Dexterity and force checks: When an entire team tries to get out of combat someone should be able to break through, so I increase dexterity checks accordingly; similarly for force checks, even in grappling-type situations (it’s hard to grapple one mook when three others are whaling on you).
Auto-fire: This is the key enhancement. Every extra minion in a group increases the number of 1s that need to be rolled to exhaust their weapons’ ammunition, so for example if there are four minions in a team they need to roll four 1s (the first 1, plus 3 more) in order to exhaust their weapons ammunition when using auto-fire. This makes minions with vulcan carbines absolutely lethal and ensures that my PCs are forced to take minions seriously, especially if I have enough darkness points to pray…

Group and individual skill checks

I follow a ruthless rule for adjudicating skill checks now: if the entire group fails from a single failure, everyone must roll separately; if the entire group benefits from a single success, the person with the highest pool rolls once and gains a +1 for each supporting person. This is done to ensure that the PCs do not basically automatically succeed at everything just from luck, and is something I learnt in D&D. Basically even if an observation check is super hard, if everyone rolls for it one of the group is likely to roll high. So I force the players to roll a single pool for observation checks, research, negotiations and the like – anything where even a single success from one PC is sufficient. In contrast, for stealth checks, where even one failure affects the whole group, I require everyone to roll separately and the entire group suffers from the worst roll. I recommend everyone apply this rule to a party with a fighter in plate mail!

You can really take this rule to new heights of nastiness by rolling some of the players’ dice pool secretly, yourself, so that they don’t know the exact result. I tried this a few times but the uproar led me to give it up. In this embellishment you roll perhaps a third of the dice yourself, so that if the players get no successes they don’t know whether to pray or not (since you might have rolled the one success they need); and if they don’t pray, they cannot guess whether the information they have received is untrue. It also means they cannot tell if they have got a critical success unless they see three dice in their part of the pool.

This is a real dick move, but if you like that sort of thing I strongly recommend it.

Strain from armour

When I played in a long (and excellent) Cyberpunk campaign we had to make a lot of house rules, and one modification we had to make was to armour, which proved invincible once you had more than a certain amount. We house-ruled there that if your armour fully absorbs damage you still take a point of stun damage, to ensure that no one can stay in combat for an infinite period of time just absorbing damage, because armour was so obviously over-powered in those rules[2]. Armour is not over-powered in Coriolis, but I think it would still be good to have a rule that if your armour absorbs all physical damage you still take a point of mental damage. Since absorbing physical damage often means avoiding a potentially lethal[3] critical, it seems reasonable that this should be a stressful experience. This also means that if you’re crouching behind cover absorbing huge amounts of incoming fire without taking damage, you will slowly lose your shit, which also seems reasonable. Unfortunately, however, I forgot this rule until recently and it’s definitely too late to implement it[4]. I recommend that you do!

Final comment on the rules

I have found the Coriolis rules to be very smooth, enjoyable and easy to use, with very little need for house ruling beyond judgements about positives and negatives, and winging it a bit with the use of darkness points. It’s a really well-designed and smooth system that is very fun to use. My only criticism would be that the talents and mystic powers are a bit superficial, and don’t allow the richness and depth of character creation that players demand over a long campaign. But this is a very minor criticism, and embellishing rules is much more fun than hacking them because they don’t work. So I present these rule modifications in that spirit, with the clear qualification that the system works completely fine as it is. Nonetheless, I hope you will consider using some of these rules in your own campaign, and even if you decide to ignore all of them, I strongly recommend the enhanced auto-fire rules for minions. Because, let’s face it, your players deserve the best!

fn1: Perhaps if my players were less reckless this wouldn’t be an issue … but they would argue I’m an arsehole GM and they have no choice. There were good people on both sides of the debate …

fn2: Don’t play Cyberpunk, the rules are thoroughly broken.

fn3: 50% of the time!

fn4: I suspect if my players read this they’ll be clamouring for me to implement the rule, since they’re about to face off with four guys in battle exos.

June 14, 2020

Genesys Campaign Setting: The Archipelago

Posted by faustusnotes under Fantasy, Game planning, Gaming material, RPG aids, RPG cosmology, RPG Systems | Tags: Archipelago campaign, Genesys |
[6] Comments

As my Coriolis campaign comes to its extremely violent conclusion, I am completing preparations for the next campaign I plan to GM. The last few campaigns I have GM’d have been science fiction: Coriolis, before that the Spiral Confederacy (Traveler), and before that a post-apocalyptic water-world campaign called Flood (using Cyberpunk rules, natch). My players are craving some high fantasy and so am I, but I am completely over D&D and incapable of running it or playing it any more – I just find it boring in all its incarnations and although I loved it when I was younger I can’t enjoy it past about 5th level, so I don’t want to run it anymore. I considered Warhammer, but I think my players would like to move away from worlds saturated in darkness and I know that when I GM Warhammer I make it altogether very grimdark, which some of my players don’t need. So, I decided to make my own sunny and upbeat campaign world for Genesys, using a classic fantasy RPG setting with orcs and magic and mediaeval scenes and monsters and completely arbitrary but fixed notions of good and evil which mean the PCs can slay any evil monster they want without fear of repercussions or any moral quandaries. The setting I chose is based on a map I found on the internet, and I choose at this stage to call it the Archipelago Campaign.

The Archipelago

The Archipelago is a collection of island kingdoms of manageable size, isolated from any major landmasses and connected by stormy but navigable seas. There are 8 nations of human settlements, a large wild area occupied by human-like tribespeople called wildlings, a single island for dwarves, and a couple of forests where elves live. There are also a few members of a race of people called Changelings, who are like humans but smaller and a bit weird, who live in hunter-gatherer societies and can change their form to perfectly resemble any human they have ever seen. The entire area is also plagued by deepfolk: orcs, goblins, ogres, dark elves and deep gnomes who are implacably evil and hate humans with all their heart and soul (if they have a soul). The deepfolk live underground and come out through hidden entrances and lairs in mountains, hillsides and forests, and there is constant conflict between these nasty creatures and humans. There are also other monsters in the forests and mountains, and one island has been ravaged and taken over by a dragon.

The refugee history of humans

The human society in this land is relatively light on history and politics. Humans arrived in the Archipelago 1000 years ago as refugees, but were immediately plunged into 200 years of constant flight and conflict as the deepfolk tried to destroy them. As a result of these 200 Lost Years they have forgotten their origins and lost all documents and written stories about their past, and so they know nothing about where they came from, why they fled, or how they came to the Archipelago. After 200 years the dwarves took pity on them and helped them found a few pathetic settlements, and after that they slowly formed kingdoms. They had to learn to read and write from the dwarves, either because they had no written language or all those details were destroyed during the Lost Years. They brought a kind of magic with them, learnt a new kind from the dwarves and a third kind from the elves, and slowly settled and spread across the Archipelago. Out of respect for their refugee history they have no systems of slavery or kings or queens, and generally there is not much conflict between kingdoms – I have set this society up to be light on politics and history so the PCs can focus on uncovering secrets and killing orcs, but without having the stultifying and boring influence of feudalism on the society.

In general human society is at the technology level of Britain in the 9th century, with the caveat that they have little access to iron – all iron and jewels are hoarded by deepfolk and can only be obtained through war. So weapons and armour are slightly neolithic. This introduces a new tier of weapons between mundane weapons and magic weapons, and gives additional reasons to kill those pale-skinned underground bastards.

Magic and religion

There are three forms of magic in the world, each connected to a religion: Salt, the magic humans brought with them; Storm, the magic dwarves love, which helps them become consummate sailors; and sun, the magic the elves prefer, which is most like the arcane magic we all know and love. There is no heaven and hell, no demons, no afterlife and no special moral restrictions from religion, so religion is primarily a reassuring force to make pathetic humans feel they have a place in the world, rather than a strong moral code. PCs can be one of the three religions but can never mix magical forms. There is a fourth kind of magic, deep magic, used by deepfolk, which is the only way that one can learn necromancy or enchantments, but no human has ever used it so domination spells and vampires are entirely the province of the deepfolk. Deepfolk are evil!

Races and classes

In this world as in all my worlds elves are dodgy, shonky wild creatures who can’t be understood or trusted, but players can choose an elven PC if that is their thing. Dwarves are simply small, thin folk who live on the sea and are masters of art, culture and craft – kind of like erudite 16th century explorers compared to the 9th century barbarian humans. The wildlings of the north are maybe a lost tribe of humans or maybe a different indigenous race, no one knows, but they’re bigger and kind of more savage than humans. Changelings live in small hunter-gatherer societies on the fringe of human nations, and don’t seem to have much wealth or care for human activities, but are much sought after for their transformation powers. No one can play any form of deepfolk, because deepfolk are evil.

Resources and plans

The document I have prepared for my players to read can be found here, with detailed information about the world and rules for the Genesys system. We will be starting in the next month or two, depending on brutally the players are able to end the Coriolis campaign. I am looking forward to a long, leisurely exploration of a fantasy realm after many years of science fiction!

February 20, 2020

The Shipbuilders of Dabaran

Posted by faustusnotes under Coriolis, Gaming material, RPG aids, RPG Systems, Science Fiction, Space Opera | Tags: Bangladesh, Coriolis campaign |
Leave a Comment

On old Al-Ardha there was a nation of deltas and rivers, a low-lying land that had made its history and its culture at one with the sea. Rich nations far away from this tidebound kingdom polluted and ruined Al-Ardha, and as the seas of the warming world rose this nation that had lived at peace with the brine for 1000 years was inundated and ruined.

The people of this nation had a proud tradition of ship-breaking, taking the terrestrial ships of other nations and reducing them to their bones and parts, repurposing them and selling them. When the people of the First Horizon went into space the people of this nation followed, taking their ship-breaking skills to the Dark between the stars and becoming consummate recyclers of the ships of the richer nations that were ruining the surface. But for all their labours, when the people of the First Horizon sent out their generation ships to colonize the second and third Horizons, the people of this proud riverine kingdom were not included. Watching their own land sink beneath the waves of their dying world, they decided to build their own generation ship, fashioning a mighty vessel to take them to the Third Horizon and preparing it with loving care over decades to send out to the stars.

As they finished their ship, however, the people of the First Horizon discovered the portals, and generation ships were no longer necessary. The river-folk of this drowning land saw their chance, and quickly redesigned their ship to travel through the portals. They set off through the portals with the rest of Al-Ardha’s fleet, arriving in the Third Horizon and becoming part of the wave of migration known as the Firstcome.

This nation’s ship was called অটুট, Atuta, in their language. In the language of the Third Horizon this would be interpreted as the Unbroken. While the other Firstcome ships had been designed for the portals, the Unbroken had been designed as a generation ship, and it dwarfed the other Firstcome ships. 4km long, carrying some 500,000 people and a wealth of equipment and materiel, the Unbroken was twice the size of the next largest ship in the Firstcome fleet, and carried far more people than any of the other ships in the fleet. When the Firstcome arrived in the Third Horizon a mad scramble began to find new planets and places to settle, but the people of the Unbroken, being themselves victims of colonialism, refused to join the frenzied competition for land and resources that characterized that first wave of settlement. Instead they traveled the Horizon looking for a place to rest. By dint of the skill of their captains, long honed in a land that had grown with the sea and leapt into the sky, they were able to navigate the unstable portals of the Dabaran circle, and were among the first to arrive in the Dabaran system. While some of those who came with them chose to settle planets in the system the people of the Unbroken decided to make their fate in the stars, doing what they had done in the First Horizon. They brought the Unbroken to rest in a far orbit in the Dabaran system, and turned the huge ship into a massive space station, hundreds of years before the arrival of the Zenith. The massive engines that had powered it were repurposed into material for factories and shipyards, and the Shipbuilders of Dabaran began their trade.

Over the next generations, before the portal wars collapsed the portals and destroyed the connection to Al-Ardha, the people of that drowning nation set out on many small ships to the Third Horizon to join their pioneers from the Unbroken, bringing their ship-breaking yards and their factories and their culture to the Third Horizon. Over those generations another million people joined the original settlers, and the original space station grew in size, the Unbroken now surrounded by platforms and barges and dormitory stations and factories. The complex grew, and in this complex developed the largest, most productive and well-known of the Horizon’s shipyards: the Dabaran Shipyards. These shipyards could do anything: repurposing, renovating, scrapping, salvaging and building. They took old ships and reduced them to their components, recycling the parts into new ships for clients all across the Horizon. They refurbished and repurposed ships, adding and removing modules, changing shapes, grafting in new components, redesigning anything they were asked to do. And using the components they stripped from other ships, or materials brought in from distant systems, they build new ships to order. Mira could make faster, more beautiful ships; the freighters of Darkos were unparalleled for their solidity; Harima’s ships were faster and more luxurious; but if you wanted versatility in your design, at a reasonable price, or just wanted a simple, all-purpose ship with no problems and no fuss, the shipyards of Dabaran could build it for you. Everyone in the Horizon knows about Dabaran ships, but somehow they pass through every system unheralded, unnoticed and without awe or disgust. They are the workhorses of the Horizon, the vessels that all the people of the systems of the Horizon do not even know they depend on. These are the many progeny of the shipyards of Dabaran.

A ship being broken, viewed from the deck of the Legion destroyer Azure Sky

Over the years the shipbuilders of Dabaran have become synonymous with the system itself. Their language, Dabari, is spoken on all its planets, and the industry of ship building dominates the economy of the whole system. Over time the shipbuilders themselves have become associated with the system, and so they themselves are called Dabarani. Some live on the surface of the Dabaran system’s planets, but the majority – perhaps 2 million in total – live in the many stations and satellites of the shipbuilding community, which is generally referred to as Atuta by its residents. Atuta is a huge, thriving complex of interconnected spaceships, space stations, platforms, barges and habitats, linked by a complex network of transport tubes, docking stations, and tiny fliers and transports that swarm around the habitats themselves. Even a lifetime spent on Atuta is insufficient to understand its many communities, souks, gardens and factories, and to visit Atuta is to understand what the Horizon could be like if only everyone were as industrious, as busy and as energetic as the Dabarani. People from all over the Horizon come here to trade ships and ship parts, to do business in the hectic and confused bazaars and marketplaces, and to make money from the shipping industry. In particular the agents of the Nomad Federation and the Free League swarm to Atuta to do business, and it is a stronghold of these factions. The Legion have a presence here as well, ostensibly to ensure security but in reality to ensure a steady supply of spare parts and new ships for their expanding empire. Far out from the centre of the Horizon, Atuta is a hub of commerce and industry.

The Dabarani build ships, and they also break them. But they do not, officially, break or refurbish illegal ships, and it is an unwise adventurer who brings a stolen ship to the Dabarani to be refitted or scrapped. However, a large industry of hackers and criminals has grown around Atuta, laundering the names and registrations of stolen ships so that they can be merged into the industrial landscape and repurposed or scrapped by its official industry. The Dabarani ruling council claim to be ignorant of any such crimes, and promise to punish them with extreme prejudice if caught, but everyone knows that in reality they tolerate these people in their midst in exchange for the business they bring. Some say the Legion maintain a presence here so they can watch this business, and keep track of all the ships that are being stolen and scrapped – and the people doing it. Others say that the Dabarani are nothing more than the permanent home base of the Nomad Federation, who sometimes need to trade in stolen and salvaged ships, but the truth is simpler: Atuta is open for business, and any business can be done here for the right price, if you are careful and you do not cross the Legion or the leadership of Atuta. If you have a stolen ship all you need to do is find one of the many Data Djinn who work at the fringes of Atuta, laundering ship licenses, and then you are free to take your new, “clean” ship into Artuta to pay the Dabarani to modify it.

With commercial influence and power has come cultural independence, and the Dabarani have retained many unique cultural practices over the years. The hull of the Unbroken itself remains largely untouched, but within it has been renovated to reflect its new purpose as the centre of Dabrani culture. The old hangars, vast spaces designed to hold the many courier ships and shuttles of the original generation ship, have been turned into a complex of gardens and shrines, with at its centre a huge hall for reflection and revelation. Most of the ship’s stasis pods have long since been stripped away and turned into parts for an expanded medical bay, but a few remain, converted into tombs to hold the remains of the Nabi, the navigators, captains and engineers who guided Dabarani society through the first generation of its growth in the Third Horizon. The Unbroken also bristles with ancient Firstcome weapons, installed during the portal wars, and although quiescent now represents a potent military force if roused to action. The Dabarani also follow a variant of the Church of the Icons, in which the Icons are not revered as gods but as messengers of an ineffable elder god. While others in the Third Horizon hold all the Icons as equal, the Dabarani revere the Messenger above all, seeing him as the original conduit for the wisdom of the ancient god, and like to quote from a book of his ideas that they claim he brought with him from the First Horizon (and which the other Firstcome lost).

This is Atuta, the Unbroken, the home of the last refugees of a drowning land, its best pilots and its most industrious shipbuilders. The entire Horizon is connected by its labour, and the entire Horizon can be found here, in Atuta.