Here's something that annoys me greatly about traditional RPG systems, something that, unfortunately, is seen as inherent to the very core of role playing games, and that something is the concept of character classes and experience levels. I do realize that RPGs have to take certain liberties with "realism" in order to offer you, the player, comprehensible rules of the game universe, which is how we get hit points as a stand in for a character's health or skill ranks that quantify the character's abilities. However, I believe that the traditional class and experience systems are far more restrictive than they need to be.
For those of you who don't know, a "class" is the RPG term for a character's profession. One way to look at it is that a class is basically a pre-packaged bundle of skills, feats and special abilities that define the character's role in the adventure. Fighters fight, wizards cast spells, bards do bard stuff, rogues do rogue stuff. The problem with this is, though, that your character usually ends up defined entirely by their class. You're not Lord Gabriel of Asken, you're The Fighter. You're not Moonslip the Orphan, you're The Thief. Players are discouraged from differentiating their cleric from the bajillion other clerics that came before. The cause of this problem is the way in which the class system restricts what skills is any given class allowed to possess, either by making investing in cross-class skills expensive or outright impossible. If you're lucky, your system will allow the thief instruct the ranger on how to pick pockets or let the monk train the mage in advanced staff combat skills. If you're not, well, better hope you like having no identity.
I have encountered a particularly nasty case of this in the Czech knock-off version of Dungeons & Dragons called Dračí Doupě ("Dragon's Lair"). In this system, a character's abilities are given entirely by their class, of which there are five (each of which then branches out into two different prestige classes at level 6). The rules spend a lot of time outlining what each class can or can't do, including what equipment they're allowed to use, but then the DM's Handbook contains a section that essentially says "well, of course these things aren't forbidden per se, you just have to think real hard about why they're said so and rule accordingly". In other words, the system forbids perfectly rational actions (such as a ranger using a stolen heavy weapon when breaking out of jail or a wizard wearing armor) for no reason other than ballancing issues and then provides the DM with no way to resolve these issues apart from "use your best judgment".
I have mentioned the traditional experience system, too. Unlike the class system, this one doesn't really irk me all that much and I can see why it's so popular, after all, a character's level is a clear indicator of how strong that character is. Also, it provides an easy way to simulate the growth of a character's capabilities. My only problem with it is that it's really not all that important and it allows the flaws of the class system to exist. This is especially evident in systems that allow players to make multi-class characters, as their experience levels count towards their classes, not the character as a whole. I like to say that the levelling system solves problems that would otherwise not even exist.
Saying all this, I believe it's no surprise that I have decided not to implement a class or levelling system in my homebrew, instead opting to go with an alternate system that has appeared in parts in other games. The cornerstone of this system consists of what I call "advancement points" that are either "bought" for collected experience (the homebrew specifically set the price of one advancement point as 100 experience points) or awarded directly by the GM. These points are then used to, well, advance the character, mainly by increasing skill ranks, but also by buying feats or improving hit points (if your system has those things). I'll be the first to admit that this system is far from perfect - it is rather simplistic, even though its implementation requires balancing out the costs and the rate at which the points are awarded - but I like the way it smooths out character progression.
Showing posts with label rpg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rpg. Show all posts
Monday, February 11, 2013
Friday, January 18, 2013
Die Selection system
Today, I'm going to build on what I said in my last postabout good RPGs only using a minimal number of different dice rolls. Now, you may not believe it, but I have tried to design my own homebrew RPG system in the past, although unsuccessfully. Oh, who am I kidding, of course you're going to believe it. The point is, I do have some basics thought up.
The main thought of that system was to put as much decisive power into the GM's hand as possible and minimise the effect that a character's stats would have on that character's player's roleplaying, and the way I did that was by simplifying the number parts of that system as much as possible. Part of that simplification was the Die Selection system.
The point of the DS system is that each roll is tied to an attribute, usually a character's stat, and that attribute can have one of three values, which are 0 (null), + (plus) and - (minus), with null being average, plus being good and minus being bad, obviously. This has the effect of simplifying character stats, since their attributes' values are only given by one of the three symbols, not a numerical value, thus achieving the second goal stated in the previous paragraph.
The roll itself uses two dice, and although I'll be using d10s for reasons I stated in my last post, they can be of any kind. The only rule is that they have the same amount of sides and different colors.The way it works is that you roll both dice and, barring unusual circumstances that I'll talk about soon, you select which one applies as the result based on the attribute tied to the roll. If the attribute's value is:
Critical successes and failures (or crits and botches for short) are a big part of any RPG system, which is why I added them into the DS system, too. But I had to find a way that would implement them in an easy way that would give you the same chance of a crit or botch regardless of the roll atrribute. And I found one. So the way critical rolls work is, if the sum of your rolled numbers is 3 or lower, you have rolled a botch, and symmetrically, if the sum is 19 or higher, you have rolled a crit. Critical rolls are resolved before the die selection, meaning "crit" or "botch" is a result of the roll instead of a numerical value, not in addition to. As for what they mean, well, there are multiple ways to handle them. You could say they're autimatic successes/failures, you could have a confirmation roll à la the d20 system or you could come up with your own far more original solution. I'd say let the GM decide.
Now I'll be the first one to damit that this system is far from perfect. One thing in particular that rubs me the wrong way about it is the way how a minus roll will almost never result in anything more than 4 and a plus roll will scarcely drop below 7. But then again, that's kind of the point and let's be honest here, if you find yourself in a situation where a minus roll is inevitable, you've probably done something wrong. Or the DM hates you.
The main thought of that system was to put as much decisive power into the GM's hand as possible and minimise the effect that a character's stats would have on that character's player's roleplaying, and the way I did that was by simplifying the number parts of that system as much as possible. Part of that simplification was the Die Selection system.
The point of the DS system is that each roll is tied to an attribute, usually a character's stat, and that attribute can have one of three values, which are 0 (null), + (plus) and - (minus), with null being average, plus being good and minus being bad, obviously. This has the effect of simplifying character stats, since their attributes' values are only given by one of the three symbols, not a numerical value, thus achieving the second goal stated in the previous paragraph.
The roll itself uses two dice, and although I'll be using d10s for reasons I stated in my last post, they can be of any kind. The only rule is that they have the same amount of sides and different colors.The way it works is that you roll both dice and, barring unusual circumstances that I'll talk about soon, you select which one applies as the result based on the attribute tied to the roll. If the attribute's value is:
- plus, the higher number rolled applies.
- minus, the lower number rolled applies.
- null, the die that was selected beforehand applies.
Critical successes and failures (or crits and botches for short) are a big part of any RPG system, which is why I added them into the DS system, too. But I had to find a way that would implement them in an easy way that would give you the same chance of a crit or botch regardless of the roll atrribute. And I found one. So the way critical rolls work is, if the sum of your rolled numbers is 3 or lower, you have rolled a botch, and symmetrically, if the sum is 19 or higher, you have rolled a crit. Critical rolls are resolved before the die selection, meaning "crit" or "botch" is a result of the roll instead of a numerical value, not in addition to. As for what they mean, well, there are multiple ways to handle them. You could say they're autimatic successes/failures, you could have a confirmation roll à la the d20 system or you could come up with your own far more original solution. I'd say let the GM decide.
Now I'll be the first one to damit that this system is far from perfect. One thing in particular that rubs me the wrong way about it is the way how a minus roll will almost never result in anything more than 4 and a plus roll will scarcely drop below 7. But then again, that's kind of the point and let's be honest here, if you find yourself in a situation where a minus roll is inevitable, you've probably done something wrong. Or the DM hates you.
Monday, January 7, 2013
Ten-Sided Master Race
d10s are the only dice that are worth having and using, all the other dice suck. d6s are baby toys, and who the fuck would in their right mind even use a d20? You could just as well roll a marble. d8s look like d6s that got the number of faces and vertices wrong and what the fuck is even a d4? What, you couldn't even afford a face that would, uh, face upwards? You have to read the value off of a point? At least d12s look cool, what with being made of pentagons and all. They're almost as good as d10s, but only almost.
Okay, now that I got the silly out of my system, let me get a bit more serious on this subject. I do believe that ten-sided dice are the best choice for tabletop RPG, a belief I share with Jacob, who nicknamed it rather beautifully "the glorious ten-sided master race". I don't know his reasoning, but my train of thought stems from what I think an ideal RPG should be like.
My ideal RPG would be focused on the role-playing aspect of the game, not on the sheet of paper that defines your character. It would be less about rolling high numbers and more aboput making the right choices in difficult situations. It should also not limit what kind of stories you can tell in them, by which I mean it shouldn't define special rules and, especially, rolls, because once it does, it starts to limit potential stories to a particular genre, or worse yet, setting. Fantasy RPGs are especially guilty of this when they start defining magic systems so interwoven with the central rules that if you take it out, the whole system collapses into an unplayable mess. For those reasons, I think the ideal RPG would have complex rules and very simple dice rolls. Ideally, one single roll.
So why should that one roll use ten-sided dice? Well, it's partly mathematics and partly convenience. Convenience, because some dice are simply "better" at giving random results than other. For one, the general shape of a die influences how well it rolls. I admit, this is a very subjective point, but from my experience, d4s and d8s are very bad in this regard due to their very angular nature. This would imply that the less angular a die is, and the more faces it has, the better it rolls, but there's more to it than just that. You see, most gaming dice aren't exactly fair. They're made in a device called "rock tumbler". Those interested can research the whole process in their own time, but for what I'm saying here it's only important to know that the end result is a die with rounded edges that is more dense in certain parts. While this irregularity only poses as a very small influence on the randomness of that particular die, it's still there and the easier it is for the die to, in physics terms, change from one state to another, the bigger the influence is. This phenomenon is particularly noticeable with hundred-sided dice (yes, they exist, although they're made using more fair methods), but it's mainly a big problem with modern twenty-sided dice. For example, my good ol' purple d20 tends to land on 18 and adjacent numbers (2, 4 and 5) more than anything else.
Following the above logic, the best choices for our one true die are d6, d10 and d12. So why do I choose the d10? As I said before, mathematics. In the most simple case, a one die roll, I don't think the scale of 1-6 is large enough to allow for convenient division. In a simple success/fail case, the probabilities only move in sixths, and the problem only worsens in cases where we have multiple results. In this regard, the 1-12 scale is clearly superior, because it's divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6. So the d12 sounds like an ideal candidate, and in a way it would be, were I not human. But I am, and as a result I'm primed to think in base-10, which makes operating with numbers between 1-10 much easier, which comes in handy when you need to roll more than one die, not to mention that humans just instinctively understand the scale of 1 to 10 better than any other. There's also the ability to perform a so-called "percentile roll" (d%) that provides you with a scale of 1-100.
In terms of major RPG systems, at least those that I'm somewhat familiar with, d10s are important in Vampire: The Masquerade, and probably other World of Darkness systems as well, with what I think is a very beautiful roll mechanic, where the player's stats influence not an additive modifier to the roll, but rather the number of d10s that they roll. I have seen versions that use d6s rather than d10s, but I believe that was a homebrew "hack" of the game, not any official version. There are other major systems that utilize different kinds of dice, for example GURPS (d6) and the d20 system (guess), so don't think that the d10 is unviersally revered as the Jesus of dice. This is all just my opinion, so feel free to disagree.
Okay, now that I got the silly out of my system, let me get a bit more serious on this subject. I do believe that ten-sided dice are the best choice for tabletop RPG, a belief I share with Jacob, who nicknamed it rather beautifully "the glorious ten-sided master race". I don't know his reasoning, but my train of thought stems from what I think an ideal RPG should be like.
My ideal RPG would be focused on the role-playing aspect of the game, not on the sheet of paper that defines your character. It would be less about rolling high numbers and more aboput making the right choices in difficult situations. It should also not limit what kind of stories you can tell in them, by which I mean it shouldn't define special rules and, especially, rolls, because once it does, it starts to limit potential stories to a particular genre, or worse yet, setting. Fantasy RPGs are especially guilty of this when they start defining magic systems so interwoven with the central rules that if you take it out, the whole system collapses into an unplayable mess. For those reasons, I think the ideal RPG would have complex rules and very simple dice rolls. Ideally, one single roll.
So why should that one roll use ten-sided dice? Well, it's partly mathematics and partly convenience. Convenience, because some dice are simply "better" at giving random results than other. For one, the general shape of a die influences how well it rolls. I admit, this is a very subjective point, but from my experience, d4s and d8s are very bad in this regard due to their very angular nature. This would imply that the less angular a die is, and the more faces it has, the better it rolls, but there's more to it than just that. You see, most gaming dice aren't exactly fair. They're made in a device called "rock tumbler". Those interested can research the whole process in their own time, but for what I'm saying here it's only important to know that the end result is a die with rounded edges that is more dense in certain parts. While this irregularity only poses as a very small influence on the randomness of that particular die, it's still there and the easier it is for the die to, in physics terms, change from one state to another, the bigger the influence is. This phenomenon is particularly noticeable with hundred-sided dice (yes, they exist, although they're made using more fair methods), but it's mainly a big problem with modern twenty-sided dice. For example, my good ol' purple d20 tends to land on 18 and adjacent numbers (2, 4 and 5) more than anything else.
Following the above logic, the best choices for our one true die are d6, d10 and d12. So why do I choose the d10? As I said before, mathematics. In the most simple case, a one die roll, I don't think the scale of 1-6 is large enough to allow for convenient division. In a simple success/fail case, the probabilities only move in sixths, and the problem only worsens in cases where we have multiple results. In this regard, the 1-12 scale is clearly superior, because it's divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6. So the d12 sounds like an ideal candidate, and in a way it would be, were I not human. But I am, and as a result I'm primed to think in base-10, which makes operating with numbers between 1-10 much easier, which comes in handy when you need to roll more than one die, not to mention that humans just instinctively understand the scale of 1 to 10 better than any other. There's also the ability to perform a so-called "percentile roll" (d%) that provides you with a scale of 1-100.
In terms of major RPG systems, at least those that I'm somewhat familiar with, d10s are important in Vampire: The Masquerade, and probably other World of Darkness systems as well, with what I think is a very beautiful roll mechanic, where the player's stats influence not an additive modifier to the roll, but rather the number of d10s that they roll. I have seen versions that use d6s rather than d10s, but I believe that was a homebrew "hack" of the game, not any official version. There are other major systems that utilize different kinds of dice, for example GURPS (d6) and the d20 system (guess), so don't think that the d10 is unviersally revered as the Jesus of dice. This is all just my opinion, so feel free to disagree.
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