With this article, I’m starting a new way to organize content on the site. This is the first in my new Dweomercraft series which is where I’ll write about the development of the (redesigned) magic system for ARPS.

Recently, I’ve talked about how we’re jiggering the costs of performing magic in ARPS. I’ve been a touch brief on the topic in recent postings, so let me fill you in on how the system used to work and the whats and whys about the changes.

Each magical “thing” you can do in the game is expressed as a “generic” dweomer which can be worked and cast in the game in a variety of forms (commonly as a spell, rune, talisman, artifice, formula, gift, or talent) depending on the character’s skills and other traits. Each dweomer has a specific Difficulty (in ARPS parlance, a Diff; basically, a target number for a check) which represents its overall difficulty. Modifications can be made to the dweomer expressed as a modification to its Diff. Under the current rules, the time requirement to work a dweomer and the cost to cast the dweomer is based on the Diff and the character’s skill level, in fact, Diff – Level. For example, if a character with a skill level of 10 casts a Diff 20 Simple dweomer as a spell it’d cost him (20 – 10) 10 points of drain and take 10 TAPs (as it takes 1 TAP, a unit of time in combat, per point of cost for a Simple spell). The idea being that the time requirement and costs would go down as the character gained more skill. (There’s obviously a lot more going on in the background, but the bulk of our magic problems are combat-oriented, so we don’t need to deal with all of the concepts to understand the current problems.)

A problem with this system is that in combat, a character gains a number of Tactical Action Points (TAPs) per round of combat based on his initiative roll. These TAPs are spent to perform various actions. As the character gains in combat ability, he gains more TAPs to spend, effectively making him faster in a fixed 15 second combat round. Thus, combat mages are double-dipping in time since they’d both receive more TAPs to spend and take less time to cast their spells. For example, a starting mage with a Combat Sense (the skill used for initiative) of level 8 might have 20 TAPs for a given round. A mage with some experience with a Combat Sense of 12 would average 24 TAPs or so. In the meantime, a Diff 20 dweomer would drop from 12 TAPs to 8 TAPs.

The crux of the problem was that combat mages were acting too quickly. As time went on, they were casting multiple dweomers at dagger and sword speed. In recent games, mages started taking over combat and stealing the thunder from the fighters (despite limited resources to spend to cast magic). After looking at that piece of the problem, we determined that mages needed to act at a speed more akin to a bow than a sword or dagger. This was a reasonable shift since players of archers didn’t tend to have a problem with their attack speeds.

Another ongoing problem was that, under the current model, the costs of performing magic crept quickly toward being too low to be reasonable. Mages started taking over every aspect of play, especially if there were multiple mages in a party. One of the problem was that players could game the system a bit. Though there are soft limits in place for mages, a player could, by doing the right math, know exactly how much he could pull off in a given situation. Magic was thus not only too cheap but also allowed a player to take no risk.

A tenet of ARPS is a certain amount of “gritty cinema” which allows characters to do a number of fantastic and cinematic things, but with certain limitations which, if pushed, could have negative side-effects for the character. Magic failed to meet this requirement, primarily because of the ability to game the system.

I’ve alluded to this in a few previous posts, but we did some thinking and some play-testing, and we decided to take away some of the ability to game the system. First, we decided that the time requirements for combat magic should be fixed, regardless of modification (the time requirement is based on the dweomer’s degree (roughly equivalent to a spell level in D&D) and the form of the magic). This prevents the time double-dipping problem. Second, we decided that the costs to cast magic should be based purely on the player’s roll to cast rather than on a fixed calculation at the current level. Thus, we added risk to the system since the player can’t accurately predict his final costs. Now, the player’s total roll (the result of adding his level to his die roll) is compared against the dweomer’s Diff to determine a cost differential (this mechanic is used elsewhere in the system, but I have yet to give it a name…this is a new idea to name it) and that differential is subtracted from the dweomer’s Diff which also serves as its base cost. This seems a touch complicated, but in testing, it’s turned out to be faster than expected. Let me give you an example:

A character with level 10 in his magical skill is casting a Diff 20 dweomer (a Simple spell, as above, to avoid confusion). He rolls his dice and rolls a 15 giving him a total roll of (15 + 10) 25. He beat the Diff by 5, reducing the cost (the dweomer’s Diff) of 20 by 5 to 15. (For those who work quickly through potential mechanics, there’s a minimum cost of 1 here.)

This, in combination with some of our other changes (see posts on magical schools and changing how magic is organized) has really helped to smooth out the power of magic and help spread the power to the higher skill levels. So far in testing, we’ve been utterly thrilled by how this is working. And, last night, we finally were able to use the new system to give us a good guideline of how to adjust the Diffs of the various dweomers (our ongoing dweomer review) to the appropriate skill level.

Next Time on Dweomercraft: The Makings of a Mage: Looking at how we’re changing the way characters become mages and what this means to the system.

It’s been a while since I GMed a game (reasons mentioned before, but really, it was burnout), but I finally got back into the GM’s chair this past Tuesday night. I managed to build a reasonably campaign-length plot, worked up maps of the local village and various local players, worked through character backgrounds and profiles, and was pretty much set and ready to go. Possibly with the most preparation I’ve done in a long while (and I plan more as this progresses).

Now, we GM’s are our own worst critics, that’s for sure. The game started off with what I refer to as “the contrived set up” (though a mite more involved than “you meet in a bar and there’s a dwarf bartender”) but that went reasonably well with some basic role-playing as the players felt out their characters. There was a slightly tense moment when the party members almost shot each other, but they got past that without injury. Most of the adventure was tracking down these boar-beastmen who kidnapped someone important. Worked in a minor skirmish (hard to follow beastmen that have good senses of smell) that the party got through without any risk of injury. For the record, no matter how big you are, no matter how much you frenzy and ignore wounds, a couple of arrows in the head will do you in. We left the party figuring out what to do now that they found the main encampment and they’re outnumbered like twelve-to-one.

I say GM’s are our own worst critics since I’m not really sure how things went. Everything felt a touch slow and bit contrived to me and I really wasn’t able to gauge the group’s overall interest very well. I’m trying to attribute things to it being the first session and we lost the first hour to finishing up characters and other minutia.

On top of this, we rolled in a piece of the magic changes we’ve been working on. The time and cost pieces worked reasonably well, though we really haven’t given them a good test in a dire situation yet. The piece of it that turned out problematic was that the setting is intended to be a touch more “low magic” (the uneducated woodsman of the party nearly freaked when he was exposed to serious magic the first time), but the system doesn’t really allow itself to be tweaked that way very well. That being said, with some of the other changes that go with the ones we rolled out, I do think the final system will make magic somewhere between low magic and the super-high fantasy magic that games like D&D present.

Bah. Maybe I’m just being too hard on myself? We’ll see.

Been suffering through a magical imbalance in the game through recent play-tests. Thanks to a few blog posts (some of which I’ve alluded to before and the others, unfortunately, I didn’t bookmark), I’ve had some realizations about what gritty cinema means for ARPS magic.

Without getting into system details that no one’s going to follow (since it’s a closed play-test at this point), essentially the mechanics we’ve been using for some time are essentially flawed. We’ve come up with some new ways to take the power gaming out of the costs of casting and working magic and generally reduced the overall ubiquity of powerful magic in the game. Some of the changes (along with some proposed mechanics changes elsewhere) have really opened up the possibilities for magic in the game.

For the curious, we made magic slower and more in-line with the speed of bow attacks rather than melee attacks, we increased the cost of magic and made the cost variable introducing an element of risk to working magic, and we’re taking advantage of a new complex check system to handle prepared magic, complex and elaborate workings, and learning new dweomers. Among a few other things, of course.

In a quick test of the new idea we replayed a combat from our previous game session. In the session, a single vampire profane mage was able to hold off the entire party. Now, he was a match for any one party member, but not for all of us together. This is an important thing for “game balance” since the vampire’s skills were equivalent to the party’s. This means that at an equivalent level, he’s a challenge, but would need to be considerably more powerful to take on multiple opponents of equal power.

This is a huge step. We’re going to attempt to roll this into our Tuesday game (smaller group, single mage, and 75% are on the development team) and see how it works before we roll it out to our larger party where magic is considerably more prevalent among the players.

Got my notification this morning that we’re now a member of the RPG Bloggers Network and the ORP feed should start syndication sometime later today. If you’ve arrived here from the Network feed, welcome to OpenRoleplaying.org.

In other news, I guess this means I need to start writing pithier posts.

In recent play-tests, we’ve realized that in certain cases, magic remains too powerful in ARPS. For some quick background, the rest of the system has been relatively stable for a few years now other than some adjustments to recovery and combat to better accommodate grappling (every game designer’s friend). Magic, however, has been a moving target especially where “game balance” is concerned. The core of the magic system is good; but, we find ourselves needing to continually adjust the levers, switches, and knobs hoping to get the balance right.

Some of our recent changes have definitely helped. Having characters with a more narrow magical focus has brought pieces of magic under control. Restricting how magic can be modified by the characters has also helped to curtail some of the abuse. A problem (and I’ve alluded to this before) is that, simply, we have old-style dweomers vying for control against new-style dweomers that are better written and better balanced.

Interestingly, we don’t always see the problem. In our year-plus play-test (known as the Dwarf Party) we didn’t have problems even though we had one of the characters achieve arch-mage level ability. In our most recent game (known as The Apocalypse Is Nigh), we have four out of five characters with magic, two of which with elf blood which gives those particular characters an especially high level of power (balanced by their relative frailty; as the player of one of these elves I can assure you, it balances). Of course, one of the characters is learning magic in-game and only knows two cantrips at this point, but magic tends to be at the forefront of the game. In our new Tuesday game (yet to begin) we only have one magic-using character at all, so we will probably see a different balance entirely.

The difficult part is figuring out where the problem lies. Is it in GMing style? Is it in the system? Is it in the player choices? Is it the style of the campaign? Is it some combination of all of that? At this point, we can’t tell. All we know is that we see a trending problem. These types of problems are always the hardest to nail down no matter what the development project. It’s unfortunate, but that’s reality.

This, of course, dovetails in with the current efforts to scale back and trim down the system to make it less “my master’s thesis” (as a former girlfriend dubbed it) and more of a viable game system that others can play. And this ties in with our ongoing development efforts which muddy the waters a bit. In a sense, perhaps, the players deciding they’d rather play ARPS “without reactor containment” rather than a more stable system while we work through the kinks may not be helping either. Still, we plow ahead and work on it and try not to grandfather in too many changes to keep the games themselves as stable as possible.

As anyone who reads the blog regularly knows I’m planning a new campaign for Tuesday nights. Today’s topic is character development woes. To play ARPS as written (and well, I’m writing it, so I should), a player is intended to spend time working on a Background and Profile (B&P; the latter detailing the character’s personality elements) before attempting to translate the character into mechanical terms. ARPS goes so far as to provide 10 DP (Development Points) as a bonus to the player as a reward.

Our game has three players. Their initial character concepts included an Elvish druid, a human knight, and a human something vaguely conceptualized as “something like Robin Hood” (and even getting that out of him was a bit like pulling teeth). The third character was intended to fulfill the thief/rogue role to balance out against the cleric/mage and the primary fighter. Since the initial concepts were submitted and approved, I’ve received one complete B&P (our wood-elf druid of the Rowan Clan), one that I know enough about that I’m simply waiting for the write-up with all the details (the second son of an Earl whose title and lands were divested by the Crown now making a living as a knight-errant), and one B&P from our Robin Hood type.

Unfortunately, our Robin Hood profile was lacking. The background ended up vague and the profile was essentially missing other than knowing the character is scruffy-looking and right-handed. This brings me to the primary topic of today’s entry.

The Man With No Personality

When faced with a similar problem, how does a GM approach the problem? There are two main issues on the table. First, the GM needs to address the problem with the player. Second, the GM needs to compensate for the lack of information when planning his campaign.

Addressing the Problem With the Player

The first step is to simply address the problem directly with the player–talk to him. Make sure he knows what the goals for the campaign are and why we’re going through the process. Make sure he knows that he’s letting his GM and his fellow players down. And, most importantly, make sure the player is on-board with the character concept. There’s a good chance that his lack of detail or interest comes from a desire to play a different type of character.

Furthermore, if the character is suffering from a lack of detail, ask the player if there’s more information he needs about the world/setting and if he has any questions. Sometimes, detail suffers for lack of enough information to build upon.

If it turns out that the player’s on board with the ideas and concepts and is simply not delivering, it might be a good idea to lay down the law a little. In the case of ARPS, this may mean allowing the character development process to proceed anyway and hope that the technical details flesh out the rest of the character shortcomings. In this case, I’d simply withhold the bonus DP since the player didn’t do the work to gain the reward. (Especially since I’ve made it clear in my case that I wouldn’t hand the bonus out if the B&P wasn’t done this time.)

In the end, however, make sure that you aid your player toward something that not only makes him happy, but also makes you happy as a GM (read: fits well into the campaign you’re planning/designing) and fits in well with the rest of the characters in the party.

Addressing the Problem in Campaign Planning

The other problem with a lack of character detail is planning your campaign. Unfinished characters mean you don’t have the information to plan out a character-centric plot line and it delays your campaign start date. This, in turn means that your players may be expecting a game on your scheduled game day, but you may not be ready to deliver one.

An enterprising GM might take this as an opportunity to try out something different, potentially running a one-shot off-the-cuff or using a published adventure. This keeps your players engaged.

The other option is to simply delay your game and make it clear that since you haven’t received final character details you need more time to plan things. Sadly, for most of us who want to put in the appropriate effort as a GM, this is the likely scenario.

Of course, if you’re planning a sandbox campaign, are planning on using more published adventures, or are simply planning a campaign that doesn’t focus on character as much, you may be able to proceed with less detail. Only you, as GM, can gauge your players and your original plans and figure out what’s right for your group.

Sometime in the last few days, I had mused on Twitter that I had forgotten how much work planning a campaign was and that I’d gone “all player.” The title of the article was something that @thefreerpgblog commented to me at the time and it just seemed so apropos that I’m stealing it.

Recently, we decided to dedicate some of our ARPS development time on Tuesday nights to a second game so we could have a consistent gaming experience (to my weekend gamers: I love you guys, but you frustrate me). I volunteered to GM the game. I had a good experience recently with a “snow day” one-shot and with all my recent writing inspiration, I felt I was ready to jump back into the fray. (Some background: I’ve been gaming for 27 years or so and I spent most of that time as DM, GM, Storyteller, or whatever it was called in whatever game we were playing at the time. In the last few years, my campaign pacing and inspiration was starting to come apart at the seams so I decided to take a sabbatical from GMing.)

This time out we decided we wanted to do some more character-centric gaming rather than focus on the world-spanning, epic plots that have been the staples of our other games. These types of games not only require the players to put more effort into their character backgrounds, but also for the GM to do the same, as well. I had forgotten how much work that truly is.

Like many of you, I spent most of my gaming career GMing on the fly having learned that excessive planning fails the second the players and the plan meet. This time out, however, for gamecraft reasons on the design and writing side, I have been reading a number of books and blogs on the art of GMing and the art of adventure planning (Robins Laws, the Kobold Guides to Game Design, Chatty DM’s excellent exposition on Robin’s Laws, Open Game Table #1, etc.). This means I wanted to it “right.”

At this point, I am spending my time on the dramatis personae for the campaign and the small town that will serve as the (initial) base of operation for the PCs. Once I have all the character backgrounds, I will work with the players to weave them into the backdrop for the campaign. Then I can spend the time working on the meta-plot for the series (campaign) and break down the plot into episodes (sessions) and focus on the specific encounters and pacing for each adventure and the overall campaign.

For any of you who have never run a game, let me tell you: this is a lot of work. Learn to appreciate your GM. For any GMs out there: I’m not sure how we fit this into our (adult) lives, but we need to not only care, but have the “GMing bug” or we would never succeed. To this, I salute you all.

Sidebar: For whatever this is worth, blogging is a new thing to me. Bear with me as I figure out how to put together coherent, thematic posts. I hope this one gets me closer; if anything, this process could turn into a series of its own. Let me know what you think either way.

It’s all the rage today, but honestly, for a $20 donation, you get $1400 worth of gaming stuff. Proving to be the most popular thing tweeted about today, but more than worth it even if you’ll only use a fraction of it. At last check, they’ve raised over $23k. Go here: http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=78023

Update: Since writing this, they’ve now made over $100k. I’ve also managed to download all the materials. It comes it at just under 3 GB of stuff. I’ve looked at about half of it so far. There’s a little for everyone. Some gems, some really nice things that someday might come in handy, some stuff I’ve wanted to look at, and a few things that will just take up disk space (and a few things I can’t figure out how people are charging money for them).

Recently purchased (or received) a number of RPGs and have downloaded a number of free ones (this is about open gaming, after all), so wanted to do some quick reviews on each. Not going into any depth on any one of them, but wanted to at least note what my initial impressions were. I should note that all games, where appropriate, were purchased with my own money (0r given as a holiday gift by friends/family) and no publisher is buttering the bread, as it were.

For the most part, I look at games in my favorite genre (fantasy) and I pick things up so I can get insight into what’s out there, either for ideas or inspiration, to see something I’ve been meaning to look at, or simply to support our industry. I’d talk about looking at the competition, but I’m not planning on making money at this (at least not initially), so that’s not foremost on my mind. Still, it’s good to know what’s out there–like when I realized that d20’s base mechanics were the same as mine and I’d been using them for years and now there was no chance I could stick with it in its current form.

Savage Worlds Fantasy Companion

This was one of the books I wanted since I wanted to see, with more detail, how a fantasy setting played out in Savage Worlds. I’ve had the Savage Worlds book for a while (mostly to support Deadlands), but I’ve always kind of liked the system. The book was a lot smaller than I intended, but overall quality and artwork was good. It’s not especially detailed and doesn’t spend a lot of time with a setting (implicit or otherwise). It gets down to the “here’s the fantasy tropes you’ll need to deal with” and gives you a good idea how to implement it in your Savage Worlds game. Overall, not bad, but less interesting than I’d hoped.

Pathfinder Core Rulebook

I’ve been looking at Pathfinder since a friend showed me some of the beta PDFs. I’ve since lost interest in 3e/3.5e due to some of the system flaws, but I really liked the fact that Paizo is working to keep the game alive (OGL!) and I’ve never bought in to the 4e style. I also liked some of the core system changes (especially the class changes) they implemented in Pathfinder. While it upped the power level a bit, it also balanced out the classes a bit more and added some nice flavor. I haven’t yet looked through the book in detail (mostly because it’s 80% known material), but after the first impression (“my, that’s a large book”) it looks to be everything you’d want in a game book. Well-written, good artwork and layout, attention to the craft, and full of crunchy bits. If we ever go back to playing 3e in some form, it will definitively be with the PFRPG as our system.

Burning Wheel Fantasy Role Playing System / Character Burner

Burning Wheel is one of those games I’d heard good things about and it’s one I wanted to look at more closely. I finally received my copies of the Fantasy Role Playing System (core book) and the Character Burner last night. Unlike the two games above, I actually gave this one a cursory read through. Overall, the books are pretty basic in layout and art, but the writing is, for the most part, clear with reasonably good examples.

I’m a fan of crunchy, rules-heavy systems…to a point. There’s just too much detail here. I like the intent of the system, but I don’t really like the execution. Some things just feel like they could be simpler to get across the same concepts. It may play differently than it reads, however, but I’ve played a lot of games over the years. What I did like, however, was the implicit setting and especially the lifepath character-building. Potentially complicated and limiting, but you’d get a well-rounded, logical character when you finished. The setting and color elements were nice, though, and gave a lot of flavor to the characters and world in ways that a lot of games don’t.

Regardless, since fantasy magic in RPGs is one of my core interests, I’m still looking at picking up the Magic Burner and giving that a whirl. I’m also planning on looking at the character elements more closely in the core books; some of it is very well done (as mentioned above).

Swords & Wizardry

Wanted to make a quick note on this one. This is the first of the OSR products that I’ve taken a liking to. It gives me a similar feeling to the one I got when I ran myself through the sample game in my old D&D red box. There’s an extended White Box boxed set printing on 20 January that I’m actually considering looking into.

Others

There were a number of other PDFs I’ve looked at, but as I write, none of them have made any significant impression. Then again, I still have a large “pile” of them with which I want to spend some more quality time.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently regarding good writing and game development practices and I’m starting to apply this to our development efforts. At the moment, ARPS (for anyone coming late to the party, ARPS = A Role-Playing System and I’ve been working on it [read: fiddling with it since I'm never satisfied] for nigh unto 16 years or so) stands at about 300 pages of system; a number of ongoing discussion and summary documents handling bugfixes, enhancements, and ideas; and, some unknown number of written notes, most of which are long-since obsolete, but contain a lot of setting material I haven’t worked on in recent years.

Since I’ve been treating the game as more of a hobby than a real effort toward a finished product, I haven’t really put in the effort to use reasonable good practices. For the most part, I’ve been treating it as a software development project, attempting to version the “code,” keep everything in version control (Subversion, in this case), and put in appropriate feature freezes and bugfix releases of the main rules. This has worked to a point, but writing anything, especially an RPG, isn’t a software project. Still, you default to what you know.

As I said above, I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently. One of the best practices I’m planning on putting into place is finding not only a place where I can write undisturbed (with an appropriately motivating soundtrack), but also establishing writing goals in the form of (self-imposed) deadlines and/or writing goals (not necessarily word counts, but something that fulfills that requirement). A thing that’s been plaguing recent play-testing has been the lack of an updated Rulebook. Primarily, this hasn’t been done for two simple reasons: the amount of changes are rather large and the effort to roll it all in seems daunting, at best (not to mention that we’re still working on the revisions a good part of it).

Additionally, I’m looking at how I want to present the material at this stage, as well. I already know that the main Rulebook is large and will likely need to be broken up a bit (the massive tomes that are Pathfinder or HERO notwithstanding). I will also need to decide what material makes the Core Rulebook and which things will be relegated to supplements like the ARPS Grimoire or the ARPS Bestiary. My recent reading also tells me that I’m going to need to spend some time editing and cutting out a lot of cruft from the system. I’m OK with that. It’s long since overdue. Cruft-removal also means I’m going to need to spend some time with the development team to try to distill the current batch of (rule) crunch into something more accessible. Things are, right now, pretty writing- and rules-heavy and we need to trim it a bit for final presentation and streamlining.

As I’ve been dusting off old materials (for the play-test game I’m going to run Tuesday nights), I’m also starting to look at what it will take to complete my Mythgar game setting. This is a setting I’ve spent a lot of time working on and researching which means there’s a great deal of background information and detail. As a RPG setting, though, this obviously needs to be more directed and the essence of the world needs to be presented. The background information (such as linguistic relationships, cultural migrations, and ecological treatises) needs to become part of the greater tapestry and drive consistency. It cannot be the primary presentation.

Because the world is so detailed, my goal here is to split the setting down into modules (not necessarily of the adventure type, that’s not really my bag) for each kingdom or political unit, allowing each setting module to focus on one area of the world. This allows me to treat the region in enough detail to make it compelling and allow a GM or player the ability to focus on only the areas they find desirable. With the final batch of regional modules I will likely include some background modules to tie things together and do things like handle economy, equipment, the map, and other supporting things to make a game go.

Good writing practices, primarily writing goals, will make this all happen (I hope). A first step to setting goals is figuring out what the final products will be (or at least, a working list). All necessary when you’re acting as editor, producer, art director, game developer, and writer. Not a good way out of it when you’re self-publishing. Of course, I could simply take a few irons out of the fire and do something less ambitious, but what fun would that be? Reality will drop that critical hit on me eventually if it’s unsustainable.