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.

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.