Hit Point's Honesty

Most role playing games have some portion of them which is dedicated to combats and fights. Because of this, most systems also have some way to track your characters well being during the course of the encounter. The most common way to do this is through a stat called hit points, or hp for short. As the battle wears on and your characters lose hp, they are inching closer to being eliminated from the fight. But what exactly does hp stand for during these battles? Surely every lost hit point isn't blood drawn, or is it? In this article I am going to look a few examples of hit points (or similar mechanisms) in different RPG systems.

So let's start off with the big kahuna. In Dungeons and Dragons, nearly everything has a listed value of hp. A first level character may have around 12 hit points depending on class. As they gain levels, their hp increases, all the way into the hundreds. So, what do the hit points in D&D stand for? Well first we have to look at a few things. A character loses hp when they are hit with damage from an attack. Characters also gain hp when they level up. So, is hp loss is the result of physical wounds, does this mean that a level 5 character can be stabbed in the gut more times than a level 1 character? Logically, this doesn't make much sense. A football player will be taken out just as quickly with a stab to the gut as myself. HP in D&D is an abstract way to track a characters weariness. Damage represents close calls, near misses, and general fatigue that must be endured. That is, until you hit half of your HP. In D&D 4th Edition, characters gained a status called bloodied once they dropped below half of their max hp. This represented a physical hit on a character.

The One Ring RPG takes the idea of hit points and becoming bloodied and turns it into the concepts of endurance and becoming wounded. Characters lose endurance during a fight, and a physical hit is never landed until the character becomes wounded via the TOR equivalent of a critical hit. Being wounded in TOR is much more explicit and difficult to heal compared to endurance. Fate has a similar mechanic, tracking stress and consequences. Fate's consequences mechanic also has the benefit of being useful for social encounters, representing mental knocks and setbacks rather than physical ones.

FFG's Star Wars systems "fixes" this abstract hit point problem by having a stat called wounds. Wounds represent actual physical hits of blaster bolts and lightsabers on a character. This stat can be increased, but not in the same fashion or scale that D&D does. These wounds also lead to critical injuries, which maim and cripple characters. Strain is consumed and drained from characters for more mental and endurance consequences.

So if you're running a game and you want a better understanding of how to narrate combats, take a look at what the hit points in your system represents.

The Game Part of RPG

I've had the pleasure to experience over a dozen role playing game systems over the past three years. Most of these RPGs I have played, while some I've only read the rules on and I've started to notice a trend in the hobby, which a lot of people are already familiar with. This is the swinging pendulum of crunch. New games on the market trend with the swing of this pendulum. On one side of the pendulum we have rules heavy games and systems, and on the other we have extremely rules light. At the moment, I feel like we're on the up swing to the extremely rules light end of the pendulum, and this can be evident in what is hitting the table more and more these days.

Some of these rules light games I've read through include games like Questlandia and Fiasco. Both of these games focus so much on the role playing aspect of RPGs, that I sometimes wonder why they even bother coming with a book. Just through reading these rule books it got me thinking, I believe the game part of RPG is very important.

RPGs take aspects from two different mediums and slams them together into these books which we gather around for fun. Role playing on its own can be compared to acting or improv, which people take on characters and tell stories. Games are everywhere, they're essentially a contest with a distinct set of rules. Combining these two mediums into one we end up with essentially story telling with a set of rules, and I believe that having a good set of rules for a game is important. When it comes to rules light games, it sometimes feels like the rules were just thrown in there to make it a "game". Games like Fiasco and Questlandia feel like they have just as much depth in rules as Rory's Story Cubes.

The rules in an RPG serve two major purposes. They provide a framework that is (hopefully) balanced and equal for all players. They also provide an element of uncertainty. Any board game typically comes with a solid set of rules to use and it can come natural to role players to build a story out of actions that are taken during the game. These rules make the story interesting and unpredictable, throwing in complications that characters need to deal with in order to proceed. This may come natural to the theater and literary majors out there, but for everyone else, we need a little help. Part of this uncertainty has to be balanced though. Unbalanced rules lead to a narrative funnel, where all of the cool actions happen to a single player and everyone else feeling useless. Dice are a great randomizer and also very good for balancing if used properly, which is why we see so many games with dice.

While the weight of the rules and mechanisms for a game don't necessarily matter, the way that the rules integrate with the theme do. This is why it is easier for us to tack on a story to a board game than to tack rules on to an improv session. The rules need to facilitate the story, keeping the players immersed and engaged. Typically this is done via a good/bad traits mechanic. There are things your character is better and worse at than other people at the table (skills, aspects, traits, etc.). It's very simple, and is usually implemented unconsciously in normal story telling.

Without a good set of rules for an RPG it can feel like you're just sitting around a table making up a story. While I'm not calling this a bad thing (I like Rory's Story Cubes very much), I wouldn't call it a game either.  Questlandia and Fiasco offer very few rules and focus mainly on the story telling. I like to view these games as an assisted story telling exercise. Ultimately, when I play an RPG I really want solid mechanisms behind it.

PC Death in a Role Playing Game

Some GMs call it taboo. Other GMs revel in it. Most players despise it. The death of a player character is often a weird subject in most role playing games, to the point that some don't even acknowledge it. When telling a story that involves living thing, there are often times when that thing may die. What makes a role playing game different than cooperative story telling is uncertainty.  If you are telling the story together (like in straight improv), you and your partners want the outcome of some sort of conflict to be the most meaningful possible to construct a certain story. But in an RPG, there is often a mechanic which will semi-randomly decide the resolution of a conflict. Death in a straight storytelling setting is usually agreed upon during the story's construction. In an RPG, death could happen narratively like this, but more often than not, will happen via the roll of a die. This has led to much discussion over the consequences of killing off a PC. In this article, I will discuss a PC's death via game mechanisms from the eyes of a GM who views it as bad, a GM who views it as good, and the view as a player.

Lately, I've been hearing from multiple podcasts or people that I listen too that player character death via a die roll should never happen. If they're losing a fight, the characters don't perish, yet there is some narrative thing that happens that keeps them from dying. This can be used to keep the game pretty much on track. Introducing new characters into the game isn't easy, and getting them invested in the story is even harder. Most of these GMs will insist that a PC character should never be killed by goblin grunt #4 or Stormtrooper FN-2187, but rather if they are to be killed nonnarratively that the foe has a name. You rarely see in cinema or read in literature about the protagonist killed by a random extra. The PCs are exceptions, heroes, and generally awesome.

During my last D&D 5e game I just ran, I told my player's before we even started that I was not going to stop random monster x from killing them this campaign. My goal was to try and make this system as gritty as possible. In the first few weeks of the campaign, I had killed two of the PCs. When death is on the table for every instance, the game takes on a new dimension. The players now must be much more cautious, not just busting into any room they want and killing everything in it. They lose the sense of security they have when the GM takes death off the table for most encounters. They can make rash decisions with little fear of PC death most of the time. Keeping death on the table reigns this in. They want to avoid more combats now, and ones that are inevitable, they want to have the advantage. The down side to this is what I will call the 10 foot pole problem. The players are now overly cautious, tapping every flagstone and door with a 10 foot pole to check for traps or monsters before continuing. This will slow the game down tremendously. Luckily for myself, this didn't seem to happen during my D&D 5e campaign.

Those views are from the perspective of the GM, which is widely different than what a player sees. A player who's PC has been killed now has real world consequences. They now can not take part in the rest of tonight's game (easily) and now must invest more time into creating another character. Depending on the game system, this could be only a few minutes or a few hours. Nobody wants to sit at the table next to their friend as they play the game and you have to sit there digging through a book, especially if it's a new system. Now, occasionally PC death can be OK for a player. If the scene makes it incredibly cool, a player may make the choice to have a PC die. But it must be incredibly cool. As a player, real life time is usually more valuable than in game themes or story arcs. If a player has to make a choice between sacrificing themselves for an NPC, more often than not they won't do it. The story would be much better with the PC saving the princess in exchange for their life, but the player doesn't want to have to spend the next few hours building a character.

So that's my thoughts on PC death in an RPG. I switch up my GMing style depending on the system I'm running and the themes I want to play with. Currently, I am running a 13th Age game on the rare PC death spectrum. I believe that most systems should be run in this spectrum, because it makes it a hell of a lot easier for me to GM and keeps the game flowing pretty quickly. If my players start making rash and dumb decisions, I will find another way to punish them, which PC death may be delivered for a particularly brash offense.

D&D 5e Encounter Building and Campaign Thoughts

While I sit here avoid Twitter and Facebook, I decided to keep myself entertained by composing closing thoughts to my initial thoughts on the encounter building rules for Dungeons and Dragons, 5th Editions. After DMing a campaign that lasted from late June to mid November, running a game nearly once a week, I thing I gathered enough experience building encounters by the book. At the end of this post, I will also briefly discuss my thoughts on running a homebrew game in D&D 5e. But first with the encounter building rules.

In short, they're garbage. Complete trash that has killed off 7 characters over the course of the adventure. It feels like the CR system is flawed, either not fully considering an enemy's special ability or resistance. Half way through the adventure, after the party was decimated by a couple of lava slugs (reskinned fire snakes), I decided to just through out the encounter building rules and just eyeball it. This wasn't as difficult as it may have been for others, since I have become used to running systems that don't even include encounter building rules. Reflecting upon this, I should have reestablished the death ground rules. Originally, death was never off the table because I was stress testing the encounter building rules, but after not using them anymore, I should have reevaluated this clause.

It was too much work to build these fair fight encounters using the rules, and I don't think that you should invest too much time into creating D&D combats by the numbers. A good rule that I ended up using was to build fights with creatures that could be eliminated in 2-3 hits (or more if less creatures). I think the game thrives on many little, one sided fights during a day rather then a few fair fights, though this also depends on the characters in your party. If you have short rest dependent characters, I think that these favor fewer fights, since they always seem to have some amount of power ready to go. In the more weaker fights, the long rest characters don't have as big of hurdles to climb if they've already used up their big powers. So basically, ditch the encounter building rules and find out what works for your party.



Now, my general thoughts on running a nonpublished campaign in the new D&D 5e system. A quick summary of the campaign would be a fetch quest to find a special rock in the desert. There are a few things that stood out as issues, and in the end very little that I can find as enticing. So I'll start with the good first, go onto my issues, and then things that fell flat at the table. The game does a very good job at making "mundane" magically items extremely useful and powerful. A simple +1 sword or resistant cape goes a long way without giving the characters too much crazy power. A +1 "magical" weapon will beat many of the resistance types that a ton of the monsters seem to have (resistance to slashing, piercing and bludgeoning from non-magical weapons).  While I do enjoy the backgrounds and etc. for the characters, player's with poor backgrounds ended up getting hosed.

One of the problems I have with D&D 5e is that the monsters seem very boring. Only a few monsters had entertaining mechanics tied to them, while most had a form of multi attack if they needed to be more powerful. Abilities like Pack Tactics were good, but go boring after a while. The best designed monster was probably the Zombie, who felt like an undead force with it's Undead Fortitude ability.

Another issue is that there seemed to be a definite power balance issue. Classes like the ranger and sorcerer seemed out matched by the rogue, fighter and cleric. And because each character's powers function differently on short and long rests, it became difficult to build encounters to the appropriate difficulty for the number they did.

Some of the players had issues with the backgrounds and etc. mechanic. Either forgetting that they had them or trying to stretch to fill odd ones. The worst were players who created their own backgrounds etc. and then found it very difficult to gain advantage from them.

Some of the players seemed to hate the trinkets. Nearly anytime they found some source of treasure, I would have them roll on the trinket table for fun. I figured they would like getting little random items that they could think of using in future predicaments. But it was mostly seen as useless junk, and extremely disliked.

So would I run another 5e game again? Yes, but it would have to be for a certain tone and setting. I think for a gritty fantasy game, I would run this IF the story I wanted to tell couldn't be done in the One Ring. I think everything that I like about D&D 5e comes from its gritty difficulty and feeling, which I can get most of from the One Ring. For more high fantasy, I will stick with 13th Age.

Sorry that this article was so choppy. If I would have written right after finishing the campaign it would have better flow and more links (or any).

My Micro Games: Umami Chef and Yamamichi

Very recently, I have become enamored with the idea of self publishing/DIY. I've always enjoyed making things and two years ago, when I decided to print one of my now wife's stories she wrote,  I got flung down this self publishing rabbit hole. I used a site called lulu.com to create her book into a paperback. Holding a physical copy of a digital document, bound together just like the other books in the bookstore gave me a weird sense of accomplishment. I didn't write the story, yet I learned that in today's digital era it can be super easy to something that could never had been done before.

Shortly after this, my creative switch was hit and the idea of self publishing a game became a reality. For years, I worked on putting together small micro games that I could publish and print through the Game Crafter website. This culminated into a small game we put out this year called Mars to Jupiter.  But it wasn't till recently that I decided I wanted to try and tackle publishing an RPG.

A few months ago, I started learning about zine culture. I remember hearing about them from the Anime FLCL, in which they're described almost like a guerrilla medium. So I started tossing around the idea of publishing a micro zine basically for myself. In it I would talk about my thoughts on gaming along with other articles from my friends and family. I also told myself that I could probably print a small game or system in it. I ran a test run creating a small 8 page booklet zine which featured the Lasers and Feelings game in it and I thought it was great (of course it was, I made it right?). But shortly after, I realized that I had never really created an RPG, and that finding a small enough system that I could print would be nearly impossible after a while.

So I decided to give a shot a creating a micro RPG. My wife and I both submitted entries into the 200 word RPG contest. Neither of these games were elegant or inventive. Shortly after that though, at my Saturday game night, we joked about combat chefs, and I mentioned something about creating that game. After that night, it only took a day or so before I had created a micro game called Umami Chef. And now a week ago, I decided to try my hand at creating another system called Yamamichi, this one tackling the obstacle of trying to feel like a Studio Ghibli movie. While Yamamichi is still being worked on, Umami Chef was done and I pretty much left it on Facebook to stay. But it wasn't till today at lunch that I was reflecting on what I was looking for when building the game.

While the game can thank Lasers and Feelings for being its legged fish to my frog, I had a few core tenants that I wanted to follow and huge pitfalls I wanted to avoid when creating this 1 page document. I wanted there to be some form of normality to the dice. I chose rolling and totaling regular six-sided dice over a roll for successes model, making the game more predictable. A target number system is used with the predictability of normal rolls to create fair challenges to the players. I wanted to prune the advantage and success with style ideas from Fate and FFG's Star Wars RPG and morphed that into the rolling doubles rule, which can happen on a success of failure. I wanted to avoid adding static skill/stat numbers, so I came up with the exploding stat. I really liked the idea of a stat that lowered the number that the dice explode on. Exploding dice are fun, and allow for the stand up and cheer moments, but the stat should also reflect that you can't always pass every challenge. I felt like it was important to feel better at something than other people, and that teamwork will be required to complete the story.

Being a small micro system, Umami Chef really doesn't need any form of advancement. Reflecting on it, I could have used that space to help develop the theme of the game, as it will most likely see play as just a one shot. More examples might also have been helpful, but I really wanted to keep it down to a single page. I plan on reskinning Umami Chef into a game about reporters and press called Scoop, and I think I will make these changes for it. For Yamamichi, I am expanding into a single page, double sided. I am also cribbing some of the ideas I liked from Umami Chef into Yamamichi including the dice normality, target number system and traits adding dice. But for Yamamichi, I am ditching exploding dice and stats for a roll/keep system.

Creating these two games has been a lot of fun. I'm hoping to eventually create a small 8-12 page booklet game, but I'm not sure on what and how I can make the mechanics interesting enough to do so. But for now I'll keep creating the small games until I get a good hang of what I'm doing. I have a list of things that make me like an RPG, and I'm going to try and reflect on those before moving forward. I also don't want to steal concepts and mechanics from other systems that I adore like The One Ring or FFG's Star Wars. I think that will be the hard part...

AcadeCon 2015: GMing Into the Wilds

Recently my wife and I have become enamored with the One Shot and Campaign podcasts. After listening to the podcasts together, Campaign's GM, Kat Kuhl, had inspired my wife to GM for the first time. While I typically don't fall into fandom, my wife really wanted to meet the two responsible for inspiring and entertaining her. The two GMs typically take the pilgrimage to the Mecca of board gaming, GenCon in Indianapolis. While she was thrilled at the prospect of taking the trip, I did not share her enthusiasm. I have little patience for crowds, and the cram packed foray that is GenCon did not excite me the least bit. Slow moving people, long lines, and the general social awkwardness that comes with convention fanaticism share many parallels to that of other places I dread to go (i.e. Disney World).

But not too long ago I heard that the two stars from the One Shot network were coming to a gaming convention in the same state I reside in, I decided to give it a look. That's when I started to learn about AcadeCon 2015: Into The Wilds, the small gaming convention only a four hour drive away. The convention ran a Kickstater campaign where they sold tickets and raised money for the event, which I unfortunately didn't look into in time to jump on board. A convention of only 150 people, one of which is my wife's current gaming Sherpa?  It was almost a no brainer. So after getting in touch with the organizers, I was able to secure a player badge and a GM badge.

Yes, a GM badge.

I've decided that there is no better time to test my GM chops than at a small convention of people who really want to be there. A intimate, quite(r) environment where after running a game I can take some time to relax and cool down. Sounds like a great start, piece of cake.

Except, this is the first time I'm running games for people I don't even know, and I have become a bit nervous. I think that part of me is concerned that my GMing will pale in comparison to a lot of other's who are there. The other part is that there must be some expectations that I will not meet just in general structure of how a convention event is run. Heck, I haven't even played in a convention game, and I'm starting off my first RPG convention game as the GM? What have I got myself into!

For my events, I have chosen to run at least two games. The first being a Star Wars: Edge of the Empire game similar to a casino heist I've already run. The second game will be a Futurama adaptation of the popular microgame Lasers & Feelings, also something that I have done before. As an extra treat, if I'm feeling well enough to do so, I will also attempt to run an Star Wars: Age of Rebellion game, something new and unique.

While I feel generally confident in knowing the game and system, I do not feel confident running for a full crew of six players, since my normal game nights run between three and sometimes five players. I'm concerned about fulfilling everyone's role in the four hour time slot.

So for now, there will just be prep time and maybe a little practice. But while there is doubt that the game will be great, one thing is for sure. No matter what I do, this will definitely be a learning experience. I just hope I don't fall on the GMing battlefield.

Firefly RPG: A Bug in the System

We've all had nights as players and GMs when games just fall flat. Typically the problem comes from low energy, poor storytelling, or unhappy character builds. But for the first time I've had run across a system and it's mechanisms which I, and some of my players, just don't like. Unfortunately, it is the Firefly Cortex+ RPG.

The people in my group are fairly open to new RPG systems. This group was started with the understanding that we will switch systems from time to time to try and experience games which we normally would not have been able to. We've gone through 7 unique systems in the past year and a half, with Firefly by Margaret Weis Productions being the latest.

This isn't my first experience with Firefly. The same GM currently running the game had run one a while ago, using the pregenerated characters and adventure in the book. Running for a group of four hardcore Firefly fans and me, the game went well, but at the end of the night something left a bad taste in my mouth. I chalked it up to new system jitters and decided if it were to get another run I'd probably not have the same thoughts.

But here we are. About a year and a half later and we had just started a new Firefly game, this time with player generated characters. But halfway through the session that bad taste started coming back. I asked some of our newbie players (1.5 year veterans now) how they enjoyed the game over the next couple of days and they both seemed put off by it, each for different reasons (in a nutshell, dice and plot point mechanisms). While they both admitted their minds could change with more play, their reasons didn't seem to match my feelings toward the game. So I spent the last week fermenting my thoughts of the game, trying to dig up what it is that keeps putting that taste in my mouth, and I believe I've come to a conclusion.

Most of the players in my group have compared the Firefly RPG to the Fate system. The mechanisms of rolling dice and spending plot/fate points to manipulate the roll are very similar to each other in these games. While I don't believe that a full comparison to Fate should be done, I will be comparing Firefly to some aspects (pun) of the Fate system.

So what's my issue with the system if it isn't the dice rolling or the plot point mechanisms of the game? It's the jinxes. Specifically, now the jinxes seem to take a lot of work to make narrative sense. To quickly summarize, a jinx is when you roll a 1 on any of your dice, which can be used by the GM to buy complications with plot points. This can be compared to threat or despair in FFG's Star Wars games. But in Star Wars, the threats come from the difficulty pool, which I don't seem to have a problem with. Firefly Jinxes come from the dice pool of your character's skills and backgrounds which, to me, has a narrative disconnect to how you are earning complications. It can somewhat be compared to The One Ring's act of rolling an Eye of Sauron on the feat die. But, for whatever reason, it doesn't seem the same to me and here is why.

In The One Ring, the feat die is rolled with every roll you make. You don't choose to add the feat die in when a skill you have associated with an action may assist you. In Firefly, every die you add to your pool for backgrounds and proficiencies increases your odds of rolling a jinx. In every case in Firefly you will be rolling at least two dice (lets use two d8s for example), which gives you a 24% probability of rolling a jinx. Now lets say you add a d8 distinction, and a d8 signature asset. The probability of rolling a jinx with 4d8 is now 41%. Now, because the more dice you add to your pool the greater the possibility of a jinx, I ended up trying to not use dice that made narrative sense to use. As the attacker, I wanted to look at the defenders result and try to use as few dice as possible for my roll. Where as when I was defending, I didn't want to give my attacker and dice from complications that arose from my defense roll.

The way jinxes come about do not seem to make sense to me. They feel like they may have been designed like this to keep players from stacking tons of dice into their pool, but it doesn't make sense if a character doesn't add a die in for a proficiency or specialty that they. I think it gets very narratively muddy at that point, and I think this is what turns me off from this system. I tried to turn the probability part of my brain off during some rolls last session, thinking of the extra dice as a chance to earn extra plot points instead of complications. But whenever I rolled a jinx, I didn't feel like a plot point was worth the complication, because it takes the same plot point you earned to snag an opportunity to get rid of it.

In the end, I will play more Firefly to see if my opinion changes on this again. There must be something I'm missing that I have yet to realize. But for now, if I hear that Firefly will be the next system to hit the table, I might pass.