These are not all the roles, just the 3 that I think the GM or system need to pick up. They aren’t exclusive to GMs of course, and there are other roles, but that’s probably another post.

After yesterday’s post about GM Roles, I had a fun discussion on G+ which proposed a model – given any set of GM roles (not just the bog three that I talk about – Authority, Entertainer & Celebrant) you can ask if a game Provides, Supports, Expects, or Ignores that role.

If a game provides that role, then the game is designed to do the heavy lifting for that particular sort of work.  A very clear and strictly procedural game might provide authority.  A game with a lot of pre-generated content might provide entertainment.  A game with rituals and procedures for cross-engagement might provide celebration.

This is usually not absolute.  Computer games & RPGs need to fully provide these things, but in tabletop the players still have a role to play.  The GM still needs to do something for each role, but the game actively minimizes it.

A game that supports a role provides tools to help with the role, but those tools expect a higher level of GM engagement.  Any game with clear and comprehensive rules is supporting authority.  A game that provides prompts and seeds is supporting entertainment.  A game that has cross-table hooks is supporting celebration.

A game that ignores a role might provide incidental support for a role, but it’s not part of the design or intent.  This can be an oversight, but often it’s because the game has specific goals.  A very freeform game may ignore authority.  A small rules engine may ignore entertainment.  A lot of older games ignore celebration.

Obviously, it is something of a spectrum between providing, supporting and ignoring. There’s no precise metric to determine if a game strongly supports or weakly provides a role.  That’s fine – the utility of the model mostly relative anyway.

More tricky is the nuance of the difference between ignores and expects.

When a game expects a role, it may look a lot like it ignores it, but where ignoring a role happens because the designer doesn’t consider it important, expecting a role happened because the designer thinks it’s critical, and that it’s what the people at the table are bringing to the game.  A game that expects a role might still have a few rules to support that, but only a few – enough to nudge things.  Rules that nudge rather than push.

That is, a game might have very loose and simple rules because it expects authority to provide clarity and interpretation in flight.  A game might provide little in the way of content or inspiration because it expects entertainment to flow from the table.  A game might provide little in the way of celebration because it expects that people are already going to play in a  cooperative and supportive fashion.

As such, expectations contain a contradiction (one related to the “fruitful void”, of old) – their lack of tools is a reflection that they may be the *most important* thing in the designers mind.   They will also speak to the strengths and weaknesses of any given game.

I find this an interesting lens to turn to my game shelf.   It quickly becomes apparent that different games have prioritized differently. If there’s an example of a game that Provides all three roles, I haven’t found it.  A more common pattern is that a game provides one, supports another and expects a third.

For example, in my mind, Fate provides celebration, supports authority and expects entertainment. The whole aspect system is in place to make engaging with the content of people’s sheets a critical part of play – playing Fate without celebration requires ignoring a lot of the game.  It’s lighter on authority, partly because there’s room for interpretation, partly because it’s a semi-generic engine that expects there may be some assembly required. For entertainment, Fate largely stands back and expects the table to step up – the game is about YOUR characters and what you bring to the table.

This makes it a great game for people with authorial instincts but no desire to play games that feel like writing exercises (*cough*Me*cough) but it also highlights some of the weaknessesof Fate.  Expecting entertainment is very demanding, and can introduce blank page problems.  For a lot of players, Fate is a better game when it also supports entertainment (with setting material, prompts, sample aspects and so on), and tellingly that is the direction a lot of people have taken things.

Let’s compare that to Fiasco – I would say Fiasco supports authority, provides entertainment, and expects celebration.  Some of these are muddy – its authority support is on the strong side, and it has a few rules that might push celebration up to “support”, but I’m of with this general take on it.  Playset provide strong, driving prompts for entertainment, and there are enough rules to keep things moving, but lots of space for non-rules on the authority front.  Celebration is largely on the players, and is going to make or break the game.  This might seem like a gap, but phrased slightly differently, this is saying that the table is going to have as much fun as it wants to have.

On the other hand, there is a common Powered By The Apocalypse mode which provides authority, supports entertainment and expects celebration.  The rules are designed to strongly hold authority, but also provide prompts and suggestions as well as tools for structuring the entertainment portion of things, but celebration is expected to emerge from play.  Different PBTA games have tweaked this formula in different ways, so it’s far from cast in stone.

D&D is even more interesting to look at this way, because there have been enough D&D versions and derivations that you can see wildly different priorities between versions.  D&D that provides entertainment, expects authority and ignores celebration is a model that’s easy to recognize, but also interesting to contrast with 5e (which I would say takes the curious but appropriately middle-of-the-road position of supporting all three, but expecting or providing none).

Ok, so this is a fun toy. Categorization systems always are. But is it of any real use?

For me, at least a little.  The problem that is underlying all of this is my desire for a Santorini experience, and this model has emerged as I’ve looked for patterns to help with that.  I think explicitly examining what roles a game brings ot the table is going to make it a lot easier to intentionally design to cover for gaps.  So this is definitely going into my toolkit, and we’ll see what kind of nails it hammers.

Saw another thing about the magic of GMless play the other day, and my response is largely what it always is: I think it’s nice, but it doesn’t really excite me.

To be clear, that’s not a criticism, it’s just a statement of taste. Games like Microscope and Fiasco are great, and can absolutely be fun to play. But they don’t scratch any particular itch for me. I enjoy them when I play them, but don’t necessarily seek them out. And there’s no harm in that – our tastes are not uniform, and it would kind of suck if they were.

But this is on my mind because a comment on my Santorini post cut right to the heart of one of the biggest challenges to a “pick up and play” RPG – the GM. There are decent tricks and tools for getting players ramped up very quickly, but the idea of going from zero to GM seems much more daunting.

One of the solutions to this is, of course, GMless play.

It seems like a no brainer. Cut the Gordian knot and remove the problem entirely. I have to respect a solution like that. And more, I acknowledge that for certain games (particularly those that unfold in a procedural manner) it can probably work really well. For these games, there is probably a lot to be said for looking at the kinds of things that companies like Stronghold Games are doing with making games with no rulebook, but which instead make teaching the game and emergent part of the gameplay.[1]

But it’s also a bit of a cheat, depending on the job you think the GM has. Critically, the GM is often the subject matter expert on the game in question. Obviously, this may not be the case for established tables, but we’re talking new players and new games here. In this case, the problem we encounter is that the GM’s lack of expertise is the thing we need to replace. That may not seem like a big deal until you consider that many GMless games skirt this problem by including a “facilitator” role.

This is not a bad thing: Every game is more easily learned and played when someone at the table is a familiar with it, so making space for that person is good design. But since we’re explicitly talking about picking up a game quickly, that option isn’t available to us. This doesn’t remove GMless games as a solution, but it means they’re in the same boat with everything else – looking at the question of how to convey what’s necessary in a playable fashion.

So, we’ve lost the silver bullet, but it’s highlighted something very useful. If we’re not going GMless, what does that mean?

People have a lot of answers to that question. I could fill pages with the differing interpretations of what a GM can and should be[2]. Hell, half the reason I shrug at the argument for GMless play is that they often rest on definitions of GM driven play which are very different than my experience or taste.

I can’t pretend to offer a comprehensive list of GM roles, but I do want to focus on what I consider the big 3, authority, entertainer and enabler.

The GM as authority is the expert on and boss of the game. She makes the choices about the game, enforces and interprets the rules, implements rule zero(or doesn’t) and is generally in charge. There is a lot of potential nuance around where that authority comes from, but the role is pretty simple. The advantages of this role is that it keeps things going and provides clarity for everyone at the table. The disadvantages are that this is a SUPER abusable dynamic, and a lot of game horror stories come from it going awry.[3]

The GM as entertainer is one that we tend to both ignore and take for granted. Classically, the idea is that the GM is generating (or using existing) content for the players to bounce off of and have a fun time. For many GMs, this is the best part. It’s an outlet for their creativity which they delight in sharing. They delight in it so much that we tend to overlook that this is work. This becomes relevant when we talk about new players – this is a hard role to step into from zero.

The GM as enabler (which sounds less weird than “servant”, the term I actually use in my head) is there to help the players along to the thing they want. I think of this as the most important role, since it is most closely tied to the table’s fun, but it’s also a tricky one. To do it successfully requires understanding what the table wants enabled, which is sometimes murky. Classically, we also have a problem with this role because it is the least well supported in our games and history.

EDIT:  in comments, Fred suggests celebrant as a better name for this, and he is 100% right.  Not only is it less weird, it also allows all three roles to be nouns (authority, entertainment and celebration) much more easily.  As such, that’s the term I’ll be using form now on. 

Now, these roles can be complimentary or contradictory from game to game and table to table. A GM might have strong authority and great entertainer skills while ignoring enabler responsibilities entirely, and her table might have an amazing time. Another GM might not entertain at all, but run a tight (authority), player-focused(enabler) game that everyone enjoys. There are many paths to a great game, and no one right route.

But I mention them in this context because it occurs to me that perhaps the trick may be to stop short of going GMless, and instead opt to explicitly narrow the GM’s role to something smaller and more specific.

The raw form this took when it popped into my head was “hey, what if the GM wasn’t tasked with coming up with content, but instead was just expected to learn some tools for helping players do cool things?”. I’d now restate that as “ok, can we teach the enabler role out of a box?”, and the thing is, i think we can.

In fact, I think we could teach any of those roles out of the box. The problem only becomes daunting when you try to teach more than one of them.

So now I find myself thinking about the differences in how i would teach those roles, and it highlights one more key point: you are under no obligation to stop at one role. I mean, feel free to do so – if you want to design your game so the GM’s role is pure enabler, then feel free. Just make sure you figure out how to make it fun for the GM.

But you can just as easily start from one role as the one to learn out of the box. And just as players will gain mastery and depth, so too can the GM. Other roles and responsibilities can be layer on after that first session of play has hooked them and left them hungry for more. THAT is when you can start laying it on thick.

Not sure if this helps anyone but me, but I am definitely feeling a step closer to a workable model here.

1 – Though this sounds great on paper, the one downside I’ve found to this approach is that I’ve only seen it work for fairly simple games. The idea is a good one, but I am not yet sure how it scales.

2 – But here’s one crazy one: it is pretty dumb that we treat the role of GM as the same from game to game rather than a function of each game-as written and game-as-played.

3 – This does not make it all bad. A table can knowingly grant someone authority because they trust them to make it worthwhile, and that combination of authority and trust can make for AMAZING play. But that takes a lot of work, and it not for everyone, which is fine. But I want to mention it because for many people, GM authority is automatically toxic, and I disagree with that notion pretty strongly.

Played more Deus Ex, though curiously that has not really been what’s been eating my time. I’ve really grown to appreciate it’s design of creating multiple paths to success, and what’s most interesting to me is that those paths remains mostly obscured unless you’re the kind of player who cheerfully spends time poking into every nook and cranny (which I am).

But the thing that’s impressed me is something that resonates very well with adventure design. There’s an old saying which I think I heard from S. John Ross, that a mystery should be like a maze – confusing if you’re in it, even if it’s obvious from up above. I’ve always liked that comparison because it speaks to one of the biggest challenges to the GM in designing coherent adventures – the GM is always looking at the maze from overhead, so it’s hard to really wrap your head around what it looks like from within.

A lot of bad habits come from this, and two of them in particular are a poor sense of difficulty (that is – “my players are such idiots, why can’t the see the obvious!”) and railroading (“There’s a path out of the maze, I just need to get them on it!”).

Now, there are a lot of solutions to these problems, and I’ve talked a lot about flexible ones such as might be used in Leverage, but if you like your structured adventures, there’s still something interesting to do about it. Thats where Deus Ex comes in.

At first my GM’s instincts twitched in the face of Deus Ex mission design. Sure, it was great to have it be objective (rather than process) driven, but when you started looking around, you realize there are SO MANY ways to approach a problem that it seems unfair – it’s _too easy_. But at the same time, I was impressed at how tidily the various approaches knitted together to feel organic.

The piece I was missing was that the organic feel was a natural offshoot of their being too many options. Even if there are multiple paths of approach, the player will only experience one, and by virtue of doing so, it will feel right. There’s some interesting thinking there – if we figure out to do some clever jumping to get somewhere, we credit the designers for foreseeing that. And, heck, maybe they did, but more likely, they didn’t stop it.

See, that’s the real trick – though there are multiple paths to the goal, what really makes them work is that the player can change paths at will. You are not compelled to keep sneaking even if you have been sneaking up to this point.

This is the point that intersects with adventure design interestingly. There’s a tendency in structured designs to dig tunnels – single paths to the destination. A “flexible” design might have multiple discrete tunnels, but discrete is the operative word. Writers and GMs will regretfully accept the necessity of this approach because, without a tunnel, there’s no telling which way the characters will go.

A game like Deus Ex forgoes tunnels in favor of trenches. The trenches all flow towards the end point on various routes[1] which the player can easily follow, but they are also easy to step out of and into a different trench. The net effect is a sort of mesh design which has some fascinating emergent properties. Specifically, by making the process through them non-procedural, it feels more player driven and organic, and provides opportunities for meaningful out-of-combat choice and strategy. Yes, all trenches may get you where you’re going eventually, but you can still be smart about picking which ones to follow.

Anyway, I have more to play, and I expect it to continue to be fun, but I just want to plant that idea in your ear: Mesh Design. It’s worth a try.

1 – How do they do this? By being built _out_ from the goal. Building a maze from the outside in is a novice mistake.

I love the Discworld novels. They’re fantastic, and I enjoy the heck out of them, but like many fans I am partial to a particular subset of them. In my case, I’m a huge fan of the City Watch books. Nothing else comes close (except perhaps the Moist von Lipwig stuff, which I’m willing to acknowledge as a fair second). Now, there are many reasons I love these books, but there’s a particular element about them which I think is very relevant to setting design.

See, I should also note that I’m a big fan of cities. I have purchased city books for games I will never play because I’m always fascinated to see how people present cities and urban adventures. I am, by and large, disappointed. The bulk of city products tend to be a handful of really interesting pages about the shape of the city, then piles and piles of pages that turn the city into some sort of above-ground dungeon.

Now, thankfully, this is less common with more modern products (and as noted, the recently released Neverwinter Campaign setting is not half bad) but what’s gotten me thinking is the difference in how Ankh-Morpork (the city of the City Watch novels) is presented. Certainly, there are a handful of places (The Unseen University, the Watch House, the Opera House, the river Ankh, Guildhouses and so on) but the city is primarily defined by trends and people.

Now, people are kind of an obvious part of things, albeit one that is often undeserved in setting design. It is possible to design a setting that is almost entirely characters, but it’s trickier to do it in a way that preserves player agency. That is, there is a strong tendency for a character-based setting to become about the NPCs rather than the PCs. This is where the Forgotten Realm soften go wrong, and it’s where Amber often (but not always) went right by firmly tying the characters to the setting NPCs.

Trends are a little more interesting, because they apply to people and to places equally. They’re the answer to broad, semi-specific question – where would a high class scribe work? How do people on the street respond to a mugging? Things like that. I can answer those questiosn about Ankh-Morpork because they’re the parts that get detailed in the books much more than the specific drilldown of street addresses.

The thing is, most good city books have this information, but they tend to present it in a very different manner. They provide raw data from which a savvy reader might be able to extract trends, but only rarely do they make that leap of abstraction themselves.

Now, I’m a firm believer that one of the most useful things a published setting can do is let the GM answer when a player wonders “What’s here?” It’s a good, often relevant question, and I’ve seen a few products that have sustained the level of detail to actually be able to answer it explicitly (The Birthright campaign setting for one, the old Thieves of Tharbad city book for MERP for another) without being ENTIRELY overwhelming, but it’s a lot of work.

The alternative would seem to be to arm the GM with the understanding to know the answer, or to create an answer that is consistent with the greater whole. But how do you convey that without a series of bestselling novels? The answer, I think, demands experimentation.

(Oh, and we will be getting back to prep in 4e, but let’s just say that one is a many-headed beast)

Ok, enough combat for now. We’ll need to come back to it after other things have evolved a bit more, but I feel like we’ve got enough of a foundation to work with. That brings us to something that’s potentially even stickier: Skills.

Broadly speaking, skills are going to be what distinguishes one dice pool from another. That may seem like a very pedestrian, gamey way to describe them, but in practice it’s the purpose they ultimately serve outside of the game space. Inside the game, in the fiction, there’s obviously a bit more to it than than, but to someoen watching your game, they’re the reason you rolled 5 dice instead of 3.

There are a lot of different ways to handle skills lists. There’s the traditional skill list, where you create an actual list of skills which – hopefully – covers everything a character might do and let players buy from it. There’s the broadly descriptive model, where players simply take descriptors (like Cop, Soldier or Pastry Chef) and use those values for anything that fall under the auspices of that descriptor. There are hybrid models that use a short list of broad descriptors to be all encompassing. And we’ve only scratched the surface – we haven’t yet considered, stats, pyramids, simple and advance skills, specialties, descriptive vs. narrative pricing, implicit skills and many many other things.

All of which is to say, there’s no right way to build a skill system. Use what you’re comfortable with and you’ll be fine, but if you try to present it as somehow inherently superior to other models, you mostly reveal your own ignorance. I think the skill model I’m going to pursue is clever, and I like it because it does some novel (and some less novel) things, but it’s no great apex of skill design.

The system starts from two datapoints: I like cultural skills and the system has been designed so a d6 is a valid value. For the unfamiliar, cultural skills are a bit of an idea riffed from Over the Edge, where you had a 2d6 in anything you should normally be able to do. It’s a super practical rule, but when you try to move the OtE system to another setting, you find yourself asking what “normal” is when you start comparing elves and dwarves. With that in mind, I want the starting point of every character to be “[Culture] d6”.

Now, it will probably be pretty easy to figure out what that means, and if that was the only skill then it wouldn’t really be much of an issue, but obviously we’re going to need to start slicing things thinner. And that’s where things are going to get a little bit fiddly, since I’m not going to let skills improve.

That sounds draconian on the surface of it, so let me explain a bit. The character’s [Culture] skill will never be higher than a d6, but he can learn more specific skills at a higher level. However, rather than making a fixed skill list and letting people buy up it (So one guy might be Swordsman 2d6 and another might be Swordsman 4d6), I’m going to make the scope of skills narrow as they go up. That is, 1d6 skills (of which [Culture] is the only example) are SUPER broad. Any skill at 2d6 is still going to be very broad, but not as broad as culture. As such, Merchant, Soldier, Noble and so on are all valid 2d6 skills.

Each tier narrows things further. At 3d6 might be Musketeer or Doctor. 4d6 might be Fencer and Neurologist. 5d6 narrows down to a specific specialty, like rapier or diseases of the brain.

Obviously, each of these must be built on a foundation. So you need to have Culture to get Soldier, Soldier to get Musketeer and so on. These higher level containers create natural limiters on the flow of skills, so you don’t just get “Rapier 5d6” out of the blue.

Now, this is a good start, but there’s one more twist to it that I haven’t touched yet, and this is the really crazy bit, but it’s going to have to wait until next week. 🙂

Ok, the remaining questions:

1. How many dice should it take to offset a status?
2. Who gets to say what form the status/result takes in the fiction?
3. What order do things happen in?
4. How big an advantage is 1 die?
5. How does this map over to multiple combatants?

These are some of the hard ones.

How many dice should it take to offset a status?
I touched on this earlier, and one commenter gave some useful breakdown, and the short form is that this is a surprisingly tricky question. If this number is fairly low (say, 1 die per) then it makes dice differences more potent because it makes it easier to smooth out any short term advantage that a smaller die pool might have achieved. Not sure if that’s good or bad, but it’s important to know.

This also plays interestingly into the question of how target numbers are rolled for, because there is some question as to whether and how players can -try- to recover. This is not totally black and white, since I think it might not be unreasonable to say that if you really want to focus on recovering, pick something other than attacking (with a target of 4) and do that.

Lastly, we get some interesting effects if the pricing is inconsistent. Damage could become “stickier” if it becomes more costly to remove (or reduce) a status.

But in that, I think we might have our answer – reduction. If the “cost” is 1 die per 1 step reduction (rather than total removal) then it has two interesting effects. First, it makes it harder to clear the board – totally removing a severe effect – so the more severe the effect, the more implicitly costly it has become. Second, it means that even with mitigation, the accumulation of statuses is dangerous. That is, if you are already inconveniences and harmed (or whatever) then you can’t just bump a taken out result down 1 to save yourself – you need to remove it entirely.

There’s also some asymmetry to deal with. The steps for inflicting a status are big, so leftover dice are going to be more common than statuses, and that’s a problem, since it invites fights that never end except at the very high and very low skill ranges. Some of that will hopefully be mitigated by other things you want to spend overage dice on, but that’s a weak prop.

So with all that in mind, I think the right answer is to make the price consistent, but slightly higher – Allow 2 overage dice to reduce (but not remove) a status.

Who gets to say what form the status/result takes in the fiction?
Touched on this yesterday, and for the moment, I’ll stick with the target defining things (with the possible optional rule of allowing the attacker to define things with a higher roll).

What order do things happen in?
Ah, now there’s a bit of a bear. Initiative.

I cannot think of an initiative system I’ve ever actually liked. Round robin works ok, so it’s all the way up to tolerable. Speedy action based ones (Shadowrun, Deadlands) make me crazily stabby. Shot Clock ones (Feng Shui, Exalted 2nd) always seem promising in theory but always prove more work than they’re worth in practice. I could totally cheat the whole issue and go for scene based resolution or some other abstraction to escape the question entirely, but I don’t actually enjoy things like that (with the exception of how The Shadow of Yesterday handles it, which I’ll probably steal).

The reality is that I’m probably going to be forced to go with some sort of round robin/turn taking model out of brutal necessity, but I don’t have to like it, and I can work to avoid things like “Declare up, resolve down” because part of what I’m trying to avoid is the big pow-wow between each round of combat. If action isn’t fluid then it’s less fun for everyone.

Honestly, initiative is one of those areas where I really prefer GM instinct and dicelessness. That is to say, while numeric initiative totally makes sense when everyone is part of the big picture (as in the case of, say, a tactical minis skirmish) that’s not how fights work in fiction or perception. They are lots of miniature stages within the large picture, and we (as audience) move from one to another according to the cadence of the fight. A good GM can use “initiative” as that audience, moving from place to place according to the logic of the fights, not according to some numeric counter. Doing so covers a multitude of sins, allows for characters with different levels of combat focus to get different levels of attention while still keeping the spotlight from lingering too long in one place.

But that’s not something you can really write a rule for. That’s a problem.

So, honestly, my take on it is to make the official rule very simple – literally just go around the table rather than do any weird rolling or anything – but provide guidelines for initiative as cameraman. Mechanically, we might allow some rules for speed tricks using unused dice or the like, but those are for exceptions – character for whom speed is a schtick. In the absence of that the role of initiative is to keep everyone playing and engaged, not to reward the guy who found the best mechanical abuse of the system.

How big an advantage is 1 die?
Pretty big. In the end, if a 1d advantage means an 80% chance of success, I’ll be happy. Obviously, there’s a sliding scale to this – 3d should beat 2d more reliably than 5d will beat 4d, but that’s my ballpark starting point, with a roughly 10% margin of error. However, I expect abilities (ways to spend dice) will throw this off when I get to them, which is fine.

How does this map over to multiple combatants?
This is the most important question to apply to any combat system. It is not hard to come up with a brilliant, clever, intricate system for handling 1-on-1 fights which utterly fails to account for multiple actors. Some of them try to apply duct tape solutions, like trying to make everything into chained sets of duels or aggregating opposition, but you can see the seams when that happens.

There’s also an important genre consideration to how numbers work. I hate to invoke realism, but I’ll do so in this very broad context – being outnumbered sucks. One man can absolutely fight a larger number of opponents, but doing so is dependent on a lot of factors, most of them involving finding a way to keep them all from coming at him at the same time. This is important, not because of how you model tactics, but because it’s very important to _society_. It’s what makes armies and police and many other things work. It also matters to style. The number of people one guy can fight speaks directly to the genre of things. In a gritty setting, even badass will run from groups of lesser adversaries, but in very cinematic settings, those adversaries are probably mooks, and can be easily dispensed with.

I’m definitely looking to avoid mook rules, though that’s a whole other discussion of it’s own. They’re easy to add if a specific genre demands it, but I don’t want them as a baseline. I like ganging up to be dangerous because of the aforementioned social element (and, in fact, this sentiment is all over the Fate 2 combat rules) but I think I may have implicitly handled that already. Since status mitigation depends on excess dice, the simple reality is that multiple opponents are going to burn through your dice in no time at all, even if they’re not hugely dangerous individually. That’s just a gut answer for now, but I think it will do.

Ok, getting into some of the nitty gritty here, so let’s review.

The idea so far is that combatants will have die pools of D6’s. When they go after someone in a fight, they are trying to hit a fixed target number, with a result as follows:

4 – Inconvenienced
7 – Harmed (possibly handicapped. Maybe another term)
13 – Taken Out

These are statuses which map to in-fiction effects, and they also accumulate, so an inconvenienced character who is inconvenienced again becomes harmed.

Statuses can be changed by spending unused dice. Unused dice are dice which have been rolled, but which were not necessary to hit the target number. If, for example, you rolled 4,3,3 then you can hit a 7 with 1 unused die (or a 4 with 2 unused dice) which you can use for stuff. Much of the stuff is currently undefined (and is expected to be a place for mechanical hooks) but specifically, they can be spent to “downgrade” statuses.

With that in mind, I’m looking down the barrel of the following questions:

1. Does the attacker choose the target number he’s going for, or does he simply take the result?
2. When a status “rolls up” does the previous status remain? That is, if a second inconvenience becomes harm, is the target now inconvenienced and harmed, or just harmed?
3. Is there an option to respond to a Taken Out result?
4. Are statuses the only possible outcome, or are they simply the non-specific outcome? That is, is a disarm a _form_ of harm, or something with a difficulty equivalent to harm (because it has a similar impact but with player-directed outcome)
5. Are 3 statuses enough? Do we need 4?
6. How many dice should it take to offset a status?
7. Who gets to say what form the status/result takes in the fiction?
8. What order to things happen in?
9. How big an advantage is 1 die?
10. How does this map over to multiple combatants?

That’s a lot. Enough to tempt me to just accept a standard injury model and move on, but I’m kind of dumb that way, so let’s press on and work through these, though it may take a while.

1. Does the attacker choose the target number he’s going for, or does he simply take the result?

Ok, two options: decide before you roll (declare intent) or declare after you roll ( describe outcome). The argument for post-roll is that the assumption is that every attack is an attempt to finish the fight. It also opens up an interesting decision-point of allowing the attack to choose to get a lesser outcome in order to keep more unused dice. That is, if you rolled 4,1,1,1 then you might feel better off taking the 4 and three unused dice (which probably need a cool name) than taking the 7 with no remaining budget.

The argument for a pre-roll decision is that it adds a little more strategy to the mix. It makes risk-taking a bit more of a calculated gamble, and it does _not_ require any post-roll decisionmaking. That’s kind of a big deal, since post-roll decisions are a big source of friction – you totally don’t want a player sitting there deciding if he really wants that 7 or those unused dice on a borderline case.

So, there’s a clear priority conflict here with no clear answer. I think either option could work well, so it’s really a matter of taste, style and (of course) subsequent testing to see which works. It’s one of those situatiosn where you make a decision, but put a pin in it to come back to. With that in mind, I’m going to go with decision before the roll because I think it will be easier to test whether that feels frustrating than it will be to test if it’s what people want.

2. When a status “rolls up” does the previous status remain? That is, if a second inconvenience becomes harm, is the target now inconvenienced and harmed, or just harmed?
The default assumption in most systems would be that the effects stack – that is, that you would now be inconvenienced and harmed. I’m inclined to buck that trend, at least while we have such a short list of statues, because it effectively lengthens the “damage track”. This might prove to be too much bookkeeping in the end, but it’s what I want to try for now.

3. Is there an option to respond to a Taken Out result?
I feel like there should be, but the real answer to this can be found in the question of sequencing. If all action is simultaneous, then this is easy to implement – just let overage dice be used immediately to mitigate an effect. Unfortunately, simultaneous action has its own drawbacks, so this question needs to be set aside until we answer the question of order of events.

4. Are statuses the only possible outcome, or are they simply the non-specific outcome? That is, is a disarm a _form_ of harm, or something with a difficulty equivalent to harm (because it has a similar impact but with player-directed outcome)
I’m strongly inclined to the latter, and as I think about it, I think the rubric may be simple. Outcomes are defined by the attacker, harm by the defender. That means that the fiction of being taken out stays firmly in the hands of the player, which is a plus. It also works nicely with the idea of hitting set difficulties, and it also supports players who are very descriptive as well as those who are not.

Curiously, this also suggests an interesting extension of the outcome ladder, which might be a little meta, but kind of resonates with me. To inflict harm AND describe it, you must hit the next target up. That is, the target for taking someone out in the way YOU want is 19. It means the “one shot kill” still exists as a possibility when dealing with very skilled opponents, but it’s rare. That has some weird interplay with things when the target is already hurt, so I’ll need ot think about it some more, but if nothing else it feels like a good optional rule.

5. Are 3 statuses enough? Do we need 4?
Dunno yet. But the answer to that previous question may prove a suitable compromise.

Ok, enough for today. We’ll run through 6-10 tomorrow.