doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
(+ thread is basically just, if the basic assumptions of the system don't appeal to you that is fine, but telling me all about how you don't like big skill lists or whatever isn't helpful)
So I am looking for some feedback on my game's resolution system and skills.
First, the design philosophy.
Rangers Helping People
The premise of the game is that the modern world doesn't know that supernatural stuff exists, but you do, and you are a Ranger. Rangers go about and help people with supernatural problems, while trying to keep the secret from blowing up and causing chaos. This might mean hunting a feral monster, or wizard nazis, or protecting a spirit from a human necromancer, or tracking down the creep who has kidnapped the Troll King's daughter and rescuing her while either killing the creep or bringing them to the Troll King for justice. Or whatever else you can think of.
Additionally, the game assumes that most problems you solve will benefit from research and investigation. Using research, investigation, social challenges to gain allies and favors specifically to deal with a given problem, calling in previously earned favors, etc, rather than just rushing in to kill something. Many problems won't be solved by violence at all, as in, the entities involved either cannot be killed or killing them will make things worse for everyone, etc.
The Books Are Not There For Use During a Session.
The actual rules you use in a session should be simple enough that they can fit on the character sheet, the text of individual special abilities (like how you can read a magic card and know how to use it), and a general one-page cheat sheet. The book should only be opened during a session to do some advanced downtime stuff, to reference lore stuff, or for gaining new abilities during an extended rest that the group has decided to resolved in play rather than as a quick montage.
Where the books are needed is during character creation, and campaign creation.
There is Just One Resolution Mechanic
You roll your action die plus rank dice, plus or minus advantage or disadvantage, and compare the result to the success ladder on the front of your character sheet. That's the whole system, basically. There is room for simple systems for things like creating new spells and elixers and items of power, but even they lean on the basic resolution system.
Characters Can Be Complex, Because The System Isn't
Since the general mechanics are quite simple, characters can carry most of the game's complexity. While the structure of things like preparing for a conflict, gaining and leveraging allies, using investigation and research to mitigate a dangerous enemy's advantages, can add depth to the game, most of the small moving parts are found in character creation, and thus the sort of list of stuff you can do and how well you can do it.
Make It Make Sense
This is a distant cousin of dnd's "rulings not rules", but it is very different because it is not purely in the hands of the GM, and the default is that the player character does what the player says they do, unless there is some reason for it to be otherwise, rather than a default of "get the GMs permission".
The other side of this is that when the game asks for something like "spend 1 AP from an Appropriate Attribute" it is asking you as the player to make it make sense to the rest of the table. Ideally this is clearly evident to everyone, like using Grace on pretty much any Acrobatics check, using Wits on Investigate checks, Will to resist a mental assault, etc. When it isn't immediately clear or the desired Attribute isn't what one would normally expect, like using Wits to push a check with Acrobatics (Parkour), the player needs to explain how they are drawing upon Wits rather than Grace to achieve their goal more effectively.
OKAY LET'S GET TO IT
Resolution
To resolve an action, you make a Skill Check. To do so, you assemble your Dice Pool, which is 1d12 Action Die plus a number of 1d6 Rank Dice. Advantage and Disadvantage can add or remove dice, but otherwise you simply add the number of ranks in the skill you are Testing and that's your pool.
There are four degrees of success, Cursed Failure, Failure, Mixed Success, and Total Success. You can also gain a Critical Success, which is just Total Success with some extra benefits.
Cursed Failure You suck, but that doesn't mean you can't keep going. You completely fail at the task, and gain 1 Experience and the GM gains 1 Adversity Point, which can be used immediately or later to bring a complication, activate an adversarial ability, or otherwise make your life harder.
Failure You fail in your task, but you can either create an opening for another character, give the GM 1 Adversity Point, or spend 1 Attribute Point to Push.
Mixed Success You succeed, but not completely. There is a cost, or you only get part of what you wanted. You gain 1 Momentum Token and You can spend 1 AP to Push.
Total Success You completely succeed without caveats. You gain 1 Momentum Token and mark 1 Experience.
Critical Success Occurs when you gain any Success and at least 3 dice show the number 6 or 12. Your check is treated as a Total Success even if the number would normally be only a Mixed Success, and you can steal 1 Adversity Point from the GM or completely fill one of your Attribute Point Pools.
Skills
Structure. Skills are structured by Skill and Specialty. Each Skill has 3 Specialties. A Skill Check will generally ask for a check with Skill (Specialty). For instance, doing Parkour to cut off someone you are chasing would be a check with (or Test of) Acrobatics (Parkour).
The Skills are grouped into 3 categories, with each category containing 12 Skills. The Categories are Interaction, Magic, and Physical.
Notably, Attributes are not part of Skill Checks unless you spend AP to push or to activate an ability as part of the check.
Also, many special abilities do specify an Attribute, which must be used to activate that ability.
Descriptions. Skills do not have long complex rules for each skill. Instead, they have about a paragraph of description that establishes what sorts of things are Basic, what is Advanced, and where the boundaries of the skill are.
General Rules The general rules are simple and small in number. Distance makes things harder, scale makes things harder, degree of separation from the acting character increases difficulty, etc. Each category specifies how these apply to their skills in a bit more detail, but all the general rules should (when I am done writing them) fit on less than 1/3 of a standard printed page with narrow margins and a readable font.
See the attached pdf for the skill list. It needs an update, so fair warning that the success ladder isn't totally accurate anymore, but it gives the idea.
Your Skills
You will have a total of 14 Skill Ranks, four of which will be Signature Skills. Signature Skills have the benefit that you always reroll any 1s on the dice when making a check with that skill.
For each Skill Rank, you also gain 1 Specialty Rank. At character Creation you can only have 2 Ranks in a given skill, and only 3 total ranks when adding your Skill Ranks to a given Specialty Rank. For instance, if you put two Skill Ranks into Acrobatics, you can only put 1 Specialty Rank in any Acrobatics Specialty. This is important later on, because you can spend Experience to gain Specialty Ranks between levels, and your limits increase when you level.
What this means in terms of competence is that you will have roughly 1/3 of the skill table covered with each character, but only a few of those will be things you are expert in at the start, with most being things you can do decently or even things that you need help or favorable circumstances to be reliable at. Since the game has most of the success ladder dedicated to mixed results, this doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to do things you aren't good at, especially since failure gains you Experience. Most of the time it's better to succeed than to get an Experience, but at least failure doesn't totally screw you with no mitigation. Statistically, 2 ranks will hit Mixed Success or higher almost half the time, so if you only have 1 skill rank and 1 specialty rank in a task, you aren't screwed when doing that thing.
On the other hand, 5 total ranks will get total success more often than not, which is why having that number of ranks requires gaining levels or using preparation and teamwork to get Advantage and some other source of a bonus (like momentum, or a die forward from successful preparation, or a magical blessing).
The general idea of the system, and I can report from 13 years of iteration and use in my home group and introducing a couple dozen people to the system for a few sessions or so that the idea does actually play out, is that you spend a little more time during character creation to have a character that you know quite well, with lots of hooks and connections and levers to manipulate in play, and then during play the game is very simple.
In terms of gameplay, since conflict scenes use rounds and phases but not turns, and players always roll, and most quick actions don't add a roll to the round, each PC usually makes 2 or 3 checks per round. One as an action, one Defense Check, and one miscellaneous check like doing some utility thing or enhanced movement or some special ability. You get 1 action and 2 quick actions, and most of the quick action options are just quick little things like adding on a special ability to an action, or they are interruptions that change the scene state in some way.
The gameplay of a session is usually some combination of research, preparation, general downtime activiities, and 1 or 2 scenes of conflict or challenge (like a physical challenge involving travel through hazardous terrain, for instance). With major challenges or conflicts you should be spending at least a full session in prep, investigation, and downtime stuff, and a full session leading up to and resolving the action.
So.
Thoughts? Questions?
Should I delete this and post it again when I have revised the playtest document enough to post it? Doing so will take at least a couple weeks with my current recurring brain fog and how often I can sit and write.
So I am looking for some feedback on my game's resolution system and skills.
First, the design philosophy.
Rangers Helping People
The premise of the game is that the modern world doesn't know that supernatural stuff exists, but you do, and you are a Ranger. Rangers go about and help people with supernatural problems, while trying to keep the secret from blowing up and causing chaos. This might mean hunting a feral monster, or wizard nazis, or protecting a spirit from a human necromancer, or tracking down the creep who has kidnapped the Troll King's daughter and rescuing her while either killing the creep or bringing them to the Troll King for justice. Or whatever else you can think of.
Additionally, the game assumes that most problems you solve will benefit from research and investigation. Using research, investigation, social challenges to gain allies and favors specifically to deal with a given problem, calling in previously earned favors, etc, rather than just rushing in to kill something. Many problems won't be solved by violence at all, as in, the entities involved either cannot be killed or killing them will make things worse for everyone, etc.
The Books Are Not There For Use During a Session.
The actual rules you use in a session should be simple enough that they can fit on the character sheet, the text of individual special abilities (like how you can read a magic card and know how to use it), and a general one-page cheat sheet. The book should only be opened during a session to do some advanced downtime stuff, to reference lore stuff, or for gaining new abilities during an extended rest that the group has decided to resolved in play rather than as a quick montage.
Where the books are needed is during character creation, and campaign creation.
There is Just One Resolution Mechanic
You roll your action die plus rank dice, plus or minus advantage or disadvantage, and compare the result to the success ladder on the front of your character sheet. That's the whole system, basically. There is room for simple systems for things like creating new spells and elixers and items of power, but even they lean on the basic resolution system.
Characters Can Be Complex, Because The System Isn't
Since the general mechanics are quite simple, characters can carry most of the game's complexity. While the structure of things like preparing for a conflict, gaining and leveraging allies, using investigation and research to mitigate a dangerous enemy's advantages, can add depth to the game, most of the small moving parts are found in character creation, and thus the sort of list of stuff you can do and how well you can do it.
Make It Make Sense
This is a distant cousin of dnd's "rulings not rules", but it is very different because it is not purely in the hands of the GM, and the default is that the player character does what the player says they do, unless there is some reason for it to be otherwise, rather than a default of "get the GMs permission".
The other side of this is that when the game asks for something like "spend 1 AP from an Appropriate Attribute" it is asking you as the player to make it make sense to the rest of the table. Ideally this is clearly evident to everyone, like using Grace on pretty much any Acrobatics check, using Wits on Investigate checks, Will to resist a mental assault, etc. When it isn't immediately clear or the desired Attribute isn't what one would normally expect, like using Wits to push a check with Acrobatics (Parkour), the player needs to explain how they are drawing upon Wits rather than Grace to achieve their goal more effectively.
OKAY LET'S GET TO IT
Attribute Point You have 4 attributes (Grace, Strength, Will, Wits) and each has a pool of points that you can spend to activate special abilities, or Push skill checks
Adversity Points The GM begins the session with Adversity POints equal to the number of players, and can spend them to interrupt the flow of a scene to introduce adversity, bringing in a new threat, establishing a hazard, having an NPC act against the PCs "out of turn", or activate certain special abilities of an NPC that are equivelent to the more advanced PC abiltiies that require Momentum
Experience You gain Experience when you fail a check or get a Total Success naturally (ie, not from a Push), complete a character or group quest, complete a game session, etc. When you gain Experience, you also mark Advancement. When you fill the Advancement box, you gain a level. Experience can be spent during resting or downtime to gain new Traits or increase Skill Ranks.
Push When you don't like the result of a Skill Check, as long as it isn't a Cursed Failure, you can spend 1 AP appropriate to the action to Push the check one step up the ladder. For instance from Failure to Mixed Success, or Mixed Success to Total Success.
Momentum Success gives you Momentum, which you can have a number of equal to your level. When you have at least one, you can add 1d6 to a single Skill Check you make in a round of Conflict. If not in a Conflict scene, you cannot add the die again until all other PCs have taken an Action (or opted out of taking an action, as the case may be). You can give up 1 Momentum to use a special ability that costs 3 or more AP to activate. (You cannot use such abilities otherwise). Some special abilities might have [X] Momentum after the AP cost, which means that you must have that much Momentum to use the ability, regardless of the AP cost.
Adversity Points The GM begins the session with Adversity POints equal to the number of players, and can spend them to interrupt the flow of a scene to introduce adversity, bringing in a new threat, establishing a hazard, having an NPC act against the PCs "out of turn", or activate certain special abilities of an NPC that are equivelent to the more advanced PC abiltiies that require Momentum
Experience You gain Experience when you fail a check or get a Total Success naturally (ie, not from a Push), complete a character or group quest, complete a game session, etc. When you gain Experience, you also mark Advancement. When you fill the Advancement box, you gain a level. Experience can be spent during resting or downtime to gain new Traits or increase Skill Ranks.
Push When you don't like the result of a Skill Check, as long as it isn't a Cursed Failure, you can spend 1 AP appropriate to the action to Push the check one step up the ladder. For instance from Failure to Mixed Success, or Mixed Success to Total Success.
Momentum Success gives you Momentum, which you can have a number of equal to your level. When you have at least one, you can add 1d6 to a single Skill Check you make in a round of Conflict. If not in a Conflict scene, you cannot add the die again until all other PCs have taken an Action (or opted out of taking an action, as the case may be). You can give up 1 Momentum to use a special ability that costs 3 or more AP to activate. (You cannot use such abilities otherwise). Some special abilities might have [X] Momentum after the AP cost, which means that you must have that much Momentum to use the ability, regardless of the AP cost.
Resolution
To resolve an action, you make a Skill Check. To do so, you assemble your Dice Pool, which is 1d12 Action Die plus a number of 1d6 Rank Dice. Advantage and Disadvantage can add or remove dice, but otherwise you simply add the number of ranks in the skill you are Testing and that's your pool.
There are four degrees of success, Cursed Failure, Failure, Mixed Success, and Total Success. You can also gain a Critical Success, which is just Total Success with some extra benefits.
Cursed Failure You suck, but that doesn't mean you can't keep going. You completely fail at the task, and gain 1 Experience and the GM gains 1 Adversity Point, which can be used immediately or later to bring a complication, activate an adversarial ability, or otherwise make your life harder.
Failure You fail in your task, but you can either create an opening for another character, give the GM 1 Adversity Point, or spend 1 Attribute Point to Push.
Mixed Success You succeed, but not completely. There is a cost, or you only get part of what you wanted. You gain 1 Momentum Token and You can spend 1 AP to Push.
Total Success You completely succeed without caveats. You gain 1 Momentum Token and mark 1 Experience.
Critical Success Occurs when you gain any Success and at least 3 dice show the number 6 or 12. Your check is treated as a Total Success even if the number would normally be only a Mixed Success, and you can steal 1 Adversity Point from the GM or completely fill one of your Attribute Point Pools.
Skills
Structure. Skills are structured by Skill and Specialty. Each Skill has 3 Specialties. A Skill Check will generally ask for a check with Skill (Specialty). For instance, doing Parkour to cut off someone you are chasing would be a check with (or Test of) Acrobatics (Parkour).
The Skills are grouped into 3 categories, with each category containing 12 Skills. The Categories are Interaction, Magic, and Physical.
Notably, Attributes are not part of Skill Checks unless you spend AP to push or to activate an ability as part of the check.
Also, many special abilities do specify an Attribute, which must be used to activate that ability.
Descriptions. Skills do not have long complex rules for each skill. Instead, they have about a paragraph of description that establishes what sorts of things are Basic, what is Advanced, and where the boundaries of the skill are.
General Rules The general rules are simple and small in number. Distance makes things harder, scale makes things harder, degree of separation from the acting character increases difficulty, etc. Each category specifies how these apply to their skills in a bit more detail, but all the general rules should (when I am done writing them) fit on less than 1/3 of a standard printed page with narrow margins and a readable font.
See the attached pdf for the skill list. It needs an update, so fair warning that the success ladder isn't totally accurate anymore, but it gives the idea.
Your Skills
You will have a total of 14 Skill Ranks, four of which will be Signature Skills. Signature Skills have the benefit that you always reroll any 1s on the dice when making a check with that skill.
For each Skill Rank, you also gain 1 Specialty Rank. At character Creation you can only have 2 Ranks in a given skill, and only 3 total ranks when adding your Skill Ranks to a given Specialty Rank. For instance, if you put two Skill Ranks into Acrobatics, you can only put 1 Specialty Rank in any Acrobatics Specialty. This is important later on, because you can spend Experience to gain Specialty Ranks between levels, and your limits increase when you level.
What this means in terms of competence is that you will have roughly 1/3 of the skill table covered with each character, but only a few of those will be things you are expert in at the start, with most being things you can do decently or even things that you need help or favorable circumstances to be reliable at. Since the game has most of the success ladder dedicated to mixed results, this doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to do things you aren't good at, especially since failure gains you Experience. Most of the time it's better to succeed than to get an Experience, but at least failure doesn't totally screw you with no mitigation. Statistically, 2 ranks will hit Mixed Success or higher almost half the time, so if you only have 1 skill rank and 1 specialty rank in a task, you aren't screwed when doing that thing.
On the other hand, 5 total ranks will get total success more often than not, which is why having that number of ranks requires gaining levels or using preparation and teamwork to get Advantage and some other source of a bonus (like momentum, or a die forward from successful preparation, or a magical blessing).
The general idea of the system, and I can report from 13 years of iteration and use in my home group and introducing a couple dozen people to the system for a few sessions or so that the idea does actually play out, is that you spend a little more time during character creation to have a character that you know quite well, with lots of hooks and connections and levers to manipulate in play, and then during play the game is very simple.
In terms of gameplay, since conflict scenes use rounds and phases but not turns, and players always roll, and most quick actions don't add a roll to the round, each PC usually makes 2 or 3 checks per round. One as an action, one Defense Check, and one miscellaneous check like doing some utility thing or enhanced movement or some special ability. You get 1 action and 2 quick actions, and most of the quick action options are just quick little things like adding on a special ability to an action, or they are interruptions that change the scene state in some way.
The gameplay of a session is usually some combination of research, preparation, general downtime activiities, and 1 or 2 scenes of conflict or challenge (like a physical challenge involving travel through hazardous terrain, for instance). With major challenges or conflicts you should be spending at least a full session in prep, investigation, and downtime stuff, and a full session leading up to and resolving the action.
So.
Thoughts? Questions?
Should I delete this and post it again when I have revised the playtest document enough to post it? Doing so will take at least a couple weeks with my current recurring brain fog and how often I can sit and write.
