SWADE: Let's talk about the non-combat tools.

[Reynard]

I am doing final prep for some games for a convention next weekend (TotalConfusion in MA, USA) and was reviewing the SWADE core to make sure I had my brain straight. It occurred to me that there really are a lot of tools outside combat to get things done in SWADE, and if you throw in things like setting rules and all the various switches and dials, SWADE becomes one of the most versatile action adventure games on the market just from the core book.

Don't get me wrong, I really like SWADE combat: it's tactical and swingy and medium crunchy. It's fun. But that said SWADE provides some really good tools other than it's combat system.

There are quick encounters for when you want things to have some uncertainty and consequence, but not eat up a ton of time. There are specific networking ("gather information") and hacking systems. The chase rules are dynamic and fun.

Mostly, though, I really like Dramatic Tasks as a play tool. They are at once easy to implement and versatile, serving a similar function as the Skill Challenge or even immediate clocks a la PbtA/FitD games.

They do take a little system mastery by the GM to keep them from getting repetitive, and I usually recommend ditching the initiative count for most uses, but overall it is a great subsystem for maintaining cinematic style without constantly resorting to life or death combat.

 

[dbm]

Dramatic Tasks are cool, they are a really good way of putting some mechanical crunch into scenes and abstracting them if you want to. Some examples from a sci-fi game I ran:

The team wanted to infiltrate a military space dock and steal a ship; this involved getting through the outer perimeter, sneaking through the complex, tricking their way onto a ship and then hot wiring it.

Later on in that arc they had to break their way out of a military space station which entailed out thinking and out manoeuvring the space station defences.

And at another point in the campaign the team were undercover as asteroid miners and during a mining mission one of the other mining teams had their pod crash - the team decided to rescue them, jury-rigging a way of reaching them, getting in the pod, rescuing the injured miners and getting back to their own pod in time to be collected by their command ship.

Each scene was really fun to play out, the action was driven by the player’s decisions and the characters abilities.

 

[aco175]

I'll see you there, but I'm just playing D&D and do not know about SWADE.

 

[GMMichael]

The team wanted to infiltrate a military space dock and steal a ship; this involved getting through the outer perimeter, sneaking through the complex, tricking their way onto a ship and then hot wiring it.

Later on in that arc they had to break their way out of a military space station which entailed out thinking and out manoeuvring the space station defences.

And at another point in the campaign the team were undercover as asteroid miners and during a mining mission one of the other mining teams had their pod crash - the team decided to rescue them, jury-rigging a way of reaching them, getting in the pod, rescuing the injured miners and getting back to their own pod in time to be collected by their command ship.

Each scene was really fun to play out, the action was driven by the player’s decisions and the characters abilities.

Cool examples, but how did SWADE Dramatic Tasks make these different from something the GM just came up with?

 

[dbm]

Cool examples, but how did SWADE Dramatic Tasks make these different from something the GM just came up with?

Dramatic Tasks have some qualities which are really cool in my opinion.

They are inherently fail-forward. The group needs to collect a number of successes by the end of the task (with each success or Raise counting) and so if the early rounds go poorly that doesn’t mean the party have failed at whatever they were trying in those early stages, it just means they need to pick up the slack later on.

They encourage all the party to be involved, so for example in the infiltration scene when the PCs were trying to cross the base one party member used stealth to find the best route, but another used persuasion to talk their way past a guard they bumped into and the third (who was an engineer) used his knowledge of how docks are usually set up to help find their target location.

There is, of course, a desire to use your best skills all the time as a player. The rules discourage this - the GM can veto or penalise repetition. More mechanically, though, the target is quite high - typically two successes per character per round for a tough but achievable dramatic task. This is because you can assume that the PCs will achieve a Raise on average (i.e. two successes per roll) each round. The balance works well in my experience.

The system meshes well with the other parts. It uses the same initiative mechanism (with a twist I will come to) and that means edges which influence initiative or trigger off Jokers all work as expected. Your character’s abilities have the beneficial impact you would expect.

The twist is complications - if you draw a club card for initiative then your action that turn is at -2 and if you fail, the whole task fails. This creates risk and drama in any task as nothing is ever assured. It also adds a degree of tactical choice - the player could avoid working on the task that round and so avoid the issue indirectly but put the rest of the team under pressure.

Put this all together and you have a situation where the GM sets the starting parameters but the players’ choices drive how things move forwards narratively, based on the approaches that they take. Add in the mechanical aspects and overall it is a great way of putting a mechanical skeleton into any non-combat scene you want (unless there is one of the other non-combat tools you would rather use).

 

[deganawida]

I have to wait for my books to arrive However, I am eagerly looking forward to them, and to making a fantasy campaign that has far less fighting and more exploration, mystery, and other fun adventure stuff.

 

[Faolyn]

I'll see you there, but I'm just playing D&D and do not know about SWADE.

I've started playing it and highly recommend it. It's pretty easy to learn and, according to the GM, it's easy to adjust encounters on the fly.

 

[Reynard]

I've started playing it and highly recommend it. It's pretty easy to learn and, according to the GM, it's easy to adjust encounters on the fly.

There isn't really a solid "CR" system, so as GM you are playing by feel anyway. If your players get in more trouble than expected, just give them bennies or have your bad guys burn bennies on unimportant stuff so they can soak damage.

 

[Faolyn]

There isn't really a solid "CR" system, so as GM you are playing by feel anyway. If your players get in more trouble than expected, just give them bennies or have your bad guys burn bennies on unimportant stuff so they can soak damage.

Yeah, the bennies are really important. We had our first really major combat and, as one player put it, they were what kept the game from having CoC-levels of lethalness.

(Which is funny, because in our CoC game, we have so little combat that there has been only one death, and that was because I really didn't like the character and wanted to switch to another one, so I asked the Keeper to kill her off.)

 

[Reynard]

Yeah, the bennies are really important. We had our first really major combat and, as one player put it, they were what kept the game from having CoC-levels of lethalness.

(Which is funny, because in our CoC game, we have so little combat that there has been only one death, and that was because I really didn't like the character and wanted to switch to another one, so I asked the Keeper to kill her off.)

Bennies are essentially hit points in SWADE. They have other uses, yes, but if you burn them all before the big fight, chances are you're done for.

 

[schneeland]

Bennies are essentially hit points in SWADE. They have other uses, yes, but if you burn them all before the big fight, chances are you're done for.

Not really my experience in our current game (Savage World + Sprawlrunners). Since you can take 3 wounds before going down, I rarely spend my bennies soaking damage - most of them are used to compensate my "great" luck with skill rolls early in missions

 

[thullgrim]

In my experience if your hoarding the Bennies it means there aren’t enough of them in play. I’m not good about handing them out so o make sure I do it on a schedule. After pretty much every scene I hand at least one out to each player.

I want them to be able to do cool things not just soak damage. By the same token I rarely soak damage with bad guys. I almost always use the bennies for them to do something proactive as well.

 

[Reynard]

Not really my experience in our current game (Savage World + Sprawlrunners). Since you can take 3 wounds before going down, I rarely spend my bennies soaking damage - most of them are used to compensate my "great" luck with skill rolls early in missions

Your GM is going easy on you, I think. One of the great aspects of SW is that damage is swingy. If you are getting in any fights at all, you are inevitably going to get hit with one of those exploding 35 damage accidents.

 

[Faolyn]

Your GM is going easy on you, I think. One of the great aspects of SW is that damage is swingy. If you are getting in any fights at all, you are inevitably going to get hit with one of those exploding 35 damage accidents.

More or less happened in our first combat. The player able to soak damage helped enormously, as was the fact I'm playing a healer, because natural healing is not fast.

 

[schneeland]

Your GM is going easy on you, I think. One of the great aspects of SW is that damage is swingy. If you are getting in any fights at all, you are inevitably going to get hit with one of those exploding 35 damage accidents.

Kind of. Enemies are not pulling any punches, but he's not baying for blood either. But I think it's fair to say that we are all playing more for the shared enjoyment of a pulpy (Cyberpunk) action story than any sort of tactical challenge.
Also, just last session my guy got hit by a lot more bullets from an autocannon than he would have liked - while, just like @thullgrim, I usually don't find soaking damage a very interesting use of bennies, in that situation it was appreciated

 

[dbm]

When I GM I use Bennies as a pacing mechanism. If the interesting opponents get hit and would go down quickly or be neutered through damage I will attempt to Soak on their behalf. Similarly, if an NPC tries to pull off some key move but fails to activate it, making things a damp squib, then I will re-roll for them.

So I aim to use the Bennies to make things more interesting and entertaining for the players rather than using them ‘maximally’ from an in-character NPC perspective.

 

[dbm]

Thinking about the non-combat systems, if Dramatic Tasks are my most used the second is Chases.

What do people think about the chase rules in SWADE?

Have people tried the Pathfinder Chase rules which are different?

 

[Reynard]

What do people think about the chase rules in SWADE?

I think they are a little overly fiddly and could be leaner, but generally they do the job.

 

[schneeland]

We use chase rules quite frequently and generally they work, but it's a rather abstract and gamey part of the system, so just like Reynard, I'm not overly enthusiastic about them (I'm fine with initiative cards and also like dramatic tasks). Still they get the job done and I prefer them to chases in D&D.

 

[dbm]

In general I think chases are handled extremely poorly in RPGs. Even with the basic combat rules SWADE is one up on most other systems since the distance you can run is based on a dice roll but I like the chase rules personally. Similar to the Dramatic Task system the complications and range of choices available each turn make the game much more interesting in my opinion.

The tricky bit in some ways is starting the chase. Because few systems include them, my experience is that players assume any tactical scene is about combat rather than a potential chase. I have started being a bit meta about it and telling the players that we’re going to have a chase. Over time it will become more natural for the them to include the possibility in their assumptions of how the game might play out.