UNITY RPG: The Best of D&D 4E, Pathfinder, & Dungeon World

Unity is an interesting new game going soon. With diceless GMing, a narrative approach, and tactical gridless combat in which players operate in "unity" rather than taking turns, and inspirations from D&D 4E, Pathfinder, and Dungeon World, it's an indie game with great production values. I've been sent an exclusive preview of the game, which you can see below - two page spreads, one introducing the game and one taking a look at a combat encounter.

Designer Anson Tran says "If I could sum up what I’m trying to do with Unity, it would be to create a game that has the tactical depth and crunch of D&D 4e, the excitement of character builds from 3.5e/Pathfinder and finally the narrative ease and storytelling potential of a game like Dungeon World. All of this oriented around very team-focused turn-less combat. Unity is Epic Fantasy infused with a flavourful dose of long lost magic-powered technology – there are guns, robots, and floating cities but they are a rare and momentous thing to discover."

There's a Kickstarter coming later this year for the 330+ page full-colour hardcover.

 

[gribble]

Definitely look at it from a "spirit of the game" perspective. I loved the different builds and character concepts you could create in Pathfinder. The anticipation of putting together a build and then the exhilaration of it working out in-game felt so good. From 4e we have deep tactical combat that really scratches the 'game' itch. DW embodies a spirit of storytelling, character development and constantly pushing the narrative towards interesting situations. These are the pillars that I'm trying to build Unity upon

I had hoped this would be the answer - not the system details per se, but the rich character building and advancement from Pathfinder, the balance and tactical options of 4e, and the more freeform, story focused, player driven narrative style of DW. If the game manages to succeed in blending all that, it could become my new favourite fantasy system.

My only concern is the setting as currently presented - I'm not a big fan of the "World of Warcraft" / Exalted 2e vibe it is giving me - but as long as the setting is easily separable from the rules that won't be a deal-breaker.

 

[Anson]

I had hoped this would be the answer - not the system details per se, but the rich character building and advancement from Pathfinder, the balance and tactical options of 4e, and the more freeform, story focused, player driven narrative style of DW. If the game manages to succeed in blending all that, it could become my new favourite fantasy system.

My only concern is the setting as currently presented - I'm not a big fan of the "World of Warcraft" / Exalted 2e vibe it is giving me - but as long as the setting is easily separable from the rules that won't be a deal-breaker.

I totally hear you gribble. There's a section of the book dedicated to providing guidelines for GMs to make Unity their own with regards on how to reskin/reflavour different things and what modular parts they can move around. I'll touch upon it in the 2nd part of my 2 part blog series concerning Unity's setting that's going on at the main website right now.

 

[gribble]

I totally hear you gribble. There's a section of the book dedicated to providing guidelines for GMs to make Unity their own with regards on how to reskin/reflavour different things and what modular parts they can move around. I'll touch upon it in the 2nd part of my 2 part blog series concerning Unity's setting that's going on at the main website right now.

Great! Consider my interest piqued.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I know the thread's a few days old now, but...man, I gotta say, all the stuff I'm hearing about this leaves me seriously, deeply conflicted.

That is, I can't help being deeply skeptical of something that proposes to capture the spirit of such wildly different games as Pathfinder and 4e/DW. (I agree with previous posters that there is actually a lot of similarity between 4e and DW, and that 13th Age exists by exploring that space of similarity.) The incredible divide between the customizability+"Damn the (balance) consequences" of PF/3.x, and the careful and thoughtful (perhaps too careful, though not for me) design of 4e is...hard to see how the two can live in harmony. I'm also (still) extremely skeptical of "range-band" combat, as every attempt I've ever read at explaining how it works in practice has left me more confused than when I started, even when it was a more-or-less "live" conversation.

But...man. I also can't help feeling captivated by the idea. A game that legit marries Dungeon World, 4e, and Pathfinder together? A game that gives me the freewheeling story of DW, the engagement and empowerment of 4e's balance and focus on informed choice, and the depth and variety of Pathfinder's character construction? Sweet wounded Jesus, it sounds perfect. If it's also sufficiently flexible to adapt settings and/or options I'm attached to (e.g. expanding the available race options)...well, it seems like it would be the perfect game for all of my gaming groups, past and present, which would be mind-bogglingly awesome.

I've never actually been in such a position before, of nearly equal forces of gleeful hope and intense skepticism. It's...an unusual experience.

 

[Anthony Wu]

Arguably there is no proposal to mix all the games, so much as there is a bit of a click-bait-y headline.

There is a pretty stark difference from giving credit to inspirations and trying to cluster-pack all those games into one. Unity will no doubt tick some of those "packing game elements together" boxes, but at the end of the day I think it is helpful to see it as its own game, but paying tribute to others.

Regarding range-band combat, I would say that it is a LOT more intuitive with a game board of some sort to ease players into the game. This could be done away with over time, but a lot of TCG games also use a mat to teach new players how to play. Hopefully with such high production values, a game mat will be included in the book, or printable from a PDF online. Once you get used to the terminology, range-bands are much quicker to run than tiles and squares, but you need to jump over that initial difficulty bump. It's not even that difficult, it's just not intuitive for people who haven't played video games that use range-bands.

I'm very glad as a bystander and follower of this project that Anson's game is generating so much of the feeling of "captivation" though. That is really the biggest goal of any game designer - to generate hype, to generate a sense of wonder and desire to play.

Personally, I have a minor quibble, Anson, if you swing by this way again: so far all the writing promoting your game talks a lot about the combat engine being fast, and about the lore being interesting/weird, and about the classes being good at fighting together with meshed initiative. This means there's not really any spotlight on how the non-combat scenes go, and how your ruleset facilitates storytelling. Dungeon World, for example, shines best in the non-combat part of the game, with the combat often feeling too free-form to newer GMs. Are there any mechanical levers to storytelling that Unity has, besides the flavor aspect? I was hoping Darkest Dungeon might give you some ideas, since it is a combat-heavy game that nonetheless creates a very nice atmosphere.

But, as game theorists will usually say about D&D - the game doesn't actually facilitate storytelling. That seems almost entirely up to the DM. FATE and DW comparatively have a lot more mechanical goodness that assists storytelling, built into the rules, even with a poor GM.

 

[Anson]

I know the thread's a few days old now, but...man, I gotta say, all the stuff I'm hearing about this leaves me seriously, deeply conflicted.

I've never actually been in such a position before, of nearly equal forces of gleeful hope and intense skepticism. It's...an unusual experience.

Haha... EzekielRaiden I'll take it! I'll do my best to confirm your hope

Personally, I have a minor quibble, Anson, if you swing by this way again: so far all the writing promoting your game talks a lot about the combat engine being fast, and about the lore being interesting/weird, and about the classes being good at fighting together with meshed initiative. This means there's not really any spotlight on how the non-combat scenes go, and how your ruleset facilitates storytelling. Dungeon World, for example, shines best in the non-combat part of the game, with the combat often feeling too free-form to newer GMs. Are there any mechanical levers to storytelling that Unity has, besides the flavor aspect? I was hoping Darkest Dungeon might give you some ideas, since it is a combat-heavy game that nonetheless creates a very nice atmosphere.

Hi Anthony, you are correct about describing Unity and I hope folks will see it as building upon inspirations from those games (and others) mentioned rather than just blenderizing everything wholesale into an RPG slurry.

With regards to why there's so much writing on combat, the initiative approach and classes/powers compared to the non-combat elements it's because of a couple of reasons:

1) I definitely feel like I've made innovative strides designing the combat engine and the interplay of powers between classes. Unity has a few unique selling points but that's the one that's easily communicated and emphasized. It's an area of the game that as time goes on is more and more my own after having drawn initial inspiration from various other games. This isn't to say that I don't give equal love to the non-combat side of Unity. That's incredibly important to me as well. But that side of the game has been so elegantly and beautifully designed by many other games out there that when I draw inspiration designing this area, the innovations or adjustments I make are fairly subtle and not as groundbreaking as what I'm trying to propose for my combat system. This doesn't mean that non-combat in Unity is a bore or weaker -- I'm just of the mindset to not reinvent a perfectly good wheel for the sake of being different. But shaving that wheel down a bit or adding bits and pieces so that it complements the vehicle that is Unity's design philosophy -- totally game for that.

2) Maturity of the design - I have a few different iterations of approaching skills, character building and resolution mechanics outside of combat. We've narrowed it down to two flavours and are currently play testing them alongside the balance testing for classes and powers. I don't want to declare strongly and specifically what the rule set is like for these elements until I'm happy with the choice we settle on. But rest assured, it does embody storytelling, rich character development and encourages cinematic scene painting. I'll definitely release this information as soon as my play test groups and I can come to a conclusion but at this point we feel like we can't go wrong going with either of the two contending iterations. For those itching to see where my head's at you can find my early musings on this topic in the RPG.net design forums.

 

[Anson]

For those interested in that question "Can I use my own setting for Unity?"

PART 2 of the blog series is up that helps shed some light on this:

http://unity-rpg.com/blog/2016/03/2...t-exist-and-can-i-use-my-own-setting-instead/

 

[EzekielRaiden]

For those interested in that question "Can I use my own setting for Unity?"

PART 2 of the blog series is up that helps shed some light on this:

http://unity-rpg.com/blog/2016/03/2...t-exist-and-can-i-use-my-own-setting-instead/

An interesting post, though I think it could have been given a little more...meat, I guess?

That is, you did a good job of explaining the internal and external ("Watsonian" and "Doylist," if you prefer) justifications for the Breach mechanic in Unity, but left it really vague as to how this concept of "setting-justified mechanics" could be tailored to fit other, well-known settings. I think this would have been a very useful way to "sell" your system to people who might like it but don't care for the default setting.

As an example, consider Planescape, which has two (more or less) setting-specific mechanics that seem ripe for use as examples. Firstly, one of the Things about the Planescape setting is that belief shapes the planes. Sigil is constantly re-aligning itself, both for understandable and incomprehensible reasons. Locations can shift between planes if a sufficiently strong change in its residents' behavior occurs, as when the border-town in Planescape: Torment shifts from the Borderlands to Carceri due to the malign influence of an extraplanar being. These kinds of "reality shifts" share a certain similarity to the Breach mechanic, and would thus be a good way to show how to re-work the already present mechanics into a new, more Planescape-specific form.

Secondly, Planescape in general--and Sigil in particular--is ALL ABOUT the crazy random Portals and the weird Keys that open them. This is less clearly like the Breach mechanic, but still has a certain vein of similarity (crossing between locations). Thus, it gives you a degree of contrast--still potentially making use of mechanical elements already present in Unity, but going further afield.

 

[Anthony Wu]

Here or elsewhere I think the title of Unity was mentioned as problematic, due to the Unity engine mucking up how searchable it is and IP issues far down the line. I personally think it is a strong title and that IP issues are unlikely. However, if problems do come up, here are some strong words that describe the central conceit fairly well and can be combined into titles. All are strong I think, though most would require some font alterations.

Ephemeral Harmony, the RPG
Ephemeral Ties, the RPG
Undivided, the RPG
United, the Airline
Kindred, the RPG
Synergy, the RPG
Concord, the RPG
Rapport, the RPG

 

[Anson]

An interesting post, though I think it could have been given a little more...meat, I guess? *SNIP*
.

Definitely. By the time I got to writing about the example of Breaches being custom tailored to another setting, I was at about 2.5-3 pages of writing already and kind of groaned thinking this might be a bit overboard. It’s been a learning experience figuring out how much, how little or how focused and how general to write. Feedback like this is useful to tune my compass -- thank you. When you mentioned Planescape, oh sweetness such great memories came flooding back It was a super neat setting to get lost in but it also spawned the cult classic Bioware game to which many sleepless nights were given to.

Here or elsewhere I think the title of Unity was mentioned as problematic, due to the Unity engine mucking up how searchable it is and IP issues far down the line. I personally think it is a strong title and that IP issues are unlikely. However, if problems do come up, here are some strong words that describe the central conceit fairly well and can be combined into titles. All are strong I think, though most would require some font alterations.

Ephemeral Harmony, the RPG
Ephemeral Ties, the RPG
Undivided, the RPG
United, the Airline
Kindred, the RPG
Synergy, the RPG
Concord, the RPG
Rapport, the RPG

Haha… United Airlines is such a winner. Definitely shouldn’t run into IP issues there Cheers for the suggestions! I really like some of them. It’ll be nice to have more of these in my back pocket just in case.