So, to mix my metaphors, here's me tossing my two cents into the ring.

Like a lot of SGers (from the posts I've seen), Ben Lehman's comments about running unaltered Moldvay Red Box resonated with me. I've identified myself (since discovering the Forge, Story-Games, and the community) as primarily interested in Simulationist play, leaning towards Narrative, with Gamist as a distant third, but I'm partnered with a (and have many friends who are) hardcore Gamist of the Old Skool type.

As such, I've tried to reach out, expand my horizons, and try playing more Gamist-oriented stuff, which I haven't touched since I was in high school.

And hey, look, I liked it. And so did a lot of other people from the looks of it. The frequency of posts regarding Moldvay and the RBH seem proof of this.

At one point, we picked up Descent, which is basically old school D&D as a board game. It was great in a lot of ways -- instant character creation (pick a card!), this snap-together puzzle maze maker thing, pre-built scenarios.

Ultimately, however, we found that (1) setup took forever, (2) the game itself took forever, and (3) it was really, really overbalanced towards the players versus the DM, such that once we found certain combinations of objects, we couldn't lose. We're thinking of trying it again at some point with the expansions, if they can solve the third problem.

Moldvay presented us with different issues. The adventure/dungeon generator? Loved it. Really fast character creation? Great. The actual combat?

Well, not so much...

This post really resonated with us. Mike Holmes' comment that we should be playing something else if what we're playing doesn't work also did so.

Our biggest issue was, as noted in that post, the rock-em, sock-em robots nature of the combat (roll, miss, roll, miss, roll, hit, damage). James Nostack's request for something more abstracted seemed liked a good idea.

I understand Rich Forest's comment that Moldvay RB's "unit of adventure" in D&D isn't the combat round or the encounter: it's the expedition. But clearly some gamers are interested in a system where combat *is* such a unit.

In the meantime, we've tried out the RBH, and though we really liked a lot of it (the tokens, the zones, the skills, the advantages of certain weapons in certain situations), it still felt very swing, hit, swing, miss.

Mike's reference to Hero Quest interested me. I'd never read the book (though I'd certainly heard of it), and the idea of purely abstracted Advantage (in the manner of D&D's Hit Points, but taken further) sounded neat.

So I borrowed HQ from a friend (thanks Mike O!) and came to two conclusions:
1. The advantage mechanic was interesting.
2. I don't think I'll ever want to play HQ.

While I liked the ideas that were put forth by the HQ rule set, I had some real issues with it: it seemed very complex; I didn't like how advantage from one fight could be carried over to the next (I knock him over! I gain 30 AP! Now I can use that when I fight the next guy!); and I especially didn't like how complicated character creation was. All of it seemed very grounded in Glorantha: great for HQ, but not so much for a generalized, abstracted system.

So I realized that I wanted something that had the almost-instant character creation of Descent, and an abstracted combat system akin to HQ, with the camera pulled back enough such it wasn't always interested in individual blows.

So, last week, I threw something together, and we tried it out this weekend.

It was...interesting.

I don't know what I've got, but it seems a step in the right direction. We tried out the scenarios that James listed in his post: 5 dudes versus 5 zombies in 10 minutes, 5 guys versus 25 goblins in 15 minutes.

From that playtest I made some changes and got: Riskbreaker. (Why yes, I'm a fan of Vagrant Story, how could you tell?)

Be warned: it's very first draft, and the character sheets are godawful looking. :)

I can put an AP of the scenarios we ran if anyone's interested, but time-wise it seemed to fit the suggestions that James put forward.

Anyway, if anyone's got some feedback, by all means post. :) I'll be curious to see what people think.

Thanks!

-d-

Thanks for the reply, Flynn! :)

I envisioned Skill Damage and Kill Damage as being completely separate. In other words, your ability to stay in battle is based on your base Stat in the skill you're using. I can do as much Skill Damage to you as I like and not get one step closer to taking you out of battle. However, you'll probably not be making any of your rolls...

Actually "Skill" Damage is something of a misnomer. You're actually lowering the associated Stat, which is what you roll against for the Skill. I guess that didn't come across clearly enough?

That said, I never thought what happens when you reach a Stat/Skill of 0. I guess you just automatically fail all your rolls? Sucks if you're trying to run away and your Agility has been taken out.


Physically representing Advantage sounds cool - though the actual scale thing sounds (as you noted) a little too complicated. :)

I was actually thinking of something like strips of paper numbered from -10 to +10 and you just move a marker up and down the scale as necessary.


By all means, smash away. Shoving a bunch of ideas from the games I talked about in my first post is what resulted in this ruleset in the first place. :)

-d-

I think you've grossly misread HQ. No, you're right about the Glorantha stuff, but I think you've got the extended conflict system all messed up. But.. that's good. I mean you don't intend to play, and it's created something new from the misunderstanding, so we'll just count it as serendipity. You might want to re-read how HQ works to see if you get any more good ideas, but then again maybe not.

:-)

Anyhow, as I read more, I'll have comments.

Mike

Posted By: peccableThis postreally resonated with us. Mike Holmes' comment that we should be playing something else if what we're playing doesn't work also did so.

Our biggest issue was, as noted in that post, the rock-em, sock-em robots nature of the combat (roll, miss, roll, miss, roll, hit, damage). James Nostack's request for something more abstracted seemed liked a good idea.

(edited)
Oh, bless you, Daniel, bless you! It felt like everyone was telling me that I was wrong and that "35% chance to do 3.55 damage vs. 45% chance to do 2.75 damage" was fascinating stuff that legends are made of, and that if it was a boring time it's because I wasn't following the rules (I was; the rules made it boring).

I don't know what I've got, but it seems a step in the right direction. We tried out the scenarios that James listed in his post: 5 dudes versus 5 zombies in 10 minutes, 5 guys versus 25 goblins in 15 minutes.

From that playtest I made some changes and got:Riskbreaker. (Why yes, I'm a fan of Vagrant Story, how could you tell?)

Holy cow! I contributed in some way to someone's creative process! It's the best feeling I've had all week! Daniel, I can't wait to try this out soon. It's going to be a couple weeks until I get to run something again, but I'll definitely give this a look and see what works for us. Thank you so much!!!

...from above.

----
"Any remaining damage can be assigned to other opponents."

Others opponents on the same side? Or anybody?

----
"If a character fails a Kill Damage Action, not only is his opponent not damaged, but his side immediately loses twice the amount of established Risk!" They lose that amount of advantage, right? Not damaged? I'm pretty sure this is what you mean, but you aren't explicit.

I'm sensing that it may be that the downside is always the same. If so, just describe what the upsides give you for each type, and have only one description of losing that applies to all losses. Easier to remember that there's no difference then.

----
There needs to be mechanics for skill damage recovery. I'm thinking about the Heal ability. I'm thinking that it's probably pretty simple: pick a risk level, roll against it, and if successful, get back that level of damage. If you fail, the caster takes that level of skill damage, or something, from spell backfire, which cannot be healed by Heal (eventually he'll burn out his ability to heal, and they'll have to rely on long-term healing).

In fact that can be your limit on magic in general... failures don't reduce your advantage, but cause skill damage to that skill (or maybe both!). So eventually they become less and less reliable, and eventually you have to go and do long-term healing.

----
I'd make the penalties to fighting three rounds one point of skill damage, instead of one point of Kill Damage. This will still limit the fight, but represents exhaustion, etc, and can be recovered with a recovery action.

----
Overall, I'd say that the only problem I see is that you have to gain advantage to hurt somebody. meaning that fights are many rolls, because it takes two successes in a row to damage the opponent once. It could go back and forth quite a lot. Why not limit Risk to, say, Advantage +2, instead of just to the level of Advantage? So that even if you're at -1 you can risk it, and you can go for damage right off the bat if you like.

Otherwise you risk replacing the "whiff-factor" with a "seesaw factor." Another idea is to make Advantage non-zero sum. Maybe each side starts out with 1 Advantage, and it goes up from there. You could also just not cap risk. Meaning that when the advantage gets high, you can resolve quickly. So things don't drag out too long.

That's not quite right there, but you get where I'm going.

----
I'd look at the zone rules for RBH and TGCHNN and such for movement. That is Zones should give you mechanical advantages that may be leveraged only with certain skills and such. This would be a good way to make it so that other skills would come in useful, rather than allowing any skill to be used to gain advantage at any time. Like "Glass Cases Zone: use Distraction skill to gain advantage by breaking glass cases." Just a thought.

----
What are you thinking for armor? Using the classic trade-off rules, the side with more armor could start off with an advantage, but at the cost of lowering their skill. Like choose a level one through three, and this is how much skill is lost, or relative advantage they have. You could do the same with weapons, actually. The other, more traditional exchange would be skill for bonus damage for weapons, and skill for damage reduction with armor.

Not great (I think these probably can be easily min-maxed), but it might be a start in thinking about armor and weapons. I'm personally a realist about these things and usually just give them situational modifiers as appropriate (usually in a fight, the side with the better armor simply has an advantage, hence why you wear armor). But for a competitive game, you don't want to make armor an advantage purely, without some cost, or there's only one winning strategy, to wear it.

---
That leads me to another observation, which is that your "everything else" resolution is wishy-washy at this point. Interestingly, your notion that it seems odd that a win at contest A can't roll over to contest B seems short-sighted. That is, why not have most rolls be an attempt before hand to store up damage. From another POV, the entire dungeon is one big combat, the foes just change at times to traps, or contests to find stuff for advantage. Treasure, for instance. If you find a magical sword, you now have an advantage against all foes who do not, right? Finding healing herbs can be an advantage in a contest to do Healing. An invisibility potion is an advantage to an ambush roll, if found.

What I'm saying is that if you unify the combat and non-combat procedures into one overall resolution method, then I think everything flows together into one seamless whole. Note that using HQ's extended contest rules, I have, in fact, resolved entire dungeon delves as one contest. Your method would be even better for this, because it allows for longer-term back and forth.

Mike

I think that Daniel's game has this close to covered, James, no? That is, each of the parts you mention like setting up the distractions and bombardments would be maneuvers made to gain advantage. Then comes the damaging roll to take out some of the gobbos. And their rolls then to try to regain the advantage by charging the barricade, for instance, their failure, and finishing them off.

Your entire example could maybe be done in just a few rounds of rolls with Daniel's system. Assuming that he just kinda allows that to happen. Right now it seems to point a tad more incremental than this, but I think that's easily fixed by removing some of the caps that slow you down.

Another thing that would help to make this work is if each team member worked to give advantage to their "Side" and that side then was resolved as a whole against the whole other side. Just a thought.

But I agree with your thrust, James, that this is a pretty good goal.

Mike

Holy wow!

First: thanks to everybody for the replies. I really appreciate it.

Mike: I'll try taking your comments one at a time. There's a lot of really great stuff here.

Posted By: Mike HolmesReading the text, some of the instructions seem to carry meaning that is implied, referring to procedures that you know, but aren't relaying.

Absolutely dead on. It's very much a first draft, unfortunately, and I'm sure there's stuff that's not coming through clearly enough, which will hopefully be fixed in future drafts.

Posted By: Mike HolmesAre you just saying that it's not blow-by-blow? If that's the case, give positive description, not negative. That is, say what it does, not what it doesn't. Something like:
"Each roll involves potentially a lot of fighting, and gives us information as to when the battle changes."

The original sentence isn't clear at all. Yes, what I was basically trying to say is that the system isn't blow-by-blow, and that characters are taking damage while things are going on (represented by the combat counter).

Posted By: Mike HolmesIn fact, stating it like that says why I like systems like this... no whiff factor. You roll, and you either are in a better position than you were, or a worse one. No rolls where we end up right where we were before the roll. But we don't have to tell people that. It'll be obvious to them when they play.

The whiff factor was very much what I was trying to avoid. Though, shouldn't I be making the intentions of the system up front?

Posted By: Mike HolmesHere's another implied procedure:
"Every fight has only two sides. If there are more than two sides, break the fight down into smaller fights until there are only two."

I think you're saying that if a side has two opponents who are not on the same side (making three sides, total), then your side has to split to take them on? Yes? Not clear. If so, then who gets to determine who they are paired off with? Even if you leave it up to the players, they will fight over who has to deal with what.

I was trying to keep things as simple as possible, but one could set up multiple fights with advantages amongst groups (i.e. three groups fighting in a melee produce 3 'fights': Group A veruss Group B, Group B versus Group C, Group C versus Group A). The problem I had with that is that you're splitting your forces, so how do you handle things like the outnumbering factor (what side do you get the bonus against?). I agree that having an established system would be better than leaving it up to the players, but I'm not sure how.

Posted By: Mike HolmesAlso you could have an effect of ambush be that the side doing the ambushing always gets to decide first.

I like this very much. :)

Posted By: Mike HolmesAnd, by the way, the ambush bonus should be based on a contest between things like Hide, and Sneak and Observation and Distract, etc. Instead of GM fiat. They risk up to 3, and get that much advantage.

And I like this even more! Consider it added to the rules. :)

Posted By: Mike HolmesIt's very important to get this part right, and make it clear. A step-by-step process would be helpful.

Agreed, it's just that I'm unclear how I'd do some of the specifics (see above).

OK, lots to work on...


About "intentions." Nowhere in Monopoly does it say, "We have an auction mechanic, because that represents real world market forces at work."

I'm not against design notes. But I really don't like them to be interspersed with the rules. This is a personal thing, obviously Vincent feels otherwise, for example, and he's right sometimes. Sometimes the intent is important to state because there's a judgment to be made, and the intent gives clarifications on how to make those judgments, etc.

But where it's just a procedure, just write the procedure, IMO. Then, later, if you want to have a chapter in which you discuss your design methodology and rationales, go for it. Just don't make me have to read through that in order to figure out how to play. I am going to assume that your system is playtested and works as designed, and alter it only when I find a problem. So you don't have to justify it at all to me or anyone else.

Again, explain what it is, simply, and not what it ain't. The worse problem with text like this is that the subtext reads like, "Dudez, this is sooo much better than those other systems that do blow-by-blow" which sounds self-conscious. Just don't do that.


The games that inspire this one always have a "surprise" die roll. Note that in games that consider themselves even more tactically aligned, these are often called "encounter" die rolls. But the point of them is to determine things like the range at which the opponent is detected and such. I'd suggest using such a system here. Mix it in with ambush. Ambush is just the result of getting a high result on the encounter roll, more likely to happen if the side has intelligence on you (an advantage from an earlier conflict, no doubt). Basically whichever side wins this contest, they get to decide on who is attacking who..

Heh, you can have a tank who pulls agro... sorry, WoW moment there...

Dare I say it, but the side that wins the contest gains an advantage called "initiative?"

Note that this involves either having each opponent roll against all the others, or everybody rolls individually, or... perhaps you want to have some "team" rule. Where you use a representative character for his whole team. This could be the one that they select, or, in a case like ambushing, if they're all involved, it could be the least skillful.


Your clarification of the procedure each round to adjust the advantage by skill is very important. Sometimes less is more. Don't say that you do this phase again next round... just say what you do in a round, and it should be clear that this is the procedure every round.

Understanding this ameliorates some of my concern about length of fights, in that one side will constantly be getting the advantage back automatically, if their skill is not attacked.


Your rule to resolve ties is the standard one. Not bad. If you wanted to get more tricksy, however, you could allow players to sacrifice some of their skill to bid up their agility to go earlier. Trading off going first for effectiveness. Another risk they can choose to take, for whatever reward that they feel it might be worth.


Continued...

Oh, and following these two posts above, one general note:

Once you have some of this all nailed down, we get to tackle the big Game Theory problem... ensuring that the game is tactically rich. As it stands I think that you are likely going to have an easily discerned optimal strategy, or, worse, equilibrium (where all strategies are the same). Which means no player challenge, either way.

I assume you want to avoid this?

Mike

(continued)

Posted By: Mike HolmesI'd look at the zone rules for RBH and TGCHNN and such for movement. That is Zones should give you mechanical advantages that may be leveraged only with certain skills and such. This would be a good way to make it so that other skills would come in useful, rather than allowing any skill to be used to gain advantage at any time. Like "Glass Cases Zone: use Distraction skill to gain advantage by breaking glass cases." Just a thought.

It's an interesting idea, but I don't know if I'd want to quantify this so specifically. As a GM, if I've described the battle as being in an area of a museum full of glass cases and the player said he was going to start smashing them to distract the enemy, I'd let him, but I don't know if I'd want it spelled out to that level.

Posted By: Mike HolmesWhat are you thinking for armor?

I honestly wasn't planning on implementing rules for it, just as there aren't rules for specific weapons (a sword is mechanically the same as a spear or a bow). The stat you're fighting with was supposed to represent all of that. I suppose you could implement it as a specific increase in a stat towards a specific use: magical weapons give you +Muscle or +Agility when using your Fight skill, magical armor would give you a higher Fight stat, but only with regards to the amount of Kill or Skill Damage you can take?

Posted By: Mike HolmesThat leads me to another observation, which is that your "everything else" resolution is wishy-washy at this point. Interestingly, your notion that it seems odd that a win at contest A can't roll over to contest B seems short-sighted. That is, why not have most rolls be an attempt before hand to store up damage. From another POV, the entire dungeon is one big combat, the foes just change at times to traps, or contests to find stuff for advantage.

Huh.

So a dungeon becomes a "Party vs. Dungeon" fight, with advantage on each side?

There's something very much like Descent boardgame in this: if the 'Dungeon' (GM) can pool up advantage from the party messing up (setting off traps, alarms, etc), then he can convert that into 'damage' like 'creating' monsters from the advantage points and the like. You could even have a Donjon-like element in characters converting their Advantage into finding treasure.

Posted By: Mike HolmesTreasure, for instance. If you find a magical sword, you now have an advantage against all foes who do not, right? Finding healing herbs can be an advantage in a contest to do Healing. An invisibility potion is an advantage to an ambush roll, if found.

I'd handle the sword as I noted above, healing herbs would be a temporary +Wit on a Healing spell or Medicine roll, and yeah, the invisibility potion would just be +Advantage in that situation.

All in all, some very neat ideas. I've got a lot to think about.

Also: I just saw your new post. Give me a bit and I'll get back to you after I process this a bit. :)

-d-

Cool stuff!

I have a question:

Why did you choose to make Advantage something that only one side can have (you get some first, then you lose some, now I get some, and we can keep going back and forth without getting anywhere)?

How about Advantage is something that both sides can accumulate, regardless of how much the other side has? Then every roll I make works out to either a) me gaining more advantage (i.e. being closer to killing something/getting what I want) or b) you gaining more advantage (i.e. getting closer to getting killed).

The second option guarantees an ending, sooner or later, to the whole charade.

But maybe I'm missing something. What's your reasoning?

I'll talk about the zero-sum question now. I've got notes responding to some of the other comments I've gotten, but don't have them together now.

The 'Advantage set around zero, positive for your side means negative for the other' concept was basically the first one I had, so you've got to understand that I'm definitely reluctant to let it go. The basic idea is that you can't press your advantage (cause damage) until you have advantage to press. If you can keep your opponent off balance, he's not going to be able to get at you with any sort of effectiveness.

Removing this and having positive points on both sides, to my mind, causes several problems. The most obvious is that the system becomes a race to boosting up huge amounts of Advantage and just hitting, hitting, hitting. Which doesn't sound interesting at all.

It just seems that there would be no real back and forth - no ebb and flow to the battle. In the original system going for a big hit (a high Risk damage action) meant that, if you failed, the Advantage could swing wildly towards your opponent (2x your Risk in Advantage loss) and then you'd be in a bad way until you could get some equilibrium. The flip side of that is a turn that starts with your opponent with a huge Advantage over you -- I feel like the existing "underdog" rule already encourages desperate moves to whittle that down. Double or nothing.

The zero-sum allows a form of defense. Some of my party can just work at keeping you off-balance enough such that we don't get slammed by you. That doesn't seem possible in a points-on-both-side system. It seems to me that would kill the whole idea of Risk/Reward, which is kind of the whole point.

Is the obvious answer that this 'keep you off balance' mechanic an action that allows you to subtract from your opponent's Advantage rather than add to your own? If that's it, I have to say that my Action list just seems to be getting longer and longer, to the point where the whole simple, abstracted idea feels like it's going out the window. :)

I've now got two votes for 'positive Advantage on both sides'. Am I missing something really obvious?

Thanks again for all the feedback.

-d-

It's Dan, actually. :)

The "sitting back on their heels" sounds really icky, I've got to say. :) Is that how it comes off? The more I think about this, the more I think that maybe my Simulationist roots are really showing, with me clinging to how things "would really be" as opposed to what would be interesting/fun from a Gamist perspective.

So how about something like this:

* Advantage is a positive value on both sides.
* Initial advantage is calculated using the initiative type stuff we've talked about (rolls for ambushes, etc).
* One side's advantage goes up every turn based on the skill difference (or no one's if there is no skill difference), including the first turn (this generalizes the 'start Advantage at skill difference, then change it by that every other turn' set of rules).
* Actions that would cause you to lose Advantage (on a failure) in the original system now add to the Advantage of the other side.
* Converting Advantage to Damage (taking a Damage action) still lowers your own Advantage by the amount you're spending. This differentiates 'cost' of damage actions from 'consequences' of failure in an interesting way.
* There are actions (Distraction, for example?) that lower the Advantage of the other side. This could actually be what the Tactic skill is for -- the 'funnelling' is represented by lowering the other side's Advantage? This could be generalized as a type of Advantage action, I guess.

Note that there's no longer 'negative' Advantage in this system, which means that both sides can attempt Damage actions if they have any Advantage at all.

Another interesting side-effect is that it generalizes consequence: your opponent's side's Advantage goes up by what you Risked. The (2x) rule is covered by the 'cost' for Damage action attempts.

(As a side-note, I'm thinking of generalizing the 'consequence' rule mentioned earlier in the thread for magic-users: you can take Skill Damage, Kill Damage, lower Advantage or some combination of all three, as the general consequence rule. You can narrate your failure as exhausting you (Skill Damage), hurting you (Kill Damage) or helping your enemy (Advantage)).

I'm trying to think if something like this would lose any of the advantages I see in the original system...

Thoughts?

-d-

Not bad.

The problem I have, however, is not with negative advantage or anything, but with the fact that it means that when you're negative, your only choice is to do something to get the advantage back. You can't attack, even at a disadvantage.

I'd allow stuff to lower advantage, so as to not have it escallate out of control too fast, just biasing it to the upside. Heck, make it possible to have a negative advantage, but make it somewhat rare.

Generally I think that a better way to make combats end over time is to concoct a system whereby the lower skills get, the more likely it is that you get damaged. I'm thinking of some sort of way of employing the fight skill in defense, having it start only semi-effectual, going down to almost entirely non-effectual.

Any thoughts about the other comments?

Mike

Huh... from a continuity POV, I'd say continue the thread... but from a versioning POV, it's probably better to do a new thread (and reference it from here).

Probably fine either way, I'd think.

Andy, do you have a preference?

Whichever way you go, I'm looking forward to seeing what you've come up with.

Mike