Heartbreaker!

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Post originally by Charlie Dunwoody at 2005-04-15 05:08:28
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Darrin Bright provide me with details on Heartbreaker games:

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/9/
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/10/

Whew. I read both articles quickly and I'm letting them sink in. Heartbreakers have clunky D&D based rules but with one innovative idea hidden somewhere inside. And they won't make it, economically. Hence, the game, despite promise, will not make it-- which is is heartbreaking.

I'm teetering on the edge of love D&D versus going to try another game and get all "sophisticated". I realize that D&D is clunky and weird and I can understand the indie desire for something better, something greater.

But D&D is fun. I'm going over to the Forge to learn, to bask in theory. I'm willing to keep an open mind. But discussions about the philosophy of roleplaying need to include one simple thing--is playing the game fun?

For my friends and me, yes D&D is fun. Does that make me unsophicated or a poor roleplayer? Maybe. I guess the question is, though, if I'm having fun does it matter?

I guess it doesn't as long as I don't sink a lot of time and money into a my own Heartbreaker game that is doomed to fail. Those two articles serve as warnings to be would be game designers and are well worth reading for anyone crazy enough to want to write roleplaying games (may God have mercy on my soul). Thanks for directing me to the articles, Darrin.

Charlie

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Post originally by Darrin Bright at 2005-04-15 08:20:18
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Well, mostly what I wanted to know was where you fell in the GNS spectrum, and if you were familiar with the differences between Drama, Fortune, and Karma mechanics.

If your premise is standard D&D is not dramatic enough... well, then that suggests to me that the primary urge you're trying to scratch when you sit down at the RPG table is a Story-Driven game (which I think is supposed to be Narrativism, but I'm not sure that's right). Actually, I'm all for that in D&D, I think the current incarnation is absolutely horrible for creating epic or heroic stories. And if you look at the structure of the rules, you can pretty much see that the core of the game is slanted very heavily *away* from Narrativism and more towards Gamism and Simulationism.

To slant D&D towards Narrativism... well, you have to slaughter a few sacred cows and then put up with the screaming fanboys who are quite convinced that the core "theme" of D&D (i.e., "Kill monsters and take their stuff") is absolutely perfect and HOW DARE YOU muck around with it. And to a large extent what sells in the market backs them up.

Anyway, if I were going to rework D&D as a more dramatic game, my crib sheet would look something like this:

1) Remove "Killing = XP" from the game. This single concept drives absolutely everything in the game, to the point where you can ask every player about every single decision in the game, and you can invariably boil down their answer to "it gave me XP". Anyone who makes a decision that doesn't involve getting XP is penalized, either directly by the rules ("You weren't there for that encounter, so no XP") or even socially by other players, such as criticism for playing poorly ("Smooth move, numb-dice!").

XP generated from monsters would be replaced with story-based awards, role-playing awards, or just a flat rate for surviving the session. Did the party clear out the dungeon for their wizard patron? Did they save the princess? Did they prevent war with the Southern Orc League from breaking out?

For combat-related challenges, ditch the formula for calculating CRs. The only thing that should matter was how easy or difficult the encounter was. Did the party slaughter everything with minimal damage on their side? Low XP encounter. Did the party take some damage, and were they challenged with some tactical decisions that required a little more thinking? Moderate XP encounter. Was it a tough fight, hovering-near-death, with a lot of desperately creative thought being put into tactics and resources? Good XP encounter. Did the party go out of it's way to roleplay their characters? Add more XP. Was the encounter an important part of completing a story-based goal? Even more XP.

You lose some precision in calculating the encounter against the party's current strength, but then again, the current system isn't entirely precise, either... lots of encounters can go horribly, horribly wrong when a seemingly easy opponent has an ability the party doesn't have the resources to overcome... for example, an underwater encounter with regenerating Scragg trolls, and only one person in the entire party can do fire damage.

2) More creative character generation, with some emphasis on personality, flaws, motivations, and goals rather than "what's my strength bonus?" The current rules system encourages boring characters with absolutely no weaknesses, because every weakness means less XP.

For example... describe your favorite D&D character. Now take away all his/her weapons, magic items, and spells. Describe him/her again. Is anyone snoring?

I find it utterly befuddling that the original game designers used epic fantasy sources as a basis for their game, but somehow absolutely *nothing* about epic heroes actually made it into the rules. Epic heroes in fantasy have flaws and weaknesses. When you get down to the Jungian archetypes, you've got "the wound that will not heal", you've got huge "father attonement" issues, the journey through the underworld, lots of stuff that epic heroes have to deal with. None of that made it into supposedly the touchstone game for epic fantasy.

Now, all sorts of arguments tend to erupt over Merit/Flaw systems, but there are other ways to encourage more interesting characters. Riddle of Steel uses the "Spiritual Attributes" as something of a more blatant carrot to encourage people to work towards story-related goals, but there are also some problems with that. Not sure I like how Spiritual Attributes are implemented, though... you can run into party cohesion problems if you're not careful.

I'm much more fond of Robin Laws design philosophy, which is usually sneakier. I can't recall where he said it, but he said something to players about telling the GM up-front what your character's hooks or weaknesses might be - drug addiction, owes a huge debt to a crimelord, nephew needs a life-saving operation, etc. Yes, you're admitting a weakness for the character, something that will most likely come up in the game to screw you over... but at least you *know about it* up front, and can anticipate it. Otherwise, if you give the GM nothing to work with, and he has to create challenges for your character, stuff you're not going to expect and may not work with your character concept.

But any chargen system that encourages more "heroic" characters or at least characters with more interesting motivations, backgrounds, etc. would be nice.

3) Put a little more emphasis on social skills such as Diplomacy, Bluff, etc., build up some rules for resolving encounters without killing everything. The current arrangement is a little wonky... a party can get the entire XP for defeating an encounter on one single high Diplomacy roll. Or they can beat the crap out of the monsters, and whichever side manages to inflict the most amount of HP damage in the least amount of time wins the encounter. You'd think on just a pure risk/benefit analysis, more people would try that single Diplomacy roll first, but oddly enough a lot of players think it's "cheap" or "boring" to do it that way.

However... ok, you want the orc to go away, so you beat on him with a sword until he's either dead or running away. Well, why not use a series of well-constructed arguments about how it's in the orc's best interest to go away? You've got HPs to abstract how "resistant" the orc is to physical violence, why not use Social Hit Points to represent the orc's resistance to acts of Diplomacy? For example: "Ok, nice argument Bob... in fact, roll for a critical. Apparently your point about preserving the natural environment moved him deeply... his mother is a retired druid."

Which I'm sure some people would be as excited about as watching paint dry. But on the other hand, why should the rules for slicing an orc in half be mind-bogglingly more complicated than negotiating safe passage through his territory?

4) Prestige Classes... oh my gawd, these things sell hardback books like they're coated with narcotics. Actually, I'm not sure what I'd do with Prestige Classes... the same concept (Kits, Player Options) you could say ruined 2nd Edition, and the absolute glut of these things is turning 3.5 into a huge unmanageable monster. I can waste literally *DAYS* trying to finesse the right combination of race, stats, feats, skill points, and requirements... to get what, exactly? A monk who can flurry with a scimitar? A +2 to hit/+2 to armor class under certain conditions? Why the heck am I wasting so much time trying to get something that essentially all boils down to a collection of abilities that give a +2 or +4 to a roll somewhere.

You'd think you could just abstract all of that fussing with a more freeform system of "off the shelf" abilities where you just buy your +2's where you want 'em. Which, in my mind, means a point-build chargen with a huge list of advantages/disadvantages similar to GURPs or Champions. (Actually, my preferred chargen is Deadlands, of all things. Yes, I probably need help.)

In any case, I'm not entirely with Prestige Classes in their current form. You have to carefully plan out every feat, every skill point, every level you advance... which pretty much squashes any spontonaeity, any real sense of wonder or spirit of adventure when your character gets better. If you've already planned out your next 10 level advancements... what the heck kind of goal is that? That's not character development, that's just strategic resource management.

5) Action Points. I'd want something similar... I think they do make the current game more dramatic, but they're not perfect... does doing more damage or getting more attacks really make your character more heroic?

In my mind, dramatic games (or at least cinematic games) tend to put a lot more creative control in the players' hands. I generally hold up Feng Shui as the best example of this (although a strict GNS interpretation classifies Feng Shui has a highly simulationist rather than narrativist game, which befuddles me). The players are responsible for coming up with cool over-the-top action movie stunts, and although the rules don't specifically reward this, they do quite a bit to set the right tone/mood/genre to encourage a lot of leeway for the players to do this.

A lot of games use Fate Points, Luck Points, Force Points, whatever... as a player, I love mechanics like these. They can allow a player to exert a lot of control over the game, but their primary use is usually to overcome or ignore the unwanted/bad results of a Fortune mechanic... rolling a 1, a critical failure, a botch, or whatever you want to call it.

Which is why I was picking on you about your proposal to replace 1d20 with 2d10, and then allow the GM to allow the player to reroll the lower die with the hopes of getting a "double zero" critical success. I saw this as a klunky mechanic that works *against* Drama and player control. On a pure math standpoint, you're reducing the number of "critical events" down to somewhere below 3%, and most likely below the current incidence of critical events (which is hard to quantify exactly if you want to get into "confirming threats" and whatnot, although a Natural 20 "always hits" 5% of the time). You were also mathematically excluding 80% or more of all rolls from every being a "critical success" simply because there were no zeroes that came up. To be fair, you did mention something about players getting to declare any one roll an "automatic" critical success per session, but you didn't go into detail.

On top of this purely random Fortune mechanic for getting a "critical success", you were layering a "GM Fiat" requirement on top of that... not every roll could be improved that way, just whenever the GM says its allowed. Which would probably drop the number of criticals down below 3%. This is a "Drama" mechanic, but you placed the decision firmly in the hands of the GM rather than the player, which is fine. On the other hand, just from a resource standpoint, you've got an entire table surrounded by some extremely creative and clever people, wouldn't it make sense to get them more involved with making the story more dramatic?

I'd like to see more Karma-based mechanics in D&D, because I think it'll lead to more dramatic play and get the players more involved in the game. It also changes the demands on the GM... instead of one person being solely responsible for the creative content of the game, you have an entire table full of really creative people contributing great ideas.

Action Points kind of are a nod in that direction... but they're still almost entirely fortune-based. One of the players in our current group is convinced that whenever he spends one, it either never helps him succeed (he gets a roll that would have succeeded anyway without the AP) or the roll had no hope for success in the first place (DC too high). Getting an extra attack doesn't mean it'll hit or do damage. Gaining a feat for a round doesn't mean it'll be useful (although buying Improved Toughness for a round when you're at negative hit points can be a life-saver). What we've found is when you spend action points to activate abilities that don't depend on rolling the dice, then they become quite powerful. For example, recovering a spell for spellcasters... holy crap, an extra fireball or two is a huge benefit.

There are some other approaches that give a lot more control to the players. For example, the Drama Deck from TORG. Adventure! has "Dramatic Editing" that can allow players to ret-con certain events. Rune has revolving (but competitive) GM duties.



Well, wasn't that all a bit rantish? I suppose it's my turn to get picked apart. Perge, Scelus, Mihi Diem Perficias.

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Post originally by Charlie Dunwoody at 2005-04-15 10:09:54
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Darrin,

Actually, getting you to write down and share everything you did is why I wrote the column. I was just brainstorming, tossing ideas, not trying to rewrite D&D. Some posters misunderstood me or I wasn't clear that I was just brainstorming in a fictional way with other fictional 4th edition game designers.

I'm gamist I think with a leaning toward using fortune rules. I roll in front of the players and let them control what happens, not me fudging the dice. I try to balance encounters the best I can, but I let the dice fall where they may.

Since I've started playing Eberron, everything that used to bug me about D&D has gone away. The setting called out to my group in a way no homebrew I've done has managed and got the game rolling.

For instance with no D&D rules speak I can say that Rurik is a dwarf from the Mror Holds and a member of House Kunderark (sp.). He started out as a bouncer at a bar, served as a bodyguard in the Last War, and ended up in Q'barra as a bodyguard for hire.

He ended up working for House Tharashk retrieving items and people that needed retrieving. Along the way his devotation to Dol Dorn, god of battle, turned into full fledged worship. He is now a holy warrior, working with a small group of skilled individuals, to unravel a mystery concerning the Draconic Prophecy and the dragon scales that have appeared on his arm and those of his friends.

Back to gamespeak. The last thirteen levels for Rurik have been amazing. He seems like a separate person from his player and in D&D that is no small accomplishment. And it was the player who led Rurik down the path of religion and has struggled with some of his friends less than savory lifestyle choices. Great roleplaying and the story belongs to the players.

We introduced action points and I changed XP awards from monster slaying to goal achievement. The only other rule change I made, besides bringing in the Eberron rules, was to use Destroy Undead instead of Turn Undead. And the rules haven't really gotten in the way at all.

D&D just works for us. And it is fun.

4th edition will change the game some, but not as radically as I proposed. If I really want change I'll try another system I suppose.

Charlie

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Post originally by JRM at 2005-04-15 15:32:15
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Just to be picky, you're "mathematically excluding" 81% of the rolls from being successes, not 80. To exclude any chance of success you need to roll 1-9 on both d10, so you have 81 permutations out of 100 = 81%. Or looking at it from the other direction, with 2d10 there's an 18% chance of rolling one zero (either a 0 on the 'first' dice and 1-9 on the 'second' dice or vica versa) and a 1% chance of rolling two zeros, so you've got a 19% chance of rolling one or two zeros and hence a (100-19) = 81% chance of rolling no zeros.


As for my 'next generation D&D' I certainly would like more emphasis on the diplomatic skills / XP rules / sense of epic. The biggest thing that irks me about the current D&D core rules is its formulaic approach to awarding XPs & designing adventures. Specifically, the way a character should have X adventures of Challenge Rating Y to reach level Z. I prefer character advancement to be dependent on the setting, GM and players than have it all laid out like that.

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Post originally by Sergio Mascarenhas at 2005-04-17 11:04:11
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Charlie, interestingly I'm working in my column (http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/glove14apr05.html) on a project that is more or less similar to yours but it is focuzing on a different system of reference (BRP in my case). You may find interesting to look at it.

Sergio

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Post originally by jaredsingers at 2005-09-14 17:16:19
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yeah howzit falla

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Post originally by jaredsingers at 2005-09-14 17:16:23
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yeah howzit falla