Homebrew Diary: Reassessing Things

It’s both a nice feeling and a bad feeling – when you spin off a mechanic and find you like it so much better than what you spun it out of. On twitter I talked about how I dabbled in writing a bit of a near-future/cyberpunk game called Idyllic Future which may come out sometime, who knows. The system was a modified Expedition alpha with some features of the beta. It was devoid of the charts, and used a roll-over resolution with its own Fates system (called the Aftermath system). Fates/Aftermaths are basically a table where you tally up how many successes you scored, and compare to four possible outcomes of the task set by the GM.

I rather liked what I did there. Though I like the charts, there’s a feeling of rigidity with them. It is easy to look at the chart and see if you succeeded or failed, and the GM doesn’t need to involve him or herself in setting target numbers and whatnot. But it feels like it lost a lot of flexibility when the GM cannot modify task difficulties because the numbers on the players are rolling against will always be the same. The table is simplicity itself, but it already turned off a few folk, and I myself am becoming unhappy with it.

But rather than mope about it I think it’s an important time in the life of the game edition.

This is an opportunity for me to go back. I’ve been building on and off for a while, turning things over, and in so doing, I feel I’ve forgotten the origin of some of these mechanics. When you put something in a game, you shouldn’t do it just for giggles. It has to have a function in the overall scheme of things. The charts, I feel, have lost their original reason to be – and I am right, according to my designer notes. In the big mess of 3d6 probabilities and wondering about whether to include more dice than the d6, I wrote about using the charts to give Strikes and Edge equal opportunity through randomness – essentially, if the Strike system was less valuable, I used the table so it’s random whether you make a Strike or gain Edge in a combat.

The Strike system in this form no longer exists. What the tables do now is either give Fortune, or give Edge. But Fortune does a ton of stuff now, much more stuff than Strikes used to do. It interacts with both combat and non-combat. There’s no real issue that this pool of points will be devalued. So the charts sort of warped out of what they were originally doing, because the system they were rescuing in essence was obsoleted in the end anyway. So the charts’ original intent is lost.

What new utility have they picked up? It’s still easier now for the PCs to choose a skill, roll, and see if they succeed or fail that particular roll because it’s right there in the chart. They don’t have to wait for the GM to give them a target number. But losing that target number is a drawback too. I don’t want players to advance a chart, get new charts, or beancount new bonuses to the charts, because that kind of defeats the purpose of “it’s as easy as looking at the chart and seeing if your roll won or failed.” So I have to think about this. Do I want to keep the charts? Do I want to maybe change the charts so they contain difficulties, and your GM says “roll a Hard X” check and you have it right there? Do I want to have the charts in combat?

Or do I want to just convert everything to the Idyllic Future system of Target Numbers and Resistance Rating, and use a 2d6 instead of a 3d6? And other new ideas? One thing you have to weigh in, is do you release something so that it is finally released (so far the Expedition Beta is just shy of taking as much time to write as the Alpha which is kind of crazy), and keep perfect from being the enemy of good? Or do you go with your heart and overhaul until you are TRULY happy? All of these are big decisions but the point of the article, I hope, is that if you’re making these decisions, it’s good to return to the origin of your mechanics, the point where you came up with them, and figure out what you made them for, and what they’re doing now. This will tell you whether or not you want to keep them, or replace them, or modify them.

I’m becoming a bit keen on “2d6, something good happens on doubles even if you fail, something kind of neat happens even if you fail, roll over.” The Charts in Expedition “cash out” on any roll. You will gain Fortune or Successes/Edge. You always gain something. Idyllic Future’s current core draft is doing the same without charts.