Legend of Zelda Adventure System: Levels, and Adventurers

In my experience, there are two kinds of leveling systems. The first is designed around the idea that the player will always have another level to strive for. The majority of the game, if not all of it, is played below the maximum level. This is mostly used in games where levels offer only minor benefits, or in games where acquiring the next level is the primary motivation for play. The other type of leveling system serves as a kind of extended tutorial. The game is fully featured and plenty of fun during the leveling process, but the gradual acquisition of levels serve as a means to gradually introduce players to the abilities they’ll be using at max level.

Both methods have their place, but I’ve always felt a certain frustration with the former option. As much fun as the game may be, the last few levels always have some really fascinating abilities that you can’t wait to get your hands on. But you know that if you ever do get them, it won’t be too long before the game is over anyway. Most console RPGs are like this, in my expereince, as is Pathfinder. Those games where levels offer only minor benefits, such as more traditional versions of D&D, are a little less frustrating in this regard. There aren’t any fancy abilities at max level you’re eager to get, so when you end the game 80% of the way through the leveling process, you don’t feel as though you’ve missed out on something you were looking forward to.

I want to model the Legend of Zelda Adventure System on the latter type of leveling system. The game should be just as fun once you’re done leveling as it was before. At max level, characters become more concerned with finding magical or wondrous items to aide them in their future adventures. And individual character progress continues, because health increases separately from the leveling structure. A max level character will probably only have between five and ten health, which isn’t much! They’ll need to continue adventuring if they want to increase their survivability.

As an example of how the leveling system works, here’s the current class description for the Adventurer class. The adventurer is the class which I think best represents Link himself. It’s a little bit like a rogue, a little bit like a ranger, a little bit like a monk, but not quite any of those. And while many of the adventurer’s abilities were never demonstrated by in the Zelda series, I think they are true to the spirit of the gameplay.

Adventurer

Equipment: Adventurers may use light armor and shields, as well as any type of weapon, without penalty. An adventurer who wears heavy armor does not gain the benefit of any of their special abilities unless otherwise stated.

Level	Abilities Gained
1	Spin Attack
2	Long Jump
3	Attack +1
4	Climb, Battle Maneuver +1
5	Sneak
6	Attack +2
7	Run
8	High Jump, Battle Maneuver +2
9	Attack +3
10	Great Courage

Spin Attack: Make an Agility Check. If the check is successful, make a normal attack against all adjacent enemies. Such an attack can not specifically aim for a creature’s weak spot. If the agility check fails, you may still make the attack, but at a -3 penalty to hit and damage rolls.

Long Jump: You can jump up to 20ft distant without needing to make a roll. You can reach distances of 21-30ft with a successful agility check. A long jump can’t end on an area more than 1ft higher than the area the character began on.

Attack: At levels 3, 6, and 9, an adventurer becomes more adept at making attacks with their weapon. They may add the indicated number to their attack rolls to determine if an attack hits.

Climb: The adventurer can move vertically or horizontally along walls so long as the walls are reasonably rough, such as an old brick wall, or a rough stone wall. The adventurer can also support themselves between two walls no more than 6ft apart for an indefinite period of time. With a successful agility check, you can move up to your normal movement speed while climbing, though failure results in a fall.

Battle Maneuver: At level 4, and 8 an Adventure becomes more adept at performing battle maneuvers, and more resilient against them. They add the indicated number to both their Battle Maneuver Attack, and Battle Maneuver Defense.

Sneak: A sneaking adventurer is able to move with complete silence, and hide themselves within deep shadows. While sneaking, an adventurer can move only half of their normal speed. While hiding in deep shadows, an adventurer must remain still while someone is looking at them, or they will be seen.

On particularly noisy ground, such as dry leaves or a creaky floor, the GM may rule that an agility check is needed to move silently.

Run: For a number of rounds equal to their Body score, an adventurer may move up to six times their normal movement rate.

High Jump: May leap up to 6ft straight up without the need for an agility check. May reach heights of up to 10ft with a successful agility check.

Great Courage: The adventurer becomes completely immune to any form of fear effect, be it mundane or magical. This ability works even if the adventurer is encumbered by heavy armor.

Zelda Adventure System: Rationale Behind the Game's Experience Mechanic

When I’m trying to cut the fat from a creative project, I’ve found it helpful to examine its aspects by positing the question: What is my overall goal, and how does this support that goal? It’s a simple question, but you might be surprised how useful it can be. At least it’s useful to me; I make no claim to greatness in any form of creative endeavor. Perhaps I’ll outgrow this question as I improve my skills. For now though, when working on a website, or a narrative, or a game system, this question helps me in identifying artifacts which sneak their way into my work. These artifacts may have had a point once, and simply no longer do because of the ways the project has changed. More often, though, they originate from my own false assumptions, or just lazy thinking.

A good example of this is something I’ve struggled with in writing. There are a lot of phrases we’re all used to seeing. We’ve come to accept and even expect their presence. Phrases such as “like there’s no tomorrow,” “going over it with a fine toothed comb,” or “ran like the wind.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with these phrases. We all know what they mean, and sometimes they can work for a writer. But just because we know the meaning of these cliches, doesn’t necessarily mean we understand them. If I were to write that a character “ate like there’s no tomorrow,” everyone would understand that I meant the character ate a great deal. They would understand it because they’ve heard that phrase all their life, and the meaning of it is etched into their minds. But when they hear it they don’t actually think about what it means. They don’t make the connection between the act of eating a great deal, and the existential panic that would fill a person who believed there was no future. The phrase has lost the depth of its meaning through overuse.

And again, that’s not always a bad thing. Everything has its place, whether it’s because the context of the piece makes the phrase more relevant, or because it works for the characters. But, as a rule, I prefer to avoid these cliches. I don’t always succeed, but it just seems like lazy technique to me.

The same thing can happen in role playing games. That’s why, when I set out to make the Legend of Zelda Adventure System, I set aside each of my basic assumptions about what a role playing game should include, and asked “what is my overall goal, and how does this support that goal?” about each one. Elements like ability scores, character classes, dice based combat, and experience points.

And, as it turns out, experience points didn’t make the cut.

Lets talk about the reason experience points work the way they do in Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder. When Gygax and Arneson where first constructing the D&D game, the primary goal of the game was to acquire as much treasure as possible. In pursuit of treasure, the players would go on grand adventures, improve their skills, and gain items to help them win treasure more efficiently. Even the things that players spent that treasure on were largely to make them more effective at acquiring treasure. To encourage players to keep their focus on treasure, it made sense to tie character progression to treasure acquisition. And so for each 1 gold piece worth of treasure recovered, a character would gain 1 experience point . It’s a genius bit of mechanic crafting on our forefather’s part, and many games (notably those in the OSR) still use it today.

Later in D&D’s development, the rules were changed so that experience points were gained from killing monsters rather than from recovering treasure. Around the same time (I’m not sure which came first, as I wasn’t playing back then) the focus of the game shifted from acquiring treasure, to killing monsters*. And while treasure remains an important part of the game, this shift in importance is evidenced by the greater focus the game’s combat system has been given as time goes on. A game which was, at one time, primarily about dungeon crawling, now includes variants where the game is reduced to nothing but combat. (Or at least, that’s how I assume 4^th edition “Encounters” works. I don’t actually know much about it, but the point stands).

I think, for players, the goal of the game is defined by whatever helps their character become more powerful. If acquiring gold is what helps a player become more powerful, then they’ll do whatever they can to acquire that gold. Monsters are just an obstacle between them and more power for their character. And as an obstacle, the player is just as happy sneaking past them as they are killing them. But if the character gains their power from killing monsters, then the treasure is more of an afterthought.

So, if experience points helps to define what the players will focus on, the question becomes: what is the goal of the Legend of Zelda Adventure System, from a player’s perspective? And to answer that question, I need to ask “what is the goal of a Zelda game, from the player’s perspective.”

To save the kingdom is the obvious answer, but that’s a long term goal. One might also say that the goal of D&D is to found a kingdom, but there needs to be short term goals which can culminate in that larger goal. Something small which the player can accomplish on a somewhat regular basis in order to feel as though they are making progress.

In a Zelda game, completing dungeons is the short term goal. With only a few exceptions, any time spent outside of a dungeon in a Zelda game, is just time which is being used to prepa jre for the next dungeon. You can collect heart pieces, or do side quests, or what have you. But the main quest can only be progressed by finding the next dungeon, and completing it. And what defines a dungeon as complete? Defeating the boss monster. Or, in LOZAS terms, a Great Monster.

I don’t want to reward fighting every monster, because as I’ve mentioned before, Zelda monsters are more puzzles than they are opponents. I want players to view avoiding monsters as a good alternative. I only want to reward defeating Great Monsters–powerful beasts whose great evil corrupts the land. But defeating great monsters is something player will have to struggle for for a long time. It may take an entire session, or two, or three to finally find and defeat a great monster. So it doesn’t seem right that players should gain traditional ‘experience points’ which they can put towards an eventual level.

That’s why in the game’s current form, defeating a great monster automatically grants all players who were involved in the fight a level. That way, the game’s ‘goal’ is clearly established for all the players, and they’re given a strong enough incentive that they’ll pursue that goal vigorously.

*For the record, I think that if the D&D 3^rd edition developers had taken the time to ask my question, they would have realized that the only reason to use large XP numbers is if XP is tied to GP. Recognizing that, they would probably have come up with something like the simple XP system I use. Unless they consciously chose to stick with large XP numbers purely for the nostalgia factor, which would be stupid.

The Legend of Zelda Adventure System: Problems

As a game designer, I’m a complete novice. More of a novice than I thought I would be, actually. After rebuilding every game I’ve ever played so many times, researching game design theories, and running this blog for a year, I thought game design would come a little more naturally to me. I didn’t expect to be some kind of prodigy or anything. I’ve been alive long enough to realize that every new venture will prove more difficult than it seems from the outside looking in. All the same, I’ve been surprised by the challenges of designing a game from the ground up.

What I’ve learned is that even though I have a solid grasp of some elements of game design, there are others which I’ve simply never tried fiddling before. Yes, I’ve rebuilt Pathfinder a dozen times, but I only changed the parts that I was interested in improving. There’s a lot more to the game which I never had to think about, because I never felt like it needed to improve. I let the game’s original designers handle those elements for me. Now that I’m trying to build a game from scratch, I’m ill prepared for the task of building a fresh approach to these elements.

Dungeons, for example, have proven to be a larger problem for me than I suspected they would. When I was originally deciding what my goals were for the Legend of Zelda Adventure System, I knew that dungeons would be a large part of it. In a Zelda game, most of the play takes place within dungeons, so it makes sense that much of the LOZAS system would be dungeon focused, yes? But a Zelda dungeon isn’t like a D&D dungeon, and I would like that to be represented by the system, rather than simply letting the game become another D&D clone.

I recognize that I’ll need to make compromises. As I’ve said before, throwing pots and pushing blocks doesn’t translate well to tabletop. A lot of Zelda dungeons have “timing” challenges, where you need to move through the room at a certain rate to avoid obstacles like monsters, spinning blades, or bursts of flame. Challenges such as those won’t function when the game isn’t being played in real time. However, in other ways, I think there are elements of Zelda dungeons which can be translated to tabletop. For example, many Zelda dungeon have a focus on traveling between sub-levels repeatedly in order to progress through to the end. There’s also the tradition of a dungeon requiring multiple keys, as well as including a map, compass, and ‘big key.’ These are things which could work well as a tabletop challenge.

What I would like to do is create a simple method GMs could use to build dungeons in this style. Something not unlike Gary Gygax’s “appendix A” in the DMG, which could be used to randomly generate dungeons, although this would not be entirely random. Ideally it would require a little more time and decision making on the part of the GM, while still streamlining the dungeon building process enough that it doesn’t require hours to accomplish the task. But this is new ground for me. I’ve never been the greatest at designing dungeons in the first place, so completing this aspect of the game has proven to be a challenge. Maybe I’ll scale back on just how ambitious it is, but I’d like to give my vision a solid try before I start making concessions.

Another element of the LOZAS system which has been something of a puzzle to me is combat. I’ve already posted a collection of notes I have for the system, but in many ways I’m not satisfied with them. As one commenter pointed out, combat in Zelda isn’t like combat in existing games. It is neither combat as sport nor is it combat as war. It’s combat as a puzzle. Enemies move in a very particular way and have a particular method of attack, and the goal of the player is to get past them, either by avoiding them or by killing them. But killing them is only a single method of completing the puzzle, and not always the best one.

Like the timed obstacles I mentioned above, I don’t think there’s any real way to translate this style of combat to tabletop, because again, it’s not in real time. However, I would like to capture its spirit as best I can. At present, the system which has developed from my notes is the best I’ve been able to come up with. but I can’t help but feel that there’s a better option out there. Something which further reduces combat time, while still forcing the player to think about combat enough that it isn’t something they can simply skip over.

I like the idea of having numerous monsters which are used sparingly, and having each monster require the players to come up with some kind of tactic to defeat it. Hitting it with swords will work eventually, but it would never be as effective as coming up with a clever solution. Such as, in the case of a leaping skeleton, tricking it into leaping off of a cliff or into a pool of lava.

So yeah, these are some of the problems I’ve been encountering lately as I work on the Legend of Zelda Adventure System. And just so we’re clear:

I love it.

I won’t deny that there was a certain satisfaction to the early stages of the design process, when ideas for how to improve the game were just falling out of my head faster than I could write them down. But this, honestly, is better. Even if it’s a little less fun in the short term. Hitting a wall and learning how to climb over it, that’s REAL problem solving. That’s how I know I’m not just retreading old ground. I’m not regurgitating something I’ve seen before and simply forgotten about, or combining elements from other more successful games. I’m learning.

And if you ask me, that’s the whole point of doing anything in the first place anyway.

Legend of Zelda Adventure System: Sage Spells

On Monday I detailed my current plans for how magic will work in the Legend of Zelda Adventure System. But a big list of magical mechanics isn’t much use without some specific spells to provide context. Below are all twenty three of the spells I’ve created so far. That should be plenty to start testing the game with, since even a max level character will only know 11 spells.

You may notice, as you look through this list, that there are very few spells which could easily be labelled “offensive” spells. My vision of the sage is that it serves as a utility class, rather than a damage dealing class. In part, this is informed by my own preference. Whenever I play a caster, I like to load up on spells which allow me to help everyone else do their jobs better, rather than spells which put me in a pivotal role. More importantly, I hope that by restricting the magic user to support spells, it will be virtually impossible for the class to become overpowered the way magic users in Pathfinder are.

Heal: May restore 1 heart container to anyone who has been injured by laying a palm upon them. Does not work if the target of the spell is dead, and cannot be used to grant health beyond a character’s normal maximum

Push: May be cast from up to 10ft away. The target is knocked back 10ft. If something stops them from being knocked back that far, the target takes damage equal to 1/2 the extra feet they would have moved. If the target will be pushed into something dangerous (lava, off of a cliff, etc.) and they pass something which they might grab onto, they are entitled to an agility check to try and grab it.

Levitate: The target may move up and down through the air at will. They must be touched by the caster in order for this spell to be cast. There is no limit to how high or low they can go, and they can move at any speed they wish. The spell has a duration of 1 minute per level of the sage who cast it.

Water Walk: The sage must have some water available to cast this spell, which they sprinkle upon the feet of of the spell’s target. The subject may they walk on water as if it were solid. Only their feet are affected by this spell, so if they fall over the spell is broken. Water is not very solid footing.

See Through Wall: Sages may cast this spell upon a surface up to 10x10ft in size. Once cast, the sage can see through up to 10ft of solid material, to the other side. The vision is slightly blurred and tinted the color of the surface which is being looked through. This spell is unable to penetrate lead. Some villains line important chambers with the material to prevent spying.

Floating Disk: A silvery disk materializes in the air, roughly 4ft in diameter. The disk floats between 1 inch and 6ft off of the ground, and can carry the weight of several full grown Hylians before the spell shatters. The sage moves the disk with their mind, it can be moved up to 60ft away from the sage, and does not need to be within their line of sight.

Conjure Plank: An extremely sturdy plank of an unknown solid material forms in the air in front of the sage. It is 12ft long, 3ft wide, and 4 inches thick. While suspended by its ends, it can support a fully grown Hylian jumping in the center of it without being damaged. Despite its strength, even a weak person can easily lift the plank with a single hand.

Passwall: The sage, and anyone touching them or their clothes, is able to walk through a wall as if it were an extremely viscous liquid substance. This spell does not allow anyone to see what is on the other side of the wall, nor can they breathe while within the wall. Any part of a person which exits the wall after entering it cannot re-enter the wall unless the spell is cast again.

Detect Hidden: Secret doors within the same room as the sage begin to glow a bright blue color for all to see. This effect works regardless of the nature of the door. It can be a section of wall which slides away, a loose stone on the floor which hides a gem beneath it, or a trapdoor in the ceiling which would drop acid on the party.

Ghost Sound: The sage can create any sound they can imagine, and make it seem as though it is coming from anywhere within earshot of themselves. This spell must be cast with the eyes closed, and requires intensive listening and hand gestures for the sage to successfully indicate where the sound is coming from.

Summon Animal: Through a number of verbal incantations, including whistling, the sage may summon a natural creature to do its bidding. The animal must be one which would be present within a mile of the Sage’s location, and it must be able to reach the sage unobstructed. A horse could not be summoned to the 10th sublevel of a dungeon, but a spider or bat could be. Note that this spell does not work on monstrous creatures, nor can it be used to tame specific creatures, such as one which is threatening the players. It takes 1d10 minutes for the creature to arrive at the sage’s location, and it will obey the sage to the best of its ability for 3 hours. This time will be lessened if the sage treats the animal poorly, or could be lengthened if the sage treats the animal particularly well.

Counterspell: Cause the spell of another sage to fail. The spell is cast using subtle hand gestures and blinking patterns, making it difficult to detect. It can be cast either in a “general” way, causing the next spell cast within 100ft to fail, or it can be cast at a specific target, causing their next spell to fail.

Airblade: A blade of focused wind cuts through the air in a slashing motion, dealing 1d6 slashing damage at a range of up to 60ft.

Speak with Plants & Animals: The sage is able to speak the language of plants and animals for the length of a single conversation (however long that takes). Remember, though, that not all plants and animals will be eager to help.

Telekinesis: The sage can use this spell to lift and move an object of up to 50 pounds. The ability functions up to 100ft away, but cannot move any object at more than a slow, clumsy wobble.

Control Fire: If fire already exists, the sage can manipulate it with their mental powers. They cannot make it larger without fuel, but they can shape it, make it flare up momentarily, cause images to form in it, or cause tendrils of it to lash out.

Freeze Water: By blowing upon the surface of a body of water, the sage can can freeze it solid. The larger the body of water, the thinner the ice will be. A 10ft diameter pond could be frozen completely solid. A 20ft pond could be frozen with ice about 6 inches thick. A 30ft pond would only have a thin layer of ice atop it. Alternatively, this spell can be used to create a 10ft block of ice within a larger body of water.

Magic Shield: Mystical energy forms into the shape of a red circle 1ft in diameter. The circle is solid, opaque, and moves of its own volition within about 3ft of the spell recipient’s skin. It can successfully block one projectile per round. If the spell’s recipient is attacked by a magical projectile, or a particularly heavy one (such as a thrown boulder) then the shield will block it, but be destroyed in doing so. Otherwise the spell lasts for 15 minutes.

Raise Fog: A thick fog rises from the ground in a 50ft radius from the caster. This fog magically fills that space, and after that acts as normal fog. On a sunny, windy day, it will quickly dissipate, while in an underground cavern it might remain for hours before slowly settling back to earth.

Sleep: A single target within 30ft suddenly falls unconscious, sleeping soundly. This effect cannot be resisted, but once they are asleep a splash of water or a slap will wake them.

Sphere of Darkness: A 10ft spherical area becomes completely engulfed in magical darkness. No light can penetrate this sphere. It can be cast either upon an object, or a location. Once cast, it will remain tied to that object or location until it fades away an hour later.

Orb of Light: The sage can conjure a 3″ orb of heatless light which is insubstantial, but can be held or mounted as though it weren’t. Bright light fills a 15ft radius from the orb, with dim light for 20ft beyond that. The light otherwise acts normally. It will not magically bend around hands, bodies, or other objects.

Fear: The target of this spell will fixate on the scariest thing in their immediate vicinity, and will become cripplingly terrified of it. They will react according to character, either groveling for mercy, cowering in fear, or simply fleeing for their lives.

Legend of Zelda Adventure System: Notes on Magic

One of my favorite things to tinker with in an RPG is the magic system. Ultimately, the goal of any tabletop game mechanic should be effectiveness and simplicity. But unlike combat mechanics, there are innumerable ways for a magic systems to achieve those goals. Combat is real, and a lot of people who play RPGs have even studied it. You can’t pull wild made-up ideas about fighting out of thin air, because everybody will recognize that those ideas don’t model reality. You have some leeway, but on a fundamental level, a combat system needs to be grounded. But magic doesn’t exist.

Magic can come from anywhere, be accessed via any method, and have any side effects the designer wants. Ultimately it still needs to be effective and simple, but the paths a game can take to reach that goal are nearly limitless. Magic can be born of nature spirits which must be asked for their spells, or it can come from pacts with demons who demand sacrifice in exchange for power. Magic can be an elemental force which speaks to a chosen few, or it can be ‘glitches’ in the universe which the intellectual elite have learned to exploit.

In the Zelda series, the source of the world’s magic is never explained. Ocarina of Time touched on the subject with the history of the three goddesses. But the LOZAS project is focused on the games which came before that, so I’m not taking it into consideration here. An argument could be made that the Triforce itself is the source of magic, but it seems more likely to me that the world is inherently possessed of mystical energies. I’m not sure if I’ll choose to add more flavor to that myself, or if I’ll leave the specifics for individual game masters to tinker with. But since the ‘fluff’ has already been taken care of–albeit ambiguously–I’ve focused my attention on creating solid mechanics for the game’s magic. Mechanics which hopefully capture the feeling of Zelda spellcasting, without resorting to a point tracking system. That would be too much bookkeeping, I think.

Before diving into the magic system in full, however, I need to explain a little bit about how the ability scores and ability checks currently function. There are three abilities: Body, Agility, and Wisdom. When generating a character, each player rolls 2d10 three times, and arranges the resulting numbers between their three stats as they choose. I like using two dice rather than three, because it makes both high and low scores more common, which seems appropriate for the dramatic style of a Zelda game. Once the scores are arranged, each player gets 2 points which they can place in any of the abilities they like. So the maximum a player can have in an ability score is 22, and if they have a 22, then it’s the only maxed they can have, since there are no opportunities to increase ability scores after character creation.

Ability checks are handled OD&D style. The player rolls 1d24 and if the result is less than or equal to the relevant ability score, then they succeed. If their roll is greater than their ability score, they fail. In the event that the player doesn’t want to use a d24, they can always use 1d12, and flip a coin to see if they add 12 to the result. I could write more about why I’ve chosen to set the game up this way, but it’s not particularly relevant to explaining how the magic system works.

There are two types of magic players can access in the Legend of Zelda Adventure System. The first comes from magic items, which anyone can use. The rod of fire, or the cloak of invisibility for example. These items draw upon the magical energies within the wielder to power their spells, but the knowledge of how those spells are cast has been crafted into the item itself. The item is casting the spell, and merely leeching off of the untrained mystical powers of the wielder. After an item has been used, a non-sage must roll a wisdom check. If they fail, then their magical energies are drained and they must restore them either by consuming a potion of magic, or by resting for 8 hours. If they succeed on the check, then they still have enough energy to continue casting without rest. For as long as a character continues to succeed on wisdom checks, they continue to find reserves of magical power within themselves.

Sages, the game’s primary casters, have a little more access to magic than other classes do. At first level they learn 2 spells from the sage spell list, and they learn one spell each level after that. At the maximum level of 10, that’s a total of 11 spells. Sages are able to cast a number of spells per day equal to twice their level. So a first level sage will know 2 different spells, and can cast 2 spells on a given day. While a 10th level sage will know 11 different spells, and be able to cast 20 spells per day. After a sage casts their final spell for the day, they make a wisdom check just as other classes would after using a magic item. If they fail the check, they are drained and cannot cast any more that day. If they succeed on the check, then their last spell slot for the day is not spent, and they may use it again later. They may continue casting spells in this manner for as long as they succeed on wisdom checks.

Sages can also make use of magic items, as other classes do. Like other classes, the sage makes a wisdom check after they use the item. If they succeed, then their spellcasting ability is unaffected. If they fail, then using the magic item expends one of their spell slots for the day. When a sage uses a potion of magic, it restores half of their total spellcasting ability for the day.

In addition to their greatly expanded spellcasting ability, sages are able to use “spell crafting.” Using spell crafting, the sage’s player describes to the GM a minor modification they would like to make to one of their spells. For example, the spell, “Conjure Plank,” creates a 10ft long, 3ft wide plank which appears in front of the sage. An example of a minor modification would be to make the plank 12ft long, or to cause it to appear in a specific place about 30-60ft away from the sage. After the sage has described the modification they’d like to make to the GM, the GM uses their own judgement to determine whether or not the alteration is minor enough to work. If it is, then the sage should make a spell crafting check.

To do this, the sage rolls a wisdom check. For particularly easy or difficult spellcrafts, the GM is encouraged to announce bonuses or penalties to the sage’s roll. If the roll is a success, then the spell works as intended, and one spell slot is lost. If the sage has no more spell slots for the day, then after a successful spell crafting attempt they are considered fully drained and unable to cast again. If the check fails, then the spell fizzles. It may function incorrectly, or simply nothing happens. Regardless, the sage still loses their spell slot as if the spell had succeed. It should be noted that spell crafting is not permanent, but only affects one specific casting of the spell.

Sometime in the next few days I’ll share a spell list for the Sage, to give you an idea of what kind of magic players will be able to access in the game.

Legend of Zelda Adventure System: Notes on Combat

I would like for the LOZAS system to be a paradigm example of simplicity in motion. Combat in gameplay should move quickly, because combat in the source material moves quickly. Hacking and slashing your way through a room full of enemies is part of a Zelda-style adventure, but it rarely takes center stage. When it does take center stage, it can be an intense experience, but rarely a long one. My goal, then, is to build a simple and easy to run combat system which can still model complex tactics. Combat should be fast, but that doesn’t mean it should be easy.

In approaching this aspect of the game’s design, my thinking is to start simple. First, figure out how the bare bones of combat will be handled, then add in the core mechanics I want to use for the game. Once those two elements are in place, I’ll call it done until playtesting shows me that something more is needed. And if that happens, my first question for myself will be “Was the GM able to handle it?” If so, are additional rules really needed?

A basic attack roll will be handled by rolling 1d20 against a target number. Since I’m trying to create a numerically simple game without too many bonuses or penalties for players to keep track of, the maximum armor class will be pretty low. Likely somewhere between 18 and 24. If the player rolls a 20 on their attack roll, it is an automatic hit. If a 20 would have hit anyway, then it is a critical hit as well. Upon a critical hit, the player doubles the number of dice they roll for damage. GMs are also encouraged to make critical hits–both for and against the players–memorable. Not through painful attempts at florid prose, but by having the hit affect the battle in a more significant way than simply causing extra damage. A broken weapon or bone, a scar, losing a finger; any of these would be appropriate.

Called shots will be a central mechanic in the game. I discussed this in detail not too long ago so I won’t re-tread that ground here. Essentially speaking, the players are encouraged to declare that they are attacking a specific part of the creature, such as an arm, or an eye. The GM makes a ruling on the spot regarding the difficutly of this maneuver, and tells the player that it will be Easy, Moderate, Difficult, or Nearly Impossible. Only after hearing how difficult the attack will be does the player decide whether or not they’d like to attempt the attack. If they do, standard critical hit rules apply. Some creatures may be particularly strong or weak on different parts of their bodies.

Battle Maneuvers cover a large range of different things. If a player would like to trip their foe, or attempt to break their opponent’s weapon, or try to blind their opponent by throwing dust in their eyes, then both the attacker and the target make opposed battle maneuver checks. This is a 1d20 roll, with the individual’s battle maneuver score added to it.

The battle maneuver score is calculated by taking both a character’s body and agility score. For each score, 11 counts as 0, while any number higher than 11 adds +1, and any number lower than 11 adds -1. So a body score of 14 would grant a +3, while a body score of 9 would confer a -2. Once both body and agility have been calculated in this manner, add the two numbers together, and this is the character’s battle maneuver score.

Anything a player wants to do within combat is either an action, or a non-action. Things such as talking, dropping an item or drawing weapons are non-actions. They do not require a significant amount of time or attention, and so they do not use up a player’s turn. Whereas things such as moving, swinging a weapon, throwing an item, using a special ability, attempting a battle maneuver or casting a spell, all count as actions. Each player is allowed to make 2 actions during their turn. So on a single turn, a soldier could move their full speed twice, or they could move their speed once and attack, or they could attack twice.

Regarding movement, I see no reason to handle it differently than the way Pathfinder did. Hylians (the game’s only playable race) move at a default speed of 30ft per action, and each square on a battle grid will represent 5ft. I like the system and it works well enough. However, it’s important that the game can be run without a battle mat as well. Grids are useful for tactical battles, but for games played over the internet (which are increasingly popular) they can be more of an inconvenience than they are worth. Running a game without the mat is usually just as simple as choosing not to use a mat, but I would like to create a subset of rules which allow players to benefit from their character’s speed even when a mat is unavailable.

On that note, I’ve always felt as though Pathfinder was missing an opportunity by keeping movement speed largely static. The ability to move an extra 5 ft represents an interesting tactical advantage in combat, and the reverse is an interesting disadvantage. Different movement speeds will play a more pronounced role in this game than I’ve personally seen in other games.

Initiative will be handled in an OD&D style, because as I’ve mentioned, I quite like it. A ‘designated initiative roller’ will roll 1d6 for the party, while the GM will roll 1d6 for the monsters involved in the combat. Whoever wins the roll will go first as a group, followed by the group who failed the roll, after which initiative will be re-determined. GMs are encouraged to offer minor initiative bonuses or penalties to groups who put themselves in a particularly good bad position at the end of the round.

GM rulings and on-the-fly modifiers are very important to the LOZAS combat system. Game masters are encouraged to allow characters to make extra actions, give penalties or bonuses to any type of roll, or otherwise modify the rules during play. This is not a subversion of the game’s rules, or a type of haphazard house-ruling, it is an essential part of making the system work correctly. The mechanics above provide combat with structure. The die rolls inject the simulated battle with chaos. The rulings of the GM provide the final piece, by rewarding or punishing the player’s tactics.

For example, there are no attacks of opportunity written into these rules. None the less, there may be times when a player or an NPC will leave themselves vulnerable to an attack. If a player is engaged in a duel and chooses to turn tail and run in the opposite direction, their foe should be given an opportunity to attack them as they flee. No rule covers this eventuality, but GMs are encouraged to take advantage if they feel it is appropriate.

System In Progress: LOZAS

My ladyfriend is 3 years younger than I am. It’s a little strange for me, since most of my relationships in the past have been with older women. And though the difference in our numerical ages is small, it sometimes feels as if those few years belie a massive generational gap. Particularly with regards to vidya games. My first console was an NES, while her was an N64, how does that even happen? The poor whippersnap missed the greatest era of gaming: the one I grew up with! I often become frustrated when I make a funny reference, only to realize she probably never used the Konami code, or blew dust out of a cartridge, or heard of games like Doki Doki Panic!

So what in Oerth does this have to do with tabletop RPGs? I’m getting to that. Be patient, geeze.

Recently, because my ladyfriend is pretty cool, she asked me to recommend an oldschool game. Probably because she was impressed by all those cool jokes she’s too young to laugh at. I considered carefully which game would be a good introduction for her, and unsurprisingly settled on my favorite of all time; The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. That game has had a defining impact on my life. It shaped my views on fantasy settings, and informed my opinions about what it means for a game to be ‘good.’ It’s the first game I ever wholeheartedly fell in love with, and that love is part of what originally led me to pursue writing. Hells, the “L” in my monicker stands for “Link,” and I’ve been known by that name for almost half my life. Even ignoring all of the personal value the game has for me, it’s still one of the most polished, well-designed games I’ve ever encountered. And since my ladyfriend is already a fan of the later Zelda titles, it’s about time she was introduced to a proper dark-haired link, rather than the boyband reject seen in more recent games.

Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I think the game is best when played on the Super Nintendo, with that fantastic controller. But before I set her up with the cartridge, I thought I should take a look at it. The last few times I played through LttP I was either using a game boy, or an emulator. Because of that, my SNES copy hadn’t been used in a few years, and I remember experiencing some audio glitches the last time I played it. Plus, with the game being over 20 years old, I worried that the battery wouldn’t be able to hold a save any longer. So I drew the cartridge from its shelf, gently cleaned the connectors with alcohol, nestled it into the console’s bosom, and flipped the big purple power switch up with a satisfying “clack.*”

Yes. That is me. Dressed as Link for Halloween. I was a cool kid.

Yeah, she hasn’t gotten a chance to play it yet. I’m on the second-to-last dungeon in the game and having the time of my life. But again, what does this have to do with tabletop RPGs?

Well, one evening after I’d been playing, I was in bed with a notepad. I began to lazily jot down notes for a Zelda tabletop RPG rooted in the spirit of the pre-Ocarina of Time games. Those random notes quickly evolved into a project which I’ve dubbed the Legend of Zelda Adventure System, or LOZAS for short. It’s what I’ve been blathering on about for the past week. I originally didn’t want to be open about the source material I was working with, in part because I didn’t want to feel obligated to finish it. But it’s become clear to me that I want to take this seriously, so there’s no point in being subtle any longer. Though I don’t know if it actually counts as subtle, since I’ve been tweeting about ‘my zelda system’ every 15 minutes.

I confess, I feel more than a little arrogant announcing that I’m trying to adapt one of the most celebrated games of all time to tabletop. Who the fuck am I? I’m an untested, aspiring game designer. To be perfectly frank, I don’t think I’m up to the task. Oh, I’ll do my best, and I’ll finish the game, and maybe some people will like it. But this is just a goofy little project I started working on for my own amusement. When I do eventually finish LOZAS, it will be the first game I’ve ever designed from the ground up. And like any ‘first,’ it’s probably going to be terrible. But it will be a labor of love, and I can only hope that will help mask some of my inexperience.

So now that I’ve wasted 786 words telling you what the project is and how I came to work on it, why don’t I share a little bit about how the game is shaping up and what my goals are? That way future posts referencing the LOZAS system can at least have some context. While my list of goals is extensive, each one descends from this single goal:

Recreate the style and ‘feel’ of A Link to the Past in a tabletop environment, without forcibly including elements which are not well suited to tabletop play.

Given that, the question becomes: what is the style and feel of LttP? Exploring that question has been an ongoing process as I work on the game, but I do have my thoughts:

Dungeons Zelda games are about dungeons. Even though every game in the series has lots for the player to do outside of dungeons, the underworld is where the real meat of the game can be found. It’s where the player encounters the most varied enemies, finds the most interesting treasure, fights bosses, and achieves the most important quest-progressing goals. As such, the game will be geared towards exploring dungeons. Hyrule is an ancient land, where many forgotten kingdoms have made their home. It is riddled with dozens, hundreds, or perhaps even thousands of underworld citadels just waiting to be explored by heroes.

While dungeons can vary wildly, most dungeons will contain the following elements:

Lots of monsters.
Lots of traps.
Lots of treasure.
A wondrous item (discussed further below).
A heart container (discussed further below).
A Great Monster.

Great Monsters are special creatures within this world. In game terms, you would call them bosses. However, within the setting, they are monsters who have acquired an immense amount of power. They did this either by defeating their fellow monsters and rising to the top of the food chain, or by forging an alliance with a great evil being. Upon defeating a great monster, all the heroes who were involved in the combat gain a level. Defeating great monsters is the only way to advance in level in this game. There are no experience points.

Characters There are two big things about A Link to the Past which do not translate well to a tabletop environment. First, not every adventure can be set in motion by Zelda being kidnapped. Second, not every player can be Link. The former problem is up to the GM to solve, but I hope to give GMs a useful toolbox with my methods for creating dungeons and great monsters. The latter problem, however, is all on me.

Long story short, I’ve determined that the game will use only three classes. The Adventurer is the closest of the three to what Link would be. It’s a class with respectable fighting skills, but which focuses on special abilities. An adventurer can leap across long gaps, climb walls quickly, move without making any sound, etc. Soldiers focus purely on physical combat, and receive bonuses to their attack, damage, critical range, armor class, and battle maneuver score as they increase in level. Sages are the mystics of the game, and probably the class I currently find most interesting. At each level, the sage can permanently add one more spell to its repertoire. I’m doing my best to balance the spells at about the same power level, so that there will be no need for multiple “spell levels.” Each time a spell is cast, the sage must roll an ability check. They are currently allowed to fail the check a number of times per day equal to their level, after which they must rest before they can cast again. Though I worry this may become tedious at higher levels, even with a current max level of 10.

Numerical Simplicity There aren’t many bonuses or penalties in a Zelda game. Sure you might get an upgraded sword or new armor now and again, but the rest of your equipment provides a unique function rather than improving the effect of a function which already exists. So far, the only bonuses and penalties which currently exist in the game are either determined at character creation, or by a character’s class as they level up. The game will employ an maximum AC, and even at high levels health will likely be pretty low for most creatures. So including a lot of +1 items would just make the game messy. Instead, the game should be filled with items like a magic grappling hook which always finds something to latch onto, or a magic glove which lets you see through any wall you touch.

Heart Containers One of the staples of every Zelda game is heart containers. The player begins the game with 3 life. By defeating bosses, the player can gain heart containers which increase that life by 1. Minor as it may seem, I think this is a great idea to use in the game. A sword to the chest kills a great knight just as surely as it would kill a peasant. However, by delving into dungeons, adventurers can find magic items which absorb into their body, allowing them to survive wounds which would kill most people.

Those are some of the larger ideas which come to mind now. I’m sure I’ll continue to write about this project as it progresses.

*Seriously, why in the world did the SNES have such a loud power switch? It was as though Nintendo was trying to alert your parents of when you were playing rather than doing your chores.

Merciless Monsters V: LOZAS Skeleton and Popo

If you haven’t yet, there’s only today and tomorrow left to fill out the first annual Papers & Pencils survey! It honestly means a lot to me, so if you enjoy the blog, and you have a couple minutes, I would really appreciate your time!

It’s been a long while since I made a Merciless Monsters post. The Draugr were all the way back in March, and my only attempt since then was when I adapted Telecanter’s work in April. For awhile after the Draugr, I avoided writing another MM because they took so damned long to get done. Then I had my big rant denouncing Pathfinder’s complex methods of stat block creation. Since then I haven’t really been sure about how to approach making monsters. I figure I ought to come up with my own style of Pathfinder-compatible statblock which allows monsters to be built faster, but I haven’t gotten there yet.

So instead, I thought it would be fun to waste everyone’s time by working out some of the monsters for my in-progress LOZAS system. Below are two of the monsters which will appear in that game, built using the current iteration of the rules. First is the Skeleton, which I’ve included to serve as a connection between the tried-and-true (skeletons in fantasy RPGs) and the new-fangled (the LOZAS system). The other creature, which I’m currently calling a Popo, is a little more unusual, and to my knowledge hasn’t appeared in a tabletop RPG before.

None of these rules are quite pinned down yet, so these creatures may end up changing before I’m done. I’ve also added some commentary to the statblocks, to explain my reasons for making certain choices. Despite my joke above, I hope you find this enjoyable rather than annoying. The survey isn’t over until tomorrow, but a lot of people have noted that they’d like to read more about my amateur game design.

Skeleton

HP 8
AC 20
Body 10; Agility 26; Wisdom 3
Speed 40
Special Protection: Skeletons take no damage from piercing weapons unless it is a critical hit.
Special Weakness None
Attacks Claw (+5/1dmg); Throw Bone (50ft)(+8/1dmg)
Special Moves

Disengage: As an action, the skeleton may leap straight back 20-50ft. If there is a wall within that range, the skeleton is not harmed by colliding with it, instead gracefully sliding down the wall to land at the bottom.

Stealthy: A sneaking skeleton is able to move with complete silence, and hide itself within deep shadows. While sneaking, a skeleton can move at full speed. While hiding in deep shadows, it must remain still while it is being observed, or it will be revealed.

Description With magically animated joints the skeleton glides silently across the stone floors of a crypt. While the creature was once a person, all flesh and humanity have been stripped from it, leaving only a collection of bones with a fervent desire to harm the living. Skeletons are created either by powerful and evil sages, or by the sheer evil presence of a monster even more merciless than itself.

Tactics Skeletons much prefer to fight from range, breaking off spare bones from their rib cage and throwing them with deadly accuracy. If a skeleton ever ends up in melee range, it will sometimes attack with its claws, but its immediate reaction is to leap straight backward. Skeletons are not very bright creatures. They’re barely more than an automaton, with only a rudimentary understanding of friend & foe, and not much ability to think ahead. Clever players could potentially trick a skeleton into using its disengage ability to take a blind leap into lava, or some other dangerous substance.

Design Notes In this game, the the range of human ability can go as low as a score 2, and as high as a 22. Given that, the skeleton shown here has an average body score, extremely low wisdom score, and supernaturally high agility score. Lacking the constraints of flesh and sinew, skeletons are more flexible and fast than the world’s greatest gymnasts and runners. I’ve never liked the portrayal of skeletons as level 1 cannon fodder, possibly because of my love for the 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts. My hope is to make them a little more menacing in this game.

While individual GMs are free to run the skeleton however they like, obviously, I thought it would be fun to play up the graceful aspect of the skeleton, making it a quick, stealthy foe. I particularly like the idea of skeletons being able to avoid melee range, thus allowing them to force their foes to use arrows–which they are immune to.

Popo

HP 2
AC 12
Body 16; Agility 11; Wisdom 5
Speed 30
Special Protection: None
Special Weakness None
Attacks Constricting Barbs (Auto-hit on entangled foes/1dmg)
Special Moves

Entangle: If a popo enters the same space as a target, then that target becomes entangled. The target cannot move until the popo is either killed or shaken free with a successful agility check. Once entangled, a target is vulnerable to the popo’s Constricting Barbs attack, which does not require any attack roll.

Description ‘A multicolored mass of wriggling tentacles with no other recognizable anatomy” is the simplest way to describe the popo’s appearance. While primarily colored in shades of orange and purple, a popo’s tentacles can fall anywhere on the color spectrum. The creature uses its bright colors and wriggling movements to attract potential predators. Once it is attacked, the popo latches on tightly, extruding small barbs which allow it to draw bloody sustenance from its would-be attacker. Even the strongest or most agile creatures find it difficult to rid themselves of a popo once it has latched on.

Tactics Popos are simple creatures who live in ‘clusters’ which generally range from 4-10. Often, members of a cluster will hunt separately. But when threatened, the creatures demonstrate remarkably unity by gathering together, and moving in union. In doing so, they cover a larger surface area than a single popo would, making it more difficult for attacks to avoid getting their feet entangled.

Design Notes I’m experimenting with mechanics which have ‘absolute’ results in this game. Above, you saw how the skeleton is almost completely immune to piercing weapons (as opposed to Pathfinder, where skeletons have DR/bludgeoning). The popo is another example of a mechanic with an absolute outcome: if the popo enters the same area as a PC, that PC is entangled. No saving throw or chance to avoid it. The player’s best chance to avoid being entangled by a popo is to deprive the monster of the opportunity in the first place.

You might note that all of the attacks mentioned deal a set amount of damage, rather than a dice range. At present, the game uses different rules for monsters and players in this regard. On the one hand, monsters can have any number of HP, and player weapons deal damage using a dice range. Players, on the other hand, start with only 3 HP, which can be increased one at a time by adventuring, and discovering magical items which allow them to resist wounds beyond what a normal human could sustain.

I don’t really like that method very much, but it’s what I’m working with for now.

Investigating Ability Scores

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When you sit down to create an entirely new RPG from scratch, where do you start? I don’t know if there’s a particular method used by more experienced game designers, but the handful of times I’ve attempted it, I always start in the same place: how does the player create their character? It’s the closest thing to a ‘logical’ starting place that I can think of. Nearly every mechanic in every RPG I’ve ever looked at relates either to how the characters can affect the game world, or how the game world can affect them. And since the character needs to exist before it can affect or be affected, it seems like that’s the best place to start. So when I began making notes for the game system I mentioned yesterday, that is what I did.

From there, I chose to start with the most fundamental building block of a character: ability scores. I’m sure there’s a system out there where characters don’t have any of ability scores, and it might be really good. But, for my purposes with this game, ability scores seem like the best way to go. Then came my first real decisions: how many ability scores, what do they represent, and how are they generated?

I am most familiar with the D&D base ability scores. There are six of them: Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Numerous methods exist for determining the numbers associated with each ability, but all of them are just permutations on the original. The player rolls 3d6, six times. The basic score is a number between 3 and 18, weighted heavily towards scores of 10 or 11. When you look at OD&D or AD&D, it’s very clear why ability scores were set up this way. Rolling 3 dice makes the minimum and maximum scores very unlikely, so when a 17 or 18 is rolled, it’s a cherished event. Hell, I got excited when my OD&D Magic User Higgins rolled a 16 Intelligence. The maximum score of 18 also plays beautifully into the original “ability check” mechanic, where a player rolls 1d20 and compares it to the ability score they’re attempting to use. If the result of the d20 roll is less than or equal to their ability score, whatever they’re attempting succeeds. I love the way this mechanic makes the specific number of a character’s ability score significant, while also retaining an absolute 10% failure chance.

Modern versions of Dungeons and Dragons–including Pathfinder–retain the basics of this system, but have lost everything which made the systems elegant. By using larger dice pools, the game removes the rarity of high or low numbers. There are racial ability bonuses which can easily increase a character’s score to 20 at first level, and even extra ability points given to characters at every 4th level. This would kill that consistent 10% failure chance, if the ability check mechanic hadn’t been dropped in favor of rolling against a target number. As I understand it, D&D 4th edition dropped the die rolling aspect of entirely, using a ‘point buy’ system instead. The ability score range of 3-18 seems like nothing more than tradition at this point.

After seeing this example of a mechanic being used in a game where it doesn’t fit any longer, I wanted to make sure I didn’t just copy the system I was most familiar with. I needed to properly explore my alternatives, and thoroughly examining why a particular system was the right choice for this game. (Incidentally, this concern is what prompted me to question Reinventing the Wheel.) And what better way to explore my alternatives was to grab every game sourcebook I own, and look at how they handled ability scores, presented in no particular order.

Note that these are specifically from books I own, and not an exhaustive investigation into every system of ability scores ever used. I’ve also excluded the Adventurer Conqueror King and Dungeon Crawl Classic systems, since they both use a system based heavily on oldschool D&D.

The Deadlands RPG published in 1996 (which I picked up at a garage sale about a year ago, but have not yet taken a serious look at) has a whopping 10 ability scores, divided into two groups. There are the “Corporeal Traits,” which include Deftness, Nimbleness, Quickness, Strength, and Vigor; and the “Mental Traits,” which include Cognition, Knowledge, Mien, Smarts, and Spirit. Having not played the game it seems unfair to judge, but some of these seem awful similar to me. Deftness is defined as “Hand-eye coordination and manual dexterity. Great for shooting holes in things.” and Quickness is defined as “Reflexes and speed. Draw, pardner!” I get that there’s a difference, but is it really significant enough to add additional complication to a tabletop game? I would need a lot of convincing.

Ability scores are determined by drawing from a standard deck of playing cards, with the two jokers included. You draw 12 cards, discard 2. You then assign each card to one of your ten scores. The card is then compared to a chart. The number on the card determines which type of die you roll in association with that ability score, while the suit determines how many of that die you roll.

The game has a wild-west setting, so using playing cards as a mechanic makes sense. Aces & Eights did the same thing. But really it’s just a fancy method for assigning dice to abilities, and that idea has always interested me. The difference between having a 1d4 Strength and a 1d12 dexterity is a lot more interesting than the difference between a -2 Strength and a +4 Dexterity in Pathfinder.

The Serenity RPG was the first game I bought after D&D, but I still haven’t had the opportunity to play it! I blame none of my friends being big Firefly fans. And maybe it’s just as well–I’ve heard that the system is horribly broken.

Like Deadlands, the attributes in the Serenity RPG are die types, rather than numbers. Before play begins, the group selects which “heroic level” they’d like to play at, choosing from “Greenhorn,” “Veteran,” and “Big Damn Hero.” Each of the heroic levels has a different number of “Attribute Points” which are spent in creating a character. Again, they are divided into physical and mental, but with only 6 instead of 10: Agility, Strength, Vitality, Alertness, Intelligence, and Willpower. Dice are purchased for each of the scores, with each die costing a number of points equal to the number on its highest face. (A d6 costs 6 points, a d8 costs 8, etc.)

Personally, I’m not a fan of point-buy systems. I see their value as a means of balancing characters, but I find it far more fun when characters have a chance of being unusually flawed or gifted. None the less, I still like the dice idea. It’s something to think about.

Earthdawn is another system I picked up at a garage sale and never took a really look at. It appears to be more of a storytelling game, which is not my forte. Again it uses a sort of “point buy” system, ranging from 2-18, with the lowest numbers actually adding points to your pool if you take them. It also has an alternative method allowing characters to roll 3d6 for their scores. The actual scores are similar to D&D as well: dexterity, strength, toughness, perception, willpower, and charisma.

Whatever other interesting elements the game might have, it’s not particularly useful for this exercise.

Star Trek: The Next Generation RPG is notoriously bad. I couldn’t not buy it when I found it at a used book store a few years back, just for the sake of morbid curiosity. I’m honestly having a difficult time even understanding how this works. From what I can tell, there are actually only 5 attributes, which range from 1 to 5 for humans, and each attribute has two “edges” which a character can be particularly strong or particularly weak in. I honestly can’t decipher how this works by flipping through the book, but it seems similar to the WEG Star Wars RPG, which I’ll discuss below.

Gangbusters (first edition, 1982) has some seriously strange ability scores. It looks like each character has Muscle, Agility, Observation, Presence, Driving, and Luck. But each is rolled differently! For muscle, agility, and observation, the player rolls a percentile die. Modifiers go from +0 to +25, with a lower roll being better. The presence score is just rolled on a D10, with modifiers from 0 to 2. The driving score is the average of your agility and observation scores, and the luck score is just a percentile dice divided by two.

This is a mess. I don’t think there’s really any way to redeem it within the system’s mechanics. Though again, I should probably play it before I pass judgement. (If you haven’t figured it out: I own a great many systems I’ve never had an opportunity to play!)

I picked up the Batman Role Playing Game a little over a year ago because I found it at a used book store and was curious. Unlike some of the other RPGs I’ve picked up second had, I took a very serious look at it. My ladyfriend is a huge batman fan, and I had some fun ideas for a campaign where the players started out as thugs in Gotham city, constantly hounded by Batman. Unfortunately, I discovered that it was the worst system I’ve ever laid eyes on.

But lets stick to the attributes. This game has a nine of them. When I first read it, that seemed extremely excessive. But then, I hadn’t read anything about Deadwood yet. The attributes make up a cross-section, which I do find somewhat interesting. Three attributes are physical, three are mental, and three are spiritual. Of those, one in each category is an “Acting/Opposing” attribute, one is an “Effect Attribute,” and one is a “Resistance Attribute.” Once again, point-buy is used during character creation, so this isn’t of particular interest.

The Mouse Guard Roleplaying Game is god damned beautiful. It is based on the Burning Wheel role playing system, which I’ve had no prior experience with. Despite appearing to focus more on storytelling than gaming, the system is very interesting and I would like to learn more about it.

The game doesn’t have ability scores in the traditional sense, but it does have Nature, Will, Resources, and Circles. These can used and depleted through play, however, so perhaps this would be a good example of a system without ability scores.

Shadowrun, 1st edition, has 8 attributes for most characters, but has a 9th if the character is a magician. In some ways, this seems like a poor design choice to me. The purpose of ability scores, as I view them, is to be the most basic, fundamental, and universal expression of what a character can do. An Orc Barbarian who cannot cast spells still has an Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma score.

But, on the other hand, I can see this making a certain amount of sense in a setting where mystical abilities are completely inaccessible to those who were not born with them.

The way attributes are generated is also interesting. It’s a point-buy system, with some complexities that are a little reminiscent of Gangbusters, but much more refined. There are five columns to choose from in creating a character from scratch: Magic, Attributes, Skills, Tech, and Race. The player is given five importance ratings, 0 through 4, and they must assign one rating to each of the five columns. They will receive more or less resources in each of the five categories, depending on how important they rate them. Giving attributes an importance rating of 0 gives you 15 points to spend, while an importance rating of 4 gives you 30 points.

The six physical and mental attributes can each range from 1 to 6 for humans. The three mystical attributes each work a little differently. All characters start with an Essence of 6, which decreases as they add cyberware implants, or if they are healed improperly. Reaction is the average of Quickness and Intelligence, but is also reduced by cyberware implants.

Magic rating is the ninth attribute which only magic users posses, and I don’t actually understand why it exists based on these rules. It starts at 6, and “declines with essence rating.” I can’t figure out why they would need a seperate ability if–by all appearances–magic should always be equal to essence. But as I’m not intimately familiar with the system, I’m sure there’s something I’m missing.

Traveller (2008, Mongoose) has one of the coolest character creation systems ever, wherein the players must make a number of decisions and roll on a number of charts to generate their character’s entire lifetime prior to the point that play begins. Rolling the six basic ability scores, however, is straightforward. Roll 2d6 six times and assign them in any order. It’s simple, but works.

I like the idea of using two dice to generate an ability score rather than 3. The roll is still weighted towards the center, but both high and low scores will be more common.

And lastly, we come to the West End Games Star Wars Role Playing Game. I love this game. And, as it turns out, I’ve written about its ability scores before. So if you don’t mind, I’ll just quote myself:

WEG Star Wars characters have six basic attributes; Dexterity, Knowledge, Perception, Strength, Mechanical, and Technical. Each of these has a certain number of six sided dice attached to it during character creation. (WEG Star Wars only uses six sided dice.) For example, a human character gets 18 dice total, and has a minimum of 2 dice and a maximum of 4 dice in each of the six attributes. After filling the minimum requirements, players have 6 dice to spread between their six abilities. Once in play, any action which requires a roll will be associated with one of the six abilities, and the player gets to roll however many dice they allocated for that attribute. For example, hitting something with a blaster requires the ability to aim the blaster accurately, so you would roll your dexterity. If you went ahead and maxed out your dexterity, then you’d be able to roll 4d6 against your opponent’s dodge. And if he or she rolls lower than you did, the blaster bolt hits! And given how dangerous combat is treated in this game, there’s a good chance getting hit by that blaster bolt killed them.
There’s also a skills system for more specific tasks. Each character starts out with 7 dice to apply to skills. So even though you have 4 dice in dexterity, you could put another 2 dice in the Blasters skill, and be able to roll a whopping 6 dice whenever you try to hit somebody. Dice can also be split up. Each die counts as 3 “pips,” which is WEG’s code for bonuses. Essentially, if you’ve put 2 skill die into blasters, 3 into medicine, and 1 into starfighter piloting, and can’t decide where to put your last die, you can just break it up. Add a +2 to starfighter piloting (making the skill 1d6 + 2) and a +1 to blasters.

The system is elegant, and beautiful. Despite using what is essentially a point-buy system, it doesn’t feel bogged down with number crunching, nor do you ever feel obligated to build an “optimized” character.

This has been a weird post. When I started it, my intention was to examine all of these different game systems, and figure out how their use of ability scores could be adapted to the game I’ve been working on. Instead, I’ve really just listed all the different systems I found next to one another, with some commentary attached.

This might be a bad post…but it doesn’t seem bad to me right now, at 1 in the morning. Maybe I’ll feel differently later, but I’ll let you be the judge.

Reinventing the Wheel

If you haven’t yet, there’s only 7 days left to fill out the first annual Papers & Pencils survey!

During my spare time for the last few days, I’ve been working on a new game system. It’s not a particularly ambitious project, nor am I taking its development very seriously, but I was struck by inspiration and have enjoyed putting those ideas down on paper. Whether or not I’ll ever finish this project, I don’t know, but for the time being it has been an entertaining process. Going through the motions of putting an entire system together from scratch has given me a new appreciation for the challenges involved, and raised a few questions I don’t think I would have considered previously.

Many of the mechanics I’ve come up with for this game are unique in my experience. I’ve never played another game where all spells are equally powerful, or where additional hit points are gathered as treasure. I’m not saying nobody has ever done it before, I’ve just never seen it myself. For a lot of mechanics, I have specific ideas about how they should work, and how I will adapt them from my source material. For other mechanics, however, I…well, don’t.

Take combat, for example. There’s something you want to kill, so you attack it with a weapon. This is a fundamental part of fantasy adventure games, and most everyone would agree that it requires a resolution mechanic. Unless you want to stand up from the table and start LARPing, you need a standardized procedure to easily determine the success or failure of an attack. Personally, I’m from the school of thought which says that since war is chaos, a wide variance of random probability is appropriate when determining the success or failure of an attack.

I’ve seen this handled a couple different ways in the various games I’ve played, but I am most familiar with the method D&D, and later Pathfinder, have used since their beginning. Every player and NPC has an ‘Armor Class’ number representing how difficult they are to hit. The attacker must roll a twenty sided die, and if their result is equal to or better than their target’s AC, the attack is successful and damage can be rolled. Various editions have had more or less complexity on top of this basic system, but the fundamental mechanic has remained unchanged from the early days of OD&D. Why change what works, after all?

This is one of the problems I’ve encountered while developing this game. For some things, including conflict resolution with regard to attacks, I don’t have any ideas better than the ones which have been used in D&D for decades. And while I wouldn’t go so far as to call using D&D’s attack roll system ‘plagiarism,’ there is something that feels wrong about it. If I use a mechanic someone else came up with, without adapting it to make it my own, then am I really making my own game, or am I just regurgitating something that already exists with a few superficial tweaks?

It’s not as though it would be difficult to come up with a reasonably unique mechanic, either. Just off the top of my head I can think of a few different ways to handle this kind of conflict resolution. The attacker and the defender could make opposed rolls, which would increase the chaos of battle. I could replace the 20 sided die with a 30 sided die. Perhaps the attacker doesn’t even make a ‘to hit,’ roll. Every attack immediately results in a damage roll, and every character has a minimum amount of damage which must be rolled in order to hurt them at all. Or perhaps “defense” and “attack” numbers are static, and can only be modified with clever tactics described to the GM. Give me 30 minutes and I’ll give you a dozen more ways it could be done.

But would any of them be better?

I would have to be stupid to be different, simply for uniqueness’ sake. It’s possible I’ll think of a mechanic which better suites the tone aiming for than the D&D attack roll does. It’s also possible that I won’t, and if that happens, then why should I shoehorn something different into the game just so I don’t feel as though I’m being derivative? I believe that every choice made in game design should be made because the designer believes it improves the way the game plays. I can’t think of any other consideration which matters at all by comparison.

True as that may be, however, it doesn’t stop me from feeling bad when I lift something wholesale from another game. Even a game as time honored as Dungeons and Dragons.