Internville

This was going to be for Crosstoberfest (remember that?) last year, combining the Hollow Tooth Diaries and Workshop Tomorrow. I was going to wait until next month to publish it in Crosstoberfest Redux. Today, Friend Kris threw down the gauntlet, challenging me to write a one-page RPG, done by tonight. I'd been musing on this one for almost a year, so I figured I may as well put it down on e-paper.

With that, I present to you, Internville.

Spectrum Cosmos: Meet the Factions

In order to populate a miniatures game in the modern style from the MIRACLES OF TOMORROW features, some extrapolation is necessary. First, most pieces full-fledged characters, and not 'generic' squads and soldiers. Additionally, MIRACLES was not an attempt to build a consistent setting in the model of a modern science fiction series. Any continuity between stories is as likely a product of plagiarism as it is a product of methodical world-building.

So while many of the characters, names, inventions and concepts come from Osterhagen's writers, the unifying setting framework is largely my own design. Some of the information in this framework may contradict details from the original texts, but I am striving to keep the spirit of the originals intact while developing a 'sourcebook' for the Spectrum Cosmos universe. I intend to post this sourcebook (with references, of course) in ad hoc instalments on the blog here. Look for the “Sourcebook Corner” tag.

Of course, all this work is in service to the Spectrum Cosmos game, so let's begin with something at the heart of an appealing miniatures game – the factions! To fully represent the Spectrum Cosmos setting, there would be no fewer than seven (maybe eight) distinct factions and a robust roster of mercenary forces. In brief, they are:

Spectrum Cosmos - The Basics Concluded

Okay, you didn't read all of that. I didn't read all of that. It's not as bad as it looks, I swear. Here's the cheat sheet.

The Turn

1. Beginning Phase – Effects that begin, end, or trigger at the beginning of the turn do so.
2. Activation Phase – Players activate their units one at a time. During a unit's activation, it may move its speed and then do one of the following:

• Perform a Simple action on the unit's profile. If the modified Skill on the Simple action is at least 1, it is successful. One Command Card of the appropriate suit may be played, adding its value to the unit's Skill. If successful, resolve the action's effects immediately.
• Perform a contested action on the unit's profile, declaring an enemy unit as the target. The target must immediately declare a reaction. It can use a Default reaction, or play a Command Card to use the corresponding reaction with a bonus. The acting unit cannot improve its Skill with a Command Card. Assuming both action and reaction are valid, compare the Skill values of the action and the reaction. Only the ability with the higher Skill takes effect. The acting player wins ties. The successful ability is resolved immediately.
• Play a Command Card face down, declaring an enemy unit as the target. The target may play a Command Card in response or declare a Default reaction.
• Take no action.

3. Resolution Phase – Once all the active player's units have activated, the Resolution Phase begins. One at a time, the active player chooses a face-down Command Card to reveal. Actions are resolved in the same fashion as in the Activation Phase. This time, Command Card values are added to acting units' Skill ratings.
4. End Phase – Effects that begin, end, or trigger at the end of the turn do so.

Of course, those are just the basics. Spectrum Cosmos includes all the exceptions, contradictions, rulebreaking, and ambiguity we expect from a miniatures game.

Next Time: Meet the factions, and actual unit stats! 

Spectrum Cosmos - The Basics Illustrated

Let's put it all together. Remember the Guy?

Unit Name: Guy

Keywords: Human, Living, Generic

Speed: 6

Resolve: 3

Armour: 0

Wounds: 2

Sun (Victory)	Gun – Attack: Range 12, Skill 3. Damage 1.	Evade – Default: Skill 3.
Moon (Psychology)	Scare – Skill 2. Fear 1.	Rally – Skill 3. Gain one Edge.
Mercury (Maneuver)	Hustle – Simple: Skill 3. Move 6”.	Flee – Skill 3. Retreat 6”.
Venus (Special)	Wild [+CC]	Dodge – Skill 5.
Mars (Savagery)	Fist – Attack: Range M, Skill 2. Damage 0.	Return Fire – Attack: Range 12, Skill 2. Damage 1.

Qualities:

Imagine two Guys facing each other down across an empty field. Each of their controlling players (Hadrian and Ruby) has a hand full of cards. For the sake of this example, let's say their hand size is 3. It is Hadrian's first turn. Hadrian activates his Guy, moves him up to his Speed (6) in inches, then has a choice. He can immediately resolve an action with no bonus, or secretly play a Command Card to be resolved at the end of the turn. Hadrian's hand is a Venus 1, a Mercury 2, and a Mars 1.

Be warned. This one is also way too long.

Spectrum Cosmos - The Basics Continued

Last time we looked at basic play structure, activating units, declaring and resolving actions and reactions. Below is a more concrete example.

First, let's make an example unit profile. Again, this is a structure I've condensed from Lawson's dense, longhand descriptions of unit abilities. This is a generic unit that nevertheless includes many of the game's core features.

Unit Name: Guy

Keywords: Human, Living, Generic

Speed: 6

Resolve: 3

Armour: 0

Wounds: 2

(In the final product, I'd likely include balancing mechanisms, such as point cost and maximum allowance up here)

Sun (Victory)	Gun – Attack: Range 12, Skill 3. Damage 1.	Evade – Default: Skill 3.
Moon (Psychology)	Scare – Skill 2. Fear 1.	Rally – Skill 3. Gain one Edge.
Mercury (Maneuver)	Hustle – Simple: Skill 3. Move 6”.	Flee – Skill 3. Retreat 6”.
Venus (Special)	Wild [+CC]	Dodge – Skill 5.
Mars (Savagery)	Fist – Attack: Range M, Skill 2. Damage 0.	Return Fire – Attack: Range 12, Skill 2. Damage 1.

Qualities:

My Life's Work, Explained

A few years ago, some friends and I were discussing what our issues were with 7th Sea. Wouldn't it be great, we mused, if it was more like Legend of the Five Rings, where you could actually gain ranks in your fighting styles before your gaming group was sick of the game and ready to move on to something else? In our imaginations, there was a glorious rewrite, where all the schools had five levels, sorcerers could actually accomplish anything, and Swordsman Schools didn't have abilities that outright sucked. Descending from the clouds of fancy, we realized how enormous and impractical a project this would be.

A little while later, I started on it anyway.

I called it the 7th Sea Overhaul, a title which quickly changed to the largely-nonsensical 7th Sea Keelhaul, because, you see, pirates. My loyal readers know well that I take on over-ambitious grand projects and never finish them, and this one is no exception. I've worked on it off and on over the years, at times seized with creative passion, at other times leaving it dormant for months on end.

I figure on days when I don't have anything else to write about, I'll throw up a school and a bit of commentary on what I was trying to do. It'll be good motivation to acutally edit and revise some of my clunkier additions.

Spectrum Cosmos - The Basics

Alright, enough background. Let's get to the game.

Spectrum Cosmos is a diceless miniatures game that uses cards and secrecy as its random element. If I had to compare it to modern games, I'd say it has elements of Warmachine, Infinity, Malifaux, and the board game Fury of Dracula.

Read the details below.

Spectrum Cosmos - An Explanation

A while back, I decided that I wanted to develop a ruleset for a miniatures skirmish game. As it turns out, I didn't have to.

During my layover in London, I found an old stash of MIRACLES OF TOMORROW MAGAZINE for sale in a street market. I picked it up on a whim, and, well, you can see from my last few posts what I discovered.  I'd been reading them (carefully!) off and on for the past week when I stumbled across this note from publisher Max Osterhagen. I dug through my collection to find the previous issue he referenced, which included this introduction by author James Nathaniel Lawson, who apparently invented a miniatures wargame back in 1933. Such a find prompted me to do some research.

Author's Note from MIRACLES OF TOMORROW MAGAZINE Vol 7, No 3, July, 1933

Dearest Readers,

By now you have finished reading my little fable. As I wrote it, Sergeant Bronzewood and her brave frontiersmen managed to fight off the Faceless Men from beyond Jupiter, saving the lives of the colonists of Star-Fort Alpha. But what if the battle had transpired differently?

Publisher's Note from MIRACLES OF TOMORROW MAGAZINE Vol 7, No 4, October, 1933

To All Loyal Future-Minded Readers of MIRACLES OF TOMORROW MAGAZINE:

ADAPT OR PERISH! Those are the words to live by in this, our modern age. Every day, new MIRACLES OF SCIENCE burst out of our nation's workshops and laboratories.

In our lifetimes, wireless telegraphy has begun to transmit news around the world at the speed of lightning, man has unlocked the secrets of flight, and with electrical lights we can reclaim our world from that savage conqueror Night. In earlier centuries, but one of these discoveries would define an era. But today, SCIENCE CONTINUES ITS FORWARD MARCH.

The only question that remains: WILL YOU JOIN THE FUTURE, OR BE LEFT BEHIND?

I Fixed 7th Sea Some More

I love 7th Sea, but it wasn't very good. So I rewrote it. My list of 'house rules' changes the character advancement system to be more like Legend of the Five Rings 3rd Edition, hopefully addressing some of the underdeveloped or poorly thought-out system aspects in the process. I

t currently runs to about 20,000 words. If you want a copy, let me know.

Anyway, I picked it up again this week, for no reason whatsoever, and added a new thing that I think helps an underused aspect of the system get some play. Active Defences (a topic I intend to write a bit about in a more generic sense later) in 7th Sea suck and are hard to do. So I added this:

Weapon Speed (Weapon). Advanced Knack for all Weapon Skills with that already have Parry. For the purposes of Active Defence with the noted weapon, you may treat Action Dice as if they rolled an amount lower equal to your Rank in this Knack.

Your maximum Rank in this Knack depends on the weapon: Heavy Weapons and Hand Axes cap at 1; Fencing at 2; Improvised at 2 or 3 (haven't decided, but Improvised Weapons need all the help they can get); Knives, Panzerhands, Polearms, and Staves are 3; Cloaks, Shields, and Bucklers at 4. I also can't remember if you can Parry with whips or not. If so, probably cap at 3.

'Nonstandard' Athlete Knacks (basically everything but Footwork, because I love nerfing Footwork) automatically have Weapon Speed equal to the character's Rank in the Knack.

I've tried to integrate it with some existing (and new) Swordsman Schools granting bonus Ranks and increased maximums.

Any thoughts? Specifically, any thoughts from my 7th Sea group? It feels weird to just drop it in like that, but Knacks aren't exactly hard for you guys to pick up.

If you don't care about this game, then I apologize for everything you just read.

ZSP Has Begun a Great Work!

It has the working title Pentad.

It is a universal conflict system that was conceived for mass combat, but works alright on individual, social, and biplane dogfight scales. Also, eerily good for spaceships.

It is preventing me from serving my country to the best of my ability.

Big Rolls and Little Rolls

Something to consider in RPG design is the size of the average roll. I use the term 'roll' pretty loosely. Whatever conflict-resolution mechanism - cards, resource expenditure, whatever - is fine.

The dimensions in which a roll can be big or small are:

1. Absraction - the more of a scene gets resolved in one roll, the bigger it is.
   
2. Player Control - the more the players can affect the roll, the bigger it is - especially if players can affect it at the time of the roll.
   
3. Side Effects - bigger rolls often have consequences that extend beyond a strict determination of success or failure.
   

Let's take some examples. The biggest roll I know of is in Don't Rest Your Head. You only roll the dice in that game when it's really important, as each roll involves the chance of madness or death. The roll also resolves an entire scene or antagonist. Fights, escapes, explorations, are all abstracted down to one roll. The roll is also complex. Besides the level of danger inherent in the roll, characters have control over the amount of risk and effort they're willing to take on in exchange for success.

The smallest roll is a coin flip for a single action. Heads or tails, success or failure. Neither players nor GMs can affect the probability of the outcome, the 'roll' itself only affects one action, and it doesn't 'mean' anything beyond the very minimum required by a roll in an RPG - does the action succeed?

Another game with large rolls is the new Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. All the bits and non-standard dice govern not only success and failure, but your character's approach to the situation and positive and negative side effects. The result is fairly baroque, but intuitive enough at the table to do complexity well. WFRP3E's rolls are still as common as a smaller roll - less abstract - but are still large in their level of implication.

Other ways of enlarging rolls (without using funky types of dice) are degrees of success (Alternity, Dark Heresy); complex, multi-roll challenges (D&D4E, both Spycraft editions); and Cool Points or Effort Points or the like (Shadowrun, 7th Sea, even HERO System, with its rules for 'pushing').

Conclusions? I don't really have many. It's just worth thinking about when designing a game. These are gross generalizations, but more abstract rolls tend to favour games less about combat and more about story. Rolls with more player control tend to favour characters that succeed through style or inner strength, rather than strict competence. Side effects can add levels of mechanical or tactical depth, as well as mechanical representations of more story-based consequences, but side effects can also easily be handled inelegantly.

I Hate Social Combat

... I really do. But that doesn't mean it can't be fixed.

I like the idea. It's a roleplaying game. Why not have a game-y bit that supports roleplaying? Why not make talking at least as mechanically interesting as combat? Why reduce the complex cut-and-thrust of a discussion to a single roll? Not to mention the classic argument "My character can do a whole bunch of stuff better than I can. Why can't he talk better too?" Which is a solid argument. I've just never seen it work in practice.

Why is that? As far as I can tell, it's for a couple of reasons, but they mostly stem from the fact that the basic assumptions of RPG combat don't really apply to conversations. They don't necessarily proceed in a logical order, they don't always involve the whole team, and most importantly, it's hard to synchronize the roleplaying aspect of them with the mechanical aspect.

The problem basically comes in when you have to break up a conversation to roll dice, and the dice deny the logic of the conversation. Of course, you can just ignore them, but then why have the system at all? For example, and this has happened to me, a player spouts a perfect, cast-iron argument in a social duel, amasses all his Rule of Cool bonuses, and still rolls garbage. The GM has no comeback; the NPC just says "Nuh-uh!" Utterly shatters the whole roleplaying immersiveness and leaves everyone feeling let down. The GM in this scenario was adept enough to make the next social 'hit' on the NPC basically do what the total flub should have done, but it was a jarring experience.

The attempts at doing a social combat system that I've read or played all had these problems, though some were smart enough to attempt to address them. Some games simply use the same system for physical or social combat. Examples are Mouse Guard and Spirit of the Century, aka My Favourite Game I've Never Played. These games are both clever enough to know that conflict, in whatever form, has consequences other than getting battered into the dirt, and both encourage the players to consider what 'losing' a conflict means in the circumstances of the conflict. This is a good start. They still have the problem of running out of things to say before the conflict is over, break up the conversation with arbitrary initiative rules, though do okay at incorporating multiple participants.

By contrast, and those who know me knew this was coming, Exalted has the most execrable excuse for a social combat system. A single attack is apparently five minutes of back and forth, so is therefore impossible to roleplay (which is the whole point, isn't it?) and doesn't need to follow any sort of objective set from the start. You can imperiously command some schmoe to go fetch your slippers from your affordable studio apartment in Great Forks forty times until he's out of social hitpoints, then, as long as you can hit his social defence value and keep him from punching you for five minutes, he's your willing slave. One could make the excuse that the book is supposed to include a table describing how much willpower people are willing to spend on single issues, but asking for clemency based on something the authors forgot to include in the book is a bit of a weak argument - no stunt bonus to MDV there. On top of Exalted's generally bulky dice-rolling mechanics, you have a social combat system that actively disrupts in-character roleplaying, arbitrarily governs the discussion with its '2 willpower per topic' rule (a necessary evil to prevent assholes from making the same arguments over and over - though it does also mean that the arguments that don't work are the ones that get repeated more in the conversation), and makes little to no logic when it comes to the endgame. Also, though this is more an issue of personal taste than an inherent flaw that makes things less fun, physical combat is fully incompatible with social combat. If a character makes a remark so cutting that someone pulls a sword on them, it doesn't sound to me like the conversation's over. It sounds like that character is winning, though. Why punish them for pushing the right buttons?

Friend Kris over at Glitterdust just took a swing at social combat for 4th Edition D&D, which I'd love to discuss, but this is getting a bit long. I'll look at his system, as well as attempts from my game design projects - one of which is based on 4E as well - tomorrow.

Workshop Tomorrow! A Sad Excuse for a First Entry

My biggest RPG project lately is a pretty crazy appropriation of D&D4E. Before I chuck up too many details, does anyone know what happened to the OGL of old? If I share this with the world, will sinister agents parachute from helicopters and mess up my house?