Skills and the Ghostbusters-inspired simple system. Also, rantage.

Dammit, I just realised that if I run a fantasy game with the GB-style rules, I'm gonna have skills.  Only four per player, but... nngh.

I believe that skills take away from a gaming experience rather than add to it.  They tell you what you can't do rather than what you can.  You can do these things, but no other ones.  You fell into a river.  What's that?  You don't have Swimming on your list of Skills/NWPs?  Oh, dear, dear me.  It looks like you're going to be able to go fishing in your lungs now!  Yay for you!  I find it far better to do away with skills entirely.  Adventurers are considered to be the unusual ones for various reasons.  If your raison d'etre includes stomping about in haunted ruins, falling into rivers and other stuff that your average citizen likes to read about but never ever actually do, you probably have all the basic skills you need for such activity.  Swimming.  Horseback riding. Knowledge of rope use.  If I didn't spend the slot/points for Rope Use, I don't know how to make a knot?  Seriously?  And doing away with skills leaves the necessary room for player agency.  If you can't fast talk your way out of a situation with a die roll, guess what?  You have to actually do the talking.  If you don't have Find Secret Doors on your character sheet, you'll have to ask the GM what things look like, whether there's a loose stone or pivot point or hollow section of wall, by interacting with the game world.  You, the player, with the soda in your hand.  Yeah, you. Because what are you here for if not to role-play?  I've often heard "roll-playing" contrasted to "role-playing", but if you just roll your dice for success all the time (combat mechanics aside, of course), you're "roll-playing".  And you might as well go play Neverwinter Nights or Worlds of Warcraft, at that rate.

I also am of the opinion that weapon proficiences are for the birds, for fighters at the least.  I just read an article by Gygax in a Dragon collection wherein he denounces weapon profs (as well as critical hit/miss systems, which I also disdain).  In my Saturday game, our group has been dropped into a place where we're being hunted and we don't have any of our equipment.  It's not kept the machine gun dart thrower from punching people to death (it only takes a few hits from a dude with +11 to damage from strength to make most opponents fall the hell over), but the others, such as the bard and the militant mage who are proficient/specialised in longsword have to wield short swords at a slightly reduced penalty due to familiarity, are having some troubles.  If you can use a sword, you can use a sword!  Use it!  I don't care if you've been in the SCA for eleventy billion years!  This is a game, not a simulation.  I don't care about 'sword and board' and how it *really* is!  Augh!  Ahem.

So... what was I originally talking about?  Right, the fantasy Ghostbusters system thing and the skills and whatnot.  That's something I'll have to deal with when I get that off the ground.  Can there be a happy application of player agency when the players have skills on their sheets, or is that just my pessimism reinforced by ten years of playing with "roll-players"?

Changing of the Dice

While tinkering around in the simple system I'm yanking out of West End Games' Ghostbusters game, I pondered changing from using six-sided dice to using four-sided dice.  I find the ubiquitous six-sider boring, though it's far more accessible to non-gamers who might be better able to pick up this rules-light system as opposed to the monstrosities that are latter-day editions of D&D.  Four-siders are my favourite die, followed by twelve-siders, so I thought I'd look into how the game might change based on a different randomiser.

Adjusting the difficulty numbers assigned to tasks is simple: the standard range is 5 (easy) to 30 (difficult), with a new level after every five numbers.  Well, I see that 5 is 6-1.  Six is the maximum you can roll on one d6.  So for every "level" of difficulty you should be rolling one more die if you hope to succeed.  You would have a hard time rolling a 5 on a d6, but most characters don't have scores of 1 (I think 2 is the minimum, though injury or unusual circumstances can cause you to lose points in your traits), so we can safely assume the player will be rolling at least two dice.  If I apply the 'max on die minus one' formula to the d4, I get a scale from 3-18.  Again, it's hard to roll a 3 on a d4, but if you're rolling two of them, not too bad.  So adjusting the scale of difficulty numbers seems to translate okay.

However, with only four possibilities whenever you roll a die, the Ghost or Skull Die becomes a much larger threat.  The probability you will roll the skull and have Something Bad happen leaps from 1 in 6 to 1 in 4.  That's significant.  It could be justified by the setting -- if you run a dark horror or post-apocalyptic game with a deadly and/or scary mood, where the PCs should expect awfulness to be around each and every corner, it might actually benefit you.  I don't know that that's a good idea for my setting idea, which I'm planning to be mostly serious but not grim, with ample opportunity for some comedy/foolishness/slapstick.

So the jury's still  out on this one.  I'm still very much in the brainstorming phase of the setting, and I'm assembling the rules (mostly, as I said, pulled right from the pages of the Ghostbusters book) bit by bit as I go, so there's plenty of time to tweak and experiment.

Rules Light

I'm tinkering about, in my head, mostly, with the idea of adapting using stealing the D6 rules used in West End Games' "Ghostbusters" RPG for a gaming experience. I loved the super-light rules in that game and I think they'll be great for any number of settings. I would probably re-name the "Ghost Die" to a generic "Skull Die" or something, but that's barely worth mentioning.

In the Ghostbusters game, character sheets are slightly larger than a 3x5 card, including room for a portrait. Characters have four Traits: Brains, Muscle, Moves, and Cool, and a Talent for each, which lets a player roll four extra dice when attempting a feat that falls under that Talent. Each character also has a Goal and a set of Brownie Points. The general mechanic is: to complete a task, the GM assigns it a difficulty and decides what Trait it falls under. The player rolls the number of dice their character has in that Trait and tries to equal or beat the difficulty number. The dice are all six-siders, and one must be the Ghost Die, which has the famous 'no-ghost' symbol in place of the six. If you roll the ghost, Something Bad happens, whether or not you succeed, and the ghost counts as a zero. If you succeed or fail without rolling a ghost, you just succeed or fail and nothing particularly special happens outside what you might expect to happen in that situation. But if you roll a ghost, even if you succeed, Something Bad happens, usually, in Ghostbusters, with comic effect.

Players can spend Brownie Points to improve their chances to succeed or to save their character's butt in an emergency. They earn Brownie Points by successfully completing adventures and by explaining what happens to their character when they save his/her butt with Brownie Points. Brownie Points are a little like Fate points, but they're also hit points: if you take damage from something, say, a poltergeist slams you in the face with a phone pole, you lose Brownie Points. I think it's a wonderfully compact and functional system that you can play without the need to look up things on a chart every 2.5x10-2 seconds.

I've made some notes on vague ideas for a sci-fi setting, a 'mutant animals living in our modern world a la Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' setting, and I've even pondered using this in a fantasy setting, and not only to wean some of my players from the idea that D&D 2nd Edition Skills and Powers is the only D&D ruleset worth playing fantasy in. And I'm really getting tired of Forgotten Realms.

When I've looked over the Ghostbusters rules in a little more detail, and decided if this is something I want to do or not, I'll update here.

This Might Be Considered a Rant: THAC0

I just started reading Howling Tower.  I opened up a post from January today and the author referenced a post on Critical Hits about the way the game has changed, the influence of the Internet, et cetera.  I was cruising through this post and suddenly came to a screeching halt at this sentence: "We all know that huge weight that was lifted when THAC0 went away."

What?

What's wrong with THAC0?  If I know your character's THAC0 I know what Armour Class he's going to hit.  THAC0 20?  Rolled a 12?  AC 8.  It's basic subtraction, folks.  Not rocket science.  Third Edition decided to dumb down the system and now you all can't do math?  Eh?  Sure, it's easier to go, "The monster's AC is 12 so you need a 12 to hit it," but really.  I'm an English  Major.  I don't do math like some people don't do windows, get it?  I  like rules-light systems because I don't want to spend all my time figuring out seventy billion adjustments to my roll just to see if I can successfully walk down the street without falling over.  But THAC0 is not an example of a complex rule.

I started playing D&D (red box Mentzer) around 1984 or so.  I don't recall, as a child, having a great difficulty with descending Armour Class.  I learned it, and THAC0, very quickly.  Could it be that today's players are preoccupied with having the game their way, so their characters can be the special snowflake?  That they love all the new rules that "protect" them from "nasty DMs"?  That's fine for them.  I feel sad for them, but I'm not gonna argue with them, as long as they don't come leaning over here and telling me I'm a moron for using THAC0 and descending AC.  I feel sad that they've had to play with selfish and/or killer DMs who've abused them so much that they see a complicated, bloated ruleset as their only salvation.  And honestly: if you wanna be the badass mofo who kills all the monsters flawlessly and can never ever lose?  Go play an FPS game and turn on god mode.  If you want an experience that you'll remember, a fun time with friends, by all means, play D&D.

Told you this was gonna be ranty.