I’ve been thinking a lot lately about ability scores and their place in the game. It’s affected by a lot of things – read Monte Cook’s recent posts on how he’s handling stats and characters in Numenera, for instance. (Pitch in on the kickstarter while you’re there, if it looks interesting to you, because it looks fucking amazing to me.) Essentially the numerical stats are very, very truncated – there are three of them – and most of the character is modifiers, which might (in the case of a strong or charming character) affect stats for certain types of rolls, or might give the character a new suite of abilities. I’ve also been thinking a lot about the traits system in The Sims 3 (which I’ve been playing an embarrassing amount of lately) and the manner in which that differs from The Sims 2 (which I’m glad isn’t on Steam and that I didn’t use Steam when I mostly played it and that I don’t think Steam tracked hours played at the time I played the most of it, because good God did I dump a lot of time into that game). The Sims 2 had . . . eh, I could wax eloquent for a while on the differences and how I feel about them, but it’s mostly beside the point at the moment, to be honest.
Essentially the takeaway is this: I like complex character systems. Or rather, I like deep character systems; the complexity tends to be a side effect, not a goal in and of itself. However, there’s a lot of what I’m going to call legacy complexity in Zosias. Zosias as a system is based on the System Reference Document, which formed the heart of the D20 system, which was nearly synonymous with 3.0/3.5 D&D, which in turn evolved from several older versions of D&D. And so there’s a lot of stuff in the system that I’ve considered pruning, or have pruned, or have modified unto unrecognizability. On the other hand, there’s a lot that’s still in there because . . . legacy. I don’t want to tear the system completely down and completely rebuild it. Not all at once, anyway. Well, sometimes I want to, but that’s beside the point.
In my home games – which you have to remember are just between my wife and I, we form the entire extent of my regular gaming group at the moment – three-quarters of the rules never get used. I don’t remember the last time massive damage came up in our home game; the few fights her characters get into tend to be one-sided one way or the other, and don’t generally form the heart of the plot. The heart of the plot is typically romance and political intrigue, with cameos of genres such as mystery/detective stories. I don’t remember the last time I ran a dungeon-styled adventure. It must have been . . . well . . . five years, maybe? More? I actually have an amusing anecdote I used to share on this topic, which I wrote up and posted separately so I could get back to work on this post. Her current character isn’t a spellcaster, so that’s like half the rules only applicable for NPCs right there, and I mostly fudge that anyway. The fudging is informed by the rules – I know roughly what a spellcaster of x power can do, and what spells they have access to — but outside of combat situations, which are rather infrequent, the precise stats aren’t terribly important.
On the larger scale of the meta-campaign, though, the set of home games that I run . . . there have been a lot of campaigns between us where we never got around to statting out the character before the campaign concluded. Typically what’s passed for a character sheet is actually more of a highlights sheet of just the stuff that really matters – this character is unusually charismatic and a bit of a spellcaster, that character is more intelligent than usual but crap for physical stats, with Sherlockian levels of deductive skill that merits getting written up as its own ability . . . and gee, doesn’t this sound a lot more like a traits-based system than a stats-based system?
I’m reminded of an article I read years ago which talked about how (third-edition) grappling rules often ended up not getting used because gaming groups would organically route around them. Essentially, the subsystems that are more trouble than they’re worth get organically pruned because, often without any sort of spoken consensus, groups just stop using them, and GMs stop putting in situations where they come up. I thought it was this one (whose formatting does not seem to have survived the intervening years intact) but it’s clearly not; perhaps one of the posts leading up to 4th edition? I can’t find it now, regardless, which makes me sad because the point is a very good one. If anyone takes the time to find it or happens to remember it, I’d appreciate it.
Anyway, the point is, in our home games most characters end up being a sort of greatest-hits sheet when it comes to their stats. Skill rolls are used more frequently by an order of magnitude than anything else, but even then I often hit a situation described rather well by Steve Winter over at Howling Tower:
[. . .]I’ve observed many campaigns that appeared to depend heavily on skill rolls but in fact relied on GM/player interaction more than either the GM or the players let on[. . .]
[. . .]For the game to advance from A to C, characters must accomplish B. That task might be finding a door, unlocking a chest, spotting a bloodstain, bending a bar/lifting a gate, persuading the victim’s lawyer to let you have a look at the will, etc. The player with the key skill rolls 1 on the check[. . .]
Several things can happen at that moment. One is, the GM manufactures a reason to allow a second roll: “You didn’t find any secret door on the east side of the room. Roll again for the west side.” Another is, the GM turns the failure into success but makes it sound as if it could have been much better: “You find a secret door but you can only pry it open about a foot. You’ll need to strip off your backpacks and pass them through one at a time.” A third is that the challenge passes to someone much less capable: “The elf rogue couldn’t find anything, but what the heck, everyone else give it a shot.” Inevitably the one-eyed, hook-handed barbarian who doesn’t even like doors rolls a 20, saving the day and making Houdini Dorfinder look like a fool.
A fourth option is that the GM slips into the skill-free zone without realizing it: “You didn’t find a door, but you discovered a stone in the mosaic that seems out of place.” Someone says “I press the stone” and quelle surprise! A door opens. Intentionally or not, another group of players has just experienced the awe and mystery of the OD&D Limits.
Since I’m running solo campaigns, option 3 doesn’t come up very often. Occasionally I’ll let one of the NPC companions have the find, particularly if it plays up something important about their character, but if I do that too much I run the risk of running a one-person improv skit while my wife bemusedly opens a book.* The other three get a ton of use, and I do mean a ton. Because when you’re running a campaign mostly based around skill rolls, and some of them are important, and there’s only one person making the rolls, they’re going to spend a lot of time flubbing important rolls. There are a lot of things I do to prepare for this – trying to make it so that no one roll is a bottleneck for the adventure is good practice, anyway, and Zosias has luck points which can be used to reroll, and sometimes I’ll say something to the effect of “wink wink nudge nudge use a luck point.” But sometimes it comes up anyway.** And it’s at times like this that I really wonder how much utility skills have in our game. Yet there are times when skills are genuinely valuable – times when success and failure are both interesting results with interesting consequences. (Unfortunately these often get derailed by the expenditure of valuable resources to succeed, but that’s a whole ‘nother topic.) And nothing quite raises tension like a chance to fail when it matters. I certainly wouldn’t want to go to a completely diceless, statless system, and neither would my wife.
And the answer isn’t necessarily, “run a simpler system that matches the needs of the campaign.” The needs of the campaign tend to vary dramatically from campaign to campaign set in the same world. Sometimes a campaign needs complicated . . . er . . . deep and robust rules for, say, musical performances. If the story is about a traveling musician struggling to be the best traveling musician, currying favor and learning cool music-related tricks along the way, a simple skill bonus to Perform (Sing) and Perform (Yansing***) is not going to be enough. If the story is about becoming a prominent noble and tactician in a time of war who also happens to be an amazing musician, those same skill bonuses might be just enough – or even too much. What’s more damning still is when a campaign transmutes from one to another: when a campaign’s needs change dramatically over the course of the campaign – as happened with Kat’s traveling musician who eventually became a prominent noble and tactician in a time of war.
At a time like this, the best thing seems to be to have the depth and robustness necessary to handle a wide variety of situations, but just ignore the nonrelevant parts when they aren’t relevant. Mostly, this is what we do, but it’s not really supported by the system – we end up fudging it, making it up as we go along. Of course, ignoring parts of the system during the campaign is easy enough to do; if your AC and HP don’t come up for twenty sessions in a row but are still on the character sheet, it’s not necessarily a big deal as long as the things that do matter are there, and easy to find. The real trouble comes during character creation, because in a campaign like this the default method of creating a character is basically:
- Create your character. Spend several hours working out the entire character build. Calculate all of your stats and bonuses for all of the widely varying situations your character might experience. Make sure you remember to calculate your massive damage threshold, your skill in Bluff and Diplomacy (which you will use constantly) as well as Jump and Sleight of hand (which you will never use but have synergy or racial bonuses to), your saving throws, your HP, your AC (regular, touch, flat-footed, and all of the above, if you please, and since you’re going to be spending a lot of time in civilian clothes would you mind doing it all again for when you’re wearing those?), and your spell slots/day.
- Play the game, ignoring most of those several hours of work for the vast majority of the campaign, only to discover when they finally came up that at some point you made a math error when leveling up or just neglected to update your Jump skill, meaning that the stats on your sheet have to be fudged or recalculate anyway.
I think I might have just figured out why my wife hates character creation so much.
Potential Solutions
I got to thinking about this because I was thinking about creating a game based around political intrigue that could coexist with Zosias; that is, some stats (Intelligence, Charisma, some skills) would be shared and you could have a full character sheet that was completely statted out for both without conflicts, but you could also play either in isolation. It’s not as tall an order as it sounds, and I’m still probably going to meddle with it a bit, but my thought process essentially went “Well, if you can have some optional stats that only come up for certain campaigns, then why not . . .” and never came back. What if the game was designed so that stats and abilities broke down into clusters, which could be simplified if they weren’t important?
In a game like that, it would be easy to summarize portions of a character sheet. If the game is about politics and noble culture, it generally doesn’t matter whether someone’s Strength score is 15 or 16 — or even an 18 — it just matters that they’re strong. In most cases it becomes a character trait, like eye color or height but slightly more important — it sets them apart, makes them different from the other nobles, and gives you a handle to hang a name on, but doesn’t affect the game much. Generally, for something like Strength, Dexterity, or Constitution, you could just have a set of traits (Strong, Weak, Agile, Clumsy, etcetera) which players can take, or not. If they don’t have any of the traits? Well, you can assume that they’re around average strength — say, 8 to 13 or so. If they’re Strong then you can expect them to be in the 14-18 range. If they’re Weak, the 3-7 range. But the point is, the exact stat doesn’t matter.
I could even envision linking it to the build point system somehow: while the campaign is political it only matters that a character has 30 points spent in Combat, meaning they’re a capable fighter compared to their colleagues, and it may never get more complicated than that. Meanwhile they have 25 points spent in Social, and since that’s the important subsystem they have a detailed breakdown of what Social abilities they bought and what their (say) Influence and Rank are. If at some point they get irritated enough at another noble to challenge them to a duel, but the duel isn’t a focus and doesn’t carry a risk of death, they could conceivably treat it as an opposed skill check; they roll a d20 and add their 30 Combat, the other noble rolls a d20 and adds their 15 Combat, and it is summarily determined that the PC humiliates said other noble in one-on-one combat before a crowd of witnesses. The campaign doesn’t need anything more detailed than that.
If, later, the GM makes the decision that there are going to be a few tense fight scenes, perhaps even a rebellion or coup within the capital, he can say, “Hey, folks, have your Combat stats ready for the next session.” Then and only then do they worry about their precise Strength, their AC, and their HP. Most characters have a Strength of somewhere from 8 to 13, but one of them is Strong and so has a 14+; they all use some method to determine where they fall in that range. The character with 30 points in Combat sits down and decides whether they have Power Attack, Improved Initiative, Weapon Focus: Fancy Watch, etcetera. Essentially, much of the complicated character creation can be put off until it’s important, hastening character creation and ensuring that no one gets frustrated spending hours on stats which they will literally never use. Meanwhile, the players who really enjoy spending hours tweaking their characters can do so, and don’t have to do so before the game begins.
So, yeah. I think I’m going to go muddle with that idea for a little while.
*I’m probably going to do a whole bunch of posts on solo campaigns eventually, but one of the things that really stands out is how much I used to rely on the players talking to each other to fill space. There are a lot of situations where important characters who aren’t the PC have to talk to each other on-screen, which involves either making it really interesting and brief or finding a way to shoehorn the PC into the conversation. What I’m saying is, running solo campaigns with an RP focus is really good practice for being batshit insane.
**For one thing, it seems unfair to force the player to use a valuable resource to get past an unlucky moment. That argument doesn’t entirely hold up on its own – I mean, isn’t the game basically all about using resources to get past the adventure, if you condense it down enough? I think it’s more that situations like this often feel like a design flaw. Also, if you give players a valuable resource to use, the players should decide when to spend the resource — not the GM. Otherwise why give it to them at all? Granted this breaks down in some cases – it can be a good narrative element for increasing tension, with a good example being time as a resource that the players have only so much of to get to the bottom of something – but even then they’re in charge of how they spend it, for the most part.
***A popular Zosian musical instrument combining elements of the harp, the guitar, and the lute, in varying quantities depending on campaign, mood, memory, and creativeness.
