To Be Resolved

Let's Talk Saves and Action Resolution!

Why this blog should just be called "Games I like"

This time I’m just going to get my praise for Chris McDowall and Rise Up Comus out of the way in the first paragraph. Both of them have fundamentally changed how I think about running games in their own way, but if you’re reading this blog you probably know enough about them that I can hop to the point. I’ll start with an entry from the first chapter of His Majesty the Worm, which I first read while I was still running fifth edition D&D and variants of Cypher every other week. Josh says, “…GMs are armed with four stock phrases:

It’s foundational and, again, if you’re reading a blog about tabletop then this is not going to be revolutionary for you. I was reminded the other day of how clear this toolkit is to get on the same page as your players when I was listening to his interview on Reading DnD Aloud; it had been a long time since I looked back at it! But it was an important part of my growth as a GM to put formal steps of how much conversation should happen before the question of randomness even comes into play. The conversation that comes out of “Say more about what you’re doing” or, more often, “tell me how on Earth you think this should go” leads to some of the best tabletop experiences that I’ve had!

Chris then alley-oops this process when he talks us through the action resolution procedure for Mythic Bastionland:

When the players take action the Referee works down this list:

  1. Intent: What are you trying to do?
  2. Leverage: What makes it possible?
  3. Cost: Would it use a resource, cause Virtue Loss, or have a side-effect?
  4. Risk: What's at risk? No risk, no roll. Otherwise make a Save or a Luck Roll.
  5. Impact: Show the consequences, honour the established risk, and move forward

There isn’t really any difference between these two methods, they are just a, like, mathematically perfect way of translating conversation-as-play to mechanical implementation of what is happening in the fiction. One thing I won’t dwell on but I appreciate is that the specifics of the system rules only come into play to resolve anything that is left to chance. Regardless of how we implement character-differentiating stats and action resolution, the texture is going to be the same. Intent, leverage, cost, risk, and impact.

So What?

I’m going to quickly run through a compare and contrast of the three systems I feel most inspired by, and then we will finally get to what that means for this version of our game.

Tests of Fate

In HMTW, uncertain actions are adjudicated by a test of fate. Players draw from the Minor Arcana (1-14) and add their Attribute Modifier (1-4) in an attempt to hit a static target number of 14. Situational modifiers are called (dis)favor and either add or subtract 3 from the total value. If players miss the target number on the first draw, they can “push fate” at the risk of a critical failure. This is a very fast procedure. There’s no step to calculate a DC, players know what they are in for, it’s very fun when everyone is watching the draw like a hawk. While this is the closest matched to our game by virtue of already being a system that uses cards, it does not quite match my mental model for how we will work with stats. Still a great benchmark to return to.

Virtue Saves

Mythic Bastionland adjudicates player-facing uncertainty with a d20 roll under “save” system. Player “Virtues” range from 0-18. The juice here is that, as the knights continue adventuring, they deplete their Virtues, which serve double duty as health and stamina. Thus, a save that would have been easy at the beginning of the session becomes far less certain as the knight is sleep-deprived and stressed out. This is elegant, it directly and mechanically couples adventuring attrition to difficulty. That said, Chris himself has a better post about the relationship of difficulty to tasks in the Bastionland sphere, so I’d recommend reading that. For completeness, GM-facing uncertainty is adjudicated with a basic d6 Oracle roll.

Skill Tests

I’ve mentioned Cypher as an inspiration a few times so I quickly want to share some of what I think works really well in it. Cypher is also a d20 system, but its task resolution process works sort of backward from Bastionland. The procedure is more like:

  1. Player states what they want to do
  2. GM assesses the difficulty of that task in a vacuum on a standardized scale of 0-10. This corresponds to a target number on a d20 of 3 X Difficulty. Note that this means a difficulty of 7 and above is impossible by any reasonable standard
  3. Player then checks to see if they have any relevant skills in which they are Trained or Impaired. Training (or specialization) that is relevant to the task at hand knocks down difficulty by 1 (or 2 for specialization) without any additional input.
  4. Player and GM then negotiate whether there are any situational modifiers in the scene. The classic example is weather, but this is where players and the GM have a chance to flesh out the physicality of the environment. This step may decrease or increase task difficulty by another 1 or 2 steps
  5. Player then determines how much Effort they want to spend. Effort requires spending resources from a pool and allowable amount of effort is limited by current player Tier. Each level of effort spent decreases the final task difficulty by 1

At this point the task difficulty is set and the player attempts to beat the final target number on a d20 roll. This process is less elegant than either HMTW or Bastionland, but it does facilitate the same overall conversation that our other games encourage – it just fixates heavily on the concept of difficulty. What I like about it is, again, it correlates expenditure of diegetic effort to overall stamina. There are no “stats” in Cypher – there are Pools for Might, Speed, and Intelligence. Like Bastionland, combat damage is dealt to your pools, which correlate to how effectively you can resolve actions as the day wears on. I think there are lessons we can take from all of these to build our system. Note: I wrote this summary like twelve hours before learning about the updates for the new version of Cypher, which seems to be switching from damage-to-pools to a more narrative, condition-based version of player damage. Funny!

Game Design Time

Our second post postulated a character with suit-based stats that hew closely to stats in an Oddlike game. Let’s double down on that. I liked it. As a recap:

• Spades: a temporary HP buffer
• Hearts: physical endurance and toughness
• Diamonds: brains and quickness
• Clubs: force of will

Let’s say that we have a standard array of 8, 6, 5, and 4 that we assign to our stats at character generation. Maybe you have to assign 8 to your Past Life suit. We draw a Fixer, so we know our Diamonds is an 8. We want to be good at avoiding harm, so we assign 6 to Spades, then we have a toss-up but decide we are tougher than we are willful so we go with 5 for Hearts and 4 for Clubs.

Right now I am thinking that Spades acts like Guard in Mythic Bastionland – there are no saves associated with it, so in a standard array system you’re sacrificing performance under pressure for a better defensive capacity. As for other stats – Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs, I think we will go with something simple like Electrum Archive’s d10 roll under for saves. Draw a card from the deck, aiming for an equal or lesser value than your stat. The caveat here is that obviously a deck of cards is really more like a d13, so I mildly worry that players may get frustrated by a slightly unintuitive probability distribution. If your Mask in Electrum Archives is a 4, you have a 40% chance of successfully deceiving someone. Intuitive. If your Hearts in our game is a 4, you have a 31% chance of successfully leaping over a ravine. Just a little off, but I can live with it for now.

Aside on Bonuses

Because we have axes of character customization that provide them with unique background knowledge (Past Life, Creditor’s domain, and Special Interest), I think I do want to provide a numerical bonus for doing something your character would logically be good at. Something like HMTW Favor is solid, a flat +2 or +3 bonus to your stat during the save would make a big difference and probably feel good at the table. I also like the idea of a benefit for suit matching on a save, but we can put a pin in that for now - maybe situational bonuses interact with card suit.

Regardless, we now have a simple enough action resolution framework to hang our hat on. Let's go pretty directly with what we have learned from MBL and HMTW. Intent and Leverage are used whole cloth. As for Cost, we now have a framework where we can incur costs against our stats in order to make things happen – I think we potentially lean harder on Cypher and use stat cost as our barometer for task difficulty. We are working with low enough numbers here to probably stick with costs in the 1-2 range for severe difficulty. If a cost is incurred, you probably don’t have to turn around and then draw a Save against your reduced stat, but risky actions require risky resolution. Then, of course, resolve the Impact of the action.

Conclusion

I’ve been wrestling with how baroque to go with action resolution for this game, but I think Chris gives us a great starting point, and the questions that we have from Josh help us get there in play. One concern off the bat is that this now puts a ceiling on size for our stat pools; if stats can raise above 13, then saves automatically succeed, but if we expect to be regularly spending from our stat pool then we have a fairly hard limit on what we can accomplish in between recovery periods. I would rather see an advanced character in this game have an analog for Cypher’s Edge, which makes spending resources more efficient, than see an advanced character not face risky Saves. Maybe an advanced character gets a “free level of effort” on some types of tasks. Worth noodling on another day!

The other thing I like with this approach is that it feels like it interacts intuitively with some of the character generation ideas we have talked about until now. We know we are looking for ways to resolve uncertainty and spend resources for certain outcomes in our travel subsystem, or to activate Past Life abilities, and this feels like the right starting point.

I couldn’t make this post fewer than 1500 words, but in my defense I did combine two of the topics I wanted to hit next – that leaves Combat Revisited as my last topic I want to hit before I move into Level 0 playtesting. I hope you all have enjoyed reading because this has been a fun process so far!