To Be Resolved

Stats_Redux_1_Final_Final_Rev2

Preamble Ramble

I’m glad I wrote my original post on stats because sometimes you need to have the wrong idea before the right idea presents itself. Josh and I were chatting about ideas of ways to fiddle with cards a few days ago – I’ve been sort of fixated on the turn of phrase, “an ace up my sleeve” and what it might mean in our game. With the stat scheme we wrote up last time, an Ace will basically always be a successful save. I had the idea of being able to draw an Ace and voluntarily fail the save by treating it as Rank 11 instead of Rank 1 in exchange for putting it “up your sleeve” for later. Josh and I agreed that if we are using OSR/NSR principles, saves should only really come up in a dramatic enough circumstance that a reasonable player should never be voluntarily failing the save; it would encourage degenerate play on both sides of the screen.

He then mentioned offhandedly that, if we are thinking about cards up our sleeves, maybe they should represent the Guard stat currently occupied by Spades and Spades should be converted to a normal stat that can be saved against. I balked slightly, but that’s because I always need to chew on a big change overnight before I can fairly weigh it against the current state. It wasn’t until I got through the first writeup of combat actions that I fully accepted that I should move away from the ItO stat scheme.

A New Scheme with New Inspiration

Part of the vision of the Past Lives aspect of a character is that Past Lives correspond to how that character solves problems. Additionally, we loosely associated Past Lives with Suits. I was too fixated on adhering to the Oddlike formula to follow this concept to its conclusion, so I think I missed a more interesting opportunity. We’ve previously said that:

Note – as a knock-on consequence of what we are doing today, I will probably swap Spades and Hearts. Hearts will not be the default HP stat for better or for worse, so Mediators should really be Hearts and Bruisers should really be Spades.

Why don’t we just make those our four stats?

Now we’re going to turn to another game that I find friggin interesting: Fabula Ultima. Fabula Ultima is a TTRPG designed to emulate classic JRPG tropes (probably hewing most closely to Bravely Default, but you see aesthetic cues from lots of other Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy games). A unique aspect of FabUlt is its approach to Checks that I wish I had thought about more closely in our compare/contrast post. There are four core attributes for characters: Might, Dexterity, Insight, and Willpower, each represented by a separate die. When a character attempts an uncertain task, the GM calls for a Check against two attributes. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been extremely frustrated in a d20 fantasy game where a player is trying to do something that reasonably requires both dexterity and strength to accomplish, but you can really only check against one at a time. The example given in FabUlt on Page 41 of the rulebook is a character hopping from roof to roof – the GM calls for a [Might] + [Dexterity] check, so the player rolls their d8 Might and d10 Dexterity dice and adds them together. This paradigm also allows for pure attribute checks; breaking down a door would be the canonical [Might] + [Might] test.

I think this method is clever. When the player gets to the point of the Risk step of Chris’s action resolution procedure (Intent, Leverage, Cost, Risk, Impact), what if we execute our “draw-under” save against a combination of our stats. Last night, I was running a session of His Majesty the Worm where a player was working to soothe an NPC while also convincing him that a member of his gang might be an infiltrator – this feels like an example of a [Clubs + Hearts] Save, but if he tried to de-escalate with a more technical, intricate argument it may have turned into a [Diamonds + Clubs] Save. To execute this, we add our two stats, draw a card, and hope that the card that we drew is equal or lesser than the combined stats. This adds a step of arithmetic to our checks but I think it smooths out our marriage of the fiction and the mechanics a little bit better.

Continuing the Train of Thought

The next organic thought that came up while I was working through combat mechanics was that some actions should be related to an ability to Ante resources. We’ve been sort of dancing around this idea of antes, bets, and incurring costs but haven’t really committed yet. I think in this iteration of stats I’m more ready to lean harder in; players start the adventuring day with a pool of poker chips for each suit equal to their stat value. Our standard array for "level one" is 5, 4, 3, and 2. The total number of chips is an analog for the character’s overall stamina, and when players take incoming damage they have to take it away from their pool of chips. For the sake of reducing overhead, we won’t tie conditions to being out of chips for a certain Suit (like Exhausted or Exposed in Mythic Bastionland), we will handle it in-fiction as not being able to incur costs against that suit anymore.

Then finally, we want to capture the effects of attrition on an adventurer’s capability. When a save is requested, the player sets their success threshold by selecting one suit’s max value and the second suit’s current number of poker chips. If a Bruiser has a max Spades value of 5 and only has 2 chips left in their Spades pool, a [Spades + Spades] save to break down a door must draw 7 (5+2 or under). If a Fixer is trying to carefully soothe the mood of an NPC, they make a [Diamonds + Hearts] save. Their max diamonds score is 5 and they have 1 Hearts chip left, so they have to meet or beat a value of 6.

Unanswered Premise

So what happened to our temporary buffer stat? I think it’s gone because we have rethought how we manage our stats overall. We are still achieving our goals of:

Concerns at this stage are:

-Additional arithmetic steps that may be unfriendly to players who don’t want that

But this pivot overall feels good and more playtest-ready. Plus finally finding an implementation for poker chips feels right for this game. Let me know what you think!