Some Dork Notes

So, still kicking around my games.  Got one Mouse Guard based on an earlier version of the current system (ROPE) and a game running on Wednesday with a more traditional system that I threw together in a couple days.  That system is sort of a mess, and the (gaping) cracks (already) are showing, but the point of the game is sort of a stop-gap while the usual GMs on Wednesday night get their shit together.  

That said, both have been really useful, and I am starting to get more out of playing out systems which are not perfect or even very good for more than one or two goes to see how much I learn.  Fact is, I am good enough at working a crowd that my players forgive (or don't notice) shit that really bugs me.


So the Wednesday game is for really traditional style gamers who like D20 and World o Darkness (New more than Old) and they prefer the task based (Roll to see if you pick this lock.  Roll to see if you hit that guy.) to my preferred action/stakes based (Roll to see if you make it to the point in the house where something interesting happens.  Roll to see if you beat this guy or advance to the next stage of the boss battle) way of resolving shit.  I am cool with that.  Really.  I just don't like any of the systems that work that way, so I made my own, which I like a little better, but it's not very good.  That's what I am thinking about today.

In particular, I noticed one thing I screwed up pretty badly - I threw in a bunch of powers that were not all created equal, and one of my players lost the lottery on that.  

Another thing I noticed is that Keys (from The Shadow of Yesterday, Lady Blackbird, the current Marvel Comics game - you get experience when you do things that are important to your character) are probably not a great idea for my group.  I love them, but one of my players wasn't around when we made characters, and therefore got a lot of extra time to read through and took keys that basically reward him for doing what he always does, and he is the most active player in the bunch.  Meanwhile, my player who lost the power lottery made his character while coming off the effects of electro-convulsive therapy and chose randomly.  He is usually my second most active player.  I have a couple of other players who are moderately active, one who shows up for the explicit purpose of this being his night out of the house (full of children).

Anyway, there is one thing I have noticed about games like this - they have skill lists.  Skill lists good, skill lists fine, but first take care of he... erm.  Wait.  And I have come up with a problem with skill lists, that I think is pretty damned insoluble.

The skills on any skill list I have ever seen are not equal to one another.  I tried to remedy this with pulling a lot of utility skills together, though I also sabotaged myself by making the skill list lean heavily on Mouse Guard's which is fine if you are playing a game like Mouse Guard that is heavily survival focused, but this one is not, so a lot of wasted points.  Wasted points that I know a lot of players feel compelled to spend.  

There are a certain number of things that anyone, everyone involved in a game that centers on adventures needs to be able to do to be competent, to make a player feel like they showed up with this character for a reason.  You can be deficient in one or maybe two areas, but I know my players think that needs to be a choice.

In order to be a competent adventurer you need to be able to:Have strong or at least reliable recourse when things get violent.Be able to withstand hardships of physical, mental, spiritual natures and do what is onerous.Have strong or at least reliable recourse when people start talking.Be able to notice, investigate, hit the clues you need to progress in a mystery.Sneak, chase, escape, buckle on some swash when things get tricky, react quickly to danger.Tie your own shoes, interact with the setting in a way that you could hold down an honest job if you weren't an adventurer and survive as an adult.Depending on setting, there might be more than that (magic frex), but those are the basics.  Generally, a player, one of mine is going to want to feel like they are, in at least one of those instances, better than most people they will ever meet, even in the course of an adventure.  In absence of all other context, I pump my stealth or equivalent 10 times out of 10, and make sure that I can lose a fight less than the other guy, most of the time.  

There is other stuff, almost all of it could fall under the umbrella of the six above (and most of those under the sixth), but my players (and I) like to be able to look at a sheet and know not just what their character can do, but what their character usually would do.

With that you have things like the following:Scholarship and expert knowledge.Medical training.Wilderness and woodcraft.Technical Skills, computers (if applicable)Professional training of one type or another.Entertaining, working a crowd.Handling animals, domestic and wild.Skilled trades and crafts.Pick locks and pockets and doing larcenous things.Bargaining and haggling, appraisal and sales.These things are important to my players.  They want to be able to say they are good at some of these things, because it opens up actions that they can take, things that they can do as things that they do do, things they would do.  It's one thing to assume that my character who is adept at facing the onerous, reacting to danger, and taking care of his basic material needs is going to be fine in the forest, but it's another thing to know for a fact that the forest is where he likes to hang out.  At the same time, I might not, with this character's abilities, worry too much about his ability to pick a pocket or a lock, because he's good at that implicitly (through his major capabilities) and it's not that important to me.  On the other hand, I might want to make explicit that he's good at bargaining and haggling, because he doesn't have *that* strong a recourse when people start talking, but I want him to be able to trade in town despite his deficiencies in that area and not have to really fight to not get rooked.

To a certain extent, I think D20 got it kind of right and 4e D&D got it even a little more right - recourse in combat, the arguable center of the game (you have the odds stacked against you if you want to argue against) and the ability to handle that which is onerous (to an extent) is separate from your ability to handle animals, and rises independently of your other choices.  I think I got it more right, by accident, with ROPE, but I didn't see it as well as I do now.