Weaponized Fluff

I’m fascinated by how all the different role-playing systems handle common tasks in different ways.

For example: the “help” action.

D&D: if you help someone, they roll with advantage. Instead of rolling the usual 1d20 plus bonuses in order to meet or beat a difficulty class (DC) or armor class (AC) number, they roll 2d20 and take the higher of the two (twice the chance of success!). The only thing you spend is time: this will use up your action in your turn, if in combat.

Dragonbane: Like D&D, help only costs your action, and they roll with advantage, which Dragonbane calls getting a boon. The difference here is that you have to roll at or below your skill level to succeed — a roll under system, not a roll over system.

Cypher System: if you don’t have an inability in it (i.e. are bad at it), you can ease the task for someone else’s d20 roll by one step — two if you’re trained or specialized in it. Each step translates to 3 points in the target number (TN), so easing the task by two steps changes it from difficulty 6 (target number 18) to difficulty 4 (target number 12). As with D&D, help only costs your action.

It’s also possible for you to perform a complementary action instead that eases someone’s else’s roll.

Avatar Legends: you can mark 1 fatigue and make the Basic move help a companion. This only improves their roll by 1 point, and so it’s only useful if they missed the roll with a 6 — where a +1 turns it into a 7, a weak hit — or got a weak hit on a 9 — where a +1 turns it into a 10, a strong hit.

Unlike other systems, it is done after the roll.

The One Ring: first, some background: TOR has aspects of roll over games and dice pool games. For a skill check, you roll a Feat die (a d12 with some special values) and a variable number of Success dice (a d6), and add them up. If you roll a 6 on any of the d6s, that is extra successes.

Now, on to the help details: you support someone by spending a Hope point (a somewhat limited resource), which gives them an extra d6. Also, you must have a rank in the skill you want to employ to help them, similar to Cypher System, where you can’t have an inability in the skill.

Star Trek Adventures: again, I’ll start with some background: Star Trek Adventures is based on the 2d20 system, which, like The One Ring, is another kind of dice pool hybrid. It uses d20s instead of d6s; for each d20 result, it uses roll under rules to see if that roll is a success — but after that, you only care about the number of successes, like a more traditional dice pool game.

Your helping someone is called teamwork, and multiple helpers are possible, if discouraged. You roll a single d20, and if it succeeds, you can add that success to the successes of the person you’re helping — but their roll only succeeds if they get at least one of their own successes.

Vaesen: in our first standard dice pool game, you generally roll your Ability + Skill number of d6s, and each 6 rolled is a success. You and up to 2 other characters can help someone with their roll, and each person helping adds a d6, up to 3d6. No cost for helping is mentioned in the rules at all.

Candela Obscura: also a d6 dice pool game, but you generally roll fewer dice than Vaesen, and there’s the concept of a mixed success on a 4–5 result. You help someone by spending 1 drive point (a limited resource) to add a d6 to their roll. You can only spend 1 drive point, and doing so opens you up to shared consequences if the roll goes poorly — since the GM never rolls, bad things only happen as a result of your rolls.

If multiple people want to help, it becomes a group roll, though it’s still only one person rolling and the others contributing. The dice pool also maxes out at 6 dice. (The subject can also spend their own drive points.)

Blades in the Dark: has the same dice rolling mechanic as Candela Obscura (which is based on it). To help, you take 1 stress, and only one person can help.

If someone is already helping, you can perform a setup action instead to help indirectly, similar to Cypher System’s complementary action.

Star Wars: again, I’ll provide some background first: Star Wars is a dice pool game, but the d6/d8/d12 dice have their own special positive and negative symbols on them rather than numbers, which you add up to determine the outcome. Assisting someone else is a maneuver, rather than your main action. Your assistance adds a bonus die (a d6 with positive symbols) to that person’s dice pool. Multiple people can provide assistance.

Whew! These are just the games I’m personally familiar with. I’m sure there are a lot of other variations out there.

It’s especially interesting how much or how little you can help. Sometimes, it’s doubling the chance of success. Sometimes, it’s just nudging things the tiniest bit.

And in the best examples, the way you help is inextricably linked to the unique features of that game, whether it’s a roll over/roll under game, a dice pool game, or a hybrid.

One last thing to note: in most systems, it is explicitly stated that the GM must approve the assistance attempt, and the player must explain what steps they’re taking in-game to provide the help. You can’t just say “I’m helping” — you have to say how.

These days, I’m leaning towards TTRPG systems where there’s a mission goal, stated up front, for every adventure.

D&D: The Road Goes Ever On

In D&D, the adventuring party often spends forever wandering around, trying to figure out what the goal even is. Especially in one-shots, this time spent can mean the adventure never finishes, because scheduling a second session with the same people turns out to be…impossible.

And, even in campaigns, it can lead to a lot of player frustration, when you just don’t know what to do. I’ve experienced both the player side of this and the Dungeon Master side of this, and neither is a particularly fun.

Sometimes, players even begin to fall into the mindset of “Let’s read the DM’s mind” and won’t do anything until they’re sure they’ve got it right. Or they’ll go round and round arguing about their course of action forever.

Mothership: Money, Money, Money

Outside of D&D, there are sci fi games where you’re just trying to make enough money to get by: what I like to call the “budget Alien” games. Mothership is the one I’ve been playing, but there’s also Orbital Blues, Death in Space, and many others.

The trouble is, players act differently when they just want money. In one of my games, the characters met an extraterrestrial no one had ever seen before. It should’ve been a big deal! But instead of exploring that, they just wanted to sneak past it to so they could loot its ship.

If you actually want your players to get involved in your story, they need different motivations.

What does it look like when you get the mission stated up front?

Star Trek: You Have Your Orders

Well, maybe you’re in a military organization, and the mission is literally a set of orders. The fits games like Stargate RPG, Star Trek Adventures, and Delta Green, all games that I’ve had a lot of fun running recently. (Though hierarchical organizations can cause their own problems, if players start thinking they can countermand what other players want to do. Lookin’ at you, Star Trek!)

Some of these games, in their published adventures, have an initial scene where the orders are given out. But for one-shots, I find that unnecessary. Post the orders somewhere, and you can start in medias res, already in the town/on the planet/etc.

Having orders doesn’t take all the surprise out of it, not at all! It’s always fun when something comes up that the orders don’t cover. When the team in the field has to make a difficult choice. When a walk in the park becomes a life-or-death struggle.

Vaesen: The Structure of Fairytales

In Vaesen, my current favorite of these types of games, you don’t have orders, per se, but your organization receives requests for help, and a team is sent out to provide it.

The objective always involves a Vaesen, or supernatural entity, in a world where such creatures can’t simply be shot and killed. Instead, their secret must be uncovered. The Vaesen are all different, as is their secret. So there’s variety, but there’s also structure. There’s always something new to learn.

And it’s not just playing the game that’s better. I also find writing such adventures is more fun, because there’s less ambiguity about what’s involved. You don’t have to invent a random hook and hope the players go for it. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time.

But that doesn’t mean there’s no creativity! While the Vaesen rulebook has lots of examples of the creatures, I’m also having fun inventing new Vaesen myself. I’ve taken from my own knowledge (yeti), from, yes, a Pirates of the Caribbean movie (Davy Jones), and even from Russian folklore (Finist the Falcon).

Less Frustration, More Fun

In my experience, players usually like knowing the goal, and only having to worry about exactly how to achieve it. The more I make that ambiguous, I’ve found, the more frustrated my players get. The clearer the mission is, the more fun they have. And that’s what it’s all about!

1. What’s Fun, What’s Not

Nobody likes it when their character dies in a role-playing game. It’s just not fun, and RPGs should be fun.

But the suspense of being in a situation where your character might die…well, there’s nothing else like it. That’s intoxicating.

How do you square that circle?

Most GMs, especially in D&D, lean heavily on the mechanics that make it virtually impossible to die. Even after you’ve gone to zero hit points, there’s still death saving throws, right? And, in addition to that, your enemies don’t hit you after you’re down. And, in addition to that, your friends are usually available to heal you.

And, and, and.

Those same GMs give you plenty of warning if you’re going into deadly situations, so you can know to prepare more, to be more cautious, while still allowing for a more carefree, chaotic attitude in most cases.

This works, for the most part, but it still feels like an unfortunate dynamic to me. Because it still leaves GMs scrambling when the dice do say that a character has to die.

The alternative is — well, the GM hastily concocts some sort of deus ex machina that prevents the death.

That saves you from the unexpected demise of a character, but it takes the tension away, too. You know, the thing I said was so exhilarating? You can’t both have the delicious suspense of death around every corner and the safety of knowing your character will survive.

For me, it’s a fundamental contradiction of D&D and its ilk.

2. The Horror, the Horror!

In horror RPGs, like Free League’s Alien (yes, from the Ridley Scott movie and its sequels) and Vaesen (dark fairytale 19th-century Scandinavia), death is far more overt and commonplace.

The Alien RPG’s mechanics are specifically designed to replicate the movies, where, once the action starts, tensions run ever higher, and violent ends pile up.

Marrying the RPG format (where you’re supposed to have the agency) with an Alien movie (where there’s tons of inevitable deaths) is not, for me, a great combination. The two sides aren’t complementary: they’re at war.

I want to feel like I have at least some say in whether I live or die, and how. And I didn’t feel like I had that when I played the Alien RPG.

OK…but if that’s true, then why do I think Vaesen, published by the same company, with many of the same rules and even worse player character fragility, works so much better?

Vaesen adventures don’t feel like movies to me. They feel like short stories.

In short stories, there may be a violent confrontation, where people die, but there’s generally only one of them. And every character gets to have their moment in the sun. They’re not just sacrifices on the way to the Final Girl.

You’re more careful under these circumstances, where real death is always right around the corner, but there’s also heightened terror and wonder as well. Personally, I like this setup more than the implied-but-often-not-really danger of D&D games.

And what’s true in D&D is true here as well: if your GM intervenes to save you, the tension goes out the window. So I prefer GMs who will follow through on a dangerous situation. Which isn’t all of them!

3. The Story’s the Thing

The trick is to make the character’s sacrifice matter. And here’s where it evolves from just die rolls and numbers to how both the GM and the player handle the story, the narrative elements.

I’m not a fan of games where it’s all narrative elements, where it’s just players improvising with no rules or rolls — I want the rules and rolls! But, on top of that, you have to weave a tale, something that ties together the randomness of the dice and the structure of the system. You have to make it mean something.

In D&D, the story is more like a novel — and beyond that, a long-running novel series, like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. The characters always come back for more adventures.

But as I said above, I think of Vaesen at a short story. You craft a beginning for your character, and — partially as the dice dictate — you also craft an end. There’s danger, but you have a choice how to go, how to tell your own saga. Unlike in real life, you get to narrate your own death, to your own satisfaction.

And that’s how I square that circle.