Killing Stuff & Doing Stuff. The Game
My Favorite Local Watering Hole (Bar) is sometimes my second office. It’s a bit of a retreat for me when the four walls of my home office start to bubble up, when the hobo presses his face against my window, when the cats, in their endless plotting, start yowling show tunes until I feed them, I may snatch a small notebook and pen, race to the bar, and plant my ass on a barstool. I’ve had some great ideas at this place. I’ve also had some terrible ones. I’ll leave it to you to decide what this one is.
The evening started when I followed through on an invitation to talk to some local teens about writing, game design, and so on. I arrived at the library ahead of schedule. Sat in an office until it was time to start. And then was introduced to the audience. It was an interesting time, but I was a bit disheartened that the kids didn’t know anything about RPGs, and the lion’s share of the questions came from three adults, one of whom is a good friend from all the way back to the days of High School. After the talk, I wandered out of the library, down the steps to the garage below, and drove on over to 2 Public Square.
My fellow beer-slayers were there and we swapped the usual lies, traded offensive stories, raged about the troubles with nouns (people, places, things), and settled into the usual evening of bar banter. It was a bit into the night when I started talking about system complexity as a barrier to entry (I’m super-fun to drink with; in my defense, I was asked. I’m just as happy to talk movies, TV, sports, the gubment, whatever), something that’s been defecating in my brain pain for these last few months. What brought this up was how none of the kids had ever played a Pen & Paper RPG before and every time I used the word, I could see their minds latching onto Mass Effect or some other video game. Anyway, I spent a few minutes talking about how the various editions of The Game handled grabbing, grappling, and wrestling, and how the various efforts ranged from absurdly complex to overly simple, all to illustrate my point that simulation can and does get in the way of having a good time. This was not the interesting part of the conversation.
The interesting part came when my buddy Dustin asked why such games needed to be so complex. Rather than give a short answer—you have to understand that for every 1d2 beers I drink, my stories get 1d6 minutes longer—I said let’s make up a game. Right now. Well, right then. I wanted to show just how simple an RPG could be (both to him and myself). Here’s what I came up with.
You have three attributes, Killing Stuff and Doing Stuff and Hits.
Killing Stuff describes how well you murder things. My inclination is to say a character should murder things about half the time he or she tries. Others disagree and want to murder things all the time. So I will compromise and say 2 out of 3 times.
Doing Stuff describes how well you do things associated with your character concept. If you’re a warrior, the stuff you do probably involves breaking things and people. If you’re a wizard, the stuff you do is Book Learning, being pompous, and having all the answers. In this case, when a character has to roll the dice, I want him or her to succeed 1 out of 2 times.
Finally, Hits describes how many times you can be hit before you die. I decided on 4 times. It felt fair to me. Sorry if you disagree.
This is a simple game and so it only uses one 6-sided die. Since I know my accuracy rates are 66% to kill stuff and 50% to do stuff, I can easily model this on the die roll. You Kill Stuff when you roll a 3 or better and Do Stuff when you roll a 4 or better. Done.
What about the bad guys?
All bad guys have Kill Stuff, Do Stuff, and Hits too. We want these guys to be worse, so they Kill Stuff on a 4 or better and Do Stuff on a 5 or better. We also want bad guys to die quick, so a standard Bad Guy has 1 hit, tough Bad Guy has 2 hits, and a Bad Guy you fight all by himself has 4 or 5 hits.
In a fight, each group rolls a d6. Side with the highest result goes first. We don’t care about moving around. We only care about Killing Stuff in a fight. Each combatant uses Kill Stuff (strike with a sword, shoot an arrow from a bow, blast a monster with magic) by rolling a d6. If the character gets a result equal to the score or higher, he deals 1 hit to the target.
And that’s it.
I could of course make this more complicated. Some monsters might be harder or easier to hit, which would increase or decrease the chance of Killing Stuff. I could also layer in improved Killing Stuff options. These options would let characters spike their damage at different frequency rates.
1/Fight: A character can use the 1/Fight benefit once in a fight before rolling to Kill Stuff. On a success, the character deals 1 extra hit.
1/Game: A character can use the 1/Game benefit once in a fight before rolling to Kill Stuff. On a success, the character deals 2 extra hits. On a failure, the character deals 1 hit.
If I wanted to layer in levels, I could increase the number of 1/Fight and 1/Game benefits and also increase the number of extra hits as the characters gain experience.
If I wanted to layer in multi-target Killing Stuff options, I could just tax a 1/Fight, 1/Game benefit 1 Hit to affect one extra target.
And, you know, it doesn’t really matter what these pieces are, right? These elements can be whatever the player wants. A hit is a hit is a hit. If a player decides he or she attacks monsters using a sentient and giant pink teddy bear, that’s fine. If another player wants to suck souls with Stormbringer, that’s fine too. The system doesn’t change no matter how you dress it up. The stories players and GMs tell can. Space Opera, Western, Fantasy, whatever flavor of escape you want, this can do it.
I wonder if this isn’t all you really need. Sure it’s crude, ultra simple and unpolished. Sure, the quality of game play would vary based on the GM and players’ imagination. And at the core, there’s no improvement, no growth, no development beyond what you start with. But really, when you get right down to it, and I’m sure I’m wrong (16 years of marriage has made me comfortable with being wrong [I kid!]), isn’t your favorite game basically this anyway?
Yes, most games are exactly that when you boil things down. The important things is what you call the system, and if I can play an elf.
Well no, that’s NOT what my home games boil down to. But then, I’ve always known I’m a major outlier as an rpg player.
I think you’re right. At the core, this accomplishes everything a group needs to tell a story. However, the level of imagination required to play this game is much higher than a game that has some plug and play options. This system is akin to a blank canvas, waiting for the GM and players to paint on, where as “our favorite game” currently acts as a paint by numbers. The game currently has a great number of jump off points for story. Mechanically, the different effects and such, while yes adding complexity, allow players that have trouble visualizing what a wizards ‘kill stuff’ roll would be vs what a fighters ‘kill stuff’ roll would be immersed in the game, by at least allowing them to witness variable game logic. This is something that up until about six months ago I didn’t even realize was a problem. I thought that the more imagination space a game gave the better, then I stated to talk with some of my players about it and what I found is that a game that gives next to no imaginative direction would lose them quick, because for them the required imagination is scary. Of course these were the accountants, lawyers and other numbers crunching types… Maybe that has something to do with it. But why not allow both options in the same game? Start super open, with just some stats and hit points. Let the DM be the rules. Then layer in complexity. If a group wants full freedom, they get it. Roll some STR or Int to hit, deal small damage and move on. With that system a group can do anything, as you’ve described. But then add in layers of optional complexity, these would be things like skills, classes and items. Treat these like suggested DM rulings, and basically they just help shape what can and cannot be done with your super open base system. Groups can take them or leave them. Sure you may end up with dependencies ( to use the rogue class you must use a skill system) but if built right these would be easily managed. Maybe I’m crazy but I think giving both crowds what they want might be possible…
I was really embarrassed when I figured out that Fiasco was a long-form improvisation written down on paper.
I further realized that RPGs and long-form improvisation FORMS are the same beast. But this is a much longer conversation that you and I will have in a bar at some point, if you desire.
Mass Effect is an entirely different conversation, but I think it’s relevant that their minds latched on to _that_ game in particular. It’s not the kind of game we play at the table, and as an electronic game it’s necessarily limited in what it can do–however those that play that (story-based) series feel a very personal connection and stake in the protagonist because of the choices they’re offered. But again, whole different conversation.
On one level, sure. But, I’m going to go with No, this isn’t what my favorite game is about. There are a couple of reasons for that. For one, this isn’t a full capture of the basics of what draws us to the game. What you’ve presented is closer to a board game than an actual RPG that I would play. And it is a board game of which I would tire.
We can take something like Dungeon Command or the Castle Ravenloft/Ashardalon/Drizzt board games. Those are all simplified versions of 4E, and we could actually use those rules to run an RPG. But, we don’t. We don’t because they are missing all the important parts that stimulate our brains. We don’t have the cool intersecting build aspects that make us really enjoy character creation. We don’t have the role-playing parts that give our characters differentiation and personality. We don’t have the interesting rules that make us want to dig deeper and understand the game better (perhaps even to run it). We are also missing the ties to setting and story that give RPGs such great depth.
We see the same with Basic D&D. It can be very neat to play White Box D&D and suddenly be free of so many rules. It’s just a super-basic and fast PC Gen followed by dungeon exploring and getting mauled by horrible monsters. With so little said, our brains fill in the empty spaces. However, for most of us this starts to feel too thin. There isn’t enough there to feel like an RPG we want to play. We go from “this is so cool, so open”, to “okay, this is boring”.
That’s why RPG design matters. If every game were just the same skeleton with some paint, we wouldn’t be so passionate about our favorite games. There is a huge difference between every edition and every RPG, once we get down to what makes us tick or makes us happy.
On the kids in the library… we do need to reach that demographic. We seem to be doing a good job of getting cool board games like Forbidden island to very young kids, but somehow missing on the 10-teens with RPGs. We need some RPGs designed for kids that capture their imagination while keeping things light, then offer more as they climb up to our level of gaming. And, we need media to bring them in. Good D&D video games, a cartoon, and more.
My kids are really interested in RPGs. We run “choose your own adventure” imagination sessions as a form of group storytelling. We play a few simple versions of RPGs. For my son’s upcoming dragon-themed birthday, I’m running everyone through what is basically a scavenger-hunt LARP. When they get a bit older they will be playing RPGs – they’ve made that clear. They’ve also had lots of on-ramps to show them why RPGs are cool.
Ha ha ha, very nice, but you totally left out character creation, and a character sheet, and index, so clearly you’re not serious about this.
You’ve just described the GUMSHOE system from Pelgrane Press. And yes, they have an SF game (Ashen Stars), a spy thriller game (Nights Black Agents), a Supers game (Mutant City Blues), a horror game (Fear Itself) and a Cthulhu game (Trail of Cthulhu); all of them use the system you’ve just described. A lot of the DoStuff rolls are oriented around investigation, hence the name GUMSHOE. Check it out.
I think Alphastream hit the nail in the head.
That may be an excellent system to roleplay a varied number of situations with some modicum of improvisational rules, but it’s too light a -game-, and most of the audience of Dungeons & Dragons -prize- the “game aspect” of the system, wether some of them reaize it or not.
Tha narrative and adaptability on an RPG system are big factors on its design, but so should be the “gameplay” of the more “gamey” aspects of it. If the mechanics -bore- you, then it won’t matter much if the game is conductive to great narratives and character aspects, because you’ll tire of -playing- it.
Nowadays, RPG design seem to focusing too much on the narrative aspects of the game and forgetting the gameplay value of the mechanics per se….
A good mesh of narrative, adaptability and gameplay would make for a very strong RPG system…
As a freelancing RPG maker I must say that a lot of such a simple RPG games exists and are pretty awesome (D6 Lite for example is one-sheet game system and it is brilliant), I even made two similar games myself (only polish language version for now, sadly…). And this is the direction in RPG that I really like: minimalistic, rules-light (and usually light-headed) game that is simple and fun, without a pile of books and rules compendium that is visible from Space… Different people like different games, but my, my party and a lot of people wordwide want exactly a simple game that anyone can play, without a character sheet looking like an MS Excell document… When i cn use pure narration, I do it, theres no need for rules how to make every little thingy in the universe, seriously:)
“A game is a series of interesting decisions.” This game doesn’t seem to present many interesting decisions. In particular, it seems like the odds and the outcomes are exactly the same no matter what I choose; if a decision doesn’t matter, it’s not very interesting.
Players WANT the game to recognize different actions or options so that their choices matter. If the game rules don’t provide that (like in many rules-light games, including the one you propose here) then the GM has to figure it out on the fly, which can be a terrible mental burden and a distraction from the fiction. Of course some games go too far the other way, featuring so many rules that the GM and players are burdened with remembering them all and executing them during play.
A good RPG rule system is like a FAQ, addressing the most frequently encountered situations and presenting them in ways that make the players’ decisions really interesting. A great example of this approach is Dungeon World; each rule says very specifically when to invoke it, and provides outcomes that are interesting and useful to the imagination.
I completely agree that simplifying the rules can help things move quicker, which can make things more fun – but whether it works depends on what it is that a particular player finds fun about the game. This game is a simple simulation of some task probabilities – other content (dramatic flow, tactical decisions) will all be decided by the people round the table, not by the rules. If the group works well that way, great. But…
If you want a game with interesting tactical challenges, which IME a lot of players do, then I don’t think this is it. As Will said above, having a consistent probability means the mechanics don’t support interesting decisions – any tactical advantage will be handled entirely outside the rules, by negotiation between the players and the GM. This can work, but it risks people finding it unfair. (Player: “Yeah, I really like this plan, it can’t fail!” GM: “No, this plan is too obvious – the bad guy would have thought of that.” No rules involvement, just GM fiat.)
Similarly, if you play for a good narrative (as I and others do), this system doesn’t guarantee, or even help with, that; you’re reliant on the GM and players each contributing their own drama to the story, and (a greater challenge) on those people sharing the same idea of what’s appropriate for the game both in terms of what contributions to make and in terms of who can say what things. (Obvious example: If the GM thinks she should lead the players through a story she’s written, and the players think they should be contributing their own plot twists through their characters’ actions, then you’ve got a mismatch which might lead to frustration.)
For this second case: there are plenty of games whose mechanics *provide* drama, rather than relying on the players to supply it – one of my favourites is Apocalypse World, in particular because it is very clear to see *how* it does that. And it certainly doesn’t boil down to the system described above
(Will suggested Dungeon World, which is based on the Apocalypse World system. I haven’t read or played Dungeon World but I would imagine the same goes for that too.)
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to paraphrase Rod & Todd:
Imagination RPG! Yay!