Alternate History and Horror in Feng Shui

Feng Shui is well on its way to a long awated second edition and though I was in on on the playtest I can't share much. I can share that Robin Laws' goals for this game were to make the template system even faster to use, and to even more focus on the preferred campaign frame of the PCs being the new incarnation of the Dragons moving from one butt-kicking site to another.

All well and good - it's his game after all - but when I've run it I've always wanted a slower burn on my conspiracy. There's a lot to be said for "someone shows up to explain the incredibly convoluted chi war and basically anyone not on your team is either an enemy now or will be one later" as a way to get the game moving, but there's also something for both non-chi war games and those where the PCs are slowly inserted in, being courted by multiple sides (perhaps in opposition to one another) and playing with the politics that are inherent to the setting but minimized by the Dragons campaign frame.

One area I want to touch on today is how the malleable history of the chi war gives room for some real horror. To explain, Feng Shui has 4 separate time junctures for action, and acquisitions or losses of Feng Shui sites in an earlier juncture change the downsteam history. Every normal person remembers the new history. the PCs, however, and anyone else who has traveled through the Netherworld (and likely through time) remember their old history unchanged. Eventually most abandon the 'normal world' because their external past changes so often in so many subtle ways that they have no frame of reference - a handy device for removing the complex interpersonal relations that are secondary to the Dragons frame.

That historical malleability, however, is a fertile ground for horror. I got some good mileage out of events in my 1001 New York Nights campaign - the PCs were top officers in a NYC 'flying squad' sent out to handle rough cases - not just in how the conspiracy was roping them in, but how the conspiracy was altering their pasts to make them more amenable to joining, or how once they had unwittingly entered the netherworld they started sliding out of sync with the rest of the squads remembered reality. I could easily ramp this up to 11 and make the game about both butt kicking action and the disintegration of ones history, the sort of trade off that powers horror gaming like Call of Cthulhu.

Imagine if you will the PCs entering the Netherworld without realizing it, returning home and finding over the next few sessions their case files change, their jobs change, their friends and enemies shifting roles and so on as the world alters around them. That's room for horror. And I expect I'll come back to that even after Feng Shui 2 comes out.

Turning Buffy to Agatha part 1 - Skills

Last time the players opted for a melodramatic rather than political view of Girl Genius. That meant using C. J. Carella’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer rules as my baseline. I could’ve built something from scratch but I’d enjoyed BtVS before and thought it’s balancing of powerful Slayer with scoobies would capture the powerful Spark and allies dynamic.

The Cinematic Unisystem is simple so I didn’t alter any baseline mechanics: same d10+stat+skill compared to a simple success table, same stats and life point calculation, same damage philosophy. Where I made changes were the Skills and Qualities that define PCs. BtVS eschewed the long Unisystem skill list for one that stripped down and combined skills and renamed them to match the show’s vocabulary. This fits my design philosophy, long being an advocate of the “no more than 24” skills list.

As such I compressed the BTVS melee skills into one and rolled Sports into Athletics. I broke out the Science skill into medicine, cooking and physics since science is much more important here. I dropped Computers and renamed the somewhat jokey Mr Fix-it to Mechanics. (Why do that if I made Chemistry into ‘cooking’, which is also a little jokey? Because there are a couple instances in GG where people incorporate chemistry as food, or say they’re going to cook or brew something, so I liked the flavor. )

I dropped Languages because, as my lovely wife pointed out, it’s an exclusionary skill – flagging that your PC to be good at languages means the GM should put in language challenges, and such challenges exclude the other players and slow communication. (As James Maliszewski pointed out in his lamented Grognardia blog stealth had the same problem – in early D&D everyone could do it, then the thief class was introduced with specific rules for doing it better, and 5E is struggling to bring such a basic ability back to the PC masses.) Since language challenges never occur in the source material the Languages skill is gone.

I added a Travels skill to indicate how widely your PC has ventured from the games starting point because that was somewhere I wanted an exclusion – the heiress would have been living in a small town in secret and learning about the world on the run, which creates a niche for a high Travels ally who looks cool knowing safe places to hide, arranging travel routes, finding the best restaurants, having contacts and, yes, savvy the local argot if I want to add a language challenge. Society was added for the same reason – something our heroine wouldn’t have but an allies could.

BtVS makes some interesting decisions on skill breadth and overlap – there isn’t a stealth skill, but you can attempt sneaking with Acrobatics or Crime. I aimed for that aesthetic so the allies wouldn’t have to spend their precious points mastering 3 or 4 skills to have a society belle who can sing, dance, use the right fork, speak classical French and do other things belle’s do – Society would cover for that.

Next time, I tackle qualities

Musings: Advantage, Disadvantage and Bounded Accuracy in 5E (Thur, Oct 2)

I’m planning a 5E campaign for one of my two game groups and that means reading through not just the new PHB and starter kits but also a lot of the online design discussions so I understand why the game is the way it is. A lot of the discussion revolves around a pair of 5E innovations – Advantage/Disadvantage and Bounded Accuracy

Advantage/Disadvantage is the mechanism for removing all of the +1 tracking that occurred in earlier systems. Rather than getting a +2 for having the high ground and another +2 for flanking and a +1 for racial advantage and a +2 for the Bard’s singing you simply roll 2d20 with an attack or skill test and take the higher roll. Likewise if you have a mass of penalties you roll 2d10 and take the lower roll. There’s a general claim that the bonus and penalty tracking got really bad in 3E onward but I never saw it as a problem (and will admit that when I was playing 2E I’d engineer insane contrivances like the black mesh bag designed to make my continual light stone instead produce twilight conditions to boost the efficacy of my Fairy Fire spell, layered with a Prayer and a Chant simultaneously – I referred to myself as a +1 Slut in my drive to be a force multiplier for the party fighters). Still, this is an elegant enough mechanic that won’t cause too much problem.

Bounded Accuracy is the designer’s term for doing away with the really high bonuses that higher level PCs could accrue in 3E onward. If your thief maxes out their Climb skill (just to pick an example) by high level their bonus is so high that things that challenge them will be impossible for their partners. This is something I have a lot less sympathy for, just because I have been running some version of 3E on and off for 14 years and I have never seen it. Now enough other people have brought this up that it must be happening, but it still floors me.

I’ve run/played several campaigns up to 9^th level and others where I started the PCs at 14^th or so and one of two things always happen – the players opt for PCs with very broad skill sets that max out around +10 in any one skill (so that a take 10 will give a 20 result) or the PCs focus on one skill that they bring up to superhuman levels with skill and magic and therefore I treat them as… superhuman. Now, I run a lot of supers games with Ninja heroes or people who can turn invisible or intangible while staying part of a team so the idea of having managing challenges for someone with +25 with Hide, Sneak and Climb just doesn’t worry me.

For combat fighter types would have high to hit rolls that people though would require really high Armor Classes on opponents, high enough to make other PCs unable to hit. But 3E solved that problem by giving additional attacks ever increasing penalties, so you could aim the AC at their 2^nd or 3^rd attack bonus and it would just mean fighters would hit reliably on their 1^st attack.

I just don’t see either as a game breaker, but apparently a lot of people who played a lot of D&D did. There was some inexplicable urge to say “the sample characters are built to look like X, but the rules allow me to build my PC to have up to X+8, so I have to do that! Wow, PCs at X+8 are stomping over some parts of the adventure and wrecking party cohesion, we need to try to bed the rules to make X+8 the standard. Now everyone has X+8 and look at all these unfixable problems the system has. These rules suck for letting me ignore the suggested designs and build my character to X+8!” So now we need to fix that.

5E solves these ‘problems’ (and I’m sorry if I sound derisive here, but I’ve been listening to some variant of “doctor it hurts when I do this” for more than a decade) by radically curtailing the bonuses PCs get. A 7^th level fighter used to get a +7 to hit on his first attack for skill, probably up to +12 when you add in magic and stats, letting him reliably hit most targets with his first attack and increasingly less reliably with his second attack. Now that fighter has a +3 for to hit, likely increased to +8 with magic and stats. Notice how his stats and any magic are now more important than his skill? That’s a design decision – it’s probably not until 17^th level that a characters training with their key abilities outstrips the bonus they get from their stats, and at no point is the combination going to exceed +11. (OK, I lie – Rogues can get up to a +17, which means there’s a good chance that stealth, climbing and similar skill checks will still have to be statted outside the easy range of anyone else.)

The goal on this is to keep the bonus in line with the AC ranges and make lower difficulty scores the standard. The outcome is that PCs don’t have heroic bonuses for a very long time and the swinginess of the d20 means an awful lot more than before. Worse, with no way to stack a meaningful skill bonus onto a stat bonus the strongest, smartest or most graceful people in the world end up with a 25% advantage over the average man. The game designer’s solution for this is to let the DM skip those checks for high attribute characters in favor of auto successes, which is a fine piece of handwaving.

I may be wrong – this may all work swimmingly. I admire the designers for identifying a problem and trying to fix it. It’s just not a problem I ever had, and I don’t know about the solution. I’ll find out soon enough. 

Alternate Paths Towards Running a Girl Genius RPG

I’m trusting that if you’re reading this you’re marginally familiar with the Foglo’s award winning webcomic Girl Genius. (If you’re not, go here: http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/) While there is an official RPG adaptation on the way from Steve Jackson Games several years ago I had posited to my player group that I design and run and my own version. I gave them two different options, which I called Gaslamp Intrigue and Gaslamp Melodrama.

Gaslamp Intrigue is looking at the Girl Genius world at the higher level – the PCs are all Sparks of considerable power or potential and, like Agatha and co, are the heirs of the previous generation of Sparks who tried to remake the world. They might BE Agatha, Gilgamesh and Tarvek, be their peers or replace them in the narrative. For this style of game I would repurpose Erick Wujek’s masterful Amber Diceless Role Playing since through this lens there are a lot of similar elements. Bill, Barry, Klaus, etc. take the role of Corwin, Eric, Blaise etc. from Amber while the PCs have the role of their children. The PCs are all more powerful than normal men but stack up well against one another, and engage in their own politics as well as trying to unravel the politics and mysteries of their parents. The Amber rules even have lots of space for the sort of inter-character competitions and conflicting goals that typify parts of Girl Genius.

Gaslamp Melodrama is looking at the Girl Genius world at the personal level – the PCs are a powerful spark heiress and her allies helping her fulfill her destiny. Again they could be Agatha with Zeetha, Krosp and perhaps a couple of others. Some of those allies are close to the heiress in power, the rest are distinctly weaker but have skills she doesn’t, and she relies on them for advice and emotional stability. For this style of game I would repurpose C. J. Carella’s very solid Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG. BtVS does a good job of balancing the PCs spotlight time and effectiveness even as it ignores the idea that everyone is balanced in power. The rules have a lot to do with generating and releasing the emotional tension and angst that propelled the TV show and have no shortage inside the Girl Genius webcomic.

The player group selected the Gaslamp Melodrama game, but then that campaign fell through due to player scheduling and life concerns. The idea went onto the back burner until 6 months ago when James Cambias (http://www.jamescambias.com/) and I decided to revive it as a game for him and me to alternate running for each other, our families and friends. We’ve had 4 sessions as of this writing. I’ll be laying out what I did for the first set of rules, how that played out during PC creation and the early games, and how I’m adjusting the rules set based on actual play experience. 

A brief apology

So this blog obviously feel into torpor some time ago. My hope is to revive it with a few modifications.

First, several of the comments were that my posts were too long, making them difficult to read in the usual blog post rotation. Fair enough. I’ll strive for concision this time, and also breaking the big ideas up into smaller ideas.

Second rather than trying to fit a whole game into a month I’m going to focus on some things I’m doing right now over the next several months. These will be my entirely unauthorized Girl Genius rules set, my entirely unauthorized and started before the 2E playtest revisions to Feng Shui for a Western with the kitchen sink environment and my experiences with D&D 5E as I run it for my parent and child D&D group. I’ll be alternating between these three.

Hopefully I will be able to work enough in so that I can keep up momentum and not have things peter out again. Switching things up might help.

As always the comment boxes are open.