I don’t usually discuss RPG reports here, but I ran a session today that was a little different. It was using the Engel Matrix system, rules available here. The Engel Matrix system is fascinating, but only arguably even counts as an RPG–it truly is the group storytelling system that other games claim to be.

In my experience today, the game’s major strength is that every player has a large degree of control over what happens and there’s very little downtime. It’s three hours of constant activity for everyone. The weakness is that because every player is narrating “what happens,” but sometimes those things just don’t end up occurring, it’s easy to get confused as to what actually has happened and what hasn’t. We all got lost at points.

For your amusement, the game setup information for my session, the jumping off point my players used, is given below the cut.

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Thursday’s discussion of decision paralysis in RPGs left me thinking about something else that sometimes bugs me in character generation: Flaws. For the uninitiated, most modern RPG systems let you build a character using a system of points to buy skills, abilities, powers, and so on. To encourage players to play characters with interesting weaknesses, they often award extra points for accepting character flaws. That’s the idea, anyway. However, the flaws almost always have flaws of their own…

Shy. Biggest mistake ever. No amount of points are ever worth this flaw, because it prevents you from entering the most interesting part of the game: interacting with other characters. If you are naturally shy it will exacerbate the problem. The only time I can see this being acceptable is for a very loud, forceful, experienced player who’s trying to restrain him/herself and give less experienced players a time to shine.

Bad eyesight, correctible with glasses. Quick. Tell me the last time a character’s glasses got knocked off, resulting in penalties to Perception? I thought you couldn’t. I joke that among all my friends, I alone forgot to take this flaw for the cheap points.

Enemies. What, like your character wasn’t going to make enemies? Did we end up in Peace and Harmony: the RPG? Besides, your problems are your party’s problems. Everyone shares the pain, you get the points.

Dark Secret. Character hook, plot time, and extra points too? Probably a lot of them? Sign me up, baby!

Berserk. Or any Flaw that your party is going to pay for as much or more than you yourself. If anything your friends should get points for the Flaw “Forced To Hang Around With Lunatic.”

Any Flaw worth the same as an equivalent Merit. Ooh. I can take Inept (Driving Trucks) and use it to pay for Born Natural (Driving Cars)? I’ll take 15 of those, please, because it’s easy, in an RPG as in real life, to make sure you’re in the situation that’s advantageous. 99% of the time you’ll be at an advantage, and when for whatever bizarre reason there’s nothing else but a truck to drive, someone else can do it. When balanced Merit/Flaw pairs like this exist, the Flaw should be worth much less than the Merit. The exception is that if this kind of specialization is an integral part of the skill system, as it is in, say, Paranoia.

Quirks. These I don’t actually mind. Many games provide you the chance to take little quirks, like “hates beer, only drinks whiskey,” “always wears red shoes that match her eyes,” and so on. The idea is to reward you with a small number of points for thinking about your character enough to come up with these little touches, and I approve.

Reader John Rhoadhouse described an RPG system he was considering, but decided not to run with. (This is what I got out of the 15-minute afternoon break we had to chat, so if it sounds underdeveloped, it’s probably due to a limitation in my understanding.) It was based on the Tarot; each character had a suit aspect, was better at using cards of that suit in combat, and could use any card as if it were their own suit. (The suits corresponded to offense, defense, magic/debilitating effects, and healing.) For instance, a Swords character could play a Cups card for offense. Trumps could be used for a potent amount of any suit.

Characters also were able to train the trumps like “skills” in other RPGs. Each trump could always be played for a specific effect; and with enough skill, it would be likely to have an additional effect as well. For instance, the World card might have a movement effect whenever you play it, but a teleportation or other mystical movement effect if you have enough skill in it.

One of the things that frustrates me about Tarot mythology is that the trumps (or Major Arcana) don’t seem to fill any kind of cycle. What kind of parallelism do “The Emperor,” “Strength,” and “The Moon,” and “The Tower” have? Answer: None. On the other hand, the suits do correspond nicely to the four classical elements, and the trumps can fill the role of a “fifth element” that seems to pop up in many places, whether you want to call it Void, Spirit, Ether, Mana, Mind, or whatever.

As a result, I think someone who was so inclined could put together a pretty interesting RPG based on giving a character five “affinities,” one for each of the suits plus one for trumps. At some interval, based on level, situation, or GM whim, a character would gain access to cards from the deck. They would be played to help with various feats, and the stronger that character’s affinity for a given card, the more it would help. For example, a character with a strong Wands affinity could expend a Wands card to, say, compose a song, Wands being a suit associated with creativity. A character with poorer Wands affinity wouldn’t be able to compose as good of a song, or would need access to extra Wands cards.

Trumps, of course, have strong symbolism (Death! Lovers! The Devil! The Fool!) and would have great power, perhaps even supernatural power in the game. The corresponding disadvantage is that they are much more specialized. For example, a Swords card could be used in a fight, or an argument, to solve a puzzle, or to take any bold or brash action; but the Wheel of Fortune card is never going to be good for anything but influencing your luck in some matter that would otherwise be left to chance. So if you have good trumps affinity and that card, you’ll have to work to manufacture a situation where you can put it to good use.

I already have enough RPG ideas running around my head that I’m never going to take Tarotmancer anywhere, and John feels the same way. It’s sad, but perhaps it will give you something to think about.

Procrastination is killing me…

I have a great article trying to get out of my head, about the importance of theme to a game. Problem is, I want to give this article the thought it deserves. Given that it’ll probably weigh in at about 600 words (unless I end up making it a 2-parter), this means I’ll want to spend about 2 hours getting it right. And since I just remembered at 11:15 that I need to get tonight’s article out… I’ll try to remember to go to the coffee shop and spend some quality time there writing tomorrow.

(And if I start letting the deadlines slip for articles, I’ll end up mothballing the entire blog in a month. I’ve gotta pretend I have discipline or I just fall apart.)

So tonight, you take what you get. I was discussing RPG systems on the ride home today. I was bemoaning the other drivers’ lack of skill (“Where the hell did you spend your skill ranks, anyway? Profession: Masturbator?”) but this got me thinking of a weakness of RPG systems: the unfortunate ease of failing easy tasks.

Driving to work every day is a task for which no sane GM is going to require a roll. But let’s say I want to make it to work in 30 minutes (the usual time is 45). This is going to take some talent, because I’ll have to go 85 on the interstate, do some creative interpretations of yellow lights on city streets, and some artful weaving on both. In this system, sure, the GM is justified in making me roll.

Now, I’m 25 and have never killed a goblin, so let’s say that in d20, I’m a 1^st-level Expert with a maxed Drive skill, for 4 ranks, and have a 15 Dexterity, for another +2 modifier. Even though there’s a roll involved, this is still a pretty easy task, so the GM sets the DC at 10. Seems reasonable enough? The trouble is, even with my +6 modifier, I still have a 15% chance of failure. It’s not a safe drive, but geez, I can do better than that…

At this point, I was going to launch into a tirade about how White Wolf’s new World of Darkness system is a lot better. Then I did the math… oops. Giving myself a 3 Dexterity and 2 Drive, I have a 17% chance of failure. White Wolf makes it just as hard to do easy things, unless I whine to the GM for a bonus modifier for special equipment like my lucky driving sunglasses. (You laugh, but the book suggests—in earnest—bonuses to Resolve rolls for a WWJD keychain.)

The moral of the story is that in every system, failing easy tasks is… well, too easy. To resolve this, I suppose that you’d want to think of “failure” not in terms of “your skill broke down” (and I crashed the car) but instead “you didn’t get what you wanted” (I couldn’t manage to shave the time I wanted off the drive, so I ended up late anyway.)

Today I’m taking a digression into the land of roleplaying games (RPGs). You don’t necessarily have to be a fan; I think that the moral, which is that too much arbitrariness can be a Bad Thing, transcends game genre.

For a long time the D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide has given the rules for a powerful artifact, the Deck of Many Things. The way it works is this: if you want to draw from the deck, you have to commit to a certain number of draws; you draw that many cards, receive that many effects (depending on the cards you draw), and then the deck vanishes, to be found by some other hapless fool.

The cards are about half good and half bad. One problem is that the bad effects, in general, outweigh the good ones. Consider this sample (translated from D&D terms into rough modern equivalents) and tell me whether you would roll on this table:

1. You win $250,000.
2. You gain the services of a bodyguard, who will serve you (for free) for your life.
3. A demon appears and starts attacking you. If anyone tries to help you, another demon appears and attacks them.
4. One of your best friends develops hatred toward you, keeping it secret until the time is right for the most devastating betrayal.

The benefits just don’t stack up to the risks. The benefits are nice, but the bad cards are devastating; any one could easily spell your death. One relatively harmless one “just” takes away all of your property and possessions, which is especially harmful for a D&D character, who tend to live and die by their stuff.

But there’s more. In most RPGs, the Game Master (GM) tries to have an idea of where the story is going. S/he takes into account the players’ interests and the characters’ abilities, and creates appropriate challenges. But with the Deck of Many Things, the GM has no idea what’s going to happen. The party might suddenly have an unexpected, powerful magic weapon, or might suddenly find itself lacking a key party member and suddenly more interested in rescuing that person than on whatever else might have been planned for that session.

Thus, there are plenty of funny and humorously tragic stories that involve the Deck. GMs are seduced by the sheer variety of nifty effects; players and characters are seduced by the opportunity for a quick gain. However, nobody starts an interesting story “Two sessions after we found the Deck…” because if someone starts drawing, it’s going to take over the game.

Next time I’ll tie this back into board games.