An exercise in dice pool-based game design

I love rolling large dice pools. Hearing all those shiny math rocks clink, eagerly hoping for a good roll and dreading those pesky 1s is way too satisfying. Sure, rolling lots of dice can be unwieldy and lead to dice clog, but years of playing Vampire: The Masquerade have conditioned me to enjoy the simple pleasures offered by dice pools.

Here's a quick V.V. fact: I write when I'm stressed, and I've had a pretty stressful couple of days. Stressful enough for me to write a pretty solid foundation for a dice pool-based system. Right now, this is just an exercise in game design, but I could definitely see myself using this for a game someday. You can check it out below!

CHARACTER CREATION

One of your Attributes is great (d10), one is good (d8), one is average (d6) and one is poor (d4). Roll four d20s, then assign each result to a different Attribute, forming your Attribute Pools. If no result is higher than 10, discard all results and roll again.

TASK RESOLUTION

Every Attribute has a dice pool, and you can choose how many dice to invest in any given Attribute Check. After investing your dice, roll them. You always keep any dice that rolls at or above 4. When you're out of dice, you can't succeed with that Attribute anymore. 

Degrees of success are determined by how many dice were invested in the check.

• 1 die: you succeed at a cost, such as spending resources or facing complications
• 2 dice: you succeed by doing the bare minimum
• 3 dice: you solve the matter at hand cleanly and competently
• 4+ dice: you go above and beyond, succeeding with gusto. For each die above 3, add a flourish to your success: elegance, quickness, subtlety, precision, substance, surprise

COMBAT: VITALITY

When entering a fight, invest as many dice from your Attribute Pools as you want, forming your Vitality Pool for the combat. 

Every enemy attack has a matching Condition with a Resistance Cost. To avoid suffering a Condition, roll a number of Vitality dice equal to the Resistance Cost. Keep any dice that rolls at 4 or higher, and discard the rest.

If you can't or don't want to match the Condition's Resistance Cost, you suffer its effects.

When combat ends, any remaining Vitality dice can be freely reassigned to your Attribute Pools.

COMBAT: ATTACKING

To deal damage in combat, you need to spend <melee attribute> dice for melee attacks, <ranged attribute> dice for ranged attacks, and <magic attribute> for offensive spellcasting. Roll them normally, and keep any dice resulting in a number equal to 4 or above. Any dice spent this way can be used to assign Conditions to an enemy. Once you reach an enemy's Condition Threshold, you decide whether they're dead or simply defeated.

CONDITIONS

Optimally, a game using these rules would have a full list of interesting conditions, each with a matching Resistance Cost (or, in the case of PC attacks, Damage Costs) and some interesting mechanical flair to differentiate them. As is, this is just the skeleton of a system, and not a game at all. No harm in giving some examples, though!

• Vulnerable (5): -1 Damage Cost to all Conditions
• Weakened (4): Can't cause any Conditions above RC 3
• Wounded (3): Can be inflicted multiple times
• Dizzy (2): Can't attack for a turn (doesn't stack)

POTENTIAL SHENANIGANS

Designing powers for this system would be a blast, as there's so much room to play with dice pools and degrees of success. Hell, I almost bolted a skill system to this thing just for fun, but it felt like too much (skill points would allow rerolls on relevant Attribute Checks, furthering the system's dice clog problem).

At the present time, though, I have no plans on expanding this any further, as I'm already working on way too many games. Still, I'm curious to know whether this is as interesting as my stress-addled brain thinks it is, or just an excuse to roll a lot of dice at once.

Lemme know what you think!

On encounter design, combat and incentives

After writing the third Hexember post, I couldn't stop thinking about two blog posts regarding incentivized behavior, the first by Luke Gearing, and the second by Zedeck Siew. Did I unintentionally incentivize players to act diplomatically rather than violently through how I designed the hex's points of interest? And if so, is that really such a bad thing?

COMBAT & MODERN ELFGAMES

It's no secret that 5e has more rules and guidelines for combat than anything else, and while I'm not trying to start a discourse on "eliding", it's my personal opinion that if most of the tools bestowed by a system are related to violence, then you shouldn't be surprised when violence becomes the players' default approach to every problem or situation. That incentive is baked into the game, and while most OSR games are better about this, there's still a prevalence of combat-related rules in them.

Paradoxically, OSR combat has been frequently touted as a fail state, particularly when it's fought fairly. The maxim "combat as war, not sport" is also a mainstay in these discussions, even if the rules don't always reflect it. One could argue that the high lethality found in the majority of OSR games supports those points, but that lethality usually ceases to be a problem once characters have enough experience under their belts. Some games have done their part to mitigate that power creep (shoutout to Into the Odd, Cairn and CY_BORG!), but when it comes to older games, well, character advancement tended to lead to HP bloat and/or disparity, as seen with the good ol' linear fighters vs. quadratic wizards conundrum.

If combat is the baked-in solution to most problems, then rewarding it would only worsen the issue at hand. This leads us to the crux of my encounter design philosophy: if the players want to maim and kill everything in their way, they are free to do so. The world, on the other hand, won't reward them for committing senseless violence. Most of the time, they'll only be wasting their resources and risking their lives by acting that way — just like in real life.

STICK VS. CARROT

Let's face it: if rewarding violence is the carrot, and if most of the rules are combat-oriented, there's an argument to be made that not rewarding it is akin to punishing the players for playing the game as written, or as it was intended to be played — hence, the stick. This could lead us to an entire discussion about setting expectations, the importance of a session zero and so on, but that's one rabbit hole I'm not willing to dive into today, lest this post completely loses its original purpose: discussing incentives in play.

So what's the solution here? Should you just play a different game if you don't want to reward violence?

Well, not necessarily, no. As mentioned above, setting expectations before play is an important part of literally any game, and unlike 5e, a lot of OSR/NSR games have plenty of rules for approaching the world in many different ways. But then again, rewarding players for engaging with those rules could be seen as just as bad as rewarding violence; you're just signaling that diplomacy, careful exploration and scheming are the optimal ways to play the game. 

While there's nothing wrong with that playstyle (some would go as far as saying that the ideal OSR playstyle looks a lot like what I just described), it can become stale. Once the characters start doing what's optimal rather than what their backgrounds and personalities dictate, are the players still roleplaying them, or are they just gaming? Going too far in the opposite direction is just as bad, mind! "It's what my character would do" has traumatized countless GMs, including yours truly.

Me, I advocate for balance in all things. Naturally, that goes for encounters and their rewards, too.

BALANCING INCENTIVES

Balancing what you incentivize with your rewards is simpler than you might expect. When you're writing any situation, encounter or location, consider what's logical. Sometimes, violence is the best answer, one that may wield the best rewards. Oftentimes, it isn't. The secret here is letting whatever makes the most sense happen, rather than trying to direct your players and their characters towards being kind and diplomatic or bloodthirsty murderers through in-game rewards. Let them do what's natural for them and reap the consequences, good or bad.

The first three Hexember posts actually have relevant examples of logical consequences, rather than incentivized behaviors:

• Fighting (and killing) the sickly giant from the Stinging-Tree Canyon won't lead the party to a tomb full of gold, and it may even lead to a few PCs getting sick, too. On the other hand, they'll have put an end to the poor giant's suffering, and that counts for something. A party that sneakily avoids the encounter entirely won't risk contracting the disease, but the giant may still be a problem for anyone who passes through the canyon in the future. No obvious rewards here.
  
• Combat isn't really much of a concern in the Chronal Wastes, but if the party does end up in a fight while trapped in the war zone, they'll actually benefit from defeating the enemy squad, gaining access to firearms that won't be invented anytime soon. Violence would be rewarded, but only because looting a superior force's advanced weapons is a logical conclusion to fighting them.
• The Crimson Crystarium is what brought us here in the first place, so it's a little more ambiguous than the examples above. The vampire packs encountered in that hex can be approached in several different ways, and one pack actually initiates combat in a "honorable" manner (sport and war, yadda, yadda). Outright murdering that pack turns the others hostile, yes, but only because it makes sense. Hell, murdering any pack would have that result, even if I didn't outright spell that. Meanwhile, there's another pack that won't even directly engage the party, and if attacked, will leave combat as soon as they've gotten their share of blood. Finally, killing the "diplomatic" pack could potentially lead to an even better reward (as many weird healing crystals as the party can carry), with the consequence of making every other pack hostile. But would ridding the lands of bloodsucking monsters be such a bad thing? No easy answers here. No simple solution.
  

And that, I guess, is what I've been trying to get at: when designing a situation, encounter or location, consider the logical consequences of its likely outcomes. It shouldn't matter whether those consequences would be beneficial or prejudicial to the players and their characters, as long as they're organic. 

The world is your character, and playing it straight can do wonders for your campaign's verisimilitude.

HEXEMBER: Crimson Crystarium

Before we begin, here's a recap: Hexember is a month-long series of posts, each of which presents a hex and its points of interest, tailored for OSR hexcrawls (but compatible with most games). If you need a simple procedure for exploring hexes, I included one in the first entry!

CRIMSON CRYSTARIUM

✦ At first glance

Sharp, ferrous, perilous and yet strangely magnificent, this region is covered in blood-red crystals, tended for and fed by a ravenous vampire clan, the Sanguine Grievers. Long ago, these vampires were known for their nobility and influence, but after a hunter destroyed their progenitor, they left all of that behind, seizing these lands as their territory and starting a centuries-long ritual to bring him back. 

By sacrificing the blood of travelers and trespassers, the Grievers have grown a garden of crystals — or, as they call it, a crystarium — that stretches as far as the eye can see. These crystals are slowly taking the form of the clan's former estate, but its completion is still centuries away. Still, their effects can already be felt, as the Grievers are completely immune to the sun's baleful reckoning in these lands.

1-3. The Hunting Grounds

Anyone unlucky (or incautiously brave) enough to travel through the Crimson Crystarium will probably find themselves right in the middle of the Sanguine Grievers' hunting grounds. Surrounded by their gruesome creations, the travelers will immediately be approached by one of three hunting packs; roll a d4 to determine which.

• 1-2, the commanding, proud and honorable Heirs will openly approach the party and challenge them to a fight. If their challenge is accepted, there are d4x2 Heirs in the pack; stat most of them as regular vampires in your system of choice, but give their leader +2 HD. If half of them are defeated, or if their leader loses over half of their HP, they will humbly recognize the party's valor and propose an end to the battle. If the party accepts, they shall henceforth be under the pack's protection, and will be granted free passage through the hunting grounds now and forever. If, however, they decide to fight to the death, all three packs will be permanently hostile and will attack on sight the next time the party enters their territory.
  

• 3, the savvy Growers will send a delegation of d4+1 blood servants to intercept the party. These servants are pale humans dressed in ruined clothes that may have once been worn by nobility, but hasn't been in use for centuries. They come with an offer: if the party agrees to accompany them back to the pack's den, no harm will come to them (proceed to the next point of interest). If not, they will be at the mercy of the other packs (roll again!).
  

• 4, the sadistic Stalkers will pursue the party for hours, but won't engage them directly unless any character looks sick, weak or wounded. The torments doled by the pack tend to take the form of hideous laughter in the distance, exsanguinated corpses dropped in the party's path, tempting promises of immortality whispered directly into each character's mind, copious, graphic descriptions of what they're going to do to the party once they catch them, and finally, as the hunting grounds are departed, an invitation to "come play with us again". In the event of a fight, the Stalkers are to be statted with -1 HD, and there are 2d6x2 of them. They won't fight to the death, however, and once they make at least two characters bleed, the whole pack will skulk back into the shadows, laughing all the way.

 

4. The Scarlet Chapel

The section of the Crystarium claimed by the Growers is slowly taking the shape of a chapel, though it is very far from finished. In any case, a party that decides to parlay with the pack will be welcomed with pomp, circumstance and a strange proposal: they may take a crimson shard with them, but in exchange, they must willingly feed the Crystarium, sacrificing d6 HP in the process. As long as it's fed with blood once a week, a crimson shard will recover d4 HP for every party member on a daily basis. If the characters refuse the bargain, they will be allowed to leave unharmed... this time. If combat is engaged, treat the Growers like the Heirs, but with d4x4 members, no leader and an inclination towards surrendering and bargaining if defeat seems inevitable.

INSPIRATIONS

Vampire: The Masquerade was the obvious inspiration here; this is basically what The Eldest (as the Tzimisce Antediluvian is commonly known) became beneath New York, but as a crystalline sprawl instead. Innistrad was also conceptually important for the Crimson Crystarium, even if the Sanguine Grievers have more in common with Ravnica's vampires than with Innistrad's vampiric families.

USING THE GRIEVERS AS A FACTION

Factions are one of the best parts of any hexcrawl, and the Sanguine Grievers could easily be expanded into a full-fledged faction (although a regional one, at best). If you decide to do so, I recommend creating at least one important NPC for each pack. Give them one or two extravagant personality traits (a seductive, flirty and sadistic Stalker will immediately leave an impression on the party, especially if they're Astarion fans), and let them act as the pack's "face" when interacting with other factions and the party. 

You should also consider giving each pack a clear goal for the future, and at least one way of achieving that goal. The Heirs could be recruiting valiant warriors from neighboring hexes in order to expand their ranks, while the obvious route with the Growers is proselytizing their progenitor's word throughout the land, slowly building an insidious cult. And when the Stalkers start hunting outside the Crystarium, well, that's the perfect excuse to set up some inter-faction conflicts!

HEXEMBER: Chronal Wastes

Here's a quick recap: Hexember is a series of semi-daily blogposts where I detail a hex and its points of interest, tailored for OSR hexcrawls (but compatible with most games). If you need a simple procedure for exploring hexes, I included one in the first entry!

CHRONAL WASTES

✦ At first glance

A magical catastrophe has befallen these lands, causing the landscape to constantly flicker between different eras, ranging from an Ice Age, a post-industrial nightmarish wasteland or a barren battlefield filled with trenches and corpses. Sometimes, it stays in an era for hours. Other times, it changes several times in the span of a minute. The only predictable things about the Chronal Wastes are its unpredictability, and the fact that any living things trapped in its many eras normally can't interact with travelers, for they are stuck in an unbreakable loop.

1-2. The Disaster

The vast majority of the Chronal Wastes is comprised of an area known simply as the Disaster. For every hour spent in this area, roll a d20.

• 1-5, the wastes manifest as idyllic fields of prismatic flowers, constantly changing shapes and colors. Those flowers can be picked and sold, though they'll become normal flowers in d4 days. Herbalists, druids and mages will pay at least 20 copper coins per flower. 
• 6-12, the wastes are undergoing an Ice Age. Unless they are appropriately dressed for the freezing cold, the party will suffer d6 damage for every hour spent braving the elements.
• 13-16, a time-storm will be raging through the area, violently mixing traits from every conceivable era and preventing any progress from being made in a journey until it settles. When a traveler survives a time-storm, they emerge a few years younger or older from it. Roll 3d6: the first determines whether a character becomes younger (odds) or older (evens), the second determines how many years they gain or lose, and the third determines how many days it takes for them to get back to normal.
• 17-19, the party finds itself in the middle of every war that's ever been or ever will be fought in these lands. Although the combatants will usually ignore them, the party has a 2-in-6 chance of being perceived as enemies by a squad of d8+2 soldiers wearing elegant uniforms and carrying 18th century firearms. If the characters fight and defeat those soldiers, they can keep the firearms and enough ammo for three encounters.
  
• 20, roll 2d20 and combine the results.
  

3. The Royal Academy of Chronomancy

The very source of the Chronal Wastes and the former authority on time magic, the Royal Academy of Chronomancy fell victim to its own hubris. Whatever caused the Disaster, it's too late to fix it, but the Academy may still offer knowledge for those willing to risk repeating their mistakes. When the party visits the Academy, roll a d6 to determine the state they find it in:

• 1-2, the Academy has yet to be built, and all the party finds are its foundations, rich in chronal energy. A sufficiently powerful mage will be capable of detecting these energies, which can be used to immediately replenish all of their spells and any spent scrolls.
  
• 3-5, the party finds the Academy in the middle of the incident that brought its downfall. Students are disintegrating and the walls are rapidly crumbling, while professors are valiantly yet uselessly trying to counteract what triggered the disaster. The party can try to uncover the mystery behind this catastrophe, but they've arrived too late to find much more than the following clues: the fuming, blindingly white shell of a divine egg, a professor exclaiming that "the divine one is free", and another pleading for everyone not to hurt it, because "it's just a child, it doesn't know what it's doing".
• 6, visiting the Royal Academy of Chronomancy in its heyday is a rare privilege, even if it's eerily ethereal. The student body, the faculty and the staff are mere after-images, incapable of seeing the party or interacting with them, and busily living out their daily lives with not a care in the world. The Academy is flourishing in every way, its ivory walls standing tall. Though nothing can be taken from here without disappearing, the Library of Eons still offers the world's largest selection of books, some of which haven't even been written yet. Alas, the party can't stay here forever, and the Academy will shift to another era in d4 hours.

4. The Cave of Epochs

Scintillating with the promise of safety, the Cave of Epochs offers a refuge from the chaos outside, yet it was here that most chronomancers mined one of the most valuable resources of their craft: the omen stones. When a character gazes deep into the cave's glittering walls, they have a 2-in-6 chance of finding an omen stone and experiencing an omen. Roll a d4 to determine which kind of omen they receive.

• 1-2, they sense that someone they trust will betray them in the future.
  
• 3, they get a glimpse of an impending (yet preventable) disaster.
  
• 4, they don't see anything, but what does that say about their future?
  

These omens would be more aptly described as intuitive feelings than as precise visions, but they are rarely wrong. The GM is free to plan a way to incorporate them in a future session or to ignore them completely. Rarely doesn't mean never, after all.

 

Omen stones can be mined, and weapons infused with them have an infamous ability: anything hit by one will age d10 years. After rolling a 1, the weapon will lose its charge, but it can be restored by bringing it to the Chronal Wastes. Most merchants won't pay anything for an omen stone out of superstition, but a crazy, ambitious or driven blacksmith may be willing to craft something with one.

 

INSPIRATIONS

The concept for the Chronal Wastes came from a Twitter thread I wrote last year, back when I was experimenting with using MtG cards as oracles. The execution, however, owes a lot to the film Synchronic (by Benson and Moorhead, two of my favorite directors) and the comic DIE, by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans. Can't say much more than that, though, lest we head into spoiler territory!

HEXEMBER: Stinging-Tree Canyon

In an effort to get out of a rut and force myself to write anything (regardless of quality or relevance), I decided to start Hexember, a series of semi-daily blog posts in which I detail a hex y'all can drop in your hexcrawls. 

Hexember was inspired by Dice Goblin's Adventure Calendar Jam, and if last year's Adventure Calendar is anything to go by, we should be in for a bunch of treats until the 24th!

SIX MILES, BEST MILES

When running or building a hexcrawl, I have a personal preference for 6 mile hexes. They're big enough to support a few points of interest, but not so big that the players will be forced to spend days trying to traverse each hex. With that said, most (if not all) of the hexes presented in Hexember should be scalable to your taste, be it bigger or smaller.

HEXPLORATION

Every hex in the series will have at least two distinct points of interest, so if your system of choice doesn't have a procedure for exploring everything a hex has to offer, you can use the sample one below:

• When the party enters a new hex, roll 1d4 and consult the list of points of interest in that hex. They'll have to pass through that point of interest in order to successfully cross the hex.
  
• When the party explores a hex, ask them how many hours they plan to spend looking for points of interest. They can spend up to six hours scouring a hex per exploration attempt, and they have a X-in-6 chance of finding a new point of interest, with X being determined by the amount of hours spent exploring. If they're successful in their exploration attempt, roll a d4 to determine the point of interest they find; re-roll any results matching known points of interest.
•  When the party explores a fully-mapped hex, let them know there are no more points of interest to be found. They can still move between known points (spending up to one hour to travel between any two of them), interact with their features and have random encounters, but they've seen all there is to see. Outwardly, that is.

And with that cleared up, let's get to our first hex!

 

STINGING-TREE CANYON

✦ At first glance

Green, rocky and oppressively narrow, Stinging-Tree Canyon is as beautiful as it is treacherous. The trees from which this patch of wilderness takes its name are impossibly tall, with spikes sprouting from their tough barks. Most of the canyon's wildlife is nocturnal, with birds of prey nesting in the treetops and their rodent prey burrowing in the trunks.

1. Hot Springs

A party couldn't ask for a better place to rest and recuperate than this. The canyon's hot springs offer a good view of its surroundings — as the area in which they're situated is slightly higher than the surrounding treeline —, and the waters are to die for. If any PC decides to take a bath in the springs, they have a 4-in-6 chance of getting rid of any maladies currently afflicting them.

2-3. The Boneyard

Craters, broken trees and piles of bones of considerable size litter this stretch of the canyon, with the occasional rusty weapon and ruined armor lying around as well. Whatever happened here wasn't exactly recent, but it wasn't long enough for the trees and the grass to recover from it.

If the party wants to search the bodies, they'll find 3d20 copper coins for every hour spent searching, up to a maximum of 150+d20 copper coins. The weapons and armors in the corpses are far too big and far too damaged to be of any use for a human-sized character, however.

4. The Giant's Mound

The entrance to a colossal cave blocked by an enormous boulder can be spotted from a mile away, but the incessant, deafening pounding can be heard from even further. The tribal markings on the boulder indicate this is the final resting place of a mountain giant, and although such mounds aren't particularly uncommon, they're usually far more quiet, and definitely not as impregnable.

This particular mound wasn't meant to keep grave-robbers from pillaging a mountain giant's precious ivory bones, but to keep a rotting, diseased giant from rampaging freely through the canyons and infecting anyone else with the Black Ichor.

When passing by the Giant's Mounds, the characters will notice that unlike the rest of the canyon, this area seems completely devoid of wildlife; the giant's endless hammering has clearly spooked them away from the vicinity. Once they near the mound's boulder, they'll spot the markings; a sufficiently knowledgeable PC might recognize some of the symbols as "funeral", "warning" and "plague".

Unless the party makes an effort to pass through the mound quietly, they have a 4-in-6 chance of alerting the shambling giant, in which case he will furiously wallop at the entrance's boulder for d4 turns before breaking free.

If the party decides to stay and fight, stat their sickly foe as you would any giant on your system of preference, but decrease his HD by 1. The poor creature is visibly ill, with black sludge pouring out of its festering body, and he will fight with blind, self-destructive rage. He is clearly suffering, and death would be a welcome release. Any attacks involving fire and heat will stun the giant for d4 turns and deal double damage.

Any survivors have a 2-in-6 chance of being infected with the Black Ichor; 3-in-6 if they engaged in melee. The first symptom will manifest in d4 hours as a persistent, mucous cough, followed by vomiting of a dark, thick substance. The infected character will experience violent urges after a day and will have an X-in-6 chance of succumbing to them, with X being determined by the number of days the disease was left untreated. Once they succumb, their wounds will seep with the same pitch-like sludge as the fallen giant's, and will be just as infectious.

The Black Ichor can be cured by any skilled druid, including a fellow party member. A competent druid will quickly identify the disease by its symptoms, applying a simple yet effective treatment: heat. No matter how virulent or cruel it may be, the Black Ichor can't survive the heat. Being covered in furs near a campfire for a full night should be enough to rid an infected character of the disease, after which they'll be immune to it in the future.

INSPIRATIONS

Most (or maybe all) Hexember hexes will be designed after something I like, and in this case, the inspiration was an episode from Primal, an animated series by Genndy Tartakovsky. If you enjoyed this at all, give it a shot! The episode in question is called Plague of Madness, and it's simply phenomenal.

PS: if anyone ends up using this in a game, I'd love to know how it went!

The Wyvern Journals: The Six Masteries

I've been teasing a big post on expanded casting rules for well over a month now, and while I was finally getting ready to write it, the strangest thing happened. I remembered an old magic system I was tinkering with years ago. After re-reading it, I mean, oof. It was rough. There were some pretty cool ideas in there, but overall, I didn't love the execution, which relied on using six different dice to represent six different aspects of magic. Messy as it was, though, I started thinking that maybe, just maybe, it could be compatible with The Wyvern Hack; all it needed was some love and a much needed cleanup. 

I was right. It fit like a glove. Thing is, now I have two different, completely incompatible magic systems, so one of them has to go. 

I vented on Twitter about these first world problems of mine (oh, the irony), and the majority of my moots supported me going with this weird new thing I'm working on, rather than the Vancian-inspired magic system with a tweeeest I was planning on building.

I'm not pulling the trigger on either of them yet, but blogging about the former can't hurt, right? If it sucks, I'll just sweep it under the rug and blog about the latter, too. There's always the possibility that both of them will end up sucking, so I'm not gonna stress about it too much!

CORE ELEMENTS

The Six Masteries, as I've taken to calling this, are centered on two core concepts: a Magic Die, and the aforementioned masteries, named Forces, Divine, Aberrant, Essence, Chaos and Primordial, each corresponding to a different aspect of reality. 

When casting a spell, the magic user declares what they want to achieve with it and how they're going to achieve that, picking an appropriate mastery for their spell. Then, they roll a d6 on said mastery's table, which will determine whether that spell is a failure, a weaker version of itself, a success, a strong success, or if something weirder happens. Each mastery has different, thematically appropriate permutations.

If the spell was a success (regardless of degree), that's where the Magic Die comes in, as it is rolled to determine a spell's duration, damage, area and healing. For utility spells, you assign the results to duration (1/turn), area (2/square or 1,5m) and/or targets (3/extra target). For damage and healing spells, the roll's result determines how much damage you deal or heal, and it can be split between multiple targets. You can use Luck to boost this (I promise we'll talk about Luck Dice soon!).

SPELLCASTING CLASSES

Each spellcasting class handles magic quite differently, both fictionally and mechanically. Mages weave their spells through Arcane knowledge and means, Clerics rely on their Faith to bend reality to their will, while Spellswords use the Craft to shape the world around them. But we're here to talk about mechanics, so...

• Mages use a d12 as their Magic Die. They start the game with two masteries of their choice. They gain one more mastery on level 3, another on level 5, and a final one on level 10.

• Clerics use a d10 as their Magic Die. They start the game with mastery over Essence and the Divine.

• Spellswords use a d8 as their Magic Die. They start the game with one mastery of their choice, gaining another on level 5 and a final one on level 10.

DEPLETION

Rolling a 6 or a 1 on some masteries can deplete your Magic Die. When that happens, you knock it down a tier, and if it is depleted as a d4, then you're deprived. When deprived, you can't cast spells until you take a long rest, after which your magic is completely recovered. Depleted Magic Die are increased by a single step when you take a short rest, up to their original form.

INGREDIENTS AND ARTIFACTS

Ingredients are things like a dragon's petrified gallbladder, graveyard fruits, a nobleman's fingernails or the bottled whimper of a dying man, and they can be spent to adjust a mastery check by 1/each. If an ingredient has a high synergy with the spell you're casting, it can adjust the mastery check by 2.

Magical artifacts can be drained to raise a Magic Die by a step, up to d20. More powerful artifacts can raise them multiple times in a single use. They all have different recharge triggers (blood, sunrise, death, storms, etc). Mages use talismans as artifacts, while Clerics prefer relics and Spellswords are innately acquainted with instruments.

THE SIX MASTERIES

Fucking finally, eh? I won't include all of the mastery tables here, but two should be enough to help y'all visualize how they work, yeah? Read on, fellow wonder weavers.

Forces Mastery

Fireballs, magic missiles, thunderstorms, psychic blasts

1. Your insecurities and fear take hold of you, and you fail to fully exert your mastery over magic. Your spell works, but it is weaker than it should have been. [Roll your Magic Die as if it was one step lower.]
2-3. Everything works exactly as you willed it!
4-5. Some might call it arrogance, but your confidence allows you to surpass your limits, casting an even more potent version of the spell. [Roll your Magic Die as if it was one step higher.]
6. Such greatness is exhausting even for the most revered masters of magic. Your spell has a colossal effect, but you have to knock your Magic Die down a step, lest you lose control of the Forces you're playing with. [If you lower your Magic Die by a step, its resulting roll is tripled. If you don't, the Referee rolls on the disaster table.]

Mastery over Forces deals with pure, raw power, molding magic without a hint of subtlety. No other mastery captures the destructive potential of magic as profoundly as Forces does.

Primordial Mastery

Turning light into darkness, rewinding time itself, teleportation, true resurrection

1. Disaster! Reality refuses to surrender to you, and this spell can never be invoked again.
2-3. You are not yet powerful enough to achieve the desired effect, but your confidence is admirable. Use another mastery to successfully simulate a weaker version of that spell, or give up and temporarily raise your Magic Die by one step.
4-5. The elements are transmuted, gravity is lifted, day turns to night — whatever you intend, it comes true. For now.
6. You reach into the very fabric of reality, and it fights back. Choose between carving your spell into perpetuity and permanently lowering your Magic Die by two steps, fully recovering your Magic Die and failing, or paying a price of the Referee's choosing and achieving temporary success.

In the metaphysical hierarchy of the universe, some elements belong to the surface, while others form the very foundation of reality. Formidable and imperious, Primordial mastery allows its users to shape the essence of all that is, with all the consequences that brings.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

I have no idea if this is balanced or fun, but I'm 100% sure some of y'all would (will?) find ways to abuse and break it, much to your Referee's chagrin. That's fine! I wanted to give casters a lot of utility, and I feel like I achieved that goal. Their damage potential, on the other hand, can't compare to a Fighter's, which is completely intentional. I'm bored of combat casters. I'll take reality warpers any day of the week, because I want my magic to feel alive, weird and expansive. 

This feels like a step in that direction.

The Wyvern Journals: Dissecting the Character Class Model

The Wyvern Journals is the title of what is (hopefully) going to be a series in which we dissect several aspects of my OSR fantasy heartbreaker, The Wyvern Hack, while discussing the decisions behind them. Theoretically, this is already part 2, since the "announcement" post already introduced TWH's core combat rules, but I'm sure we'll revisit those later on. This post, though, will focus on the character class model. I have already posted a couple of class spreads on Twitter, but rather than diving in the specifics of those classes, this is a more general take on how every class in The Wyvern Hack is structured.

CORE ELEMENTS

When push comes to shove, dividing the character class model into its core elements is a lot more efficient than discussing it as a whole, so that's where we'll start. Afterwards, we'll do an individual dive into each element.

1. The Intro Blurb
2. Class Icons
3. Traits
  3.1. Starting Hit Points
  3.2. Trait: Key Attributes
  3.3. Trait: Starting Dice
  3.4. Trait: Typical Backgrounds
  3.5. Trait: Starting Bonuses
  3.6. Trait: Experience Triggers
4. Starting Weapon
5. Special Abilities
6. Personal Table
7. Background Table
8. Starter Kits
9. Progression Table

If you're like me and love visual references, you can find the numbered elements above on an example spread right here.

1. THE INTRO BLURB

Apocalypse World did it best, but I've always been a fan of intro blurbs for classes, playbooks and even clans (or tribes, traditions, kiths and all the rest of WoD's not-classes). They're often essential in helping my AuDHD-ass pick something to play, breaking that damn decision paralysis. Adding these to TWH was a no-brainer! 

The goal here was to give the reader a quick look into the class' flavour, while also setting the tone for everything that comes after, even for myself. If you liked the intro blurb of a class, odds are you're gonna like its Traits, Special Abilities, starter kits and progression. This is usually the part I write first, and aside from everything else, it's supposed to build some hype. For the reader, that is. I'm definitely not hyping myself up with these. Scout's honor.*

2. CLASS ICONS

Much like the intro blurb, this serves the purpose of letting the reader know the kinds of characters they could reasonably play with any given class, while also potentially giving them something to get excited for. Spotting a reference to one of my favorite characters in an RPG tends to instantly get me in the mood to play a similar character, and I'm hoping this applies to some readers, too.

3. TRAITS

This is a meatier section than the previous ones, and although it carries a lot more weight when it comes to gameplay, I personally find it a lot easier to write. Starting Hit Points, for example, are just a matter of either combining two Attributes, using the class' starting Hit Dice's highest possible result, or comparing that with an Attribute (usually Constitution) and picking the highest/lowest, depending on the class.

Key Attributes are a little trickier, and they represent the two Attributes that always have a chance of being improved when a character levels up — the player rolls a d20 for each, and if the result is higher than the Attribute's current value, they increase it by 1. Players can also roll a third Attribute of their choice, but we're getting sidetracked! Levelling up and progression deserve their own blog post, and this ain't it.

Starting Dice are already outlined in the progression tables (the very first thing I did for every class, back when I first started fiddling with TWH's combat). Want to kick some ass in melee/ranged combat? A higher Attack Die will go a long way towards that. Want to recover from an ass-kicking in a timely fashion? Well, that's what your Hit Dice are for. Luck will get its own blog post in the future, but suffice to say that Luck Dice are pretty versatile; the higher, the better.

Typical Backgrounds are pretty much just flavor. So far, I don't have any plans to meaningfully implement these backgrounds as a mechanic in The Wyvern Hack, and I'm not sure I see the need to. As is, they can give the players some ideas for character concepts, and that's good enough for me.

Starting Bonuses are part of the "ctrl+c + ctrl+v" family, in that they're already available in the progression tables. Still, these can be useful for knowing straight up how much damage you can count on dealing/resisting right out of the gate.

Experience Triggers are the hardest Trait to get right, and they're also something I love doing! Again, I won't get too deep into levelling up and progression here, but you can expect an experience track similar to PbtA and FitD games, which will be filled by hitting your class' triggers once a session. While I'm generally wary of any mechanic that incentivizes players to take certain actions just for the sake of gaining experience (or any other in-game reward), my aim with these was to stay close to what someone playing a certain class will want to do anyway. Fighters, for example, will get experience when they get new scars (something that's more likely for characters on the frontline) and when they win a battle. Limiting trigger activation to once per session also helps prevent intentional experience farming.

4. STARTING WEAPONS

Some players will hate that, while others will love it, but I personally really enjoy randomly generated equipment. The Wyvern Hack doesn't randomly generate every piece of equipment, though (see: starting kits), since this can slow character creation down to a crawl, depending on the amount of items you're generating and the number of tables you're consulting, but a random starting weapon can be a lot of fun, and it might surprise you! Getting a high roll on a starting weapon's damage is a nice treat, after all. If you really hate what you rolled, though, no biggie. All classes have starter kits with extra weapons and/or some coin for you to spend on equipment in-game.

5. SPECIAL ABILITIES

This is where you'll find the very soul of each and every character class. Sure, classes have plenty of differences besides these, but Special Abilities are the things that make them truly unique, presenting the players with the tools through which they'll interact with the world. All of the Fighters' Special Abilities are related to combat, for example, while the Dungeoneer is exclusively focused on utility, exploration and, well, dungeon crawling. These not only communicate what the class will excel at, but also let the players know which class will be better suited to their preferred playstyle.

6. PERSONAL TABLE

My absolute favorite part, right there. These are a combination of a personal question and a d6 table, which will always award the character with something, while also fleshing them out a bit. Giving mechanical weight to these tables is loads of fun, too!

7. BACKGROUND TABLE

While not nearly as involved as the previous step, this is just as fun. The key part here, though, was to give every character a cool hook, while still being open enough to avoid getting boring if you're frequently rolling up characters of the same class. Challenging, sure, but I'd like to think I'm doing okay so far.

8. STARTER KITS

I have a love/hate relationship with these damn kits. They're mostly made to fit typical/iconic character archetypes, but coming up with the archetypes themselves is a pain in the ass. Once I have a clear idea of what I want out of each kit and what they're meant to represent, though, the process becomes surprisingly enjoyable!

9. PROGRESSION TABLE

Back when I was still trying to figure out what The Wyvern Hack's combat was gonna be like, before I even knew this was gonna be a thing at all, the first thing I did for fun was a bunch of progression tables for the more famous classes (Fighter, Spellcaster, Rogue and Cleric). These have changed a little since then, and I've cleaned up some of the math (huge thanks to @BourassaSam for spotting a massive issue with the modifiers), but the work itself is already over and done with.

Design-wise, these aren't a big mystery, right? They were inspired by classic OSR progression tables, and while the contents are different, the purpose remains the same. The most challenging part of making these was preventing character progression from feeling "samey" across the classes. Special Abilities are a big help, of course, but if a Rogue had the same basic progression as a Fighter, then they'd both lose a bit of what makes them special. Luck played a key role in this!

CLOSING THOUGHTS

I'm on the fence on whether this raised more questions than it answered or not, but I hope this helped shed some light on the process behind creating The Wyvern Hack's classes, and on the purpose of each of the aspects we dissected above. The next few parts of this series will probably focus on specific classes (or maybe even heritages/ancestries, who knows), and I'm looking forward to discussing those!

* I've never been a member of the scouts.