Wildlings Does a Lot with Very Little, but Could Do More
Help Me Design a Game Based on an Old Game
John Harper has designed a lot of story based games over the years including Lasers & Feelings and Blades in the Dark, but there’s one of his designs that I wish got a little more development. It’s only really an outline of a game, but that outline provides a lot of material that can be expanded to create a wide variety of games. It’s also a great example of unifying mechanics and theme, but that is a discussion for another time.
As you know I've played a lot of role playing games over the years and am always on the lookout for a game that can combine setting, rules, and accessibility in a manner that can be picked up and played within 10 minutes of starting to read the game. It's one of the great curses of some excellent role playing games that they require hours of homework, if not weeks, before one can fully understand the setting and rules sufficiently to play a game.
Take Runequest for example. The game's basic mechanic is very intuitive. Ray Turney and Steve Perrin were quite smart to have basic skill and combat rolls be based on percentile rolls. While it may take a moment to describe how to read percentile dice, most people understand the sentence "You have a 78% chance to hit it." It means what it means and it's very clear. I would even argue that it’s easier to understand the actual capability of your character succeeding when you have a 25% chance to hit over when you succeed on a 16+ on a 20 sided die. Statistically these are identical situations, but one of them requires intervening steps to translate the level of challenge. That Runequest’s system, at this level, is so intuitive is one of the reasons it might be surprising that it doesn’t have a bigger fanbase.
It’s surprising until you look at other aspects of the system. Once you add in the Battle Magic, Rune Magic, Rank/Intiative system, and the Glorantha setting, the game takes a little bit longer to fully comprehend. Add to that the fact that your 78% chance to hit isn't really a 78% chance to hit, it's a 78% to hit them if they fail their parry or dodge roll, and you add some non-intuitive or time consuming elements to the system. Watching Jackie Chan and Ken Lo run through an amazing series of strikes and parries is great fun, slogging through a mechanical representation that requires hours to emulate 8 minutes isn’t. This is true even though those elements can add to the realism of game play and make for great stories upon reflection.
On the other end of the intuitive spectrum is Champions. While it uses six-sided dice for its randomizer, and while it’s mechanics offer a “bell curve” of likelihood of success, the system isn't intuitive at all. To hit someone, you have to know your Offensive Combat Value (determined by dividing your DEX by 3 and adding modifiers for maneuvers and "combat levels") and add that number to 11. You then subtract your opponent's Defensive Combat Value (determined by their DEX divided by 3 and modified by past combat maneuvers and "combat levels"). You then need to roll this number or less on a roll of 3 six-sided dice. Never mind the complicated system, though it elegantly incorporates the "parry" and "dodge" rolls of a Runequest style game into one roll, what's not intuitive here is that most people don't know what the odds of rolling a 14 or less are off the top of their head (it's about 90.72%). Add to this a character creation system that is a tremendous amount of fun, but takes a lot of homework and practice to get familiar with, and you don't have a pick up and play game.
jim pinto (he uses lower case) has designed a number of games intended to be pick up and play in his GMZero and Protocol series of games. There are some great entries in this series, and I almost picked them as my selection for today's post. I highly recommend The Death of Ulfstater and Home. These games provide enough background detail to launch a rich and interesting game and have a pretty quick to learn system that is easy enough that it expects everyone to take a "director" moment in game play.
Another interesting pick up and play game with minimal rules and a storytelling focus is John Harper's very interesting 2010 proto-game The Wildlings. In very few words John Harper perfectly captures the setting:
You Have Been Chosen
The men and women warriors of your clan are far away
across the dark sea, raiding. You are a young warrior—a
Wildling—not yet tested in the Trials.
Two nights ago, a foul thing crept from the ruins beyond
the old forest into the village and carried away two sheep,
a barrel of lard, and a small child: Rylka, daughter of Yuri
Red Hand.
The wise women have met in council and decreed that
something must be done. The People of the Stone Spire are
not to be preyed upon. Though the child might be eaten
by now, a rescue must nevertheless be undertaken.
You have been chosen for this task. Take up your arms and
steel your courage. The time has come to do your duty.
You know exactly what is going on and what your supposed to do. It's three short paragraphs, but it frames a society and an adventure. Very elegant. The rules are also equally easy to learn and adapt and are narrative in form. At the start of play each player has a normal set of polyhedral dice, with one die of each type except for a d20 (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12). These dice represent competence in certain areas. The higher the die the better the competence.
The player assigns one of these dice to one of five different “spirits” or areas of competence. In this game, those spirits are the Wolf, the Boar, the Owl, the Snake, and the Stag. Each of these “spirits” is associated with certain kinds of actions players might have their characters attempt in play. Roughly, these spirits correspond to the following action types:
Wolf — Tracking, Hunting, Go Into Danger
Snake — Sneaking, Hiding, Entry, Escape
Stag — Swiftness, Grace, Opening Your Heart to Nature (See Highlander)
Owl — Watching, Listening, Planning
Boar — Resisting, Holding Steadfast, Aggression
Within the confines of the setting that John Harper ably crafted in his introduction, these are perfectly understandable groupings of capabilities and players assign one of the die types to each of the spirits with d4 being the one they are weakest at and d12 being the one they are best at. There is one little twist that Harper adds though. Whatever spirit the player assigns a d10 to is their “Warrior Spirit” and this represents how the character was trained to fight.
This is a very interesting design element for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, it means that all player characters are equally capable in combat. It’s not “how capable they are” at fighting, rather it’s “how they are capable” at fighting. One character might fight with swiftness and grace, but another might fight by watching and planning. While the game includes no magic system, it wouldn’t take much thought to say that a player who put a d10 in Owl fights using the magic of the Ancients. The second thing I find interesting about this is that it allows for a lot of variation in character creation as players have their characters focus on different spirits. In a party of five, each spirit could have someone with a d12 in that spirit and thus the party would be “balanced” in the Old School sense of balance where each archetype is represented.
To determine success or failure of a given action, the player rolls their spirit die with the following possible results:
3 or Less — Something Bad Happens
4,5,6 — Choose one outcome
7,8,9 — Choose two outcomes
10 — Choose three outcomes
What Harper means by “outcomes” is that the player may choose from a list of 10 adjectives to describe how they perform an action. These adjectives are Boldly, Carefully, Cleverly, Forcefully, Helpfully, Impressively, Precisely, Thoroughly, Quickly, and Quietly. The more successful you are on your roll, the more positive adjectives you get to add to your action.
For example, let’s say that Sten (with a Snake die of d8) is trying to sneak by a troll guarding the entrance to the cave. If he rolls a 1, he would fail. If he rolled a 4, he could sneak “Quickly” let’s say, but if he sneaks Quickly, he might not be doing so Quietly and the GM might have that matter. If Sten’s player rolls a 7, Sten could move Quickly and Quietly. On the surface, this is really nice.
But...there is one problem. It doesn’t tell you how you adjudicate those adjectives or tell you how many positive adjectives are necessary to succeed at a task or defeat a foe. How do we adjudicate these adjectives without falling too much into a pitfall that allows mean GMs to say, “You’re running out of the house quickly, but not carefully, right?” and having the character trip on a log and burn to death? Very little guidance is given in the rules. Given that they are only 5 pages, this isn’t surprising but I wish he’d been able to add some additional rules for how to adjudicate.
Thankfully a gamer named GremlinLegions did come up with an expansion of the rules in 2015 that provided some additional guidance, in particular guidance for how to deal with the negative aspects of failure via the use of a “Harm” mechanic.
Even with the expanded rules though, the game is not complete from a “ensure the GM is fair” perspective. How do we prevent the above scenarios from being foisted upon a player whimsically? After all, either potentially negative result (after a “successful” roll) is narratively and mechanically legitimate. Having players have to think about “how” they are successful in a situation can add narrative complexity to the situation. For example, if Sten is fighting a heavily armored Troll, maybe he needs to strike Precisely (if it’s plate armor) or Forcefully (if it’s padded armor). If the GM describes the situation, the player can then choose the manner of success hoping they applied the right kind of success.
The way to avoid capriciousness in this situation is for the GM to have written down in advance the kinds of successes required to gain a success and how many successes are needed to defeat a challenge. Not every challenge should be defeated with a single positive result, even with many adjectives. Given that the same adjective can be selected many times, this creates some opportunities for having foes defined by traits that can be overcome with these adjectives. For example, maybe a Troll is “Massive,” “Tough,” and “Fearsome.” Each trait could represent a needed success, but each trait could have adjectives associated with them. “Massive” might only be countered with Forceful or Thoroughly.
If the GM decides to use traits in this way, the same descriptive traits should always be counterable by the same attacking adjectives (i.e. Forcefully should always hurt Massive in the future), but players shouldn’t be told which adjectives to apply. They should have to learn them, but the GM should create a list of traits and their counters that grows over time. To increase player agency, the GM might allow other adjectives to be used with a good description/reason or the expenditure of some resource, but such a system would take some more development.
All of this is beyond the guidance provided by Harper though, but is within the direction that GremlinLegions expansion was headed. In these expansion rules, which were last updated in 2015 and now requiring searches via the Internet Wayback Machine, GremlinLegions provides some upgrades beyond the introduction of the Harm mechanic. GremlinLegions also redefines the abilities a little bit.
Wolf — Spirit of the hunt and night. Wolf leads by example (Leadership).
Snake — Stealth and Secrets
Stag — Speed and Grace
Owl — Wisdom and Knowledge
Bear (no Boar in his version) — Strength and Health
This redefining of the spirits gives GMs even more room to create traits for challenges the player characters face, and the expanded rules provide some examples of challenges with trait descriptions. Sadly, no rules for what is necessary to overcome those traits are provided. For example, a Cavern Drake is listed as being Alert and Scaly.
We might infer that Alert is defeated by Carefully and Scaly is defeated by Precisely, but no formal rules are given. This is likely to allow for players to creatively describe how the particular adjective overcomes the trait, but for me that leaves too much room for bad GMs to punish players. I know that bad GMs are rare, but they exist and I’d rather provide guidance towards good play and good adjudication than have a system that is too abstract and allows for too much GM fiat. GM creativity is good, GM fiat can be bad.
All I would add to GremlinLegions’ rule set is a formal list of adjectives that can overcome which traits. It wouldn’t take much time to do and it would allow for players to “learn” which things succeed versus which foes and to have their characters become more capable as they themselves learn more about the world.
Without GremlinLegions’ expansion of the rules, Wildlings isn't quite playable out of the box. An experienced GM can run it out of Harper's player's kit pdf, but an inexperienced one is left with no aid on how to resolve conflicts other than the adjectives.
All of that said, I would like to expand upon John Harper’s and GremlinLegions’ rules to create a new role playing game and I’d like to work with you to do it. This leads me to my next question, which genre should we use for the game? I’m leaning towards superheroes, but what about you?
Very interesting. A ‘Savage Worlds’ stepped dice mechanic used to power a narrative system. My experience of RPGs is, one might say, deep but narrow and I am very far from having anything like the grasp of mechanics and their implications that many people in the hobby possess (including, clearly, yourself). So take the following rambling observations in that spirit of amateurishness bordering on ineptitude.
I think something very like this could work for a supers game (although I am by now almost convinced that only a truly systemless narrative game can work in a genre where any mechanical approach has to grapple with an enormous array of potentially vastly different effects of dizzyingly various magnitude).
Personally, I’d do away with the d10 ‘fighting’ mechanic, as it seems to run counter to the ethos of a game where characters can adopt a number of approaches to problem solving. Saying ‘all characters can fight with equal competence’ presumes that all players want to play characters that can fight stuff when, surely, the point of such a system is to allow for other solutions than “I hit it with my axe”? If that’s the only meaningful option, who cares if you do it ‘quickly’ or ‘precisely’? I accept that this is offset somewhat by preserving the d12 as a ‘non combat’ dice, but I chafe against any game that prioritises hitting something with a lump of metal. It’s the old problem of things starting to look like nails when the most readily available tool is a hammer. In this context (unless I missed it) there seems to no ‘spirit’ or adverb that deals with social challenges or encounters. This seems a peculiar omission.
On the suggestion of pairing adjectives with adverbs I am in two minds. On the one hand, I agree that it is mechanically elegant. But I also think I’d be chary of a system that required adverb A to be chosen in order to have any meaningful impact on an encounter where the opposition possesses adjective Z (although I’m not suggesting that this is what you are implying). This could end up feeling too contrived or schematised, which is not necessarily the ideal mechanical tone one is aiming for in a narrative game. My concern would be that the tighter the correlation between adverb and adjective, the greater the possibility that players set about collecting a series of formal matching terms as a meta game of ‘snap’.
One solution might be to increase the variables by expanding the number of available adverbs - assigning each ‘Spirit’ it’s own list of appropriate but varied words, and to allow that a given suite of adverbs drawn from any ‘Spirit’ list is more or less effective against an opponent possessed of some collection of particular adjectives. Necessarily this will lead to some ‘fuzzy edges’ where player ingenuity bumps up against GM interpretation, but it was ever thus in rules lite narrative systems. This could be offset somewhat by limiting the number of possible adjectives under the bonnet but refraining from using them as mechanical terms of art in play. Thus an opponent might be ‘slow’ and so additionally susceptible to any adverbial action that indicates speed and agility, with actions taken using those adverbs having a greater impact (whether in terms of damage inflicted or avoided), but the GM never employs the word ‘slow’ as a rules term, only using synonymous language to allow the players to infer the requisite tactical approach.
I’ve spent so long typing this on a footling iPad virtual keyboard and editing as I go that I’ve now clean forgotten what the system has to say about determining success beyond the implication that the number of adverbs sort of determines the scale of achievement as well as the manner of it. So I hope you’ll forgive me if what follows is stunningly irrelevant. I’m all for narrative systems that adopt a presumption of character success but, from memory, this seems to be an area where the rules are a little too lite. Once you introduce maths rocks, the inevitable pull is towards metrics and measurement. The most obvious change would be to require X successes to achieve objective Y, with the employment of appropriate adverbs adding more successes to the total as already indicated by the dice. This is potentially useful because, in combat, successes can be a measure of damage but, in social encounters, it can serve as a metric for performance or plausibility or what have you, while a magic (or superpowers) system could be devised by which a number of successes convert to the magnitude of the effect created.
I think if one set out to create a system that seeks to obviate the potential for GMs to be dicks, one would drive oneself mad and I wouldn’t waste a minute trying to create anything using that criteria.