I started this series by talking about the rules of roleplaying games. But what about rules for story entertainments? Well, I’m squeezing them in at the very end because they just don’t matter much in a story entertainment.
The key thing rules do is resolve actions. Primarily, they allow the slow and complicated resolution of physical conflict. They also create an element of uncertainty when resolving actions and combat. However, as noted three issues ago, they’re also random. Stories should be uncertain, but not random. So what to do?
I suggest we turn to Mike Pondsmith’s wonderful Castle Falkenstein. It’s wonderful for many reasons but for now, we have only time to talk about the resolution system.
In Castle Falkenstein all Attributes are rated from Poor to Extraordinary, with numerical values of 2 through 12. Everyone has an Average rating in all Abilities, unless otherwise noted during character creation. To resolve any action, you use the character’s Abilities and a deck of regular playing cards. At any time, a player holds four cards in his hands. Cards are “played” by adding their total to the value of a character’s Attributes.
Let’s say you wanted your character to jump over a chasm. You’d take the value of his Athletics (let’s say it’s Average, which has a value of 4) and add a couple of cards to it. The higher the better.
The game’s Host (the ubiquitous “gamemaster,” once more in another guise) also plays cards. He sets a base Difficulty, which corresponds to your character’s Attribute, and plays cards as well. It’s a race to see who has the highest total.
You, of course, could play all your best cards. But then they’re discarded. What if you draw replacement cards and they’re not that good as the ones you just used. You might want to hold some of the good cards in reserve in case you run into more trouble on the other side of the chasm.
So, moment to moment you determine how important something is to you. If Dalan, from above, had to cross the chasm to rescue his lady love, he’d blow all his cards to get over there. She is his Goal! Who cares what his probability would be crossing the chasm. What matters is How Much Does He Want to Get Across?
And you still might not make it. That’s the beauty of the system. Like any good fictional character, you can pour your heart out to do something, and still fail. You’re not rolling a random number off a piece of plastic. You’ve invested something into the outcome because you chose how much it matters. Because it’s of value you might have used valuable cards you might need later. You’ve decided it matters that much.
What’s especially intriguing about Castle Falkenstein is its easy to use graded success system. You can get a Fumble, a Failure, a Success, a Full Success, and a High Success. Fifth Business determines the results of each card play using this system. In the example above, if you get a Full Success you’ve cleared the chasm. A Success means you’ve made it across, but are holding on by your fingernails to the edge of the chasm. A High Success might mean you jump across and are not surprised by the werewolf ready to rip your lungs out; a Failure means you fail to clear the chasm and are trapped on a ledge some three hundred feet down. And a Fumble? Well, that one’s easy.
But what about combat? Jumping over a chasm is one thing. But what about the thrusts and parries of a sword fight? What about driving an opponent to the edge of the castle walls and nearly knocking him over? What about armor, and damage, and caliber….
Well, I have this idea….
Except for a few roleplaying games (Torg and MegaTraveller come to mind) most roleplaying games assume that the result of all actions with skills (but not combat skills) can be accomplished with a singe die roll. That is, you either jump the chasm or you don’t. You either pick the lock or you don’t. Roll some dice; find out what happens.
When it comes to fighting, however, we break the combat down into all these tiny little pieces. Why? As explained in the first article in this series, because of the heritage of wargames.
But what if we treated anything involved in combat the way we treated all other skills. Let’s say your character was fighting Baron Von Zephran on the outer battlements of Castle Falkenstein and you wanted to push him back and drive him over the castle walls. Instead of using typical combat rules that breaks everything down into smaller bits, with details of hit points and modifiers for certain actions, lets say you handled the action like picking a lock. You say, “I want to drive the Baron toward the edge of the wall and push him off.”
Fifth Business says, “‘Play card with your Fencing skill.” (I’m assuming you’re using the Castle Falkenstein rule for this. I would be. However, I should note that for whatever bizarre reason, Pondsmith put hit points at the tail of end of his combat system. I say bizarre, because it’s a game that dumped so much nonsense and then stuck it back in at the last moment. What I’m proposing here uses a combat resolutions system stuck onto his rules, but it’s not the combat resolution system of Castle Falkenstein.)
You play your cards, Fifth Business plays his cards. Did you get a Full Success? You drove him over the edge. A Success? You drove him half way there, and for color Fifth Business describe how you slashed him across the cheek (No hit points or such, though.) A Failure? The two of you are still locked in combat.
Want to shoot somebody through the heart? Play your cards. Want to shoot out the light? Want to take out three guards using martial arts without making a sound? Play your cards. Using the Castle Falkenstein system, you might do it all in one attempt, you might get part of the job done, you might fail completely.
(A note: by using the system this way, it might seem advantageous to ask for the most outlandish results possible and then suffer the consequences of a Success. In other words, ask to blow his brains out with a pea shooter, and be content if you knock him out. But the way the system works, the higher the difficulty, the great greater the chance for a fumble. If you ask for too much, you’ll probably get nothing. You’re better off dividing your combat into discrete, cinematic-type actions.)
How does Fifth Business determine the value of the base difficulty? He guesses, just like he does when assigning difficulties for jumping a chasm or picking a lock in Shadowrun or Vampire and other games. Most of us know as little about gun fights as we do about jumping chasms or picking locks, but we’re willing to make arbitrary difficulty values for those actions. I assume we can do the same for combat.
The trick is, as with all other skills used in roleplaying games, common sense. If you tried to pick a lock with a banana, your Storyteller/Host/Referee/Whatever would look at you and say no. If you wanted to blow up the Empire State Building with a .22 rifle, he’d do the same. If you used an A-Bomb, nobody would bother rolling dice. I offer that most of the adjudicating required for combat between these two extremes can be done off the top of our heads. Why we need all these rules to adjudicate combat I’ll never know, because we just don’t need them.
How does someone die in this system?
It depends on the circumstances. It depends on how you define our action.
Fifth Business says, “He draws his sword. What are you going to do?”
Having lost your sword when imprisoned in the dungeon, you say, ‘-Kick the chair up with my foot and try to knock him out.” If you’d said you wanted to kill him with that chair, well that would have been really hard. Fifth Business might not let you even try. But you might knock him out.
Or, say you’re armed. You reply, “‘I draw my sword, and duel with him, attempting to find an opening and kill him.”
Cards are played. You get a Success. You stab him. Blood his drawn. But he’s still up. Why? Your action is to kill him so you need a Full Success to kill him. If you wanted to disarm him the cards you had played might have been enough, because that’s easier to do than to kill someone. So, you could try to disarm him, and then kill him, breaking the combat down into easier bits. This also breaks a fight down into specific, cinematic-style actions, making it more interesting than “I swing, you swing.”
Do you mark down the damage done for a Success? Hit points? Who cares? YOU’RE TRYING TO KILL HIM! I don’t know how many of you have noticed this, but most fights in roleplaying games end in one side just dead, dead, dead. With this system you don’t pretend all the half measures really matter. ‘Cause they don’t. All that matters his who kills who first. Or, really, who accomplishes his stated action first.
You and Fifth Business play your cards back and forth. Your companions are fighting more guards on the other side of the room. It doesn’t matter. No rounds. No hit points. Is everybody doing something interesting? Fine, let’s move on.
Fifth Business explains the swordsman has gotten some success on your character. While your character isn’t dead yet, he’s bleeding. The enemy your character is fighting is good with that sword! You need a new plan because he might kill you first. Not wear you done. Kill you. just like that. It’s actually tense… unlike most roleplaying game fights.
A new plan comes to mind. You say, “Are there chandeliers in this room?” As a fellow storyteller, you’re allowed to help build the circumstances, setting, and details of the story.
“Oh, yes,” Fifth Business answers with a smile, because he knows you’re about to try something entertaining.
“I lure him under one of them, then slash the cord tied to the wall that holds it UP, attempting to knock him unconscious.
(Wait a minute? How much damage does a chandelier do? It doesn’t matter! It’s a story entertainment! You want to knock the guy unconscious with a falling chandelier? Fine. Fifth Business sets the difficulty, not the difficulty of the sword stroke against the rope, nor difficulty of the chandelier knocking the guy out, but everything, combined into one tense play of the cards …. )
Cards are played. Since slashing the cord is easier than driving your blade through his heart, you slash the cord, Shhhhwoooomp! A Full Success! The chandelier falls on top of the swordsman! He’s out! You run off to help your friends.
Story entertainments are a loose system that can only be adjudicated within the moment. There are no hard and fast rules… only the substance of what is entertaining and interesting. What matters most is the interaction of Character Goals and Obstacles, whether the obstacles are swords, ignorance, or deep hatred by another character. If you really want to create something closer a story you can. But you’ll be better off dumping most of what we consider necessary for roleplaying games; things we assume we need but just don’t. Approach the games not as a simulation, but as an improvised story.
[I know this is a sizeable part of the post but I want to keep all necessary information on one blog not link to something which may disappear in the future, leaving me without the information.]
Interesting take on streamlining combat and bringing in line with other task resolution. There's a few people out there that have been moving to make combat less important in RPGs -- not a bad thing, mind you, but I tend toward more cinematic stuff and the denouement fight scene needs a bit of choreographing that this could work well for...if you have players looking to be more creative in describing their actions.
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