Alignments

Alignments dominated gaming for a long time, but these days they're on the decline. Now currently in gaming there are three major schools of thought when it comes to morality in gaming

1. The traditional Alignment: as seen in DnD, Palladium Games
2. The morality stat: as seen in WoD
3. Nothing whatsoever: seen in Call of Cthulhu and becoming more predominate in gaming.

I think that the problem that I (and probably a lot of people) have with traditional alignments is that they control how you play the character, at least in theory. If you're character is Lawful Good in DnD or Principled in Palladium there are actions that your GM/ST can call 'Bullshit' on and prevent you from doing or at least alter your alignment which is what happens most often, much to the chagrin of many a Paladin. The problem is that I've seen a lot of games crippled and a lot of arguments started by this alignment system. In spite of how much time DnD books spend trying to define their terms like lawful and chaotic, there are a lot of gamers who still have different interpretations of the terms. If you've been playing with the same group for long enough this is less of a problem. Sooner or later, you all get on something of the same page. However, it has been my experience that regardless of what character or class we play, MOST gamers tend to navigate every character they play with same moral compass. Yes, sometimes we manage to do something quite different, but the bottom line is that it takes a concerted effort to achieve that effect.

I like the morality stats of the WoD. I'm talking about Humanity (or other Paths/Roads in Vampire), Gnosis, Wisdom, and the like. The great thing about these is that you can do anything you want with your character as long as you're willing to pay the price. Each morality has a well defined hierarchy of sin and if you commit an action that would be sinful based on your morality score, you have to make a test or it goes down. The lower your morality goes the more deranged your character becomes.

The other option is to just not even worry about it. In DnD 4e many characters are 'unaligned' and I've been seeing a lot of campaigns for the past few years that don't worry about alignment unless you're playing some kind of priest of holy warrior and even those are trending more to a code of behavior than an actual alignment. Now, on the surface there really isn't a difference between a code of behavior and an alignment, but there is. Probably the best example that I can come up with is the movie Kingdom of Heaven. Just about all of the major players in that movie are knights. They are all bound to the same basic code of behavior, but look at them. If you tagged an alignment to the characters they would not all be the same alignment.

I think the best example that I can come up with to differentiate between a code of behavior and an alignment is the classic “I promise I won't kill you.” If a knight or paladin makes that statement, what is he promising? Is he promising to protect the man or that the entire party will spare him or, is it fair game for the rest of the party to put a shellacking on the guy as soon as the Paladin turns around?

The benefit of a WoD style morality system here is that as a GM you can set a limit for clerics or paladins. As a GM you can say “If your Humanity drops below a 7, you lose your powers”. I think this is more fair than a lot of games I've seen in the past. First of all, because there's an obvious line in the sand and you can look at the hierarchy of sins to make sure that you're character is doing the right thing. The other thing is that it takes the “1-strike and you're done” out of play. I've met a lot of gamers over the years who BRAG about how many paladins lose power in their games. These gamers are proud of it. It's really not fair to put your player's paladin in a spiritual bind and then strip their character when they fail the moral equivalent of the Kobayashi Maru.

Blue Chips

A lot of games are beginning to give players more control and this is good.  Now, you don't want to give them 'too much' control, but more is good. 

I was a big fan of Dragon Lance: 5th Age which actually used special cards instead of dice.  It was a cool idea, because you it took chance out of the equation.  You didn't have to worry about needing to roll a 15 to hit the giant and then rolling a 1.  It wasn't without its problems and it didn't last.

Shadow Run has karma which can be used to augment rolls.

7th Sea has drama dice

Dead Lands has fate chips

All of these are ways that players can exert a little more control over the game.  It's good because I know that there are times when players feel that odds are stacked 'too' much against them or they really have a vision for the way they want a scene or combat to play out.  Role Playing Games are loaded with great storytelling opportunities and these elements help take advantage of them.

Blue Chips.  This is the system that I use.

Skills:Out of combat a blue chip gives +5 to any skill check.  A blue chip can be used in combat for a +3 to any skill check (including attack skills). 
Damage: a blue chip will add 1d6 to a damage roll (these are spent after the to-hit roll, but before damage is rolled)
Saves: +3 to any save (in or out of combat)

I've devised some uses that involve magic as well, but I'll include those when talking about magic.

Distribution:
Now, most other games have a specific and structured system for the distribution of their points/chips/whathaveyou.  I don't.  GM's should give a few out to each player at the start of each session and some more anytime a major arc of play is beginning (getting to town, reaching the dungeon, etc).  I've also given them out and seen them given out for general awesomeness, which is anything that the GM felt was cool enough to warrant one and anything that elevates the game.  Things that elevate the game would be painted Pc miniatures, pictures, props, journals, anything like that.

Maintenance Cycles

I'm becoming a big fan of the maintenance/taxation cycle in gaming. How in depth a GM goes will reflect how simulationist a game is. The first maintenance cycle I was ever introduced to and probably the one that the most gamers have heard of is the lifestyles in Shadow Run. It's pretty basic: every month you pay some money and you character lives. It's pretty much up the GM and player how much detail they want to go in on and whether not it ever even becomes relevent to the campaign.
Burning Wheel has another one. What's interesting about the Burning Wheel system is that they don't use money. They use resource dice which are used for purchasing things. This is actually a pretty good way of illustrating haggling as well. The other thing about BW is that cycle is flexible. They recommend doing it either monthly or seasonally, but the GM is free to set the taxation cycle as whatever he wants it to be and the book points out that altering the cycle will actually change the feel of the campaign, so that's a useful tool to have.

The World of Darkness has one, too. That is they have the background: resources. Based on how many points you have invested your character will receive either a monthly income or a one-time lump sum. It's pretty straight forward. I will also add, that while there are no specific rules governing it, I have seen resource dice added to social rolls before, these were typically done for haggling or bribery and any resource dice would be 'lost' until the next cycle.

However, for some reason, the idea of paying taxes is anathema to a gamer. They just don't want to do it. Now, it has been put forward that part of the reason for this is because we have to pay taxes in the real world and it's unpleasant enough that we don't want it included in our fantasies. That's fine, but I'm looking at something bigger. What I'm looking at is a system where everything matters.



My idea is this: You have a number of lifestyles and each of these has a cost (which I've left off because GM's will probably want to tier things to fit their specific games. And also has some effects. On top of this a percentage is calculated of the value all the major items that a hero owns: Weapons, armor, magic items, land, horses, anything else of spectacular value as determined by the GM. This amount will be compared to a scale and depending on where it falls on the scale will determine what kind of bonuses that a player receives. Paying more in taxes may give your hero more access to the king and demonstrate a greater buying power which actually helps you negotiate with other businessmen. What I'm trying to do is introduce a hated simulationist element and use it to really create the feeling of a real culture inhabited by real people who actually respond to your hero's wealth and power the way that I believe people really would.

Squatter: You are barely one step up from living on the street. You eat what you can, when you can with no guarantees of when your next meal will be or if it will even be safe to eat it. You sleep in different places, sometimes on the streets, sometimes squatting, sometimes in a common room, or a flop house. Your clothes are thread bare and you probably can't afford to replace them.

-5 to all social rolls

-5 to all checks v. extreme climate

-5 to wound tests

Extra: A hero who lives at a squatter is constantly exposed to sickness and the elements. As a squatter, a hero must make a fortitude test every cycle or risk contracting a terrible illness (think the plague , cholera, or typhoid)

Laborer: As a laborer you are in the lower, but working, class. If you are lucky enough to own your own home or rent a house, you can bet it's in a bad neighborhood. You might rent a room at a boarding house or a small apartment. Your clothes are well worn and you can only replace them sparingly. Your meals are spartan, but wholesome, and give you the strength to keep working.

-2 to all social rolls

-2 to all tests v. extreme climate

-2 to all wound tests

Middle Class: As a member of the middle class you might have any number of jobs. You might be a senior laborer or possibly an overseer (manager). You could be an artisan or craftsman, such as a smith or baker. Your clothes are in good condition and can be replaced when need be. You eat well, though not extravagantly. You may own a small house or rent a decent apartment.

No modifiers.

Merchant Class: As a merchant, you run a larger business than just a smithy or bakery. You may be in the caravan trade or importing and exporting goods by sea. You dress nicely and eat well. You have sufficient seasonal clothing as well.

+2 to all social rolls

+2 to all rolls v. extreme climate

+2 to wound checks.

Low noble: You live at the level of a knight or possibly a baron. You live in a nice house or lavish apartment. Your clothes are nice and you dine well on high quality foods. It is likely that you keep a housekeeper on staff.

+3 to all social rolls

+3 to tests v extreme climates

+3 to all wound tests

Middle Noble: You live at the level of a Count or Viscount. You might live in a large house, lavish apartment, or a private estate. You may even have access to a second home. Your clothes are very fine and fashionable and can be replaced regularly. You dine well at every meal and like throw or attend feasts on the major holidays.

+4 to all social rolls

+4 to all tests v. extreme climates

+4 to all wound tests

High noble: You like at the level of a Duke. You live in a very fine or home or in an extremely lavish apartment or a large villa or estate. Your home is maintained by housekeepers and groundskeepers. Your clothes are the latest fashions and can replaced at your whim. You eat the best foods and are well fed at every meal.

+5 to all social rolls

+5 to all tests v. extreme climates

+5 to all wound tests

Royalty: You like like the heir or rule of a kingdom. You live a life of luxury. You wear the cutting edge of fashion, sometimes wearing a garment only once before discarding it. You dine sumptuously and likely can throw major feasts 4-5 times per year. Your home, whether a lavish house, apartment, or villa is fully staffed with servants or slaves and you have 1 or 2 personal attendants (squire, valet, courtesan, or concubine). You also have a good horse to your name or a small coach.

+6 to all social rolls
+6 to all tests v. extreme climates
+6 to all wound tests

Dependants:

Spouse: +25%

Child: +10% per child

The maintenance cycle.

Note above that the price was given per day. It is not my intent to have the heroes doing their scutwork every single day. Rather, this is done so that a maintenance cycle can be set. Typically this would be done either weekly, monthly, or seasonally. Though, annually or any other period of time can be set.

So, if you set the cycle at a week, you'll just take the daily cost and multiply it by 5.

Maintaining your gear!

Gear needs to be cleaned and maintained. Handles need to be retooled and armor needs to have its straps re-stitched. Horses have to be re-shod and the list goes on and on.

Players must track (GMs may also want to track this as well) the value of all weapons, armor, horses, barding, magic items, and other 'high value items' (this can be set by the GM). The hero must pay 5% annually. This is a combination of maintenance and taxation. It is an annual 5%, but it can be broken down to fit the maintenance cycle. Example: In a weekly cycle you would determine your 5% value and then divide that by 52.

Eventually, I'll include my own economy and the scale that determines what the taxation 'bonuses' are. My economy is vastly different because I based it on the penny: literally. A friend of mine (Tom) started running a game years back using physical money. He bought fake U.S. Currency from the dollar store, gold coins from the party supply store, and plastic beads for gems from the craft store. Then he started an economy where a beer was 1-5 pennies depending on size and quality and a decent night's sleep at an inn was a quarter. A sword was 85 cents and a shield was 100. Armor was very expensive and magic items weren't traded much at all. I really liked this idea and followed suit. If you want to do the same it's not hard. It will cost less than 50 dollars if you do it right. That's about 25 at the dollar store, 10 at the party supply store, and another 15 at the craft store. For me and the people that I've played with in these games: it's totally worth the investment. Compare it to the cost of a gaming book and you'll find it might be the best investment you ever make in gaming. It adds a whole new level of to it, the first time you open up a shoe box full of actual coins rather than being read numbers.

Hero Progression

I titled this one: Hero Progression rather than XP because I don't actually give out XP.  Some friends of mine started developing a system that tracks your character's advancement in each skill seperately as it's used.  The idea is that you track the percentage to the next level and every time that you use the skill it gains a percentage to the next level.  So swinging your sword in battle should net you percentage points towards your next level in sword (everything's a skill, remember).  The other idea is that this progression slows over time.  The idea being that from level 0 to level 1 in a skill might take only one or two encounters (netting you 100% or 50% each time) but then slows down to typically 25% until you reach the 6th rank and then 15% at 11, 10% to 16 etc.  Really it's up to the GM what rate he wants to progress you at, but that's what I consider "The Normal Rate" to be.  It allows you to progress quickly through some of the lower ranks w/out taking too long at higher levels of the skills.

There are two more things that you should know about this:
First: Stats go up as well.  So in a combat encounter you might gain percentage points in sword, str, con, and defense.  Defense is a skill and I'll talk about it a little more when I talk about combat later (basically it's a skill that factors into your difficulty to be hit the way armor does in regular DND the closest example I can give you is how star wars does AC using your character level). Your Stats would progress more slowly "The Normal Rate" for stats would be starting around 10% per encounter and slowing from there. 

Two:  You can train.  This is where things get a little more messy and it's important for the GM to keep his hands on the reigns lest his players run amuck.  Basically, if your party is town a character could devote his time to increasing his stats and skills.  Maybe by sparring or hiring a sword master or just by doing a daily work out routine to try and build up his physical stats.  Now, what I define as "The Normal Rate" for this kind of training is very small.  2 or 3% for stats maybe 5 to 8% in a skill.  The idea being that I don't want my players taking two months off from adventuring and walking back out to fight with 20 pts in every stat and skill.  In the end this has to be very cooperative and you really have to look at how much your players are investing in their character's training.  If they're dropping 1,000s on sword masters and spending 10 hours a day training and the GM is ok with it, then feel free to give them entire points in skills.  The important thing to do is remember that balance matters.  I'm going to talk about turns and the gaming day in another post, but what I want it to boil down to is this:  Every player should gain something from their actions.  Whether you're talking politics with the king, practicing the sword at the lists, or just drinking and whoring, every hero should get something out of it.  There are a lot of different ways to reward them: stat and skill progression, favors from npcs, extra information that no one else is privvy to, items.  Now, balanced doesn't necessarily mean equal, but it should be close.

A beautiful thing about this is that if you decide that you haven't been giving out enough progression: you can always give more. 

Also one other thing.  "The Standard Rate" changes.  A lot of times if a new character is brought in or someone has to change weapons for some reason later in the game.  There's no reason that you can't just bump them up to rank 2, 3, or even 4 right off the bat.

Feats, Merits, and Flaws

I love merits and flaws, but not ALL of them.
For years I loathed all of the merits and flaws that said things like "at storyteller's discretion", because as the ST/GM you really have to plan your game around these things and that takes a lot of time.  Truth is, I'm starting to come around though. I'm beginning to think of character creation not as 'get the points down quick and scrub up a back story so we can play' but as a dialogue between the GM and the players.  It's really an opportunity to define what we want out of the game.

For years: I hated the Flaw: Dark Fate.  It's a White Wolf flaw that basically says that "something tragic" is going to happen to your character and he will fall and probably die.  I hated it for a few reasons:  first of all: no one wants their character to die.  What they want is the points for the flaw.  Second because I then had to plan what the Dark Fate was.  But I started thinking recently and I realized that if one of my players wants to pick Dark Fate maybe we should start talking about what that fate is and how we "WE" want it to play out.  Maybe in a werewolf game a powerful Shadow Lord player might willingly walk his player into a series of decisions that causes the character to fall to the wyrm and innevitably become my lead villain.  That's definitely worth the 5 points from Dark Fate and it's the kind of awesome gaming that I don't get to see a lot of.

If you or your players are not in a place where you're willing to share storytelling responsibilities in that way or can't compromise then you can always do what I used to do.  I used to ban any merit or flaw that did not have a specific system effect.  In essence it had to affect the way you rolled dice.

Now a feat is a merit (and I've actually seen negative feats as well) which is why I included them in this entry. 

What I did was to look at all the games that I have and choose the Merits, flaws, and feats that I felt worked.  I pulled from White Wolf games, 7th Sea, Dead Lands, and Dnd 3/3.5  The next problem is that not all point systems are created equal.  Some times you'll have to modify the way they work to fit into a D20 based system, but that shouldn't be too hard.  The next part which is a little more difficult is deciding how many points a merit or flaw would cost.  For the most part I decided that a feat would be worth 2 points.  So, from there I simply compared the merits and flaws to that scale and worked out how many points I felt it should cost.

It's subjective, but everything in gaming is subjective.  At some point the guys who wrote the game had to establish their base values and work off of them just the way that I am.  If you think a feat should be one point: go ahead, but then what happens when there's a merit that you feel is valuable, but doesn't do as much as most feats?

Also, going through those books took me a few hours, but was totally worth it.  I've also adapted backgrounds from White Wolf because I've always felt like those added a lot.  Again, there's some rules tinkering involved, but most gamers are pretty good at that.

Somewhere down the road I'll talk about my point spread for character creation so everyone can see how I plan to tie to together.

W20

Werewolf the Apocalypse's 20th anniversary edition is coming up soon. 

I've been a big fan of this game since moving to Jacksonville in the late 90s. I've been playing since I was 15 or 16, so basically half my life. 

http://whitewolfblogs.com/w20/

That's the link to W20's blog which is a game development blog for that project. 
Enjoy

Skills

So, I love skills.  I'm a huge fan of them.  I think skill based games are the best.  7th Sea's knacks are awesome and DnD 3/3.5 had a great skill system.  It was one of my favorite parts of the system.  I am sad to see a declining skill system in 4e and to hear rumors of its further decline in 5th. 

I use a system where anyone can use any skill.  This was pioneered by a buddy of mine (Tom).  It basically worked like this:  if you try to pick a lock, your lock picking skill increases.  If you try to climb a rope, your climbing skill increases.  Now, there are a few skills, like magic, that should require training to get into, but for the most part, I feel that anyone should be free to 'try' just about anything.  This kind of moves into experience, which I'd prefer to talk about later. However, I will say this much.  I have the players track their progress as a percentage of reaching the next rank in the skill.  Each encounter in which the skill is used nets the hero a few more percentage points towards the next rank in the skill.  The next thing is that: everything is a skill.  When you swing a sword: you're using your sword skill.  When you ride a horse: you're using the ride skill.  It's all skills.