Strangetree - Et In Arcadia Ego

The Far Roofs: Systems

Kickstarter

Coming soon: The Far Roofs

a game of talking rats, god-monsters, and you

Hi!

Today I’m going to talk a little bit more about my forthcoming RPG, the Far Roofs. More specifically, I want to give a general overview of its game mechanics!

So the idea that first started the Far Roofs on the road to being its own game came out of me thinking a lot about what large projects feel like.

I was in one of those moods where I felt like the important thing in an RPG system was the parallel between that system and real-world experience. Where I felt like the key to art was always thinking about the end goal, or at least a local goal, as one did the work; and, the key to design was symmetry between the goals and methods, the means and ends.

I don't always feel that way, but it's how I work when I'm feeling both ambitious and technical.

So what I wanted to do was come up with an RPG mechanic that was really like the thing it was simulating:

Finding answers. Solving problems. Doing big things.

And it struck me that what that felt like, really, was a bit like ...

You get pieces over time. You wiggle them around. You try to fit them together. Sometimes, they fit together into larger pieces and then eventually a whole. Sometimes you just collect them and wiggle them around until suddenly there's an insight, an oh!, and you now know everything works.

The ideal thing to do here would probably be having a bag of widgets that can fit together in different ways---not as universally as Legos or whatever, but, like, gears and connectors and springs and motors and whatever. If I were going to be building a computer game I would probably think along those lines, anyway. You'd go to your screen of bits and bobs and move them around with your mouse until it hooked together into something that you liked.

... that's not really feasible for a tabletop RPG, though, at least, not with my typical financial resources. I could probably swing making that kind of thing, finding a 3d printing or woodworking partner or something to make the pieces, for the final kickstarter, but I don't have the resources to make a bunch of different physical object sets over time while I'm playtesting.

So the way I decided that I could implement this was by drawing letter tiles.

That I could do a system where you'd draw letter tiles ... not constantly, not specifically when you were working, but over time; in the moments, most of all, that could give you insight or progress.

Then, at some point, you'd have enough of them.

You'd see a word.

That word'd be your answer.

... not necessarily the word itself, but, like, what the word means to you and what the answer means to you, those would be the same.

The word would be a symbol for the answer that you've found, as a player and a character.

(The leftover letters would then stick around in your hand, bits of thought and experience that didn't directly lead to a solution there, but might help with something else later on.)

Anyway, I figured that this basic idea was feasible because, like, lots of people own Scrabble sets. Even if you don't, they're easier to find than sets of dice!

For a short indie game focused on just that this would probably have been enough of a mechanic all on its own. For a large release, though, the game needed more.

After thinking about it I decided that what it wanted was two more core resolution systems:

One, for stuff like, say ... kickstarter results ... where you're more interested in "how well did this do?" or "how good of an answer is this?" than in whether those results better fit AXLOTL or TEXTUAL. For this, I added cards, which you draw like letter tiles and combine into poker hands. A face card is probably enough for a baseline success, a pair of Kings would make the results rather exciting, and a royal flush result would smash records.

The other core system was for like ... everyday stuff. For starting a campfire or jumping a gap. That, by established RPG tradition, would use dice.

...

I guess technically it didn't have to; I mean, like, most of my games have been diceless, and in fact we've gotten to a point in the hobby where that's just "sort of unusual" instead of actually rare.

But, like, I like dice. I do. If I don't use them often, it's because I don't like the empty page of where to start in the first place building a bespoke diced system when I have so many good diceless systems right there.

... this time, though, I decided to just go for it.

--

The Dice System

So a long, long time ago I was working on a game called the Weapons of the Gods RPG. Eos Press had brought me in to do the setting, and somewhere in the middle of that endeavor, the game lost its system.

I only ever heard Eos' side of this, and these days I tend to take Eos' claims with a grain of salt ... but, my best guess is that all this stuff did happen, just, with a little more context that I don't and might not ever know?

Anyway, as best as I remember, the first writer they had doing their system quit midway through development. So they brought in a newer team to do the system, and halfway through that the team decided they'd have more fun using the system for their own game, and instead wrote up a quick alternate system for Weapons of the Gods to use.

This would have been fine if the alternate system were any good, but it was ... pretty obviously a quick kludge. It was ...

I think the best word for it would be "bad."

I don't even like the system they took away to be their own game, but at least I could believe that it was constructed with love. It was janky but like in a heartfelt way.

The replacement system was more the kind of thing where if you stepped in it you'd need a new pair of shoes.

It upset me.

It upset me, and so, full wroth, I decided to write a system to use for the game.

Now, I'd never done a diced system before at that point. My only solo game had been Nobilis. So I took a bunch of dice and started rolling them, to see ... like ... what the most fun way of reading them was.

Where I landed, ultimately, was looking for matches.

The core system for Weapons of the Gods was basically, roll some number of d10s, and if you got 3 4s, that was a 34. If you got 2 9s, that was a 29. If your best die was a 7 and you had no pairs at all, you got 1 7. 17.

It didn't have any really amazing statistical properties, but the act of rolling was fun. It was rhythmic, you know, you'd see 3 4s and putting them together into 34 was a tiny tiny dopamine shot at the cost of basically zero brain effort. It was pattern recognition, which the brain tends to enjoy.

I mean, obviously, it would pall in a few minutes if you just sat there rolling the dice for no reason ... but, as far as dice rolling goes, it was fun.

So when I went to do an optional diced system for the Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine RPG, years later, to post here on tumblr ... I already knew what would make that roll fun. That is, rolling a handful of dice and looking for matches.

What about making it even more fun?

... well, critical results are fun, so what about adding them and aiming to have a lot of them, though still like rare enough to surprise?

It made sense to me to call no matches at all a critical failure, and a triple a critical success. So I started fiddling with dice pool size to get the numbers where I wanted them.

I'm reconstructing a bit at this point, but I imagine that I hit 6d10 and was like: "these are roughly the right odds, but this is one too many dice to look at quickly on the table, and I don't like that critical failure would be a bit more common than crit success."

So after some wrestling with things I wound up with a dice pool of 5d6, which is the dice pool I'm still using today.

If you roll 5d6, you'll probably get a pair. But now and then, you'll get a triple (or more!) My combinatorics is rusty, so I might have missed a case, but, like ... 17% of the time, triples, quadruples, or quintuples? And around 9% chance, for no matches at all?

I think I was probably looking for 15% and 10%, that those were likely my optimum, but ... well, 5d6 comes pretty close. Roughly 25% total was about as far as I thought I could push critical results while still having them feel kind or rare. Like ...

If I'm rolling a d20 in a D&D-like system, and if I'm going to succeed on an 18+, that's around when success is exciting, right? Maybe 17+, though that's pushing it? So we want to fall in the 15-20% range for a "special good roll." And people have been playing for a very long time now with the 5% chance of a "1" as a "special bad roll," and that seemed fine, so, like, 20-25% chance total is good.

And like ...

People talk a lot about Rolemaster crit fail tables in my vicinity, and complain about the whiff fests you see in some games where you keep rolling and rolling and nothing good or bad actually happens, and so I was naturally drawn to pushing crit failure odds a bit higher than you see in a d20-type game.

Now, one way people in indie circles tend to address "whiff fests" is by rethinking the whole dice-rolling ... paradigm ... so you never whiff; setting things up, in short, so that every roll means something, and every success and failure mean something too.

It's a leaner, richer way of doing things than you see in, say, D&D.

... I just didn't feel like it, here, because the whole point of things was to make dice rolling fun. I wanted people coming out of traditional games to be able to just pick up the dice and say "I'm rolling for this!" because the roll would be fun. Because consulting the dice oracle here, would be fun.

So in the end, that was the heart of it:

A 5d6 roll, focusing on the ease of counting matches and the high but not exorbitant frequency of special results.

But at the same time ...

I'm indie enough that I do really like rolls where, you know, every outcome is meaningful. Where you roll, and there's never a "whiff," just a set of possible meaningful outcomes.

A lot of the time, where I'm leaning into "rolls are fun, go ahead and roll," what it means to succeed, to fail, to crit, all that's up to the group, and sometimes it'll be unsatisfying. Other times, you'll crit succeed or crit fail and the GM will give you basically the exact same result as you'd have gotten on a regular success or failure, just, you know, jazzing up the description a bit with more narrative weight.

But I did manage to pull out about a third of the rolls you'll wind up actually making and assign strong mechanical and narrative weight to each outcome. Where what you were doing was well enough defined in the system that I could add some real meat to those crits, and even regular success and regular failure.

... though that's a story, I think, to be told some other time. ^_^

The Prince of Darkness

Girl are you the Hays Code the way you consider media irredeemable if it depicts anything that strays away from the norm you're comfortable with or depicts anything morally questionable without definitively condemning it and anyone associated with it, therefore creating worse stories and content and making it difficult for people to engage with complicated issues from a nuanced and controlled perspective?

I guess with the nominations for the 2024 Hugo awards going live, now is the right time to remind folks that Rook & Rose is eligible for Best Series this year. Y'know… in case it was best for you :D