Role-Playing: How The Rules Work

The Core Mechanic

Almost every static RPG uses dice and each uses them in a slightly different way. However, a well-written game will have only one way of using the dice for almost every type of action. Using entirely different dice-rolling practices for different kinds of task is arbitrary and confusing. This basic dice-rolling structure is the Core Mechanic. As a rule, the Core Mechanic will work in one of three ways.

Roll and Add – When an action is declared, the GM will provide a target number based upon the inherent challenge of the act. The player then rolls a standard number of dice and adds a number derived from his character's traits to the total. If the final score equals of beats the target number the effort succeeds. If it is less, the character fails.

Higher traits are an advantage because they produce higher scores. Circumstantial complications are reflected in positive or negative modifiers to the total scored.

A variation of this system uses the character's traits to dictate the number and size of dice rolled. Better traits produce better dice pools. In these cases, circumstantial modifiers will add or subtract dice.

Roll Under – When an action is attempted the player adds up his character's relevant traits. He then rolls a standard number of dice and attempts to score the trait total or below. Higher traits therefore produce better odds – but a maximum dice score is always going to fail. New players can find the need to roll low hard to adjust to, whilst players with dice-based superstitions (of which there are many) take care not to use their 'lucky' high-rolling dice in these systems.

Circumstantial complications are generally represented by adding to or subtracting from the figure rolled. Some games instead alter the number of dice rolled – which can make even minor impediments crippling.

Hits – The player rolls a number of dice based upon his traits. Each die is then separately compared to a target number (which may be constant or based on the difficulty of the act). Each die that equals or exceeds the target is a 'success' while the others are discarded. To actually succeed, the player must obtain a mandated number of 'successes'.

Circumstances may alter the number of dice rolled, the score required on each dice or the number of 'successes' required.

Having established the Core Mechanic, most games introduce the idea of contested rolls. When a character rolls to influence another, the target character often gets a dice roll to cancel it out. A well-written system will ensure that highly skilled characters usually overcome this resistance, but players feel better about bad things happening to their characters when they've failed a dice roll to prevent it.

Games where the number of dice rolled is fixed often include rules for Critical Successes and Botches. A Critical Success occurs when a player rolls the best possible score on the dice. Such a roll always succeeds even if the total would still be insufficient. More importantly, A Critical will prevail in any contested roll unless the opponent matches it.

A Botch occurs when the player rolls the worst possible result. Such a score always fails. A botch also grants the GM licence to throw in consequences that are improbable on a simple failure, such as friendly fire and equipment breakage.

Systems with variable dice pools rarely use these rules exactly as described above, but many use a modified form. A lesser version of the Critical is known as rolling up. A maximum score in these systems allows more dice to be rolled and added to the total. If these dice also score a maximum further dice are rolled and so on. Some games also roll down, with a minimum score causing a further roll to be subtracted from the result.

Picture © Deborah Jackson http://dkelabirath.deviantart.com/

Combat

Due to the relatively high risk of character death when fighting breaks out, even primarily non-combat games will also include expanded systems for adjudicating combat. Many such combat systems are extremely complex and offer a wide variety of tactical options. However, the real point of a Combat system is to introduce a small number of extra functions to the Core Mechanic.

Initiative – During a combat scene, everyone is trying to act as fast as possible. The first characters to act may succeed in striking down opponents before they can make a move, so it is extremely important to decide who goes first in a fair and reasonable manner. The Initiative rule is used for this and all other contests of reaction time.

Actions – Since everyone is trying to act, it follows that the person who moves first only has a small head start over their foes. It is therefore unfair if the person that wins initiative is permitted to perform a lengthy sequence of activities before passing turn. Combat turns take a small number of seconds and characters are further restricted to performing what counts as a single action before someone else gets a go. As a good rule of thumb a basic character can attack once with one action. Minor activities such as reloading, taking cover or even talking might also use up an action. Note that the list of actions in the combat rules are not exhaustive – this is still a role-playing game after all. However, you cannot perform more than one of the deeds described as a full action in a single move.

Damage – During combat, most actions consist of trying to kill a target with your weapon. Under the Core Mechanic, a completely successful opposed roll would indicate that this had happened. This makes for rather abrupt combat and can kill a player party very fast.

Most games limit a character to attempting to land a damaging hit. Once a hit has been established, the rules use a largely arbitrary damage system to determine how bad the injuries are. Some games factor the impressiveness of the attack roll into these calculations, but the most important factors are usually the weapon used and the target's toughness.

One hit kills are often possible but generally rare. This gives the players the chance to retreat from a losing fight and to start an easy one with confidence of survival. Nearly all systems have a buffer between 'incapacitated' and 'dead', allowing for close fights where the one or two victors left standing can proceed to heal the rest of the cast.

Some action games permit the player characters to absorb what appear to be absurd amounts of damage. This is needed to give 007-style characters the necessary degree of survivability, since RPG characters get hit a lot more often than protagonists in films and books. Non-disabling hits are sometimes regarded as near misses or exhausting parries, although this can create minor inconsistencies when it comes to healing.

The damage system is also used for non-combat injuries such as falling and medical treatment rules will generally be found in the same place.

Movement and ranges – The rules will usually define how far a character can move at a walk or run with a single action. These statistics are theoretically important because all attacks have a maximum effective range. Some systems go further and define these things in terms of squares on a scale map for miniatures.

This is because modern role-playing originally diverged from tabletop war-games. Early RPGs took place inside a 'dungeon' – a sequential Moria-inspired set of rooms each containing monsters, traps or other challenges for the players to encounter. The GM started the game with a complete map (usually concealed behind a cardboard screen) and the players gradually made their own version as they explored.

As the story-telling aspects of role-playing improved, the action increasingly took place outside of these contrived arenas. As the whole world opened up, it became less and less practical for the GM to maintain a scale map of the play area for tracking combatants. Modern GMs often keep only a vague track of the relative location of the characters and refer to these rules only when absolutely necessary.

That's it! This may seem like a lengthy pair of articles, but compare them to the length of any RPG rulebook. Different systems will include chapters on elements specific to their setting, such as vehicles, magic and sanity. However, by absorbing the above information you should be able to get to grips with almost any game in very little time. Good luck!

Role-Playing: How Character Creation and Advancement Works

Last time I talked about the underlying principles of static RPG rules. This time I'm going to look at the rules which are repeated – in one form or another – in almost every role-playing game. As I've said, understanding these ideas makes picking up a new system much quicker and easier.

There are four key sections that will be found in pretty much every RPG you'll ever play. These are Character Creation, Character Advancement, The Core Mechanic and Combat. In this article I'll be looking at the first two of these four cornerstones.

Character Creation

Any rules system that goes beyond a simple coin flip does so in order to reflect the varying likelihood of success in different cases. When you start considering the factors that will influence that probability, the first thing that comes to mind is usually the competence of the character. An arthritic pensioner just doesn't have a 50% chance of beating up a Navy SEAL. Resolution rules therefore reference the traits of the character performing the act, so the traits in question need to be numerically defined before the game can begin.

Character Creation systems vary, but most are comprised of the following stages:

Concept, Race and Class

Role-playing is first and foremost about portraying a character, not winning a game. When assigning numbers to your character's traits, the emphasis should be on accurately representing who he is rather than creating a set of numbers that provide the optimum strategic advantage. Accordingly, the first step is to decide on a Concept – who your character is and what he does.

Players with very grand concepts may find that they can't make their character as universally potent as they would like due to the limited points available. Players with humble ideas might wind up giving their character very generous ratings in order to use up the points available. This is is fine – the whole point of the Character Creation system is to ensure that everyone gets an equal share of the action.

Many games permit the player to play something other than a human. Usually the choice of race will have some affect upon a character's abilities and options, so it needs to be made early. RPGs that are designed as games first and foremost will attempt to make each racial option equally powerful in its own way. Games designed to accurately represent a pre-existing fictional setting sometimes have to compromise on this or apply some arbitrary leveller. In The Lord Of The Rings an average elf is much more powerful than an average human – so human characters are generally more exceptional among their own kind than elf characters are among theirs.

Games work best if each member of the player party specialises in a different area. This requires some consultation when characters are being created. Many games seek to simplify this process by adding Character Classes. A class is a broadly drawn stereotype which defines most of the Character Creation choices for the player. If each player picks a different class, each is assured of a different role. The downside is that members of the same class are hard to distinguish from each other, leading experienced characters to stereotype each other in ways that are hard to justify within the setting (“you seem like an athletic knife fighter – help me pick this lock!”).

Attributes

Attributes are qualities that all characters possess in varying degrees – such as IQ, physical strength and sensory acuity. They are used to determine a character's basic aptitude for all actions. Many games do not allow attributes to be improved after Character Creation and almost all make the process very slow. This makes Attributes key to defining the strengths and limitations of every character.

Early systems determined Attribute vales by a random dice roll, reasoning that real people didn't get to choose their natural aptitudes. Unfortunately this created a permanent disparity of power between high-rolling and low-rolling characters. These days the usual system is to give each player a set number of points to assign.

Skills

Raw potential is not usually enough for success in challenging conditions. Skills represent specific training and experience that not everyone possesses in any degree. A game will usually have a limited list of skills and players assign points to raise them above 0. Class-based systems may charge extra for non-stereotypical skill choices, whilst combat-heavy systems may base the number of points available on the character's intelligence to balance out the advantages of physical power.

Skills typically increase quite fast during game-play as the characters are taken outside of their pre-game experience by the story.

Merits

Merits (also called feats, assets and many other things) serve two purposes. Firstly, they represent advantages that occur at random in the population, and which are better described in yes/no terms than with a sliding number scale. Is your character ambidextrous? Does he have a photographic memory? Is he naturally immune to the zombie plague?

Secondly Merits represent advantages that aren't physically part of the character at all, but which are still his alone. If you want your character to be fantastically wealthy, powerfully connected or simply famous enough to pull a groupie now and again, you might have to take a Merit or lose that facet from your concept.

Many games also include negative 'Merits' (usually called Flaws). These work the same way, but actually give extra points for Character Creation rather than using them up. You can therefore create a character that is more powerful than everyone else, but will be burdened with extra problems. Some games even insist that all Merits are paid for with points gained from Flaws.

Equipment

Since characters will buy, sell and steal many items in the course of their adventures, the inventory they carry around is never fixed. However, most characters will start with a few useful items in their possession. Selecting starting equipment is the final touch on a character sheet, but one that can take as much time as the other steps.

Some games allow a character to spend Merit points on owning a rare or special item. This can still be lost or broken, but it is bad GM practice to take such an item away from a character permanently without good reason. Such equipment can be subtle and characterful (Edmund carries the only flashlight in all Narnia) or character-defining in scale (the Green Lantern Ring makes regular human Hal Jordan into Superman's League-mate).

Character Advancement

Having established the initial traits of a character at Character Creation, most games include some method of improving them during play (even if the game world makes prolonged survival extremely rare). Players earn these advancements during play, meaning that a years-old character will be much more powerful than a starting one.

When the player group is constant, this system is used to allow the characters to take on ever greater challenges and become ever greater heroes. If one character dies, the player will usually be awarded bonus points for his new creation so that he can keep up.

If players enter and leave the game all the time, this isn't done. Instead, characters who have been part of the story for longest simply get a bigger share of the action than the new recruits. The advanced characters are aspirational figures and players are encouraged to eventually retire them so that rising stars can take their place.

Most games treat Character Advancement as a shopping list, with players free to take any advance when they earn it. Class-based games sometimes use 'levels' instead. Characters remain fixed until they pass a certain threshold, then receive multiple advances at once. These are largely prescribed so that the class stereotypes remain valid at higher levels.

There are three leading methods of awarding advances, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

Achievement-based Experience Points – Under this system, players are awarded points for succeeding at tasks. Any kind of challenge may qualify, although combat is usually a leading source of EXP. This creates an obvious correlation between learning experiences and increased skills.

Unfortunately such a system encourage players to make 'winning' decisions rather than characterful ones. Additionally, the vagaries of Character Creation sometimes produce characters that are slightly stronger or more immediately useful than their fellows. Such characters will earn EXP quicker and the disparity will increase as play continues.

Performance-based Experience Points – Alternatively, players may be awarded Exp according to how entertainingly they portray their character and how much they contribute to the game and the enjoyment of the group. This is entirely appropriate to the goals of RPGs and encourages good play.

The main problem with this system is a social one. Most GMs are uncomfortable with being too critical of their friends in an activity based on mutual enjoyment, so awards tend to be uniform. The characters will therefore advance equally until life forces a player to miss a session or two. That player's character will then be permanently de-powered with no chance of catching up, effectively punishing the player for circumstances beyond their control. This makes it more likely that they will drop out rather than renew their commitment to the game. Since most RPGs need at least 3 players to work and get very unwieldy with more than 6, keeping your players is a serious concern.

Downtime – some systems forgo EXP points entirely in favour of narrative skill improvements. To increase a skill, the character must spend enough time training (usually weeks or moths of in-game time). Such stories generally include long quiet periods for characters to train up in, which are skipped over very quickly. This system combines realism with an epic feel.

The problem is that you are rewarding the characters only for the portions of their story that are too dull to play through. Three months in the training yard may improve your skills, but three days on the front line typically won't. Indeed, characters who actually go out and do things will advance more slowly because the travel disrupts their training schedules.

That's all for this time! In the next article, I'll be explaining the common structures of the rules that use all of these carefully assembled traits.

Role-Playing Games: part 2 - Underlying Principles of the Game Rules

All published role-playing games include some form of rules system and most 'home brewed' games also involve one. The person in charge of running the game (normally known as the Games Master or GM) referees these rules during the game and explains them when a player does not understand. For this reason almost all GMs will own a copy of the game they are running and be familiar with the content. However, it is a rare occasion when every member of the player party is also in possession of their own copy.

In most cases this does not matter. A player can get by simply rolling dice when the GM tells them to and picking the rules up as they play. However, experienced players find that learning the rules of new systems gets easier as they become more familiar with other games. This is because all games are built on the same basic principles and once you 'speak the language' the imposing rules tomes become far more intelligible.

For the next section of my series on RPGs, I'm going to try and explain the underlying ideas behind the many differing rules systems in print today. I was originally going to cover the entire subject at once, but halfway through I found it was becoming a little long. I'm therefore going to stick to the general principles in this post and explain the nuts and bolts in my next article.

The rules provide a fair form of uncertainty – Stories can be exciting. The ones that excite us always share two essential characteristics – they make us care about the characters and they make us uncertain that things will work out well for them.

RPGs are perfectly set up to do the first of these things. The majority of the 'audience' have invented one of the characters themselves, with the process of play requiring them to attempt to identify with the character as much as possible. Even if a player initially regards a character as disposable, most grow attached to them over the months or years of weekly play that a successful game can entail.

The second part is trickier. Without an external story-teller to dictate the character's fate, how can their be any doubt what the ending will be? In truth, the GM is in ultimate control of each character's survival chances – he dictates whether dangerous actions succeed or fail and controls the hostile external forces that they are subjected to. Unfortunately this makes their fate arbitrary rather than exciting. If the GM just dictates that you win, you were never going to lose. If he dictates you fail, there was never a chance. This also robs the players of any practical control over the outcome of the collaborative story.

Rules allow the GM to relinquish control of the action to a set of random dice rolls. This makes the action genuinely exciting for all concerned, since even he doesn't know if the heroes are going to make it out alive this time. It also absolves him of blame if a character dies, making an unlucky player feel less 'picked on' than they otherwise would.

Of course, if the rules are going to dictate the outcome of an action, the odds have to be 'realistic'. Ensuring that the adjudication is fair gives rise to the complexity of most RPG systems.

No rules set is complete – In a conventional competitive game, the rules cover all possible moves available to a player. In chess, for example, the legal moves open to each piece on the board represent the only choices that a player can make.

RPGs are different. The games is first and foremost a story-telling experience, where characters might end up doing anything the GM deems reasonable in any situation they can imagine. For this reason, no game can cover every specific situation that might occur in play. RPGs are therefore built upon a set of general adjudication rules, with more detailed specific rules for frequently anticipated challenges.

The more specific situations that a game caters for, the more sensitive and 'realistic' it will seem when applied to the game and the less improvisation is needed from the GM. It might therefore seem that complicated is good.

However, players are only human. The more rules a game has, the more impromptu mathematics are needed and the more page-turning in search of half-remembered rules occurs in play. Since rules typically go into most detail regarding the action at the heart of the game, this can result in play slowing to a crawl precisely when the story reaches a peak.

Some games so relentlessly embrace the principle of complexity that they are considered to be literally unplayable in their pure form by most of the role-playing community. Others rebel against this by refusing to complicate the basic resolution mechanics in any circumstance. Most strike a sensible balance between the two extremes.

The rules don't apply to everyone – All of the normal players are bound by the game rules unless the GM decrees otherwise, but the GM is not. As the director of the story a GM can ignore, modify or add to the rules at any time. This includes refusing to accept the result of his own dice rolls and either re-rolling or declaring a different result.

In the early days GMs used a cardboard screen to conceal their rolls. The decline of Dungeon-based gaming (more on that in future) caused these to go out of fashion, but many GMs still conceal the rolls they make to hide this 'fudging' when it occurs. Some GMs even roll on behalf of the players (especially in situations where the character would not know the results of their efforts). I personally think that this is bad practice – although it makes no actual difference who chucks the dice, players will feel as if control of their character is being taken away from them.

A good GM uses their ability to override the rules as little as possible – doing so frequently removes the tension and sense of fairness that they exist to provide. Players accustomed to conventional gaming can find this power hard to accept, but a GM is actually more likely to use this ability to benefit the players than to rob them of an earned success. A highly improbable set of damage rolls from nameless goons can suddenly kill a character, which is unfair if the GM contrived for the fight to happen as a routine action scene. Of course, if all punches are pulled the tension is removed from what should be risky combat.

'Realistic' rules are not always related to the real world – Given their nature, it is tempting to regard RPG rules as attempts to create a mathematical model of reality. It truth the model is not of reality, but of reality as seen by a particular fictional genre. The story should work out the way that the source material suggests things work out, which may be very different from the real world experience of actual people. If something always works out well in an action film, it should usually work out well in games based upon those films.

The best games embrace the conventions of the genre that they represent. Game design is a real art form when it is done properly, elegantly expressing the hidden assumptions and ideas behind the stories in rules form. Certainly, entire rules systems are not interchangeable from one genre to another – which is why so many exist.

One consistent result of this principle stems from the fact that heroes in many genres achieve things 'against the odds'. When rolling dice, things usually go the way statistics suggest that they should. Game rules often give PCs better odds than even the world that they inhabit would credit them with – if the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field actually were 3720 to 1, Star Wars games would be pretty short.

NPCs use the rules too, of course. If they also benefit from easy odds the achievements of the heroes start to look less impressive. A typical system is laced with subtle advantages for the protagonists, enabling them to survive long enough to complete their adventures. Conversely, both

horror and slapstick games are sometimes designed to bring about improbable misfortune as soon as possible.

Role-Playing Games: part 1 - what is a Role-Playing Game?

One of my biggest hobbies is playing in role-playing games. Many people outside the hobby have only a vague idea of what that entails. As a Christian, I'm aware of some of the highly negative attitudes towards it that have existed in some quarters in the past and linger into the present day. Since I'm going to be talking about these games a lot on here, I might as well start with a description of the hobby as I see it.

A role-playing game is a collaborative story-telling exercise, using a combination of improvisational acting and task resolution rules. Unlike most acting, it is intended for the benefit of the participants rather than an outside audience. One person controls the setting and performs all incidental characters (known as NPCs). Each other player defines, controls and performs as one of the principal characters in the story (known as PCs). All events are narrated from the perspectives of the PCs.

When a character attempts to do something with multiple possible outcomes (such as jump across a gap) the rules come into play. Some form of randomiser is used (usually dice) and the result will either be the good outcome (make the jump) or the bad outcome (fall and die). The game rules determine the relative odds. In most cases the specific characteristics of the character will affect their odds of success.

Most games assume that all characters are bad at everything. When the character is created, players are issued with a standard number of points. These are used to gain competence in a chosen selection of key skills and abilities. If different selections are made by each player, different characters will be needed at different places in the story. Because every player experiences the game through the eyes of their own character, the story told has no single 'leading role'. Each PC must therefore have equal time in the spotlight if everyone is going to enjoy playing.

This is what role-playing is. This is ALL that role-playing is. Different games have wildly different content, but this is not necessarily related to the content of any other game. 'Paddington Bear: the RPG' would be a perfectly functional role-playing game (though likely too devoid of peril and drama to sustain the interest of the average adult gamer).

A wide variety of commercially published games – consisting of a rules set and expansive descriptions of a single fictional setting – are on the market today. Some of these DO contain material that I find unpleasant as a Christian and I refuse to play them for this reason. However, there is no reason to boycott the hobby as a whole on account of these - any more than there is reason to boycott all cinema or literature on account of some of the materials that have been published in these media. The only constants are the creation of fiction and the process of acting – neither of which are bad in my view.

It might seem appropriate to end this article with an explanation of why I play these games, rather than simply defining why I don't avoid them. In truth player motivation is a complex issue that I will explain more fully in a future article. However the simplest explanation for me comes from an old advert for the Dungeons and Dragons Player's Guide. “If you've ever been watching a film or reading a book and thought 'I wouldn't do that' when the hero does something stupid, this book is for you.”

Everyone enjoys stories, but at some point you end up disagreeing with the hero or wishing that the story had moved in anther direction. RPGs answer that feeling, permitting players to test themselves against the heroes of literature or to explore narrative paths that were left untouched by the franchise that they love. When a game goes well, the new stories they make are just as entertaining as the ones that inspired them.

Welcome!

So, I've created a blog. It's not something I'd considered doing before but I've had a few things bouncing around in my skull for a while now. I've also been extensively mentioned in a popular blogger's post, so I thought I'd enter the area myself.

The blogger in question can be found here:
http://subspaceemissary.blogspot.com/ He writes very entertaining articles about gaming.
A less fun but more important blog by another friend can be found here: http://thebrokenophelia.blogspot.com/

While I'm encouraging you to link away, I should mention that a more detailed glimpse into my mind can be found here: http://kingspikearcher.deviantart.com/
Enter at your own risk, naturally.
Lastly, those of you on Facebook should check out the artist page of my wife:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Debbie-Jackson/141798722549369
If you like it, Like it!

Proper articles coming soon!