Playing with mechanics

I'm currently in the midst of collecting ideas for a third edition of my personal RPG heartbreaker, Empress.  I don't know if there's much point talking about editions or versions, because homebrew rulesets like these are always in constant motion.  However, it's still a good idea to formalize these into something like "releases," if only for the sanity of the players at my table.  "How does initiative work, this week?" can be a rather pointed question.

This mechanic is all good

Anyway, the ongoing process as well as the process of formalization has me thinking about mechanics.  So here are a few of those thoughts!

Empress session report - My Beautiful Sociopaths

I am, of course, referring to my players, the crew that refers to themselves as the "Murderhobros."  But before we catch up with them, I just want to let you know that you're in for a special edition of "What Did I Learn?"  Today I'm going to go big and list my Principles of Gamemastering.  This is eternally a work-in-progress, which is how it should be for us all.  Life lessons, people!

So anyway, where did we last leave our winsome charmers?

All credit to Gus L. - check out his awesome blog, Dungeon of Signs

Ah yes...they had just received a massive text dump of plot hooks, courtesy of the GM with two thumbs (i.e. "This guy!").  And they were very curious about the effects of their sabotage on the Pie Cult.

Report on the so-called "sick rock" mineral

Let me start with a little background about my weekly campaign.  As I've mentioned before, I'm running my adaptation of Anomalous Subsurface Environment, the great OSR megadungeon affectionately known as "ASE."  The best part of it is that my players haven't set foot in so much as the gatehouse, as they are continually deflected from their quest by their own misadventures.

Just another day in ASE

That quest is to retrieve a certain quantity of raw protonium ore for their patron, an old and clever dragon.  They know that they can find this in a place called Mount Rendon, and to gain entrance to this mountain they must obtain a small quantity of what is known as "sick rock" i.e. uranium.

Towards the end of a fun little picaresque journey from their portal to Denethix, the party got its hands on this very material in the traditional way (i.e. they beat-up some lion men).  ASE provides a nice little lair dungeon to make this happen, so I ran that and the PCs won the prize.

But then they lost it.  It wasn't really their fault.  Well, actually, they sort of panicked and let it be known that they had found the wizard's lost sick rock. After being thanked and rewarded, the authorities took custody of the stuff and sent the PCs on their way.  So now what?

Empress rules

Here's the ever-evolving document that represents the Empress rules:

Empress rules!

It's about time, right?

Empress - magic rules, revised

Hey gang!  One of the things I've been doing lately has been tweaking the Empress rules for spell casting.  I didn't change that much, but here's a list of what was added:

• There are now only five spell levels.
• Casting spells now have a price, which is equal to four times the spell level minus the caster level, with a minimum value of twice the spell level.
• The price of a spell is proportional to the cost paid by the magician.  As before, the exact nature of the cost depends on the type of magician - time for sorcerers, physical energy for mystics.
• The precise costs of spells has been tightened up.
• Any spell parameters that scale, like duration, damage or range, scale based on the caster's level plus the appropriate ability modifier (Spirit for mystics, Mind for sorcerers).
• There's a spell list!  This is the biggest change; rather than leaning on the SRD or the Lamentations list, I decided to write my own from scratch.  It really wasn't too hard, since I resolved to keep the descriptions short and sweet.

One thing you may notice about my spell list is that few of them have combat applications.  My conception of magicians is that they are not medieval superheroes, firing beams out of their fingers and flying around like a robed Captain Marvel.  Using magic in combat should be quite possible, but it should be indirect and require some creativity.  When it comes to giving and taking damage, fighters should be kings of the battlefield at all levels.

Summon Answer!

Magicians occupy a strange position in many parties.  It's clear that fighters should have a front line combat role.  Thieves are well-suited to all those non-combat adventuring activities.  But magic-users, in the traditional model, are basically able to do pretty much anything, but only a limited number of times. With a traditional magic-user, you can become a combat powerhouse (with your Fireballs and your Cloudkills), or the perfect burglar (with Invisibility and Knock).  It just doesn't seem fair to the other classes to have magic-users occasionally outshining them in their own specialties. 

So I try to find other things for magicians to do.  And I partly succeed.  But you're never going to have a magic system without an Invisibility spell.

Without further ado...

Empress session report - The Murderhobros meet hard-punching lion-men

It's been a while since we had one of these.  Well, life gets in the way, which means that we missed a few sessions and I'm behind on reporting the ones that we had.  So let's catch up a bit.

We're at least three sessions behind, so I'm going to compress a bit of the older events.  Anyway, we left our lovable scoundrels having more or less disrupted the plan of Lord Python (an evil wrassler) to have some thugs drug the ales of the beloved Wolf Brothers (the good guys!) so as to impair them for the upcoming match.  

For all I know these guys really were called the Wolf Brothers

Things went well from there; the Wolf Brothers met and beat Lord Python the very next day, although he escaped the justice of the militia.  The PCs were celebrated for safekeeping the honor of Lugosi and the Wolf Brothers.  Radj was able to order dog barding at a bargain price.  Yay team!

Of course, things got messy again.

Spells without levels

The title of this post reflects a recent design ambition of mine, which is to eliminate spell levels from OSR games without eliminating spells.  I have a few reasons for this.  First, as I've been recently discussing, I have an interest in sandbox play without character progression, and having spell levels starts to feel overly restrictive when characters don't even have levels.

Another thing I've noticed, however, is that the nature of spells and spell levels in OSR makes it difficult for such games to support multi-classing.  At first glance, it may sound like I'm talking about very unrelated things, so I'll explain a little more.  

Don't make me choose, OSR!

Empress session report - The Rise of the Murderhobros #4, part 2 of 2

It's hard to believe how much we accomplished in the fourth session.  I have a feeling that part two is going to be longer than part one.  I suppose that if I'm wrong, I'll just edit this sentence later.  If I'm right, I'll leave it there, and look pretty prescient.

Anyway, where were we?  Ah yes, the gang had just been roused by a commotion from outside the inn, and townsfolk were moving en masse in that direction.  Naturally, the party joined the surging crowd, and made their way towards the town's eastern gate.  They were greeted by an interesting sight.

This

Well, not quite that.  They were more lupine-themed, for one.  The self-styled Wolf Brothers, Howl and Growl, had arrived to challenge the town of the Lugosi to...A WRASSLE-OFF!

Empress session report - The Rise of the Murderhobros #4, part 1 of 2

This session, things really started to take off.  The Murderhobros Three were about to face off against a savage lion-man and a terrifying spheroid bear-bot-thing, which had just sprouted a spinning buzzsaw at the end of a small arm that extended from its chest.  That's how things started, and from there, the Gonzometer started beeping like crazy.

Note: This is what actually happened.
Everything else is in Duncan't head.

Empress session report - The Rise of the Murderhobros #2-3

As we check in on our murderous trio, we're going to cover two sessions in one shot.  This is primarily because second of these was a pretty short one due to the intrusion of real-life demands on our participants.  That's fine; we're role-players, so we have to work around that stuff.  So without further ado...

And so it begins again...

Picking up where we left off, the crew was walking rapidly away from angry gang bosses and alarmed citizens in the town of Hoblington, making their way to meet Duncan's mysterious benefactor.  As the group approached the place, Duncan informed his compatriots that they were going to be going through a (hopefully) abandoned village to climb down a sea cliff.  There, they would find a cave wherein dwelled his employer, a dragon named Krakatoka.

Zab and Radj reacted to this announcement with a healthy dose of disbelief, and concern that their new friend wasn't right in the head.  Oh well, they reasoned; we've come this far, and hitched our wagon to this maniac.  Let's see where this leads...you never know, right?

Empress session report - The Rise of the Murderhobros #1

As I mentioned in my last post, I am now GMing for a weekly crew using my homebrew rules for Empress 2.0.  Now, I still need to catch up on session reports from the Blackrock Manor campaign, but due to its monthly nature, it won't be hard to bring this blog up to speed.

A legend is born

So as for my Empress gang, a bit of history...I was previously GMing a group with Empress 1.0 as a weekly thing, with all players connected to an audio group chat in Roll20 (later using Roll20 for shared maps and Google Hangouts for the audio).  With that group, we had some great moments, but I didn't feel that my campaign was working for the group, and we tried to transition to a weekly DCC campaign.

That campaign eventually ran into scheduling issues, and as a result, it's become my monthly DCC group aka Blackrock Manor.  And I have to say, the rules and whole sensibility of DCC are a much better fit for this crew, as are in-person sessions.

Unfortunately, the mix of in-person and online players didn't really work for the people online (crosstalk at at the gaming table can become very indistinct over webcam).  As a result, I lost one of my original players, but he wasn't done with our campaign, bless his soul.  Instead, he wrangled up a couple of players in HIS area, hyped them up on probably-untrue stories of my GMing prowess, and drafted me into being their GM.  Well, I always said I wanted enthusiastic players.

Empress 2.0!

This is a bit out of nowhere.  In short, I just drafted a new set of rules for Empress, my homebrew FRPG.  As the post title suggests, we're going to call this Empress 2.0, for now.

Here she is!

What's different?  In a nutshell: it's much simpler.  I reduced the ability count from seven to five, and that's with adding Luck as a new ability.  Armor is handled simply by increasing the Hit Class, with some rare attacks halving or nullifying the armor contribution.

Also, magic is a lot simpler.  Rather than describe a complex framework for custom spell casting methodologies, I reduced it to two: a semi-Vancian system, with slow-cast spells being stored up in a limited container for fast-casting (sorcery), and a fatigue-based system where casters develop mutations or restrictions as they advance (witchcraft).

I've added a few concepts, mostly stolen from Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC).  There's the aforementioned Luck, of course.  In this case, all characters regain a Luck point per day.  There's also a skill in Cantrips, which can basically be used to apply Luck to other characters (and also as a penalty), and to have it occur based on conditions.  It yields double the bonus of a simple Luck expenditure, as well.  This is an Explorer skill (my renaming of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess' (LotFP) Specialist) rather than a straight-up mage art, and it kind of simulates the mechanics of the DCC Halfling.

I also introduced my own system for feats which is based on Mighty Deeds.  Basically, all characters are encouraged to supplement every attack with some special effect.  The damage will always succeed if the attack hits (assuming the attacker wants to do damage).  The feat will succeed if (1) the attack succeeds by an amount based on the difficulty of the feat, and (2) if the defender fails a saving throw.  Warriors have an advantage, here, since they can take combat specializations that decrease the required margin of success to activate the feat.

The kind of mutations and restrictions that witches accrue, called "marks," are based partly on corruption from DCC, and similar ideas from Crypts and Things. The latter game influenced a number of these mechanics in subtle ways.  They show themselves most clearly in how damage is handled.

Finally, note that this is a work in progress.  Some of the tables are incomplete, and there's plenty of room for things to change.

Latest update: 2/10/2017

Without further ado...

Empress core rules - Section 6.8 - 6.9

Here's where we wrap it up: the master list of spell effects that we are using from LotFP, and some general guidelines for how particular magical effects should be handled.  That's it for the Empress core rules!

Empress core rules - Section 6.5 - 6.7

These subsections cover a few aspects of spells, such as new spell effects, how they are learned, and a standard notation system to describe spell effects.

Empress core rules - Section 6.4

This subsection is a biggie, because it covers (in comprehensive detail) all the ways you can tweak the requirements and challenges of casting a given spell, or even an entire school of magic.

Empress core rules - Section 6.1 - 6.3

We're starting to get into magic.  Here, we cover the basic concepts.

Empress core rules - Sections 4-5

This material is a bit more general.  Section 4 covers the hazards of adventuring that aren't strictly combat-oriented, while section 5 provides rules for experience and character creation.

Empress core rules - Section 3

This is the juicy stuff: combat.  I'd like to highlight the rules for initiative and armor.

Empress core rules - Sections 1-2

I said it would happen, didn't I?  For now, I'm just going to post the rules in chunks, as they currently stand in my big Google Doc.  If I find a better way to organize this stuff, I'll be circling back.

So let's get started.  There's a very brief intro, and then a big chapter on changes to basic character statistics.  Please forgive me for renaming abilities to attributes...in retrospect, there's no good reason for that.  I'll probably change it in a future version, but for now, it's all over the place.

Monsters with a twist: Vampires

Vampires are an old trope, but usually we keep circling around to Bram Stoker.  With all due respect to the wonderful Dracula and all that it has inspired, there's still a lot of rich vampire folklore from around the world that gets left unused.  What about Chinese hopping vampires?  

We don't even have to get that exotic, because even with the Germanic and Slavic folklore, there is great variation to the precise nature, powers of and proofs against vampires.  Isn't that just like folklore?

This is one of these situations where it can be very appropriate to embrace this variation. Vampires, if nothing else, are supposed to invoke fear, and nothing enhances fear like lack of knowledge.  You can make an interesting adventure out of the quest just to discover how to kill a particular vampire.

Anyway, that's my approach, here.