A Role Playing Games Blog
Category : Advice, Game Design, RPG, Random musings, Video
This time I want to share a video from the Neoncon 2009 GamesU with you. In this 51-minutes video Matthew Grau from WildFire LLC talks about the monomyth (aka the hero’s journey) and how it can be used in creating stories.
I have to admit that’s the first video in that series that I actually enjoyed watching. Perhaps because Matthew is talking about story and not the industry. What are you thoughts on Matthew’s talk?
While developing Gears I have encountered many situations where I was not sure if the direction I am taking with the game is the right direction. While working on the combat section of the Gears rules I have the problem that the basic mechanic, which I love, is getting in the way all the time. I sometimes wished I had chosen a different base mechanic. There a moments, where I believe changing the system to something like “3d6 roll higher” or even a dice pool system, would make the game much better.
While this change would force me to come up with new solutions to problems I’ve already solved, it would make combat and perhaps even my planned powers system much, much easier to design. There are quite a few things that currently just don’t work as I hoped. The problem is that I have already put quite some work and effort into the current version and changing something basic like the dice mechanic will probably force me to start from scratch. On the other hand struggling with something I am not entirely happy with seems like a waste of time.
What would you do? Would you try to keep with the current mechanics, no matter what? Or would you change the game’s basics in order to give it a fresh start? I have to admit I am pretty much torn at the moment. One thing is sure, I want to finish that project and release a product that not only I am happy with but which will be picked up and played by at least a few other gamers.
Chronicles is one of the many game designs I have floating around on my hard disk. And like most of these abandoned projects, it’s totally untested, probably extremely unbalanced and unfinished. But it was great fun to write! 
Chronicles is a rules-lite, anime-style fantasy game which uses a pretty easy dice pool system and four classes: the Warrior which is attuned to Earth, the Archer which uses Air magic, the Monk who draws his power from Water and the Sorcerer who is a master of Fire magic.
Today I stumbled upon my manuscript, made some minor layout tweaks and created a PDF you can download here. I don’t intend to anything with it in the foreseeable future, but perhaps there is someone out there who can put it to some good use.
This time I want to talk about skills in Gears. In my last post about Gears I explained how the core mechanic works. Usually you roll 3d6 (add some modifiers) and compare the result to your Mastery Level. The Mastery Level is the sum of a primary trait value and a skill rank.
So, what are skill ranks? In Gears skills are ranked using the following ladder: untrained, novice, journeyman and master. Each rank has a corresponding modifier. Untrained gives a –2 modifier, novice grants a +0, journeyman is +2 and master adds +4 to the Mastery Level.
Let’s look at an example: The Security skill is listed as an Agility skill, so you have to add the skill rank to the Agility value. If your character’s Agility is 14 and you are a journeyman in Security, the resulting Mastery Level is 16. In order do succeed at a routine Security task, you have to roll 3d6 and the result must be equal or under 16. Sounds easy enough.
But there might be complications that make that roll harder. If the character tries to perform that action in near total darkness, the roll get’s modified by +6. Or if the GM decides that the lock you try to pick is of above average quality, he may make the check a Challenging one, which adds +2 to the roll.
The important part to remember is that the Mastery Level is always set, all circumstantial modifiers are added to the die roll!
There are two kinds of skill in Gears: basic skills and advanced skills. Every character starts with all basic skills on Untrained, which means he at least has a chance to succeed in a task covered by that skill. That’s not the case with advanced skills. You have to buy the skill in order to use it. Examples of basic skills are: all of the weapon skills so far, riding, security, sleight of hand, etc. Typical advanced skills are Science, Medicine, Profession and Sorcery. Aside from the fact that you need to have Novice level in an advanced skill in order to use it, they are not that much different from basic skills. In an earlier version of Gears raising advanced skills was more expensive than raising basic skills, but I changed that in order to encourage players to pick advanced skills, too.
The last thing I want to write about today are skill groups. Skills like languages, science and profession are not one but many skills. When you pick one of those skills you have to decide which language, science or profession the character is proficient in. The core rules include a couple of examples, but basically GMs and players are free to come up with new languages, fields of scientific study and profession as they see fit. You can take all skill groups several times, as long as you pick new specializations every time.
As always I am looking forward to your thoughts and comments. Do you like how skills work in Gears or would you make some changes? And I want to thank Joshua Macy for helping me refine the core mechanic to its current form. It’s much better now, than it was before!
I promised you more posts about my upcoming Gears roleplaying game system and this time I want to share some thoughts on the core mechanic.
When I started the project I was still unsure what dice I wanted to use. I am usually a fan of percentile dice, because they are so easy. You usually roll two ten-sided dice that generate a number between 01 and 100. You then compare this to your chance of success. That’s pretty easy to explain, even to people who never played any game before.
But since I didn’t need that level of granularity (especially with the skills system I had in mind), I decided to use six-sided dice. One d6 would have been a possibility, but in the end I decided to go with 3d6. When using 3d6 you usually get a lot of average results and only a few very low or very high ones. This doesn’t work as well in games that aim for a heroic or cinematic style like D&D, but it fits perfectly the more “down to earth” approach in games like GURPS or what I planned for Gears.
Ok, let’s have a look at the relevant section in the Gears rulebook:
Dice Basics
Gears uses regular six-sided dice. Usually you have to roll several dice, sum up the results and add a modifier. As a shorthand we usually use something like that: 3d6+2. This means, you have to roll three dice, sum up the result and add 2.Basic Task Resolution
The basic task resolution method is to roll 3d6 and compare it to a given difficulty level. Is the result equal or lower than the difficulty level, the task succeeds. If the circumstances make the task at hand easier or harder, the GM may modify the difficulty level. Usually the difficulty level consists of a skill rank, the value of the relevant Primary Trait and a modifier.
That’s it. All skill and trait test work that way. If you just check against a trait (like Strength) you don’t add a skill rank to the difficulty level. The only rolls that are not made using this mechanic are damage rolls.
I got a message via the contact form on the blog’s About page from someone who has been working on the AARG system for the better part of the last two years.
He read the post about Gears yesterday and got a bit concerned since he thought that it sounds an awful lot like his AARG system. He even gave me a link to the current AARG rules, so I could have a look.
Alas said person forgot to include his name or email address in his message to me, so I have to use this blog post to quell his fears.
Gears is in no way related to AARG. Of course there are a few similarities, but you’ll find similarities between a lot of RPGs on the market. Both system have been developed independently.
If the person working on AARG is reading this, could he please contact me again and provide me with an email address, so that I can contact him directly? Thanks!
