End of the First Week (Patreon)

This is probably the last update for a little while. We all got other stuff to do. But actually, we’re so enthusiastic about the current direction, I suspect we’ll be noodling on it and tinkering with it and testing it in our spare time. Matt said, in our Discord, “I'm sort of fizzing with excitement right now. I don't just want to get back to the design, I want to get back to playing!”

We think we have a core system that does what we want, and is exciting and fun, without actually being completely unrecognizable to someone coming from a traditional fantasy TTRPG. Like, it looks like we’re still gonna use the regular polyhedrals with normal numbers on them. Probably.

But before we get to that, it might be fun to talk about the rest of the week!

That Was The Week That Was

We spent the week exploring various designs for our new game and during that time we talked about a LOT of stuff not directly related to the core die mechanic. Now that the week’s over and folks are flying home and we all go back to working on stuff like Flee, Mortals! and ARCADIA, it seems like a good time to talk about all the other ideas we came up with that excited us.

Death

D&D descends from tactical wargames in which “death” is not significant because you control an army and a single soldier dying is no big deal. In that context, one soldier dying because of a die roll makes sense. You don’t lose from random die rolls, because you are running an army and the army wins or loses because of your tactics and strategy. And your opponent’s! Sure there’s die rolling but the whole point of randomness in a strategy game is that good tactics and strategy can overcome randomness and this is one of the things that separates experienced players from novices.

You don’t run an army in D&D, you run a single character. But it still has that “a single soldier can die from poor die rolls” idea. Except now that single soldier is YOUR CHARACTER. Going from “bad die rolls = one dead soldier out of dozens I control” to “bad die rolls = my CHARACTER dies” feels very weird to people who do not accept (implicitly or explicitly) the wargaming lineage of D&D.

In other words, it’s not Heroic or Cinematic for heroes to die just because the dice went against them. So we think, in the MCDM RPG, your character can absolutely “go down,” drop unconscious, get knocked out of the battle. But you only die if you decide to.

And when you decide “this is it, I sacrifice my life for this!” then you have some ability or resource you give to your teammates. Your character’s dying words literally inspire your team. That’s why you decide “this is a dramatic ending!” Not the dice.

One of the things we like about this is; now you are the author of your character’s story. You decide how it ends. You literally decide how it ends. Or even if!

Will this work? How does this interact with the possibility of resurrection? Would we end up with a game where everyone collects raise dead scrolls so they can “decide to die” every battle and maximize their “heroic dying speech” ability or whatever?

Well, that would be dumb! So it won’t work that way! The idea that “death becomes a momentary setback” doesn’t really model…any narrative or fiction. It feels like Insert Quarter to Continue. Again, very 70s.

But characters certainly come back from the dead in fantasy fiction all the time. It just tends to be a little rarer than it can be in high-level D&D. And usually some time passes. Superheroes come back from the dead all the time, but not several times in the course of one battle! That seems uniquely D&D-ey and perhaps better left to the 70s game.

But this is just an idea, not designed, not tested. So who knows what the final implementation will be? And the Inspiring Death mechanic might just be an optional rule. Or maybe the optional rule is the “fine, you die because you rolled bad” mechanic!

Crits

We talked about whether our system even had criticals and it remains to be seen how things will work in the end (still an enormous amount of work to do) but when we were still using Funky Dice and rolling to hit with every action (no spoilers!) we really liked the idea that the 💥 symbol coming up meant you got an extra action.

This is still a game about die rolls and damage (hm…Die Rolls & Damage…) but “I get to do another thing!” just felt a lot better than “multiply your damage by some factor.” An extra action CAN mean more damage, but it doesn’t have to! Now a crit gives you more options, you get to do more stuff and that was a lot of fun.

It’s not clear our current system will work this way? But if we end up with some way to generate a critical effect, we have this design in our pocket that we know we like.

Attribute Dice and Debuffs

We think your attributes can be both a number (Agility 2 = subtract two from incoming damage, for instance) and also dice you roll. Agility 2 = roll two attribute dice, when you’re trying to generate an effect based on agility.

Now, it’s unclear whether this will survive in the current design (we think it will?) but we also like the idea that every stat has an associated debuff.

If your Might is debuffed, you’re weakened. -1 to Might, which also means “roll one fewer Might die.” If your Agility is debuffed you are sluggish, if your Reason is debuffed you are bewildered. Names subject to change! 😀

This seemed useful and powerful for design. Giving the GM and players lots of ways to debuff people, without crippling them, gives you a lot of “surface area” for design to grab on to. One of the things we don’t like about the 70s Game is that currently there just aren’t that many debuffs and most of the ones we got are really punishing. This gives GMs and designers only these incredibly crude tools for applying a negative effect to a character outside just “more damage.” That’s fine in an RPG modeling Star Trek where A: phaser use is very rare, Star Trek isn’t about fighting monsters and B: the outcomes of phaser fire tend to be catastrophic.

Debuffs can and maybe should be a spice you add to abilities. Under this system, you can have other debuffs! Including some that really bone a character, but these can now be used sparingly and when appropriate, as opposed to “well, I guess you’re stunned?” Gross.

Obviously we could end up with a "damn that's a lotta debuffs" on a single character problem, but this has more to do with the implementation than the design. How often are characters applying debuffs? Which characters are applying debuffs? We can dial that in.

But the overall idea, that stats were also dice, and each stat could be debuffed, but the debuffs all work the same way (-1 to that stat) seemed really powerful and intuitive and that seems like good design.

We’ll see if it survives into the final product!

You Have Two Good Stats

One physical, one mental. Not One Good Stat, One Mediocre Stat, and the rest are junk.

This quickly became obvious as we want Negotiation to be a pillar of this game’s design. And however that system will eventually work? It will probably rely mostly on the three mental stats.

Well, that creates this unpleasant asymmetry, where all classes are good at Fighting Monsters (some using physical attributes, some mental) but only the mental classes are good at negotiation.

Nope, the Tactician is as smart as a Wizard. If, indeed, we have a class called Wizard. And so they’re both equally useful and relevant during negotiations AND combat and it’s just down to “how, exactly?”

We can carve out exceptions, you know if there’s an MCDM Barbarian, maybe their stats are Might and Endurance, but then that’s a kind of play style. “I don’t want to be the Talky One, I’m happy keeping my mouth shut in those scenes.”

But the “two good stats” model worked pretty well in testing and it lead to something pretty cool….

Reason vs Intuition

Currently, the Tactician (our basic melee class) uses Might and Reason to do their stuff.

So there came a point, when Matt was running the goblins against Hannah’s Tactician and James’ Beastheart, where Hannah said “I make a Reason attack against the goblin’s Intuition” that felt like a eureka! moment.

It wasn’t anything particularly flashy, but it was instantly obvious what the Tactician was doing. Using their tactical smarts to find an opening, while the goblin is trying to guess, or intuit what the Tactician is going to do.

The attack still had a name, it wasn’t some freeform stat vs stat system where anyone can use any stat to do anything, but Hannah was just explaining which stats this special attack used and it felt really good.

It was another one of those “this is better” moments we have several of over the week. Along with several “this is way worse!” moments. 😀

THE COSMIC DIE

This is one of those things that just seemed neat and flavorful, but once we had it, we kept realizing uses for it. We kept having these moments where we knew something should happen, or we should have some mechanic for X, and we realized the Cosmic Die could do it.

That’s another potential sign that you’re on the right track. This feeling of “using all the parts of the buffalo.” Without the Cosmic Die, we lacked that element of fate, appealing to fate, not just using dice to model an uncertain outcome, but one that literally represents the vicissitudes of fate.

Also, interesting side note, Matt just discovered he knows how to spell “vicissitudes.” So we got that going for us.

Like most of the things on this list, will the Cosmic Die survive into the final product? Maybe not! But this is the process.

Rapid Prototyping

This is what rapid prototyping gets us. We’re all in the same room together every day, don’t bother with Design Docs, don’t even bother writing it down. If we got an idea? Try it.

There’s a huge difference between how an idea feels in your mind when you’re just modeling it with imagination, and how it actually plays at the table. And the latter is all that matters at the end of the day. So edit the monsters and PCs to reflect this new idea, and grab the dice and minis. Try it. Roll dice, push lead.

We ran something like 4 or five separate combats over the week, just some goblins vs one or two PCs, with the three designers rotating who was playing what, and it meant we ground through a lot of ideas and options quickly. The ones that felt good? Stayed. The ones that didn’t, got tossed out. But at least we tried it, and now we have that experience in case we need it later.

We often went down dead ends, but that’s the only way to make progress. So we often circled back to earlier ideas and discussions. There were times where it felt frustrating, like we weren’t making progress, but then you think back to all the other games you’ve worked on and remember “this always happens, this is the process. We’ll get there.”

Knowing “this is just how game design works” helps everyone relax and not panic when we didn’t manifest an entirely new combat resolution mechanic in a day. 😀

It also meant we were able to try out a lot of ideas, including replacing the normal polyhedrals with numbers on them, with dice that use symbols instead.

What we learned was; we didn’t need the d20. But we also learned we probably don’t need to leave it either.

The trick is…only rolling the d20 when it’s dramatic…

Normal Dice Are Probably Fine

All week we’ve been wondering the same thing “do we need the funky dice to do this?” And while this answer might change, we currently think the answer is “no, we can use the normal dice.” But funky dice have a lot of advantages.

With normal dice, like a d8, the 1 is just as likely to come up as an 8, even though the 8 is eight times larger. This is one of the things designers mean when they talk about how “swingy” a die is.

Whereas an 8-sided die that uses symbols, where one symbol = one success, is much more tame. It’s a lot easier to balance! And people seem to value balance in their games. 😀

It also gives us the power to have multiple symbols with different frequencies. Or rarities. After playing Descent, we liked the idea of “surges.” A power-up symbol. Sort of like “upcasting.” A magic bow might grant +1 success on attack, and if you get a ⚡ it does something cool. Anyone reading this can imagine what kinds of cool abilities a magic bow might grant on a ⚡.

That is very fun as a designer and for a lot of players. Now each die result can tell you several things simultaneously. Did I hit (🗡️), did I crit (💥), did Something Cool happen (⚡)? You could have one facing with 🗡️🗡️⚡ and another with ⚡⚡🗡️. Without any die having one facing that’s eight times better than another. Or twenty times better!

And now you can have a d8 where one result (like “🗡️”) only exists on one facing (1:8). Whereas “🗡️🗡️” might exist on three facings (3:8). So there aren’t eight different results, but you can still have a 1:8 chance of something happening. Or 1:4. Or 3:8. Whatever likelihood you need. Whatever makes the game feel best.

So funky dice give designers a lot of power to tune the design. It can be a lot more straightforward to design and balance a game.

But once we tried out “your meat-and-potatoes abilities just work, no attack roll needed” we ended up with a system that would be relatively easy to do with normal numbered dice. So we had a looong discussion about “should we just use the regular polyhedrals?”

The d20 and the Null Result

We talked a LOT about the null result, “I miss, next.” About why it felt bad. And the consensus among the design team was “missing isn’t that big a deal, doing nothing is.” This is an important distinction.

Rolling a d20 every time you try to do something in the 70s Game means you miss a LOT and in that game’s current implementation that basically means you do nothing.

By Friday afternoon we’d done so many combats and talked about this subject so much, it started to seem like we had the language to solve this problem.

We’d identified three classes of things you tend to do, during combat, in a Fighting Monsters game.

The meat-and-potatoes abilities you rely on. That’s the key, you rely on them. These are not your flashy abilities, they’re not a huge deal, but they still matter and you do them all the time.

What if those abilities just worked? And all you were doing was rolling to see how MUCH they worked? I.e. damage? Just…you do it, roll to see how MUCH you do.

This seemed very promising. And we tried it! But before we talk about how it went….

Initiative

In a completely unrelated discussion, we agreed to try side-based initiative. I.e. you roll once at the start of combat, and it’s literally just random. GM rolls a d6, a player rolls a d6, the winning side goes first.

Either ALL the heroes go first, or ALL the monsters go. Then you just keep going back and forth.

This is how it worked back in the 70s and 80s, but not how it’s worked since 2000 and the advent of 3E. Individual initiative made sense, and it meant that now your Dex could have another use (perhaps too many uses!) so folks liked it.

But having experienced both ways of running initiative, and knowing we’re trying to make a heroic game which has an implication of teamwork, Matt suggested we try side-based initiative. Because it very strongly seems to encourage teamwork in a way individual initiative does not.

Teamwork, in this context, just means you can literally work together. Come up with a plan together, and execute on it. We did this all the time in AD&D and it was awesome. Then individual initiative came along…and we liked that too! But something was lost.

Currently, you and your fellow players can certainly plan together what you’re each going to do on your turns, but what actually happens is: the Rogue and Paladin make a plan, the Rogue does their part, then a bunch of monsters go, and now it’s the Paladin’s turn.

But the battlefield has changed since they made their plan. So now the Paladin’s idea doesn’t make any sense. The conditions have changed! So you gotta improvise.

Over many rounds and many encounters the players eventually learn there’s not really any point in paying attention to the battle when it's not your turn. Because so much stuff is going to change anyway, might as well get some pizza or scroll through twitter, wait for the GM to say it’s your turn, then survey the battlefield and figure out what the optimal thing to do is.

This sucks. Teamwork is fun! Coming up with a plan and then executing on it together is fun. So, rapid prototyping right? We tried it! Who knows, maybe there’s a good reason to use individual initiative we haven’t thought of.

So we tried side-based initiative in the same encounter where we deployed the “your basic stuff just works, you're only rolling for damage” idea and…

Something Remarkable Happened

Suddenly, with no “roll to hit” and no individual initiative, the start of the fight felt like a shotgun shot. Just, *blam!* GO! Moving into position BECOMES attacking. It was really kinda breathtaking as a GM. The goblins just slammed into the heroes. The start of combat, even 1st level PCs against lowly goblins, felt epic.

And suddenly, the funky dice seemed less important. This experience had nothing to do with WHICH dice are rolled or what symbols might be on them. It was rolling at all that was annoying.

Meat-and-Potatoes Alone Does Not a Balanced Diet Make

Okay okay, but we never imagined EVERYTHING would be auto-hit, roll for effect. This was always only intended to be how your basic or ‘Signature Attacks’ would work.

There’s two other things you tend to do in fantasy RPGs where you Fight Monsters. You tend to have powers that generate a Big Effect, and folks try to see how well they can avoid all or some of it. This should be a more analog experience.

You, reading this now, can probably imagine the kinds of effects we’re thinking of. So the monster, or the spellcaster (or the martial hero! RAIN OF KNIVES!) rolls a lot of effect dice, usually representing damage, and everyone in the area uses Agility or maybe Toughness (Endurance? James likes Endurance) to see how much of it you can avoid.

So now we got two pretty core, classic experiences in combat. Normal attacks and FIREBALL! DRAGON BREATH! All that stuff. So far so good, anything else?

The Opposed Roll

Well there are some things that tend to happen a lot in these games where one character just tries to overwhelm another. These tend not to be analog like a dragon’s breath where some people take a LOT of damage, some much less, but more like, the Voiceless Talker tries to Mind Control you, the Ogre tries to grapple you. The Orc tries to push you over a cliff.

It’s your Might vs theirs! It’s your Presence vs theirs! Direct, individual conflict. For this, an opposed roll makes sense. It’s dramatic! It’s basically how you’d expect it would work.

It seemed like the d20 was as good a die for this as any! And at that point it started to make sense to go back to the regular polyhedrals everyone already has! And we’re still using a d20 for conflict resolution, we’re just using it only when it’s dramatic.

Now rolling a d20 is more special. The d20 takes its rightful place as the king of dice, used only when it’s me vs you, all or nothing!

The other polyhedrals are also in there, they’re your effect dice. How they change and improve based on your level, what weapon/spell you're using? We got a lot of ideas there, we’ll work it out.

But now it started to feel like a real system. You have your normal stuff you can rely on, does some damage, a little buff or debuff, or some minor positioning. You have big effects with broad, analog results that can likewise be resisted analogy and both involve rolling a bunch of dice.

And then you have the All Or Nothing effects that use the d20! Plus some modifiers, it’s not literally random, 50% chance of success or failure.

And that first test of “your basic stuff just works” combined with side-based initiative felt amazing. We still got a lot of work to do, and much actual testing, but at the end of the week, we were fizzing with ideas for how this system could be leveraged to do a lot of cool stuff, while supporting the core fantasy we’re trying to encourage.

It was a good week. There’s a lot to be excited by. Is this our system? We don’t know! It was only a week! But it certainly seems to be pointing in an exciting direction. There was a lot of “this is better” not just different.

Comms

This is going to be the last update for a little while, as everyone’s going home to work on Flee, Mortals! And ARCADIA, but we’re going to be communicating about this all the time in lots of places, including twitter and livestreams.

We created this new Patreon tier for folks who want to support the development of our new game, and who want the inside scoop on development. And we want to give you that and you’re going to continue to get updates as we continue development.

But we don’t think it’s reasonable to tell the people who work here “you can only talk about your job to the Patrons.” It’s neither reasonable nor practical and it flies in the face of our whole attitude toward comms. And just…how you treat people in general.

We don’t use NDAs. We don’t want to bully people into keeping their mouths shut. Your job is yours, it belongs to you, talk about whatever you want to. Might that get someone in trouble? Absolutely! Just like any other kind of communication.

Livestreams are also a very efficient way to handle Q&A for a lot of people at once, in a manner Patreon posts are not. It’s better than Kickstarter! But in the absence of multithreaded discussion like a classic web 1.0 forum, livestreams are really good for conversation as opposed to post-and-reply.

So Matt and probably James and Hannah will be talking about all this in way more detail on their various livestreams and twitter feeds. Because this is (part of) their lives and they are free to talk about whatever.

But any time we do a Big Test of these rules, we will absolutely let you know how it went, and how (if at all) our thinking is changing here in this patreon. When there are things to know, you will know them. We want to do Patron-only Livestreams so you can ask questions directly, that will probably start pretty soon, and we occasionally drop by the MCDM+Patreon channel in the Discord.

So you’re gonna continue to get The Straight Dope, but the team is free to talk about their lives in whatever manner they consider appropriate.

If you want to follow these folks and drop by their streams, here’s the links.

Matt’s Twitch

Matt’s Twitter

James’s Twitch

James’s Twitter

Hannah’s Twitter

The Discord.

That’s it folks! This has been an incredibly exciting week for us and a big part of it was knowing the community was watching with interest. Well, we think we have something cool here. As Jinx says, “Get excited!” 😀