RIP The Career Path (Patreon)

If I know you folks, you’re gonna say “whoah” when you realize what all is contained in this post. 😀

Matt here everybody. A lot of stuff happened in October! I feel like there was a week there, where suddenly it felt like our game snapped into focus. We have a core die mechanic we believe in, it may still get tweaked, specifically the “how is the Target Number to resist Effects determined?” But we have an idea and if that doesn’t work, we got other ideas! But we think the core has settled down.

In Brief

When you’re using an action that does damage, you roll 2d6+Stat to attack. Every attack targets one of the defender’s stats, and they subtract that value from the incoming damage. The way the math works, you’re almost never doing No Damage. You’re always making progress. But so are the monsters!

Then, if an attack has an effect, like dazed or slowed or poisoned or whatever, the defender makes a resistance roll to see if they avoid the effect.

Each class has a number of Recoveries they can use to heal themselves. Recoveries reset on a Rest. Which is like a Long Rest in a d20 game we think.

Every class has a Heroic Resource they manage, like Ferocity for Beasthearts or Strain for Talents and these are all bespoke. Some classes, they lose all their unspent Heroic Resource at the end of the encounter. Some classes keep it! Depends on the class’ core gameplay.

After each encounter, you get a Victory. Maybe if you retreat you don’t get a victory! We’ll see. 😀 Victories convert to XP when you Rest. Every class also grants a couple of Victorious Power add-ons where you can choose to boost one of your Actions by an amount equal to the number of Victories.

So, in general, you are doing cooler and cooler stuff as the battle rages, because you’ve got more of your Heroic Resource. And, as long as you don’t rest, each Encounter is getting cooler and cooler because your Victories are powering up your Victorious Powers.

There’s more details but that’s the basics! And we’re gonna continue testing and polishing, so some of this might get tweaked.

But there’s still an enormous amount of work to do! Just “making a character” is still in progress, we believe it will work thuslywise;

First you choose your ancestry, and that grants some physical traits and abilities.

Then you pick an Upbringing and that gives you some cultural stuff like skills and language.

EVENTUALLY you pick your class and kit! But we think something happens in between upbringing and class & kit which we have, up ‘til now, referred to as your Career.

Career Path

Some of us feel like making characters in d20 fantasy games is pretty tedious. And my initial response to this was “what if it was actually fun?” Fun like games are fun, not fun as in “rewarding” or “enjoyable.”

To this end I remembered fondly my time in the Traveller Career Path mines, making characters and pushing my luck hoping to get the rare and coveted Yacht, the only way for a starting Traveller hero to begin the game with their own spaceship, which meant rolling real well on the Noble career tables if I recall correctly.

Lots of RPGs have something like a “Career Path” system where you pick some starting career like Soldier, Academic, Noble, Diplomat, etc…, and get bonuses to your skills, and maybe some renown, starting cash, contacts (remember this list) based on the choices you make in your career. Then you quit for some reason and become an adventurer!

In other words, the soldier career path asks you: how many tours of duty do you want to sign up for? Each tour is a chance to earn more renown, gain more skill bonuses, make more contacts. But also! You’re a soldier! Which means, you could get wounded, even badly wounded. In classic Traveller, you could die in character creation!

This was a sign that you had pushed your luck too often, it's up to you how many tours of duty you want to take on, but each is a risk. Each tour represents more battles, campaigns, skirmishes. You didn’t learn anything about those battles, these charts you were rolling on were incredibly low on detail, but it worked and people liked it.

And you could imagine the Academic background working the same way with different years of university, graduate school, etc…. Now, it’s telling that at this point it became difficult to imagine how any other career paths would work, since very few careers work in “seasons” analogous to University Years or Tours of Duty but, as is often the case in game development, we figured we’d burn that bridge once we came to it. 😀

I imagined, loftily, that there might be a kind of…3D version of this process. Where you did learn about the battles you fought in! How well you fought, what honors and titles you earned, what rivalries developed in your career! All sorts of stuff.

This idea, that you could come out of Character Creation with a rich backstory full of cool details that would fuel all kinds of roleplaying interactions, along with stuff like fame, money, contacts etc….was pretty compelling. It was easy to imagine this kind of…infinitely extensible system, with enough detail to make a really cool starting hero.

I think, looking back, I was imagining something appropriate for a Star Trek RPG where it is assumed everyone is playing a member of the Bridge Crew. The senior officer corp of the ship. These folks, not just the Captain, all of them, have by definition already had tons of adventures and crazy life experiences just getting to this station in life. And that fuels all kinds of drama! It’s an RPG right? Let’s get some drama out of character creation!

Easier Said Than Done

Yeah, easier said than…what the header says. Yeah.

So, what I’m about to describe and, indeed, share with you is what we in GameDev call “A Dead End” and I will explain why. I will explain why I liked this idea in the first place and, even as I was writing it I was also thinking “This is absurd, this will never work.” But sometimes you need to see something through to the end, to understand why it was a bad idea.

What I Liked

We went a couple of rounds with different prototypes of a Career Path and it never landed the way we hoped. The main problem, as I saw it, was lack of detail. What I was looking for was a system that would produce a character detailed enough that you get those moments like “I served on Defiant. I was at Wolf 359.” And suddenly all the heat leaves the room and everyone’s like “holy shit.” Because that’s a legendary ship and a legendary battle.

Well whether that’s a good idea or a bad idea, it was going to take a lot of work! It’s one thing to say “Oh the players can just make all that stuff up,” sure but the point is…by and large…they don’t. In many cases, they can’t! If you’ve never seen Star Trek and the rules don’t include this info, how on Earth would you ever even KNOW there was a Battle At Wolf 359.

I ran a game for some friends and before we got the group together I spent weeks playing solo with each of them. My friend Aaron’s character, Lord Kenway of Dalrath, went to the Imperial University and had crazy adventures there! He joined a secret society, got in a duel with some local noble brats, fell in love with the Pharoah’s daughter (very prestigious university, all the nobles in Orden want to send their kids there) and even failed one year and had to go to summer school! 😀

He ended up good friends with his professor (a contact!) who gave him a family heirloom upon his graduation and it was just…super cool. Super fun adventure. Be fun to revisit that in some future MCDM product.

I wanted a system, in other words, which would simulate that Four Years At University adventure with just a few die rolls. Hah! HAH! Ridiculous. Insane.

I did it anyway.

The Soldier Career Path

This is the result of that. There’s no way to post all this stuff in here as text or images, you’ll just have to click on the link and check out the google doc. Not the best solution for mobile users, but game development happens on BIG MONITORS. 😀

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WZdwvYZDzZ9irqutmN8VMJwUY_17AVBswr77KolDkdM/edit?usp=sharing

That’s as far as I got before I had enough to at least see if it worked or not. This is the actual doc I was working in, and I should say right now this is not how careers work in our game. This is something I did because I felt like I had to see what I was imagining, for real, before I could figure out what was wrong with it.

That worked. It took two weeks, but less than 24 hours after I was done, I knew what was wrong and James and I figured out how it SHOULD and how we think it WILL work.

So let me walk you through how you “use” this spreadsheet.

The first thing you do, and one of the only choices you make, is you pick a noble in whose army you served.

Lord Kenway, Baron of Dalrath (human)

Lady Estrid, Baroness of Tor (human)

Duchess Gwylliv of the Foxglove Court (elf)

Razavok, Chieftain of the Ghost (orc)

Davax Koll, Thane of House Kurdilov (dwarf)

Red, Commander, The Chain of Acheron (all)

As you can see there are six choices (I didn’t make this easy on myself) and they each have an ancestry and a ruler. I picked 6 because our game is a 2d6 game, so you’ve got the d6s sitting around, and this way you can roll randomly if you don’t care to pick.

The text would have explained; anyone can work for any army. There are Orcs serving in the army of the Foxglove Court, there are elves serving in the army of Dalrath. There might not be a LOT of elves in the army of Dalrath but there are some!

Already you can see one of the problems, although how MUCH of a problem this is varies from person to person. The point of this design was to provide the kind of details that make up a rich backstory. So each army is specific to Orden, specific to Vasloria! So…what if you’re not playing in Vasloria?

That’s one problem, although I think a lot of homebrew fantasy worlds probably have “a local elf ruler” and “a local dwarf ruler” et al and then it’s just a question of either adopting our armies because you hadn’t figured out who the local elf ruler was yet, so it might as well be Duchess Gwilliv of the Foxglove Court, OR you DO know who the local elf ruler in your world is, and you erase Duchess Gwilliv and stick your own elflord in.

But this specificity would continue to be both a problem and the point. I would not mind if the core rules very specifically reference Orden and I’m sure they will in some capacity. As long as those references meant players were making cooler characters with better/more detail that came from the setting. It’s a trade-off and we’re not trying to make oatmeal.

It’s like everything else, some people will read about these people and places and think “Ooohhh.” Some will think “gross, that’s not my world.” Making all those people equally happy would be…well, you’d get something closer to oatmeal than I think we’re aiming for.

It’s not like Vasloria is Dark Sun, it’s specifically engineered to be a classic kind of Medieval European Fantasy, the same way Capital or the Timescape are built to be NOT that. So I felt like we could thread this middle ground of; yes it is a specific world with places and people referenced throughout. However, it’s not weird. It’s not Mad Max With Elves, so while, yes, it IS a specific world and maybe not one you like, it’s got all the archetypes of classic fantasy, just specifically instantiated.

Anyway you choose an Army (and note that armies have rulers and commanders. You served in Lord Kenway’s army, but you fought under the command of Lady Avelina.

If this process and these details aren’t immediately obvious, well this is a prototype! I was just trying to get it to work, I wasn’t trying to make it pretty or even comprehensible to someone else. 😀

After choosing which army you served in, you rolled to determine; what was your specialization?

Infantry

Artillery (Archers mostly)

Harriers (aka scouts)

Calvary (horseys!)

The Specials (like Delta Force or whatever)

There are 5 specializations and you roll 1d6. If you roll a 6, you get to pick, but you can’t pick the Specials. Only way to join them is to roll a 5 the first time. Or just have a cool Director who lets you pick.

Each army only has one special group, and I didn’t even bother to figure them all out. 😀 I had bigger fish to fry.

Then you roll another d6 to see which company you served in. And on a 6 you get to choose.

So right out of the gate there’s…a lot of combinations. It starts to get astronomically unlikely any two PCs could go through this process and have literally the same experience.

What Profit This?

Well you can sort of see the power of this system already. You could have two PCs in the same party, who both served in Duchess Gwilliv’s army, and both in the infantry! But two completely different companies. And they’ll have two different experiences as a result!

That seemed pretty cool to me, those moments where players show up to the table for the first time with their shiny new characters and, if two or more picked the Soldier career path, they could burn a whole session just talking about what battles they served in and how they did.

And while it was somewhat tedious to invent all these different armies and commanders and companies, it was also fun and not that hard. But the looming shadow of “Are we gonna do this for EVERY career path?” was growing larger and darker.

But, and this is an important point, I wasn’t really worried about how long it was, because I was pretty certain there would be WAY bigger problems with this once it was all done and, if by some miracle I was wrong, then the length and work would be something we could manage.

The next step was…figuring out what happened in each of five battles.

The Army Of Five Battles

Each of the six armies you can serve in fights 5 battles and those battles make up a campaign. And this is a fixed process, it’s not “five random battles” it’s these five battles. These SPECIFIC battles against specific enemies with specific outcomes.

Some of these battles are, intentionally, between two hero armies. The Siege of the Sparfeld Mine is a battle between the Foxglove Court and the Dwarves of Kal Kalavar, both hero armies.

And you can see, the Siege was an Elf Victory! There’s twenty-five of these battles!

Holy crap, have I gone mad?

Yes.

But, damn it’s cool though right? 😀 Game development everybody!

I felt like, sure this is crazy but it’s just me doing all the work. All the player is doing is rolling and discovering this amazing backstory. And I put a LOT of thought into those campaigns, into the enemy leaders and what they were trying to do. I hoped people would see how this enemy commander cut a swath of victories across the countryside, until this heroic commander stopped them.

Battle Results

Each battle you serve in, you roll to see how you did. And that right there is a problem, but we’ll get to that later.

Maybe you were wounded, maybe your wounds were so bad you were declared a casualty and served out your time as an advisor, not a combatant. You could get a medal, get promoted. I stole an idea from the Sharpe series of getting a temporary field promotion in one battle, but it doesn’t become permanent unless you serve with distinction or better in a subsequent battle.

That wasn’t real, I never imagined that was a serious result, I just needed to populate the chart and so I used that idea. Same with the “how were you wounded?” chart. I never imagined these were the real, final results, I just needed to populate a list and the result should broadly imply the final design. The goal is just getting it to a point where another designer, James, can look at it and say “I get it” and then we talk about the high level design ideas, not the specific results here.

So! You pick an army to serve in, roll to see which branch you served in, roll to see which specific company you served in, then roll 5 times to see what happened to you in each battle. The result is an absurdly detailed character history! Just roll dice!

What’s Missing?

Ah, quite a lot actually! None of the rewards! The expectation is: you come out of this process with skill bonuses, maybe even skill stunts if we still have those, fame/renown, honors and titles, maybe even membership in a special organization, contacts (i.e. influential people you met, who like you, and will help you out in your future adventures with advice, information, etc…), maybe a retainer, money maybe even knowledge. Progress in your research toward some future goal like making a flying castle, or making a golem, or whatever. You can start with some of that research already done.

NONE of that is in here! But that’s because I didn’t need that stuff. We can add that stuff later once the game is more mature and we understand better how skill bonuses should work for instance.

And a lot of it is just more work not more design. I could have spent MORE time making charts for different rewards, but that’s the point. I knew I could do that. So I didn’t bother, because I first needed to see “does this idea work and, if not, why not?” I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to work! But I needed to build it and see for myself.

The Incident

One thing you may have noticed if you’ve read through that google sheet is that one result on the “what happened to you in this battle?” is Incident and this means…something crazy happened to you in this battle. And note that the Battle Results table is 2-12! More granular results!

It should be so mathematically unlikely that any two PCs at the same table both get the same Incident as to be functionally impossible. But if you read the incidents, you can see they are EPIC.

They give your character a unique backstory that gets you very close to the kind of starting hero you’d see in the X-men or Baldur’s Gate. Rogue, who in a previous battle before joining the team (sound familiar?? Previous battle before joining the party!) accidentally absorbed both the powers and identity of Carol Danvers aka Captain Marvel, and it was permanent. Since then, Carol Danvers became a Herald of Galactus and is PISSED at Rogue and wants her dead! Classic!

Or Karlach from Baldur’s Gate who has a literal infernal engine where her heart should be. Gives her crazy powers in battle! But it’s killing her!

These are all “good news, bad news” moments. Good news! You’ve got all the powers of Captain Marvel! But you also stole her memories, no longer know where you stop and she starts, and she’s now an even nastier superhero and she’s coming for you!

The Incidents were all intended to work that way. They are not all remotely balanced, some were intended to give you real powers in battle, some are just political. I was trying to create a spread of results and I imagined we’d see which ones work in testing.

The Result, Madness

This is as far as I got. It was a colossal amount of work because I actually wanted all the results to be cool, dramatic. Just inventing all the different companies you can serve in, I didn’t think they were all equally cool, but I did my best!! 😀

I demo’ed this system for the first time ever, to James, live on a Patrons-only Q&A stream. I then did the same thing for a bunch of folks at MCDM, with them just rolling dice in the Discord and me telling them what happened.

It went really well! Or rather, it achieved what I set out to achieve; it produced a fantastically detailed backstory.

Wait, Was That The Point?

No, it was not the point, and that’s why it didn’t work. Remember, my original goal was just to make character creation more fun. Give players more fun choices to make and introduce some interactivity into the process. Maybe even get players to question whether they should sign up for another tour of duty given that they could come out the other side permanently wounded.

So there were lots of problems! Like…will this work for ANY other career?? I figured Academic/Scholar yes. But after that?? Will this fit in the BOOK!? Jesus, how long is this one career path and we don’t have ANY rewards in here and no descriptive text! It would be another page of text at LEAST just trying to explain how to use this and give it context!

Note that, while I liked the idea that your character could die in service (but that just means you move over to the Post Mortem Rewards chart where your character is resurrected and gets some cool, unique benefit you can only get this way) I failed to include it as an option! I was too distracted trying to make a Detail Engine, I had lost sight of the actual goal.

The Core Problem

I met with James the next day and I already knew this was a bust. I sort of knew it as James was making his character on stream, but I definitely knew it a half an hour later when the rest of MCDM was using it in the Discord. Two weeks to build! About two hours to tear apart. 😀

James was definitely in the “this is cool but what’s the point?” camp and so was I. Note that, apart from the first decision you make, you aren’t making any choices. You learn a lot about your character’s past, but there’s no drama there. I wrote:

“I suspect the absence of risk is related to the absence of choice is related to the absence of drama.”

In a different, perhaps better system, you’d be making more choices, and that would mean deciding how much risk you wanted to take, and that would create drama.

But was that the point?

I Just Want To Make A Character And Not Take 90 Minutes Doing It

Eventually I realized that my original ambition, to make character creation like a minigame was misguided. THAT is the lesson and the reason, however cool all this detail was, there was no version of this that would actually make our game better, because we shouldn’t be trying to make character creation a minigame in the first place!

IF the problem was “making a character is tedious?” Well there’s another option, besides “make it a game” and that is: just make it easy. Make it straightforward. Make the choices you’re selecting more directly useful and, ideally, inspiring.

Kits pointed the way! We spent literally months working on a quite complicated and robust A La Carte weapons and armor system where properties distinguished different weapons from each other and the way you put different weapons together affects your playstyle.

Then after much work and testing and iteration, we realized we should be focusing on archetypes and making sure they grant meaningful bonuses and fun abilities, and forget about choosing between two daggers or a dagger and a shortsword. Choose the Sniper kit or the Ranger kit!

In our meeting, James and I took a step back and tried to imagine what we wanted this process to produce. What, ideally, should your past get you?

Remember that original list?

Renown. You can start as already-famous! Maybe only locally, or with these specific people, but yeah! You’re a rock star at 1st level!

Cash. Our game isn’t about gold the way Classic d20 Fantasy was, but being able to buy a galleon or a stronghold or pay off a mercenary company absolutely could be something you might do so we think money will be useful, but the game is not about hoarding gold pieces. GP is not your score.

Contacts. People you know who can be counted on to help you out if you need a favor. We could call this Favors. You get a certain number of favors from different NPCs. We’d need to invent those NPCs! But that’s part of the fun.

Knowledge. We think knowledge will be a big part of this game. Doing research during downtime, whether it’s How Do We Get This Artifact To Work? Or…stop working! How Do I Make A Legendary Sword? How Do I Build A Flying Castle? Your ambitions could be way simpler! How do I make potions of healing? How do I make a scroll of resurrection? We just assign some number of successes to each of these, potion of healing might be 50 successes, Flying Castle might be 5,000! And then during downtime, you make Research Rolls and accumulate Knowledge points and eventually, you can make that thing. Research & Crafting. And the thing tells you how many you can make at a time. 10 per week. One per decade. Whatever. Well, you choice of Past can result in you starting having already made a lot of progress on whatever your pet project is.

Special. You might could start with an Heirloom magic item, or one of the Incidents from the career path I made up. That’s something we’ll figure out. But just getting the above idea working will be enough.

So, Like Kits

Yeah! It should work like kits! You pick the Soldier background and you start with this much Renown (probably a lot!), some money (probably not a lot), some contacts (a lot!) and some knowledge (some, but not a lot). Think like, low, medium, high. And each different Past or Backstory or whatever we call it, I think “career” might be too limiting? Whatever it’s called, each one is just a collection of presets, and then one or two specific rewards.

So the Academic backstory will grant you a lot of knowledge! But not a lot of the other stuff. A Diplomat backstory might start you off with a lot of contacts or favors. Noble backstory, a lot of cash and renown? We’ll see.

That idea, that each option is just a preset that grants you some combination of Renown, Money, Favors, and Knowledge, means it works exactly like Kits and is powerful for the same reason.

That’s Probably How It’s Gonna Work

We don’t have a prototype for this new design, which we’re currently calling Pasts, but we’re pretty confident it will work. The idea of Pasts will work, the actual design work is developing it so those choices all make sense and the rewards are both broadly useful and roughly balanced.

What about the cool Incidents?? Well, we’ll see. James and I both broadly agree that starting with some kind of Tragic Past would be cool, but we’ve done no work yet trying to imagine how it might work. And frankly, as cool as those Incidents are, they’re not the point!

I think we might be able to make the Tragic Backstory idea work, where you start with some crazy past like Astarion where you have vampire powers but A: that’s because you’re a cursed vampire and B: there’s a vampire lord around here somewhere with real strong opinions about you being free from the yoke of their control. And the tradeoff is; if you don’t want a cool Tragic Backstory and the Good News/Bad News vibe of some cool ability with some crazy drawback? Maybe that’s why you start with a Magic Heirloom. Start with a cool item with no downside, or a cooler power from your Tragic Past balanced against some real drawback.

That’s It Folks!

Long post! Lots of work done and thrown out! You are free to do whatever you want with that doc, it’s yours now. But it's also ours! So you may see some of it recycled in other design or worldbuilding.

I just feel really strongly about giving you folks value for your patreon dollars and a post like this is the kind of thing I think you can’t get anywhere else. A real dead end, why we liked it in the first place, why it didn't work, and how we think it WILL work.

Yes, those details are super cool. But it’s not the point, it wasn’t the point, and we think the real system will be more fun and actually relevant to your character’s future. Starting as a Rich Noble, or a Battle-hardened Soldier, or a Well-Connected Diplomat, on TOP of your class and ancestry and upbringing? That’s all relevant to your character’s future.

Whereas this was just about generating a cool backstory. But the game is not about your past. It’s about your future.

Anyway, I hope you folks get a kick out of this! And I hope you can see, not only that we’re serious about making a good game, but serious about showing you how the sausage is made.

Until next time folks! Peace, out!