METTLE Hybrid Dice Pool

There is a recent trend towards RPG designers leaving design notes in their actual game books. I have mostly avoided them in my work. If the reader cares they will find out soon enough through play, and if they do not it was probably unimportant. Perhaps the readers will make a video or write a blog post about the "unspoken design intent" or some such - why spoil their fun by explaining it before they do?

     In METTLE Core I had one lapse. Gaze upon this one shameless morsel of designer narcissism, from the Engine chapter:

Note: the average score of a single die is 1, making it easy to gauge chances of success. This also means you can directly contest single attributes, using one as the active check and the other as the passive difficulty.

     I like to think this was restrained, driven by the obvious necessity of explaining why I just didn't use a "normal" dice pool everyone is already familiar with. In this largely unread blog well outside of my similarly unread game books, I am less constrained by good taste and dignity.

     So let's dive deep into why I used a strange hybrid dice pool for METTLE!

Direct Contests

The biggest reason is that it allows you to directly Check a single Attribute against another, rolling one Attribute and using the other as the Difficulty. In METTLE they are equivalent! This may seem abstract but it really makes the design space much more flexible.

     The usual solution in other dice pool systems is opposed Checks or "Contests". Here both sides roll their die pool. This is also direct, but eats up time and patience for both the player and game master - especially if there are a lot of enemies or actions.

     Another typical solution is to set a defender's stat as the difficulty of a check, but with standard one die equals one success pools, the difficulty is too high! Most dice pool outcomes average out at about half of the pool or less. Other games that do this get around this with an indirect kludge: halve the defending pool or add an Attribute or Skill to the attacking pool. This pumps the number of dice up pretty high and the effect of the doubled or halved pool will scale oddly as numbers increase.

Margins/Edge

Most dice pool systems count the number of successes over the difficulty as a margin-of-success. In METTLE there is no subtraction, you just count your Edge (4-6 faces). Edge dice would normally just be failures (or worse, "scoundrels") in other dice pool systems, but here every die that falls is important. You want to roll 1-3s for a good Score, but you also want 4-6s for Edge!

Probabilities

The central conceit here is that the average score on any die is 1, ranging from 0 to 3. You can check this yourself: adding the Scoring faces and dividing by the total faces gives us:

 (1+2+3) / 6 = 1

     It's also a pretty minor feat in Anydice to check this: 

Mean/average is always the same as the number of dice, deviation increases reliably with dice, and the maximum is always 3x the pool. Really a lot of desirable behavior.

Origins

This traces back pretty far to a post on RPG.net back when you were allowed to argue about game mechanics on the game design section. Believe it or not, what is now a silent desert was once a thriving little ecosystem of horrible nerds.

https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/d6-system-but-reading-the-dice-differently.782505/post-20113769

They did bring up a fair criticism that the modal value of the dice was a little odd at lower dice pools (<5), but this is also a reason I avoid using die penalties and raise Difficulty instead.

Conclusion

That's all for now. I'm probably not posting this widely because it is very niche as far as interest.

Pipe up if you have any comments. You know what to do.

 

  

D&D B-Series Pregen Ability Scores

I have been ruminating about old school D&D Ability Scores, and whether they meant all that much. So I decided to run the numbers. I entered 146 pregenerated character stat lines found in the B series of adventure modules into a spreadsheet and imported them into R Studio. Pooped out some descriptives and ridgeline plots, and here is the result. It's more of a descriptive analysis than an inferential one - I do plenty of the latter in my day job.

 

Keep in mind that I can only look at what the designers chose for their Basic modules. I was active in the 80s and the actual state of play was all over the place. Overpowered characters with ludicrously high scores were ever-present. I propose that the more restrained arrays in the modules are reflective of designer intent, whatever you believe that is worth.

What I wanted to find out:

• How did the carefully pregenerated module characters stack up to 3d6 down the line?
• What would an average representative of a Basic D&D Class look like score-wise?
  

Overall Ability Scores by Class

Ideally, Character creation in Basic D&D involves rolling up a set of six Ability scores from 3-18 each, then seeing what sort of Class they qualify for. A Magic-user needs an INT higher than 9, etc. This first plot is the average Ability score for a given class, lumped together. This gives a broad overview of what the actual average score is and which classes tend to get assigned better rolls. At this point there were no Ability score bonuses for Races, so everything is conveniently 3-18.

 

To show this I use ridgeline plots, a kind of smoothed aesthetically-pleasing histogram. I have added a dotted vertical line in the middle of each to show the mean (10.5) for a 3d6 roll. The color also shifts with the score - lower scores are bluish, higher scores reddish.

Well, would you look at that - an awfully suspicious trend towards better-than-average! Is this a selection bias to ensure that players get decent pregens, or a result of Moldvay's option to reroll "hopeless" characters? 

 

The world may never know. 

 

The average module pregen actually sits at 11.4, or roughly 11-12. This is a slight boost over the 10-11 expected with purist 3d6 rolls. Sorry, but I can't be bothered to check for statistical significance, even with R open as I am writing. Maybe later.

Other take-aways:

• Clerics and Thieves seem to get assigned the worst overall rolls.
• Elves and Dwarves seem to get assigned the best overall rolls. 
  
• Magic-users and Dwarves seem to occupy more of the very high results, shown by the taller and longer red tails.
• Halflings have a weird small bump in the low/blue end, perhaps a population of crappy Halflings that throw their otherwise good curve off.
• Fighters are very consistent, almost a normal curve for their rolls.
  

Classes Breakdown

What follows is a little different: the average score for each individual ability, separated by Class. This shows what specific ability scores are favored or disfavored when considering a Class. Sometimes, the histogram splits into two peaks, and it is debatable what that means.

 

To preface some things I will mention later, Basic D&D also had a thing called a Prime Requisite, which is an Ability Score or two that the designers deemed important for that Class. If they were good (13+) you would get a bonus to earned XP. If they were bad, you could get a hefty penalty to XP. I believe these explain most of the patterns you see below.

 

(Images by Terry Dykstra, from the Rules Cyclopedia)

Middling folks relying on their connection to a (usually) unspecified deity! Rolled arrays with a high WIS and little else going for them seem to become Clerics. WIS is entirely for the Prime Requisite XP bonus I think. It only enhances magic saves, which everyone else needs just as much. Clerics tend toward lower INT, probably because religion is silly. To be fair though, the power and versatility of their Class more than makes up for the quality of its members.

The module authors are really giving some good scores to Dwarves. STR and CON are reliably huge. INT, CHA, and DEX tend to suffer, but the two peaks suggest two different camps on whether their WIS and CHA should be high or low. The stereotypes weren't quite set in stone then perhaps.

 

As a special note, see the low blue tail on CON that shouldn't be there. This is partly the ridgeline smoothing extending the curve, but also some mistaken roll assignments. Dwarves have a minimum CON of 9, but tell that to the module authors. This happens elsewhere too (see Halflings).

The best scores reliably go to Jacked-Genius Elves. If you get an array that could make one, I guess you just go for for it. The peaks might show a little division on whether their CON and WIS scores should be low or high.

Halflings were oddly beefy for their size, which no one seemed to think twice about. Despite basically being Fighters, they had minimums and prime requisites that meant the best scores would often go to them. This was probably intended to keep them rare, like elves, but also just made most adventuring exemplars of their race pretty outstanding.

As Ash Williams might say: "Hit first, Think never." Good physical scores and low mental ones. There is a broader range of CHA - a high one makes sense if you want them to be a good leader at domain level, a low one if they are just a rough-neckin' thug.

Scraggly nerds, but they are investments for later godliness, so you want to give them a solid set of scores. A high INT and low STR is obvious, everything else is a nudge above average. Note that like the Cleric, their prime requisite of INT is only good for the XP Bonus.

Light-fingered and charming, with little else going for them. Most of the time they will be relying on their special abilities rather than their Scores anyway - and even their godly DEX has no effect on these in Basic.

Summary of Breakdowns

So if you just "need a guy" real quick, you won't be too bad off using one of these arrays:

 

A Word on Prime Requisites

The idea of high Ability Scores primarily just giving an XP bonus to certain Classes may seem strange to a modern player. This is often its largest benefit in B/X. For example, the benefit of having a higher INT is mostly that your Magic-user rises through their levels a bit more quickly. It has no direct effect on their number of spells or spells known. It only has an impact on their magic in a roundabout way, unlike later editions.

A Word on Minimums

Most Classes also had minimum scores, but those probably had less influence. There are even errors there, for example some Halfling pregens had CON scores below 9! I have left similar genuine mistakes in the database uncorrected, only correcting obvious typos like a Fighter with a CON of 1. In that case I changed it to an 11 - "1" is a common typo for a repeating number like 11 and close to the average anyway.

Conclusion

I don't think anyone came away from this with any surprises. Pregenerated characters had slightly higher Ability Scores than 3d6 down-the-line would imply, Ability Scores tended to reflect the Prime Requisite(s) of the Class, Clerics blow, and Elves rule. I had fun doing it though and hope you got something out of it too, even if it was just confirming your suspicions.

Comment below, especially if there is something else you want to look at.

Preserving the Mundane Peril of Dungeons at Higher Levels

Lower level parties sally forth to the dungeon with a healthy concern for logistics - food, shelter, water, light, etc. Failing to stock up can mean their doom. Later, advanced magic easily makes up for a lack of preparation - or is outright superior! This can make for an unwelcome switch in play style for those who enjoyed the tension of their earlier forays. 

In most dungeon games this change in play style is inevitable. Like it or not, it is part of the experience. It allows the party to take on a grander scale of adventure after proving themselves in the muck. Still, it feels like a sad error to abandon the grim lessons of earlier adventures entirely. Players who took these  to heart do not want to see them drift into obsolescence. Those who did not may fail to even respect the threat of the dungeon.

To this point, I have assembled some methods to keep dungeons dangerous. The point here is not to turn a dungeon into the Tomb of Horrors but to show how a dungeon can be drawn up in a way that preserves its aura of mundane peril despite level.

Silent But Deadly

The flame of torches and lanterns can reveal deadly oxygen-displacing gases. Make their light flicker  when they get close to an otherwise undetectable pool of suffocating or poisonous gas. Have it snuff out when they would need to make saves. Infravision and light spells have no flame to reveal this, so parties reliant on such powers find themselves doomed by their own superiority.

Obviously, this gets tricky if the pool of gas happens to be flammable. Consider that it is still better to find that out at its edge rather than while casting a fire spell within it later. A torch or lantern that merely bursts or changes color near a concentration of flammable gas can be a lifesaver for an observant party.

Lurkers in the Darkness

It is dark. You have been eaten by a grue. An antidote to all the fancy races with dark vision and their annoying players who have to tell you about it every time. Sure, they can see the grue, but will wish they hadn’t. A hazard easily fixed by a torch or lantern, but also amenable to light spells. Bold and greedy merchants in town could mark up their torches and advertise them as “grue repellent.”

This doesn't need to be as exotic as a grue. Animals and primitive monsters may be repelled by fire itself, to the point they avoid parties carrying open flame. This is not so easily outclassed by light spells.

The Tight Squeeze

They call it a dungeon crawl, so why aren't they crawling? Heavy armor and huge weapons are great until you have to squeeze through a tiny cave tunnel. Then, it is time for the lowly, skinny, flexible goblin to shine. A party that would beat the gods themselves on the field of battle is just a wiggly, screaming meal when pinned between two solid stone cave surfaces. 

Just getting stuck may arguably be just as bad - the recent Nutty Putty cave incident being an example. This awful fate should bring a little tremor to the heart of the bravest adventurer, and at the very least make them consider hiring a local guide to keep them out of the worst passages.

This is an unglamorous way to go and it makes sense to give warnings. The tooth-marked skeletons of an early party, trapped in their rusting armor should do. I'm sure you can think of something better.

Spells like passwall and stone to mud, divination, etc. can avoid this, but this is at least a cost.

Perils to Avoid

There's a fine line here in that if you overdo these techniques it may ruin the feeling of immersion and fairness. Plan these out beforehand instead of adding them on the fly. Make them a real part of the world. Otherwise, the players may feel that you are just placing arbitrary obstacles in their way, and they will have a good point. 

 

Give them ample warnings, and use the carrot instead of the stick: show that the more earthly methods of dealing with dungeon danger still have their advantages.

 

Got your own special methods? Tell us about them below!

A Modest Procedure

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay  

Seeing all the discourse about how games do not support something if they do not have rules for it, I had a revelation. There is a glaring omission - no games support the veritable act of gaming itself! Therefore, no games actually support the gaming experience and the entire holy mission of role-playing games is a failure. 

So sad!

But, there is a cure - simply close the loop and use the system itself. When you are thinking of running a game, just roll:

For D&D-alikes

• Critical Success: You played the best game and everyone cheered at the end.
• Success: You had a good session and your players want more.
• Failure: You had a frustrating session full of boredom and arguments.
• Critical Failure: You had the worst session ever and everyone quit.

For PBTAs:

Run the Game: think about your players and roll+run. 

• On a 10+ you had a good game. 
• On a 7-10 you had a good game but payed so dearly for it you wish you hadn't even tried. 
• On a miss (6-), you had a terrible game and look stupid.

Best part is the experience of gaming is so well supported it elides every inconvenience!

SHQUART CHART

 Presented with little fanfare, and largely self-explanatory.

Hopefully, this helps someone.

METTLE Core 1.5 Revision Notes

 The 1.5 edition of METTLE Core marked a long period of reconsidering prior versions and is the most drastic revision since publication. The three major changes I want to ramble on about for a while are the Attack Check, Montages, and Drain.

Attack Check Changes:

The Attack Check originally used in METTLE Core was a sort of grand sum of offensive factors and defensive factors for the target: NATURE + FRAME - target's FRAME. This was nice because it lumped everything together and allowed for any number of damage between one and the maximum. It was also final, in that you handed it off to the target to be applied as damage with no further conversation. This called for front-loaded knowledge of both the attacker's and defender's stats but was no more convoluted than something like THACO in early D&D.

     In practice however this front-loading of all the info into a single roll stilted the conversational flow of combat at the table. It no longer felt intuitive and, worst of all, was different than a standard check. For example, a typical Attack went like this:

Attacker: Ok 5 for NATURE and 4 for damage, I've got 8 dice. Wait what was your POISE and FRAME again?

Defender:  4 for POISE and 3 for FRAME

Attacker: Ok 5 dice then, Difficulty 4... <Checks> Take 2 damage.

     The attacker here has to ask for multiple pieces of info from the defender. It also robs them of the feeling that they can soak any of the damage after the fact (they already did, but this is about the feeling rather than the process).

     The new method was the same as any other check, just NATURE vs. POISE to hit. The Attacker need only know the defender's POISE, and even then they don't really need to know this - as long as the Score ends up being over it they are good. I know that some tables like to conceal defensive values and this preserves that as an option.

Attacker: Ok 5 for NATURE, what is your POISE?

Defender: 4

Attacker: Ok, that hits, 2 Edge plus my weapon damage, take 6!

Defender: Ok I'm soaking 3 with my FRAME so just 3 gets through.

     Long story short, this just feels more like a natural conversation in play to me. Each side concerns themselves with the things that matter to them rather than loading everything onto the attacker's side.

Nixing Montages

I've played all sorts of games with different takes on downtime. Long story short: "No Sir I don't Like it." I have had many bad experiences with waiting for my character to heal up while the others go on a little side adventure without them. Whenever the GM asks "Ok, what is everyone else doing while X gets treatment and Y fixes the tank?" it always leads to a boring interlude or leaves players out. I hate that question.

 

To avoid this, I thought I would include some rules and procedures to streamline downtime so I could make a game that didn't dwell on it. Unfortunately, setting some Actions aside as long Montages had the opposite effect and made them even more intrusive. Instead of glossing over them, they became a necessity for things like healing drain or resources or whatever. 

 

This was supposed to be an Action-Adventure game, not a vacation simulator!

So it's goodbye to Montages. Some Actions may still be quite long (Travel, Use for big projects, etc.), so I put in the option for a Downtime Voucher. Instead of boring everyone else to death by describing how they spend their leisure time, you can just spend your voucher later during actual play to have gotten something done. For example, if the party is fleeing the cops on the docks, one of the players could spend their Downtime Voucher to say they bought a speedboat while their buddies were healing up. Convenient and hassle-free.

 

Nixing Drain

The prior version of METTLE Core had Draining an Attribute as the default Twist. This sort of idea has a good pedigree in similar games and is sensible at first glance. I stopped using it because it lead to an annoying sort of death spiral in play where characters just got worse and worse until they took some required downtime, which I hate anyway. Why make a central, default mechanic insist upon something I didn't want to focus on in the first place?

So it's goodbye to Drain as well. The default Twist is now a consequence that eats up your next Action. This is superior because it is how most games I have been in dealt with botches, informally. It is a solution that is well-accepted by players, and feels much more immediate than kicking a consequence down the road by lowering an Attribute temporarily. This way, the consequence is good and immediate.

 

Other Notable Changes:

 

Characters

 FOCUS changed to CONCEPT.

• Avoids the word "FOCI" as a plural.
• Is more evocative of who the player is rather than just a career or interest.
• Some people thought it meant perception.

 Backgrounds changed to Backstories

• Backgrounds was a leftover from an earlier version where they were like sub-concepts.
• These short phrases satisfy the desire for a backstory while keeping tight limits on it.
  

Backstory (nee Background) selection changed. No more points to distribute, just take a number of them equal to highest Attribute (usually 5).

• Avoids a bug where low-die level Backstories were actually worse than just defaulting to an unrelated Concept.
• Gives a more satisfying number of Backstories overall.

Mettle is now highest Attribute + Motive.

• Basing METTLE only on Motive lead to fairly flimsy adventurers, which is both a bit frustrating for players and not exactly high adventure. 
• Having a low Mettle is now reserved for poor nameless extras and such.

Mettle Surges now apply to any sort of Check during Initiative, not just Attacks.

• There are lots of things adrenaline and impending doom could feasibly fuel.

 

Engine

Twists now default to Delay instead of Attribute Strain.

• Strain to attributes was a lot of tracking on the sheet, demands a way to relieve it via rules, affects some attributes more than others, overlapped too much with deprivation, and most importantly - puts off consequences for too long.

Teamwork now adds a simple bonus for having a competent leader in a task.

• This replaces a complicated and non-intuitive roll & keep system.
• Players like to make their own Checks, as it turns out. 

Got rid of modifier stacking rules.

• They were interesting but in the end there were so many exceptions that it never really applied. A solution in search of a problem, basically.

 

Scenes

Montages removed and important montages (travel, recovery/aid) moved into Actions.

• Montages were an interesting experiment but in the end I didn't want an action/adventure game to focus too much on downtime and recovery.

Free Move given its own paragraph header to make it easier to find.
Split Actions extended to all types of actions, not just Attack.

Grapple folded in as a type of Attack

Block and Dodge combined as Defend.

Aid added to account for recovery after 0 or negative mettle status

Hustle, Recover, Relax removed as they are nuisance moves related to downtime.

Perform removed as sort of an edge case rarely related to pulp adventures.

• I have faith you can work out this sort of thing on your own if it comes up.
  

Persuade is now Parley

• Parley just sounds more fun and emphasizes this is used for tense situations not just yakking.

Rallies can be used on any Action instead of only when passed to.

• The pass-only requirement added a confusing complication to use them that really didn't add much. Being passed to by an ally is now the source of a possible advantage instead.

Rallies now rely on Motive instead of Nature.

• I have no goddamn idea why I based Rallies on Nature in the first place.

Rallies do 1 on fail, 2+ on success.

• nothing on a failure was too harsh, especially if rattled.

Rallies clear the effects of a Rattle

• It was a little depressing to have them stick regardless of personal revelations, courage, etc. This allows them to go away while giving more incentive for teamwork.

Rattles affect Rally Difficulty, +1 on a failure, +2 or more on success.

 

Resources

Armor Soaks instead of adding to Mettle.

• Matches the intended feel of having armor during play and in the source media.

Vehicle rules overhauled.

Simplified weapon ranges and rules for burst and full auto.

Half damage for "Soft" (less-lethal) attacks like hand to hand, whips, nets, etc.

 

Guidance 

Factions now use Resources instead of Influence

• No point introducing something entirely new when it was so highly correlated with Resources anyway.

Volitional Wounds

Here I'm going to explain the wounds system I favor in tabletop RPGs and use in Eldritch Gambit and METTLE Core. The idea is that a player chooses for their character to take an injury in exchange for ignoring damage. This can be any amount of damage from a single blow, as long as the character still has HP left. Discretion to use it is entirely left to the player.

For example, Bob the Fighter has 12 HP and suffers 10 HP damage from an orc. Instead of dropping to 2 HP, they can choose to forego the damage and suffer a wound penalty instead. There's not a lot to it other than deciding what a "wound" is in your favorite system. You could even swap in a roll on one of those oft-maligned critical hit tables, which would be well-used in this case.

This idea mutated from the procedural advice given in Eldritch Gambit, which recommends that players should be left to describe injuries and other misfortunes that happen to their character. This was in turn inspired by the etiquette of Dragonball Z internet forums for how members should describe fights between their characters. It will seem familiar to those who know how FATE handles Consequences and Voidheart Symphony handles wounds.

Advantages:

• It is voluntary and does not impose itself on the Players or GM. It is not another thing you have to deal with when the dice tell you.
• It is consistent, working the same for PCs and NPCs. You can expect the GM to use it only rarely and for important NPCs.
• It is an "interesting decision." If you suffer the wound, you get to fight on impaired. If you do not, you remain perilously close to incapacitation or death. The choice is thus between impairment or imperilment.
• It clarifies what HP are in these games - mere flesh wounds or positioning. Serious meat consequences are faced when you lose all HP or take wounds.
• It is adaptable, slotting in easily to just about any game that uses some variant of HP.
  

That's all there is to it.