Eldritch Gambit: Why?

 

Portrait of the author bloviating. At least I didn't put it in the book.

There is very little explanation of why I made Eldritch Gambit in the book itself, which is intentional. I am one of apparently few people who don't find author editorializing in core books enjoyable. That said, this is a blog post, and editorializing is great for a blog.

The primary reason I wrote Eldritch Gambit was to have a skeleton (pun intended) system for BONED. In this game, you play as amnesiac skeletons trying to recover their memories and escape from an inter-dimensional oubliette. BONED is in playtests right now and coming out soon enough. We are having a lot of fun - Eldritch Gambit shines in this setting!

In this very specific context, the problem with using most existing D&D-alikes is that you start out with a class or other array of abilities. This gives you a "niche," and a defined power set right from the start. But what if you don't know who you are and only find out during play? It would ruin regaining memories if you already knew you were a Rogue or Magic-user. You can't just hide it either, because so many of their features are dependent on this initial choice

So, I made most things very dependent on Attributes instead, and magic largely dependent on items. You can discover your class and such later - it only affects the die used for non-combat Checks. While it was tailor-made to a specific setting, I started to feel like this was an optimal way to play.

• One nice thing about the Attribute-dependency of your "build" in this game is that it meshes well with the design philosophy of Dark Souls style games, making it easy for that ilk of players to grasp.
• So-called "niche protection" is weakened, but I think that was always overrated. Making your character mechanically different from others is a matter of choosing the right attributes, class, skills, gear, and in-game advantages.
• It's also more difficult for a new player to pick who they want to be out of a lineup. You can get around this by offering starting setups of gear and attributes. I'm honestly just not a fan of strict classes and find it aggravating to shoehorn my character concepts into them.
  

The other reason I made Eldritch Gambit is that I really liked the idea of push-your-luck mini-games and got to focus the system around that (Gambits). It was also a perfect receptacle for many other ideas I had or ran across in other games at the time, like freeform backgrounds, volleyball initiative, non-incentive highlights XP, armor as HP, gambling with XP, etc. It went from being just a design experiment to support a particular weird setting to a celebration of how I just like to do things in fantasy RPGs.

To be blunt, it has not been a commercial success. I'm a failure as a designer I guess, but at least I got to make the game I wanted to play.

I've played and game mastered a wide variety of systems since the mid-80s, starting with Basic D&D. This has definitely given me a specific set of experiences that informed what I do and do not like. Maybe these tastes are not for everyone, but they're definitely for me. I already did positives in the book and above, so what follows is a list of gripes I have had playing other systems and what I did differently in Eldritch Gambit. 

So if you don't like griping, bail out now.

You encounter 1d6 Gripes.

- my Gaming Gripes, and my Solutions in Eldritch Gambit -

• HP bloat: Tracking massive pools of HP is tedious and so are the lengthy battles of attrition it demands. I made sure EG kept HP fairly low, reworked armor so that it added HP instead, and introduced Rallies that restore some HP by sacrificing an action.
  
• 5-minute workday: It felt unheroic to nap after every battle to get back Spells, and this really hurt the flow of a few adventures I was in. I'm all for resource tracking for material things, but the snooze loop for regaining Spells is just aggravating. In EG I got rid of resource costs for Spells entirely. As a side bonus, this also means no more keeping track of enemy magic user Spell slots or magic points for the GM.
  
• Initiative tracking: I dislike players tuning out between fore-ordained turns or keeping track of all those initiative numbers. Popcorn initiative was very appealing, but I found it too easy to engineer a one-sided slaughter with it, especially in low HP games. EG solves this with Volleyball Initiative, where the target of the last action gets the next. It also neatly follows the "spotlight" flow of a battle.
  
• XP Incentives: I was always uncomfortable with advancement as a morality tale or scooby snacks from the GM. In EG the players themselves just decide what the most worthy highlights of their last game were and get XP for those. This was playtested for a long time when I DMed D&D 3.5, and players really enjoyed it.
  
• Perception: I had bad experiences on both sides of the table with this. As a DM players would start throwing the dice while I was describing the room. As a player I'd fail perception checks for unbelievably mundane things. Probably the most OSR thing about EG is the elimination of perception - just tell them what is there and stop gating it behind a check. It retains an Insight action, but that is for knowing something extra about what you see, rather than just seeing it.
• Whiff factor: I'm not really against misses, especially for ranged weapons. BUT I still feel like it is rare to really miss in melee combat. In Eldritch Gambit, when you don't get a clean hit, melee becomes an exchange of blows or slugfest. Specifically, a melee failure is a Clash, which means the highest damage roll wins, dealing the excess or margin to the loser. Possibly taking damage on failures also means you have to rely on good clean hits if the target is more powerful than you. Combat feels risky and messy, which was intentional. You can also throw your damage die at the same time as your Check, since you will use it either way.
  

More later as I think of them.

Brandy Buck Boys

 The Trailer Park Boys as Hobbits, with a Sunnyvale random encounters table. I freaking love this show, just found out about it and have been binging it something awful. They're so much like many people I grew up with. Desperate, earthy, deeply human, horrible, compassionate, and trapped in their own habits.

Avzinnia Sessions & Genesys Impressions

 

I recently got to play an utterly fantastic game in a friend's campaign, as one of a pair of mismatched priests hunting down heresy in a Meso-American inspired setting. He ran it in Genesys, a clear favorite of his. Augustus is on the left, an ambitious sun priest on the hunt for a promotion. Tiago (my character) is in the middle, a secret anti-priest devoted to prolonging the slumber of a destructive serpent god. We had made it clear at session zero that we were playing bastards who would do anything to achieve our goals, which helped set the tone.

Long story short, it was a supernatural mystery/horror campaign. We investigated a whole array of village politics, deceitful hosts, chosen ones, possessed maniacs, and dangerous treks through the wastelands. Each priest was a heretic to the other, and many tense scenes were devoted to reconciling their differences, at least long enough to meet their common goal. In the end, Tiago sacrificed himself by allowing the serpent god to partially possess him, then taking a fatal leap into a pit before it could take him over entirely. Augustus spent the epilogue disillusioned with his faith, warning away the church, and setting up as a hermit. It's hard to sum up in a paragraph, which is as much as I can expect anyone else to read about someone elses's campaign, but it was one of the finer experiences I have had in role-playing and a story I will always remember.

Genesys notes:

Character creation: the system was flexible enough to make these odd characters, but also had what I felt were unnecessary complications. You choose archetypes that give you different attributes and starting skills, then choose a career which affects how much favored skills cost, etc. I didn't see the point to the different costs and really just wanted to pick attributes and skills as I pleased without worrying about that. But again, the important thing is that we could still make the characters we wanted in the end.

Magic System: a warding spell was our first try at the magic system. We were using a combination of "Realms of Terrinoth" and "Zynnythryx guide to magic" for guidance. We ended up just winging it, rolling Discipline with two purple difficulty dice for an effect that would scare people away. Scoring a few successes, the GM judged that only someone with a strong will could enter afterward. I was impressed by how easy it was to just make things up on the fly with magic, as it definitely suited the emergent story better than predefined spell lists.

 

Later we realized we weren't using Implements like wands or staves, which explained why our magic felt a bit underpowered. It definitely kicked things up a notch when we retconned some of our weapons as implements.

Dice as Oracle: one of the most controversial things about Genesys itself is how the dice are used. In most games the dice settle uncertain outcomes, but in Genesys you also use them to guide the emergent story. They have cues about what happened beyond success or failure. Our GM understood this well but it took me a while to come to grips with it. 

 

In one example, we had difficulty finding a trail to lead us to the top of a mesa, because we failed our checks to do so. But, in doing so we were also building up Threat results! The GM interpreted this to mean that one of our foes came down from the mesa to confront us, which also revealed the hidden path. In essence, this was a good practice fail-forward event encouraged by the die result itself. It's a different way of thinking and without it I can see becoming frustrated with the weird results of genesys rolls. It demands an oracular approach which isn't everyone's strong point. But when it works, it really does add a lot of wonder to the story. 

One of the most striking features of this campaign was that it had character arcs and massive personality changes without the input of sanity meters, bonds, etc. None of the characters had lengthy backstories, social bonds, or even last names. I'm definitely finding that a lot of character detail and rules "support" for such things are not necessary at all.

 

Anyone else have similar experiences with Genesys or other oracular die systems?