The Campaign Builder's Guild

Over the last few years I've toyed with a lot of different mechanical ideas for use with my Dark Silver setting, both in terms of adapting existing rules systems and trying to create my own based on elements that caught my eye from games I've read. The idea has been to come up with something that adequately and elegantly represents the kinds of characters and adventures present in Dark Silver, without having to shoehorn the flavour onto something that was written with something different in mind.

The thing is, although it's always fun to tinker, I'm aware that I'm really not that great with mechanics! So more recently I have decided that out of all the many, many roleplaying games out there, there has to be one that can do the job for me without too much modification. Given that the rules sets I have actual experience of playing are not numerous (a few different forms of d20, Call of Cthulhu, Vampire: the Masquerade, a little bit of GURPS and a brief brush with FATE in that one IRC Halloween game sparkletwist ran) I thought I would call on the collective expertise of the CBG to help point me in the right direction.

First, I thought I might share some of my thoughts on a few of the game systems I am at least passingly familiar with...

On Dungeons and Dragons

The great advantage of rules based on the World's Most Popular Roleplaying Game is, of course, familiarity.

Dark Silver was initially created with Iron Heroes d20 in mind, and at the time that system seemed to fix every issue I had with "Type III" D&D. It dialled back the implied magic level to almost nothing, emphasised martial player-characters, specifically in terms of variety of martial play-styles and archetypes, and to my mind did a passable job of beating feats into a somewhat friendlier shape.
There are of course problems with it, as with many d20-based games. One simple houserule that I considered for it, to overcome the issues associated with armour-as-DR, is to make it so that DR from armour can never reduce damage below 1, so that a successful hit will always have some effect at least, if only minor. Token pools are also a little fiddly to keep track of at times, although by no means impossible.
My main issue now with Iron Heroes, I think, is that although it represents an action-packed genre, the actual playing of the game can be a little ponderous in combat, as players pause to weigh up their options and remind themselves what this or that feat or manoeuvre will do for them, even as their characters are making split-second life-or-death decisions.

My more recent experience with d20/Type III based gaming has come through Pathfinder, in the form of Fimbulvinter. While the game has been immensely enjoyable, I have found that in terms of how it feels to play, Pathfinder is more-or-less indistinguishable from regular Type III in terms of the overwhelming presence of magic in the rules and the glut of – often confusing and/or seemingly overspecialised – character options (in terms of classes, races, feats, spells, etc.).
I'm aware that from a mechanical standpoint Pathfinder is supposed to be a refinement of Type III, and I'm happy to believe that it is. It's just that in terms of tone and implied setting it seems identical, and so would take a lot of fiddling and houseruling to make it work for Dark Silver.

The so-called OSR offers a number of alternative D&D-type games that are either based on Type I or a mixture of elements of Type I and Type III. Most interesting among these, for me, is Lamentations of the Flame Princess. An honourable mention, however, should also go to Crypts and Things – itself a modified version of Swords and Wizardry – which emphasises a rules-light Conanesque sword-and-sorcery playstyle. While not the best-written game I have ever read, its tone and stripped-down simplicity make it quite appealing.
Lamentations of the Flame Princess does not cling as slavishly to tradition as some other OSR offerings, which suits me as I wasn't even alive in the early 80s, let alone gaming. Rather it takes its roots in older D&D and twists them a little to fit its tone of gritty, high-stakes, horror-tinged gameplay and often seems to streamline and simplify things in the process.
I'll be getting to try out LotFP this weekend. I'm doing a Dark Silver one-shot for a few friends on Sunday night, the first game I will have run since about 2010! I'm fairly confident it will go well and be fun, but it'll be interesting to see how a game that I like in theory actually plays.

On Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

Although I have never actually played it, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay was the first RPG rulebook I ever owned, and the Warhammer World was the first fantasy gaming setting I ever invested myself in. As such the Grim World of Perilous Adventure holds a nostalgic place in my heart, and I think it's fair to say that Dark Silver borrows quite heavily from it in terms of inspiration and mood. While the development level of technology and infrastructure in the Empire is centuries ahead of that in my Heartlands and Grimdowns, I think there is a commonality of bleakness and brutality – although perhaps the despair levels are rolled back a little, to be replaced with a certain gritty heroism in Dark Silver – and the demons of my Beyond are not so very different from those that spill out from the Realm of Chaos to terrorise the Old World.

Re-reading WFRP now, I actually quite like the rules. Like RuneQuest before it, it mostly runs off percentile rolls, which gives it a nice, easy to understand central mechanic. It places most of its emphasis on the basic stat-block, with skills providing small enhancements to or advanced uses for a character's core abilities rather than defining them as in some other percentile-based systems.
Combat is straightforward and, aside from the way abilities are formatted and dice rolls resolved, I have to say not too divergent from the D&D model. A somewhat arbitrary mixture of concrete and abstract, then, but also fairly robust.
A bit like Iron Heroes, a potential issue is that characters with heavy armour and/or high Toughness scores can become almost impervious to lower damage attacks. But given the gory consequences of sustaining more than minor damage anyway, what with the almost legendary critical hit charts, that may not be such a huge problem as it at first seems. Even if it did turn out to be frustrating, a similarly simple houserule to the one I thought about for Iron Heroes could be used.
The careers system for character advancement is interesting. It seems pretty wildly imbalanced at first glance, and probably is at character generation, but I can almost see it evening out over the course of a campaign as lower powered careers can be completed in fewer advances, allowing these characters to then move on to new, more useful careers quicker than their counterparts who started strong.

While the gritty tone and low magic level are almost perfect, on the whole I feel like the rules, specifically the career system, might be a little too tied to the setting (and to the setting's assumed level of technology and infrastructure) to be used for Dark Silver without a fair bit of tweaking, which is of course what I would like to avoid having to do.
It is, though, making me kind of want to run the entire Enemy Within campaign using WFRP1e rules – all the way from Shadows Over Bögenhafen right through to Empire in Flames, possibly even with some of the shorter LoTFP adventures re-statted, re-located to the backwoods of the Empire and sprinkled in as side-quests. That would be a serious undertaking though, and is a topic for another time...

On These Newfangled Games the Kids are Playing Nowadays

While I'm certainly not against them per se, I have not found myself drawn to the idea of the more "narrativist" (apologies if I am using the term incorrectly) games of recent years. I think the main reason they don't hold such a huge appeal for me is that the problems with more traditional roleplaying games that they appear to be trying to address, seem to be ones that either don't bother me much, or could just as easily be solved with a variant or refinement of the traditional game rather than a shift to a different gaming method altogether.

My only actual play experience of these sorts of game systems was with FATE, in the Halloween game we played here over IRC. I enjoyed the game a lot, but I wouldn't say I was exactly won over by the rules. Not that I would necessarily say they're any worse than any given traditional game – they're probably even better than a lot of them – just that their imperfections were in different places. I wouldn't rule out trying FATE again, and from what I understand it's a fairly modular system so it may be that there are forms of it out there that I would like better, that I'm just unaware of.

Another modern game that sounds like it might be interesting is Dungeon World. I'd like to try playing DW at some point, but in terms of applying it to the Dark Silver setting I'm a little unsure given its mission statement to use new-school rules to represent a D&D type fantasy. This makes me worry that although it might have elegant mechanics, I might find myself having the same problem with the tone and feel of them as I have had with D&D when trying to apply it to Dark Silver.

Beyond that I'm largely ignorant when it comes to the "story" games. I do find these terms a little weird, as even the most hardcore simulationist traditional RPG will of course involve story and emergent narrative, but like I said I'm not exactly against them, just ignorant and inexperienced, and would be happy to expand my knowledge. To be honest, from what I can tell, they're not as different from the more traditional types of games as people seem to make out.

If D&D's familiarity is a boon, but you want a less cumbersome (and therefore less combat-crunch grinding experience), have you tried 5e?

I agree that Pathfinder is not a good fit for Dark Silver. Heck, even in Fimbulvinter there's a bit too much magic.

Personally, I'd go for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, sans firearms. I hope it goes well on Sunday!

Regarding the toning down of magic, with 5e, you could limit all magic to rituals, for which they have rules (and access for all classes via a feat). Can't say how that would actually, versus hypothetically, affect play and system balance, though.   

The beauty of Dungeon World (and all of its various cousins) is that they are so easily hacked and tweaked to produce any tone and feel that you want. Codifying narrative elements and good storytelling practice is the central idea, and is very well executed, and that lends itself to being able to recreate almost anything you want (with some practice and playtesting to refine it).

That said, I've only ever played Apocalypse World and various self-made hacks before - I'm running Dungeon World for the first time on Saturday and will be able to give much more specific feedback then.

Rose-of-Vellum: I've downloaded the free basic rules for Type V D&D. I'd say that while on the whole I like what they seem to have done, it doesn't seem to be too much better than/different to what something like LotFP or C&T provides, and Type V for obvious reasons sets its implied tone as much more wizards and elves and dragons than some of the OSR games do. That's fine, as vanilla D&D really has no need to distance itself from vanilla fantasy, but it means that for my purposes, a game like LotFP starts off with a mood much closer to that of my setting than Type V does. That said, I've only seen the basic rules, and I can imagine that given how much they have emphasised the modularity and customisation potential of this edition, if I were to buy some books I might find some options for tailoring it more to the tone I'm after.
The ritual magic thing is something I was unaware of, and seems interesting. Would it mean that only non-spellcasting classes are available? In the basic rules this would just be the fighter and rogue, although I'm sure there are more class options in the rulebooks proper.

Steerpike: Yeah, it does seem that of all the D&D type games LotFP would be the best fit with the least work. I'm really looking forward to trying it out. The only thing is, I do wonder if there might be something outside the realm of D&D and its clones that might work even better for me, that I'm just unaware of...

HippopotamusDundee: That does sound promising. I'd love to hear how you find Dungeon World, please report back after Saturday! :)

I haven't played LotFP or DW, so I can't say how they compare to 5e. Its flavor is certainly vanilla fantasy, no question. I mentioned it moreso due to its familiarity, and streamlined crunch, which in my experience, is far less game-grinding than 3e/PF, both in terms of combat and character creation. IIRC, ritualistic magic is available to all classes with a feat (I believe some backgrounds and/or magic-focused classes grant access as well). I don't know how much you want to limit magic (e.g., no arcane or divine caster PC?), but I can say that there are many core classes in 5e, far more than the free rules have. Each class has three archetypes with divergent flavor and distinguishing crunch. 

But as I said, I've never played LotFP or DW. I too would welcome a play report from HD. :)

Quote from: Rose-of-Vellum
I don't know how much you want to limit magic (e.g., no arcane or divine caster PC?), but I can say that there are many core classes in 5e, far more than the free rules have. Each class has three archetypes with divergent flavor and distinguishing crunch. 

I'm a major fan of 5e myself (all the best parts of 3/3.5 with less intricate and fiddly housekeeping), but I wouldn't honestly recommend it as is for a low-magic campaign. Of all the 12 classes, breaking down into 40 or so Archetypes, there's only 7 that have no magic at all. And I'm being generous in that count and allowing the Monk's ki and the Totem Barbarian's spirit-communication rituals - without those it's only 5. A low/no-magic campaign would require substantial rewrites of 5e - not to say that it can't be done, but as written it is not a system that would work for that style of campaign.

True enough. Though 7 non-magic classes is a lot more than LotFP's 2 (or 4 with demihuman 'classes'), no? How does DW handle magic and classes?

I am not a fan of D&D 5e at all, but I've written enough about that elsewhere that there's really no need to do that again unless someone specifically wants me to.

On the topic of those "newfangled games the kids are playing nowadays," I don't think that Fate necessarily is a huge departure from what came before. There are some pretty avant-garde and weird storygames out there, for the kind of people who are into that sort of thing, but Fate, for the most part, retains a pretty traditional structure. In my opinion, its biggest innovation is that it focuses more on the kind of stuff I like to focus on, and tends toward eschewing stuff that I tend to care less about-- obviously, if your priorities are different, it might not resonate as well with you.

One thing I like about oldschool games is the tendency of the game is to not focus on tons of crunch and meticulous encounter balance, and instead have a living and kind of zany world where player cleverness and creativity moves the adventure forward and making it up as you go along is not entirely a bad thing... and I feel like Fate does that thing pretty well, and at the same time eliminating the pointless nonsense that a lot of people forget about when being nostalgic about oldschool RPGs. I've run a few oldschool D&D adventures (including the dreaded Tomb of Horrors, twice!) using Fate rules and it actually went really well-- there was less capricious death due to Fate's more forgiving and empowering mechanics, but I don't regard that as a bad thing, personally. Dungeon World purports to occupy this intersection between oldschool feel and newfangled mechanics, I think, but I've never played it and I have my doubts about the *World system in general, so I don't have much to add about that.

Anyway, I would also like to point out that the game we played last Halloween was Fate Accelerated, not Fate Core; I also hope my less-than-perfect GMing didn't give you too negative of an impression of the system as a whole.

Ok, I bit the bullet and got the FATE Core pdf. Reading commences.

Quote from: Rose-of-Vellum
True enough. Though 7 non-magic classes is a lot more than LotFP's 2 (or 4 with demihuman 'classes'), no? How does DW handle magic and classes?

My wording was a little unclear there - that's 7 non-magic Archetypes. There's actually not a single class in 5e that doesn't include an option that gives spellcasting or spell-like powers unless the Totem Warrior Archetype and its spirit-talking rituals are allowed, in which case there's one. And those 7 Archetypes are representative of only 4 classes, three of which (Fight, Monk, Barbarian) are variations on a hack-slashy theme. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean you'd be working hard at homebrewing whole new classes if you wanted to run no-magic in 5e.

RAW, Dungeon World only has 2 spellcasting classes (Cleric & Wizard) because they removed the spellcasting from the Bard, Paladin & Druid and gave them specific brands of supernatural power (Shapeshifting, Bardic Music, and variations of Lay on Hands) instead, while the Ranger lost its magical powers completely.

All told Dungeon World ends up with four (Barbarian, Fighter, Ranger, Thief), but the Barbarian effectively splits down into two classes based on the decision of no-armour (Conan) or all-the-armour (the Mountain, etc) and the Fighter includes the option for a non-Eastern Monk if the Signature Weapon chosen is the Fighter's own body (which the mechanics allow for precisely that reason). And if the Bard's musical abilities are reskinned and revised and then more bardic-lore abilities added and the Paladin's healing-magic replaced with a stronger emphasis on driven-by-faith-ness it wouldn't be too hard to remove the magic from them as well.

The beauty of Powered by the Apocalypse (the system behind Dungeon World, Apocalypse World, Monsterhearts, Sage of the Icelanders, etc.) is that it's less a system than a formula and a style of building a system that creates a certain style of player-empowered, narrative-empowered, story-focused game and encodes within itself the best and most useful and immediately applicable  'How to GM' guide (for both the system itself and in general) than I think I've ever seen. None of the wisdom in it is necessarily new, but it pulls out important aspects that some GMs (especially younger/less experienced ones) may not have thought about or noticed working behind-the-scenes yet and puts them center stage.

(But now I'm going to stop singing its praises because it's too early here in Aus for a debate over the merits of various systems between sparkletwist and I :P)

Rose-of-Vellum & HippopotamusDundee: Yeah, this is kind the impression I got from Type V. You're right that 7 mundane classes (or archetypes or whatever) is more than LotFP offers, but as a proportion, 2 out of 4 (or 4 out of 7 including the demihuman classes) is much higher than 7 out of 40. To me, that makes it seem like as a game Type V D&D assumes a much higher level of magic being available to PCs on a regular basis than LotFP does, and so makes it less suitable for Dark Silver.

sparkletwist: You're absolutely right about where the appeal is for me in the old-school games and more recent games inspired by the old-school. As I said, nostalgia isn't a really as much of a factor for me because I'm (relatively) young and so wasn't around the "first time." Even for WFRP where there is some nostalgia involved, I kind of feel like it's more for the setting than the rules - although like I said there is something about the rules that does appeal to me.

I completely agree with you that FATE is definitely on the same continuum with the games I'm used to playing. I guess people seem to have a bit of an us-and-them attitude between the traditional games and things like FATE, a bit of tribalism maybe, so based on things I had heard said in those sorts of contexts I was maybe expecting it to be more alien to me than it was in practice. I actually enjoyed the game a lot, it just wasn't like a huge a-ha moment for me where I went "this is it! FATE is the game for me!" I think it has its strengths but also, at least the form of it we used, it has some weaknesses too. They're just different strengths and weaknesses to, say, D&D.
I'd be interested if you could briefly summarise the key differences between FATE Accelerated and FATE Core for me.

You also mention having some problems with the Powered by the Apocalypse system. I'd be just as curious to hear what those problems are as I am to hear HippopotamusDundee's thoughts on DW after his session with it.

EDIT: On a completely different tack, does anyone have any experience with RoleMaster or HARP Fantasy? I know RoleMaster has a reputation for being pretty ponderous due to its granularity, what with all the charts and very specific subsystems and so on, but I did read somewhere recently that most of those are actually optional, and it's almost more of a kit for creating your own game using whichever of the modular subsystems suit you best. Is that a fair assessment or is it really the tortuous mess it's often stereotyped as? If it is that heavily customisable, it could be worth looking into, as I could use the options that emphasise the kind of dark, gritty, low-magic feel I'm after and just leave out anything more high-fantasy oriented.

Quote from: KindlingI'd be interested if you could briefly summarise the key differences between FATE Accelerated and FATE Core for me.

Fate Accelerated is essentially a simplified version of Fate. Rather than Accelerated's somewhat nebulous but flexible "approach" system, Fate Core has a more standard "big list of skills" which is rather similar to the base GURPS skill list, and any action you take is based on using one of those skills. Core characters have a longer list of character options, and there's just quite a bit more situational crunch in general, like related to combat or using special abilities or when to compel or whatever, where Accelerated is much more about picking it up and playing it. One of the authors of Fate has joked that the difference between Core and Accelerated is "about 250 pages."

Quote from: KindlingYou also mention having some problems with the Powered by the Apocalypse system.

It all feels a little too nebulous for my liking. I feel like a big part of player empowerment is knowing exactly what's up in any given situation, and, at least from my reading of the rules-- I've never actually played it, I should say that right away-- that seems like it often doesn't happen. For example, there's no real action economy as such, so it's difficult to tell when your next turn is going to be or how many attacks an enemy is going to get on you. Along with that, there seems to be no tactical positioning whatsoever, not even something vague like Fate's zones, which also makes it hard to figure out what's going on. I've also noticed that there are quite a few moves that involve picking options from a list but even on a 10+ success (which is the best you can do) you still can't pick all of them; this seems to imply that something bad is going to happen no matter what, and I don't like the idea that there's just no chance of complete and resounding success. I also find the whole idea of choosing from a list of things that may or may not be true and you don't know until you've chosen one to be a bit immersion-breaking.

Quote from: sparkletwist
It all feels a little too nebulous for my liking. I feel like a big part of player empowerment is knowing exactly what's up in any given situation, and, at least from my reading of the rules-- I've never actually played it, I should say that right away-- that seems like it often doesn't happen.

I've played, run, watched, and hacked a fair bit of Powered by the Apocalypse, so let me see if I can explain how those elements work in practice (at least in my experience).

Quote from: sparkletwistFor example, there's no real action economy as such, so it's difficult to tell when your next turn is going to be or how many attacks an enemy is going to get on you.

There are no turns, that much is absolutely true. That's less of a problem because you can't mechanically make a move unless you're narrating the fictional triggers to activate it (so you can't spam one move over and over at ridiculous speeds, for instance) and also because a number of moves specify that you can't just keep trying them and grinding away towards success until your fictional circumstance becomes significantly altered by new information/events.

As for the attacks, this comes out of one of the simplest and most powerful innovations of the system - the GM never rolls dice. Instead, when the system tells them (most often when a player fails or the story is slowing into a lull) they make a 'soft' move and narrate an element that introduces a threat or consequence that doesn't resolve it ("A guy kicks down the door and levels a shotgun at you. His cheeks are flushed from an afternoon of heavy drinking and his eyes are mean. What do you do?") and if the player fails to deal with the situation (by indecision) or fails at their attempt to do so they make a follow-up move and resolve the threat. ("He doesn't seem to care for your attempt to mollify him - he lets off a blast that catches the edge of your left shoulder and skims your arm. Take 3 Harm."). Harm is never inflicted in combat save as the result of a player failing a move, and therefore the economy and rhythm of player action keeps the actions of enemies on a similar scale.

Quote from: sparkletwistAlong with that, there seems to be no tactical positioning whatsoever, not even something vague like Fate's zones, which also makes it hard to figure out what's going on.

This is mainly just a problem of things being buried in the rules and not emphasized enough - essentially how this is handled is through weapon tags, which are single-word narrative modifiers (messy, loud, subtle, etc.) that guide the GM in how to narrate the effects of weapons on targets/the surrounding environment. There's another set of tags, however, which are specifically used to govern weapon range: hand (a knife), close (a sword/machete/chainsaw), near (a shotgun, a pistol), far (a rifle, a machinegun) and I think there's one for sniper-rifle type range as well. Unless a character narrates how they maneuver so their opponent is in range, they can't yet make the move to hurt them.

Quote from: sparkletwist
I've also noticed that there are quite a few moves that involve picking options from a list but even on a 10+ success (which is the best you can do) you still can't pick all of them; this seems to imply that something bad is going to happen no matter what, and I don't like the idea that there's just no chance of complete and resounding success.

The 10+ moves all including some degree of give-and-take, at least initially, is for me a part of the flavour of Apocalypse World (that mechanic doesn't recur in Dungeon World, where instead the 10+ gives a total success and the option to expose yourself a little in exchange for even greater success). There is also an advancement option, available immediately, that grants advanced versions of half the moves (then the other half next time) which give that complete and resounding success on a 12+.

Quote from: sparkletwist
I also find the whole idea of choosing from a list of things that may or may not be true and you don't know until you've chosen one to be a bit immersion-breaking.

Looking  back over the list of basic moves, there's only one of them where the player is given the power to choose, and that's Seize by Force (the combat move). That trend continues through the playbooks - there are a fair few moves where the player gets to ask questions from a set list, or the GM is given a list of actions NPCs are limited to, or the player gets to establish elements about the fiction that make sense (the Skinner identifying after a person that this person now loves me and that person just must meet me). When it comes to Seize by Force and similar moves I'm personally fine with it because it makes sense - you're being asked what it is you really want in the situation (people hurt, people scared, yourself safe, etc.) and what you're willing to compromise on to get it.

I have no idea if any of that addresses your concerns, but I can say that in my various experiences knowing what's going on in play and having empowerment and input and agency within the narrative have never been problems. I'd definitely recommend seeing if you can find someone running a one-shot near you/online and giving it a try.