Visceral Baroque: A System For the Cadaverous Earth

[LordVreeg]

not sure i like the idea of evolving stricly on race, but racial modifiers to exp gain in certain areas makes tons of sense to me

[Llum]

not sure i like the idea of evolving stricly on race, but racial modifiers to exp gain in certain areas makes tons of sense to me

Well no, I don't think strictly evolving on race would be all that different from class based games (ex, you'd be an Elf instead of Warrior, or Halfing instead of rogue). However I think that race is something often under-valued. I mean, to me it seems like something huge, you and your adventuring companions are completely different species! I think that would have a bigger impact then a slight difference in initial values.

It's like a cat adventuring with a dog, a llama and a snake. They just won't grow in the same ways.

[beejazz]

I'd say, given the setting, that the option of starting as something monstrous is a given. And giving some unique abilities for monstrous players as they advance can only improve the game. Hell, monstrous advancement should be open at least a little to everybody, given the grafting, etc. right?

[LordVreeg]

hI.

It's the Guiltmaster, come calling again.  Glad to know that I have once again hit below the belt, and a number of members are doubled over.  (What, am I supposed act like I didn't think of the consequences of what I was saying?)

However, I'd better stand up now and be counted.

I'm at work for a little while, but I'll try to get back on tonight.  I have a list of questions I'd like to ask before I really sign on to any mechanic.  But my first question is going to be something like, "So how would a class-based system hold up in CE?"  and "What system will deal best with Nectar"?

Still wondering about the nectar thing.

How Deadly do you want CE to be?  How fast do you want PC growth?  How wide rangeing are the skill/feat/etc choices?  Do you want ressurection possible?  Divine magic?  Magical items?  how common are magic items?  

[Superfluous Crow]

If CE is to keep its visceral feel (which i reckon would be one of the design tenets of a CE system), growth should never increase the power of a character, but rather his range of options. D20 is not visceral because characters can take immense amount of punishment by the end levels. This, i think, is not something that is wanted in a CE system.
Also, remember that balance is actually a secondary feature. D20 requires strict balance because it is all about the power. In a more fluffy game balance is only important insofar as no one overshadows each other, and with a wide range of possibilities and equal chance of getting whacked by a knife to the throat this becomes less likely.  
I must admit that i think you should go for a custom system as well, although there is no reason not to steal elements from other systems : p

[Steerpike]

Nectar is going to give me a huge headache, I think.  I'm defintiely keeping it - the ideas of the Elder Tree being ravished by vampire-machinery for its eldritch sap is just such a perfect encapsulation of the setting's themes.  I think spellcasting is going to be the most complicated and scratch-built portion of the system; I'm going to go back through a long discussion I ahd with Vreeg and Crow about it, when I hammered out some ideas about how I wanted the system to work.  I'll translate those into mechanical terms and then mesh it with whatever I choose to use.

The consensus so far is on a more-or-less scratch-built system, probably based off a set of building blocks; FUDGE/FATE comes immediately to mind.

This whole excercise will probably require some playtesting on my part.

Advancement is the tricky part.  It's possible to make characters advance without drastically changing their fragility, and I've even seen some remarkably "visceral" ways of house-ruling d20, but that seems like pounding a sqare peg into a round hole.  CE is, as you point out, Cataclysmic Crow, fluff-driven and deadly: a system that accomodates that is probably best.  I migt at some hypothetical future date write up a d20 conversion primer for CE, but for now I think I should keep focusing on setting shopping, or maufacturing.

Race is a decent enough way to advance but if characters advance solely by race it's too limiting, in my opinion; every leechkin and hagman and ghul would feel the same, and I want variation.  That of course would have been the big strength of the d20 system, but as Crow points out (yet again), so long as I include lots of options and details (possibly fleshing out a more barebones system), that feeling of versatility doesn't have to be lost.

[LordVreeg]

Yeah.  I'm hip to the fragility thing.  Highest PC HP in Celtricia is 44, average is 18 and a falchion (to pick a pretty average weapon) does 2d4+1d8+10/d6, for a 26 max damage.  Lethality is a good thing.

When it comes to lots of slow, little advancements, I can be useful.
I'm going to be scary, and tell you to go skill based.

[Llum]

This whole excercise will probably require some playtesting on my part.

Race is a decent enough way to advance but if characters advance solely by race it's too limiting, in my opinion; every leechkin and hagman and ghul would feel the same, and I want variation.  That of course would have been the big strength of the d20 system, but as Crow points out (yet again), so long as I include lots of options and details (possibly fleshing out a more barebones system), that feeling of versatility doesn't have to be lost.
[/quote]

Race doesn't have to be the only way to advance, it could just be one way to advance. It could be optional. Etc.

[sparkletwist]

What about GURPS? :D

[Steerpike]

Yeah, that's one I hadn't considered, but not for any particular reason.  I have 0 experience with it but know that it's a fairly flexible and popular alternative to big systems like White Wolf's or d20.

[beejazz]

The consensus so far is on a more-or-less scratch-built system, probably based off a set of building blocks.

To maybe expand and clarify that list...

1. Character Creation
Character creation methods include classes (like in D&D), careers (like in WHFRP), random models (like Traveller), a totally or almost totally skill based system (Runequest), full point buy (GURPS, Tri-Stat, Mutants and Masterminds), multiple methods (3, 3.5 D&D, some versions of Shadowrun IIRC), Priority (I'll explain if need be... I think Shadowrun 2e used it), keyword/feat/talent based (again I'll explain if need be... SW Saga was kind of like this, FUDGE/Fate I think are kind of like this except freeform? , my system is this and skills). I'm sure I'm missing a few.

2. Character Advancement
Different from character creation, and most of the above methods still work. Sometimes you create characters in a career based system and get points to spend more or less freely on skills through play, so just remember that how you start and how you keep going don't have to be identical.

3. Task Resolution
People say you have to pick a die and stick with it. That's bull. Prior to 3e, D&D had at least three different systems for resolving tasks. For most stuff you could roll under your abilities, rogues had something like a percentile based skill system, and for combat you wanted to roll high plus and maybe minus some mods. So just remember you don't necessarily have to pick only one method for determining if stuff works or not.

That said, just assuming dice rolling there's roll over, roll under, dice pool variations of both, and percentile systems (pretty much roll under on a d100).

For both roll under and roll over you can add/subtract mods for difficulty or just scale the number (or even the type) of dice.

More dice means a steeper curve on roll under/over. Curves on roll under tend to minimize odds of rolling low if you're really good or luckily rolling high if you suck at something. I'm not terribly sure about dice pools.

There are other dice methods, and some gimmicks you can play with, like exploding dice (if you roll the max on the die, you roll another die) and risk dice (where you can increase the potential effect of a check by increasing the difficulty / risk... my combat system uses something like this).

Outside of dice there are many options. Cards can be interesting, if you want to leave things only halfway to chance (players still get good and bad "rolls", but can decide which rolls are which out of their hands).

4. Combat
Combat is a number of individual components really. D&D has always had kind of bare-bones and abstract combat, but there are a number of things you can add to make things more interesting (and you can make combat lethal in other ways than scaling hp and hit/miss odds for it).

Special stuff happens on high damage / criticals. I'll get into what that stuff might be later, but for now suffice to say that there's two main ways you can go about deciding when these things happen (well... besides "always" and "never"). For high damage, it can be either a flat value for everybody or a derived value that varies from person to person (and can be upped depending on the armor). For criticals, it happens on the luckiest rolls on the dice. In either case, one can't predict these things as well as one can predict one's hp, making combat scarier and more chaotic. Conversely, some things could happen on low hp as well. For examples of this, check out 4e's bloodied condition.

Bonus damage on high damage / critical. Like in D&D. Adds lethality by allowing one-hit kills in a system (hp) specifically set up so most of the time that doesn't happen.

Penalties on high damage / critical. Like in Star Wars SAGA. Get hit hard and you'll be less and less able to function. Favors a slow steady decline. Doesn't necessarily up lethality, but can make inferior foes scarier if you're badly hurt.

Random, variable injuries on high damage / critical. Like Cherries for martial artists in Unknown Armies or any number of hit location tables. Depending on what the injuries are and how likely it is that a character gets injured, this can up the lethality a *lot* by including the possibility of k.o. and death at random no matter what you're current hit point total is. It's also a great way to include the possibility of permanent injury, which can scare players worse than death oddly enough. Continuing play with a blind multiple amputee is a little freakier than rolling up a new character (although obviously this is a pretty extreme example... and in your setting it would just be an excuse to break out the grafts).

Called Shots can induce some of the effects above at your option, or low hit point totals could move a person along the penalty track or what have you. There's no need to have it all random. It's also possible to include both the random and intentional thing (my system has both random injuries on high damage and called shots).

Besides all that you can have an active or a passive defense against attacks. An active defense means you roll to avoid getting hit, and often means you can only do this a limited number of times. It can make large numbers of foes scary no matter how well you dodge in a one on one (or even three on one) fight. Passive defense is easier and requires less rolling, and you can devise rules to cover when you can't dodge (see D20) but getting blindsided or ganged up on will require special rules in that case.

There are a bunch of other things to consider (DR or lessen the odds to hit for armor, or both and how you determine weapon damage spring to mind).

5. Magic
Not even gonna touch this one. There are so many ways to do this stuff.

[Superfluous Crow]

I think what would serve you best is a system where character creation is point buy. This allows you to steadily increase the options at a leisurely pace without having to make entire new classes just to fit in a new idea. The system should after all also be one that fits your own style, which involves new elements every so often.
Also, point buy systems allow for drawbacks, something your systemd definitely has to have. :)
Although more or less any method can be used for task resolution, you should perhaps just go with something simple like 3d6 or 2d10. 2d10 is good because it is a bell curve (if not the greatest bell curve) and has more simple probabilities since every result has a chance of happening that is a factor of 1/100. So there is 1/100 for getting 20, 2/100 for getting 19 and so on until 11 (the average) with 10/100.
And although Gurps might seem to fit well at first sight, i honestly believe it is too complex for a visceral game like CE. But Steerpikes choice i guess...

[Steerpike]

[blockquote=Cataclysmic Crow]And although Gurps might seem to fit well at first sight, i honestly believe it is too complex for a visceral game like CE. But Steerpikes choice i guess...[/blockquote]While obviously I'm going to be the one choosing the system, I'm here to ask for input, and  consider yours very valuable - I think you intuitively understand want I mean when I say I want a visceral sort of system: gritty, violent, packed with opportunities for visitng all sorts of ills on people, and with fragile characters, for whom death is only a bullet or sword-stroke away.  Too much detail and attention to game balance for tactical reasons tends to counteract the "visceral" feel because it makes combat into a very compelx chess-game rather than a life-and-death struggle; DnD is clearly guilty of this at the higher levels of play, when characters have massive hitpoints, are tooled up with loads of magic, and generally walking around being invulnerable.  I don't have a ton of experience with GURPS, but if it clogs up task resolution and combat with an overabundance of complexities in striving for game balance and/or life simulation, it might not be right for CE either.

Beejaz, amazing post about the different facets of system design.  I'll be rereading it frequently qhile I strie to find or craft a system for CE.

Really, the sort of system I ideally want is one that can embody the two halves of CE, the decadently civilized and the raw, post-aopcalyptic stuff: the visceral and the baroque.

Everyone's input so far, and many of the system suggestions, have been excellent.  Now I have to really get down to teh nuts and bolts...

[Tangential]

You might look at 3rd Edition Shadowrun for ideas concerning both magic and lethality.

[LordVreeg]

What do you think the playable races will be?