College of War

Finally I managed to get them online.

Pre-filled character sheets for the current CoW player characters. They’re not really all that fancy. Visuals will change, but that ought to give you a picture how simplistically we’re running things at the moment. The d20 stats are there for the players to have a base of reference, as most are long-term d20ers and it makes it easier for them to have a comparison-point, but they don’t actually hold a system-significance for the current game. The real traits are written after them. The o’s written with trait are check-boxes to mark if the trait was used in the session or not.

The diagram on the right is the magic system thingamob. It’s left a bit unclear for the moment, because I’m running the game as a journey of discovery into what magic means, uncovering mechanics as the characters discover new forms of magic. If I ever get round to writing a “generic CoW character sheet”, it will be more clearly explained.

So, after 11 or so games, how do the game mechanics actually seem to work? The most common question around the gaming table seems to be “with three?” referring to the number of die used in the roll. This is good. It’s a simple system that’s quite quickly adapted and the transition from rolling a d20 to 3d6 has been less painful than originally feared.

Basically how it works, is that the player declares the intent and if I remember I provide them with a verbal clue on what’s going to be the predicted result (”you’ll most likely get hurt” or “that shouldn’t be hard for you”). Then the player rolls 3d6, and sees what happens. Roll then determines how well the action actually gets performed. The predicted result being in the middle range of rolls (somewhere around 10-11 is the actual midpoint) if the roll is lower, then the result is worse for the acting character, if the roll is higher, the result is better. Note that this rarely means differing from the original success-failure prediction. Only if the roll you get to really high (14+) or really low (7 or lower) rolls, something might change that drastically - successes can turn into failures and failures into successes. And beyond those, there are the Snake-eyes and Box-cars, the fumbles and the crits. They usually mean that things go somehow unplanned. They alter the story somehow. I’ll try to give an example.

A young fire mage is searching his master’s room for a secret exit that he knows is there, to chase behind a burglar who had just stolen his master’s staff, the one with dragon iconography on the end. The GM states that it’s likely he’ll find it after a 5 minutes of searching, knowing the hall quite well. Then it’s time to roll the dice. The lower the roll, the longer it takes for the mage to find the door. a roll of 5 could mean a good 15 minutes of searching, a roll of 10 would mean the predicted 5 minutes, a roll of 14 might mean a minute or two. A crit would mean that the passage is found instantly and the situation turns from trailing someone to chasing him. A fumble on the other hand might mean that the master arrives and finds the young mage rummaging through his things, or that the mage accidentally tips a valuable book into the fireplace. Again, meaning that the situation changes from trailing someone to trying to get out of a new mess. At least temporarily.

Beyond that basic mechanic, there is the bonus and minus dice. We’ve been a bit more freeform about those than maybe we should. In the optimal situation, additional dice are given for three things: Traits, circumstances and drama. Traits meaning that if the acting character or the object of the action has a trait, stat or a skill that benefits them in the situation, they can mark that attribute “used” for the session and gain a (bonus or minus, depending on the trait and who uses it) dice for the roll. Circumstances mean that there is something in the situation that helps or hinders the character - it’s really unusually dark night, the guards are drunk, the character is being assited by someone, etc. The third type of extra dice is drama, which is given to situations where dramatic “laws” call for a success or a failure. Generally it’s given if something is so cool that it should happen, but there is still room for how well it can happen. Bonus dice are “pick three best results from the dice you threw” and minus dice are “pick three worst results from the dice you threw.”

Biggest dice-pool so-far was for Marcus, on his “I’m going to kill the motherfucker” action on Stephan, who had just blown Iiain’s (Marcus’ girlfriend) brains out with a simple fire spell. Most likely result in the situation would ve that Marcus succeeded in killing Stephan after a short brawl. But Marcus has a lot of brawn (+1 trait dice), and it would really fit the drama of the situation that Marcus would succeed (+1 drama dice), resulting in 5 dice. And the roll was equally good (6, 6, 6, 5, 5, meaning with “pick three best” it was three 6:s for a total of 18 and a maximal critical). The critical there meant that not only there was no real fight fight buy that he pretty much beat the poor guy’s head into a pulp with his bare hands without any resistance. Something that had a real effect on quite a lot of the people involved in the situation.

One of the themes that get repeated in CoW this time is the chance to begin again. This holds true for the concept of colonies as well as the player characters who travel to this remote town where no-one they know live, away from their nice communities and families. All past sins are forgiven. The theme is emphasized by the Dark Secret mechanic (mentioned in the previous post) - every player character has a past they want to get away from. This means that while they might have some abilities that could benefit them, using them would draw attention to their true selves.

To explain a bit further - Before I started thinking about the new College of War campaign, I had an idea of a game running on multiple time-lines - the present, the past, maybe even the future. This game sadly didn’t work out (player schedule problem), but some of the original thoughts stuck with me and I imported the best of the bunch to the new CoW. The key-element that stuck was the idea of game elements that are revealed to the players through a time-dislocated narrative (ie. flashbacks).

Thus we actually have two levels of storytelling. We have the story of the characters and what they’re doing now, that is more focused on immersion. But also we’re running a side-narrative on what has happened before they have gotten here, that allows better reflection on the situation on hand… for the “audience”. The players know backgrounds to things their characters are still unaware of. To be honest, this is something that we haven’t had much experience with in the gaming circle I come from and am actually looking forward to seeing how this works in action. We’ve always been a bit more geared towards the “player knowledge and character knowledge should match on some levels”

In practice this means that the players will have to discuss in-game events off-game a bit, as they actually know stuff that their characters don’t yet know. “Ok, if we all go, Abe there will go bonkers once he sees that we’ve been actually working for the guy who killed his father and if the old man dies now, we will never get info on who he’s been feeding all this info to. Maybe if only one of us goes to talk to the guy and it just doesn’t happen to be Abriel?” Also it should lead to juicy situations when built-up things get released at appropriate times. The thing that causes the players most things to worry about is the fact they have to keep the secrets secret, not just perpetual secrets like usually - you as a player won’t have any idea that Abe’s dad was killed until it’s revealed in an Abe-centric flashback sequence. Abe’s player of course knows that his dad was murdered, part of his Dark Secret description, but the details will be hazy to him as well until the scene is actually played out.

It’ll be a hard job. I’ll try to explain it better once we’ve tried it out a couple of games.

Posting this late again.

I’d love to talk about the Character Sheet today, but apparently I’m stuck with writing about the idea of character creation sheets.

This pretty much came to me from two things. First of all, the people who I play the game with seem to need a guiding hand in the mechanical stuff. And when I say “a hand” I mean “step by step guide book with diagrams straight from IKEA, complete with the multi-purpose assembly tool”. The second reason is that character creation should be a thing done together, not separately. College of War has a sheet to calculate the boring stuff, nothing special there. The other sheet is much more interesting. It’s made for the whole group to fill before they start their individual character creation.

For the current campaign I have dealt out the roles for the players to choose from. These are quite general ones, but enough to steer the players’ ideas’ into the right direction for some of the themes I have planned - They tell the player about the background they are coming from. In the previous campaign, La Vache, everyone was related (sisters to be exact). This time the player characters come from variety of backgrounds, stuck together by a common situation. One is a child of a frontierman, one of an Imperan merchant, one the offspring of a Fieon colonial lord and the fourth is an aboriginal raised by colonists. But this is just the startup. The real use for the sheets comes from inventing the characters’ biggest strengths and flaws together.

The sheets contain information needed for coming up with skills that every character should know, only one of them should know, or in reverse, one of them should not know. Also thinking up interesting traits (be the good or bad) for characters that could lead to further conflict. Stuff like that. Note that anything are not assigned to any individual characters yet. Just a list of stuff that would be interesting to have in the group. After everything is listed out, things will be dealt to the characters through discourse like “I think it would be cool if the aboriginal had a drinking problem and the noble was the one that could navigate using the stars” or “I think it would be cool if the frontierman’s son couldn’t read and the merchant’s daughter is the only one who knows anything about traps”, whatever rocks the group’s boat. As long as the group is more or less unanimous about the decisions, everything is fine.

Besides these, the characters’ outward personality traits are done as a group-effort using a mind-map technique inspired by / shamelessly stolen from Emily Care Boss’ “Breaking The Ice” (Get that game if you want to know more) and in the end the character stats are done with a combination of randomization / selection leading to characters that sometimes are what you want, and sometimes not. (you might put your best bet on getting good number in Strength and still end up with a 13, while Finesse ends up 18 without any planning) But I’ll get to that when I talk about the actual character sheet later.

One last thing I could mention here is the Dark Secret mechanic. This is to make the characters feel like private property after everyone else has had their dirty paw prints all over them. The mechanic was originally inspired by the the Vampire: The Masquerade varying point Flaw “Dark Secret” - or at least the way we used it. It was the reason for the GM and the player to go to another room and discuss the secret that no-one else knew about. In CoW, each character has a dark thing in their past that they don’t want to reveal to the others. Only the player and the GM know about this at the beginning, and it will be used as a narrative tool to create problems for the characters in the early games where they’re still trying to figure out who they are. Mechanically the Dark Secrets aren’t assigned any numeric attribute, but they might give the “owner” a bonus to some things - for example, a character with the dark secret “I am the thirteenth duke of Wybourne” might give the character useful skills like “breaking and entering” and negative traits like “lecherous”. The downside to these is that they can’t be used until they are out on the table, known either by the characters or the players.

Characters or the players? What do you mean by that? I hope I’ll have time to explain the storytelling levels tomorrow or something…

Hello d20.

Goodbye d20.

As much as I love d20 variations (got to stealth-advertise True20 at this point in time, really nice system) and as much as College of War has always had a d20-based system, I am sort of sick of the huge randomization of the basic game mechanic. It fits some styles of play, but has no place here. To be honest, in the previous versions, rolling the d20 has been to check if the 5% critical happens or if the 5% something goes horribly wrong.

Now, I love throwing dice. I love throwing a lot of dice. With this in mind, and looking at the character’s stat range of 3-24 (with anything over 18 being “heroic”), the nicer way, in my mind would be to roll the 3d6 and add bonuses to that. However, getting a critical success (18 in this case) on that system decreases dramatically to something like 0.5%, same goes with critical failure (3 in this case). That is a bit “not-fun” — critical successes and failures are fun. So to ease the situation quite a lot, critical successes and fumbles are acquired by “box-cars and snake-eyes” -mechanic - double sixes equals a critical success, double ones equals a critical failure. This raises the probability in a standard situation to a bit.

To further make heroic successes happen, characters get a bonus dice from their stats and skills, usable in situations when the players want to make the stuff they’re good at not suck because of bad dice. Characters with a stat higher than 13 get a single bonus dice, higher than 18 another, higher than 23 yet another, and so on. For skills, the limit is 5+, 10+, etc. These bonus dice are usable only once during a period of time (depending how heroic you want, it can be once a session for high-epics feel or only a couple of times during the campaign for a more gritty look on things). Also some other things give bonus dice in the character creation and during the play. In a single roll, a player can use a single Bonus Dice.

And as a negative version of this there are Minus traits from horribly bad stats (one for lower than 9, or two if you actually got 3 in a stat) and players get to pick other negative traits for their characters to use. These “minus dice” can be used in any contest where the players feel that their negative qualities prevent them from actually putting their best effort in. These die can be used by players to regenerate the bonus die for later use.

In addition to the bonus die, skills and statistics provide the standardized pluses and minuses to the rolls - want to run a 100 meter dash? Add your Strength Bonus and Running Skill to the roll. Want to run a couple of miles? Constitution + Running. What snake of the 5 is the one that isn’t poisonous? Knowledge + Biology, or maybe Intuition + Animal Handling if you don’t feel that confident in your knowhow. The bigger total you get, the better.

In the strictest situations there will be limitations like “if you want to do this, you need 20 or more as a total”, but more of the situations will be the type “with your stats/skills, this is within your capabilities, please roll to see how well it goes”. Strict rules usually cause the narrative to degrade, rules that only give guidelines to the situation help. Using bonus dice in a scene will always call for an explanation, even if it will be as simple as “You call that a spirited horse? You should have seen the ones we had at the home ranch! I’m using a bonus dice from Animal Handling in this check.” or as long-winded as something that calls for a specific flashback scene. Either way, more than “Animal Handling +5, Wisdom -3, Will use Bonus Dice” is said.

Will get to character generation at some later point, hopefully with a Character Sheet sample.