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Game Design and Dice Theory and [The Riddle of Steel]
italianranma
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The Riddle of Steel is an indie table top RPG created by ARMA scholar Jake Norwood as a tactical/realistic fantasy combat narrative simulation...if that last noun phrase made any sense to you at all, then read on. Despite it's limited production run and eventual abandonment (the creator went to Afghanistan to participate in Operation Enduring Freedom) the game has a strong cult following who continue to create fan sites and house rules/updates. The game differs from most other fantasy tabletop RPG's in that the rules for melee combat reflect the creator's experience in scholarly study and mock combat of authentic period western martial arts, and with 'Spiritual Attributes'; roleplaying stats that represent a character's motivations which give him or her an advantage when pursuing outcomes that really matter.
The game is currently out of print, and probably will remain so: used copies go for $85+. I'm not saying...I'm just sayin' if you know what I mean. Anyway I'm a fan of the game and I think that there are a lot of great concepts in it that I could adapt to my own needs. Combat in particular is done really well. Each combatant has a 'pool' of d10s. This pool is determined by Attribute + Proficiency (similar to Exalted or any other White Wolf game), and your beginner fighting oriented character will probably have about 13 or so dice. Combat is treated as a series of vignettes between small numbers of combatants; for example if your three PCs are in a fight with 3 orcs, then you'd focus on each character's duel for 3 or 4 rounds (unless it resolved earlier) then move on to the next fight for a similar amount of time. This is necessary because of how attacking and defending work: the two (or more) combatants each choose to either 'attack' or 'defend' (with identical results being common) to determine initial roles. The attacker would choose an attack maneuver and devote dice to it, the defender would defend similarly. Success on a roll is again like the WW system where any d10s that show the target number or greater would count as successes, and the player with the most successes in that exchange would of course succeed and usually take (or continue) his role of attacker. Rounds are called bouts, and each bout has two exchanges; so players that use all their dice in the first exchange would be SOL for the second. Attacking and defending maneuvers are as mundane as 'cut' or 'parry' and as complicated as 'Simultaneous Block/Strike' adding a lot of choice to what can in other games be boring hack & slash fests. Damage is done on a sliding scale where the number of success are added to a flat damage value and the target's toughness/armor is subtracted resulting in a final damage 'level' between 0 and 5. Each attack also has a vector (like Zone IV; aka diagonal downward shoulder chop); a 0 level hit would have no effect and a 5 level hit on the neck would be (and this is a real quote); "Total or near total decapitation. Instant death."
Now hopefully I've piqued your interest enough to talk about some boring stuff instead. Like I said I like the game and want to use some elements, but there are a few things that I didn't like from the relatively few short games I've played with my gaming group: first off there are some definite winners in both the maneuvers and weapons categories. By winners I mean that this maneuver/weapon is clearly superior to another in all/every way. Second the damage model, while unique, is much too linear with the toughness attribute and armor counting for far too much. There's also too much potential for very swingy fights. I understand that sometimes that's just how it worked in the real world, but in a tabletop game I also think there's a certain need to justify character choices, and even in a more deadly simulationist game I want my players to feel like they died because of a poor decision on their part rather than the fact that the dude with the pole-axe had a really lucky attack roll and won by 1 success.
What I'd like to do is open up this thread to some discussion about how to tweak the rules into aligning with what I see as a more fun game. Specifically I want to balance the maneuvers and weapons so that there are still a wide variety of options, but no clear statistical winner. Secondly I want a damage model that has some random element to it and overall has results that occur more often in the median than in the extremes. Finally I want to both armor and weapons to function differently from Strength/Toughness attributes and to interact with each other in believable ways (for example a weapon like a warhammer being better suited to defeating heavy armor). If someone can teach me how to calculate chance of success for given numbers of dice, target number, and required number of successes, then that would really help me out as well.
Now I'm a bit of a newcomer to this forum, though not to tabletop games, and I don't really see a lot of these kinds of threads. My goal here is to get some outside/group perspective on some solutions to what I see are problems with this gaming system. I'm not going to turn around and publish anything I find here (I'm much too lazy) but if I'm in the wrong forum or if this kind of discussion is frowned upon please let me know and I'll erase the post and let it die quickly. Also, if this is something that is better done through private messages, please advise me on that too.
Also with these new forums, I didn't see any of the usual post editing buttons to let me add hyperlinks or pictures or anything of the sort. Am I doing something wrong, or do I need to man up and learn some HTML? I'll clean up this OP if there's some interest and someone points me in the right direction.
Links:
The Riddle of Steel Website (Driftwood Publishing): http://www.driftwoodpublishing.com/
Example of play: http://www.driftwoodpublishing.com/whatis/RTC.htm
The game is currently out of print, and probably will remain so: used copies go for $85+. I'm not saying...I'm just sayin' if you know what I mean. Anyway I'm a fan of the game and I think that there are a lot of great concepts in it that I could adapt to my own needs. Combat in particular is done really well. Each combatant has a 'pool' of d10s. This pool is determined by Attribute + Proficiency (similar to Exalted or any other White Wolf game), and your beginner fighting oriented character will probably have about 13 or so dice. Combat is treated as a series of vignettes between small numbers of combatants; for example if your three PCs are in a fight with 3 orcs, then you'd focus on each character's duel for 3 or 4 rounds (unless it resolved earlier) then move on to the next fight for a similar amount of time. This is necessary because of how attacking and defending work: the two (or more) combatants each choose to either 'attack' or 'defend' (with identical results being common) to determine initial roles. The attacker would choose an attack maneuver and devote dice to it, the defender would defend similarly. Success on a roll is again like the WW system where any d10s that show the target number or greater would count as successes, and the player with the most successes in that exchange would of course succeed and usually take (or continue) his role of attacker. Rounds are called bouts, and each bout has two exchanges; so players that use all their dice in the first exchange would be SOL for the second. Attacking and defending maneuvers are as mundane as 'cut' or 'parry' and as complicated as 'Simultaneous Block/Strike' adding a lot of choice to what can in other games be boring hack & slash fests. Damage is done on a sliding scale where the number of success are added to a flat damage value and the target's toughness/armor is subtracted resulting in a final damage 'level' between 0 and 5. Each attack also has a vector (like Zone IV; aka diagonal downward shoulder chop); a 0 level hit would have no effect and a 5 level hit on the neck would be (and this is a real quote); "Total or near total decapitation. Instant death."
Now hopefully I've piqued your interest enough to talk about some boring stuff instead. Like I said I like the game and want to use some elements, but there are a few things that I didn't like from the relatively few short games I've played with my gaming group: first off there are some definite winners in both the maneuvers and weapons categories. By winners I mean that this maneuver/weapon is clearly superior to another in all/every way. Second the damage model, while unique, is much too linear with the toughness attribute and armor counting for far too much. There's also too much potential for very swingy fights. I understand that sometimes that's just how it worked in the real world, but in a tabletop game I also think there's a certain need to justify character choices, and even in a more deadly simulationist game I want my players to feel like they died because of a poor decision on their part rather than the fact that the dude with the pole-axe had a really lucky attack roll and won by 1 success.
What I'd like to do is open up this thread to some discussion about how to tweak the rules into aligning with what I see as a more fun game. Specifically I want to balance the maneuvers and weapons so that there are still a wide variety of options, but no clear statistical winner. Secondly I want a damage model that has some random element to it and overall has results that occur more often in the median than in the extremes. Finally I want to both armor and weapons to function differently from Strength/Toughness attributes and to interact with each other in believable ways (for example a weapon like a warhammer being better suited to defeating heavy armor). If someone can teach me how to calculate chance of success for given numbers of dice, target number, and required number of successes, then that would really help me out as well.
Now I'm a bit of a newcomer to this forum, though not to tabletop games, and I don't really see a lot of these kinds of threads. My goal here is to get some outside/group perspective on some solutions to what I see are problems with this gaming system. I'm not going to turn around and publish anything I find here (I'm much too lazy) but if I'm in the wrong forum or if this kind of discussion is frowned upon please let me know and I'll erase the post and let it die quickly. Also, if this is something that is better done through private messages, please advise me on that too.
Also with these new forums, I didn't see any of the usual post editing buttons to let me add hyperlinks or pictures or anything of the sort. Am I doing something wrong, or do I need to man up and learn some HTML? I'll clean up this OP if there's some interest and someone points me in the right direction.
Links:
The Riddle of Steel Website (Driftwood Publishing): http://www.driftwoodpublishing.com/
Example of play: http://www.driftwoodpublishing.com/whatis/RTC.htm
飛べねぇ豚はただの豚だ。
italianranma on
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Posts
If you head to rpg.net, rpggeek.com, indie-rpg.com or giantitp.com, you're much more likely to find folks interested in discussing design/homebrewing.
In general, the more complexity you allow, the better the simulation becomes, but also the harder it becomes to play. I like multidice systems, as they are less random than single dice systems. (In the sense that rolls will very often end up in the middle of the expected a results.)
I'm not sure I like the option TROS gives of defending OR attacking, if I understand it correctly. If I'd have a multidice pool system, I'd probably make it so that you have to reserve a number of dice for both out of the same pool, and scale it nonlinearly (Perhaps by making the success threshold for defending lower, say at 5+, and an offensive hit at 6+ or 7+).
Another part, which I can't really see from just the preview, is how it handles teamwork and tactics. For me, working together to get advantages from terrain. combinations of abilities, estimation of your opponents seems more 'fun' than having the right stats to win 1 v 1 battles all the time. Of course, in a swordfight a two on one situation is terribly lethal most of the time, I'd guess (I have never been in a sword fight).
Re: Hitpoints
If I were to design a system, I would be tempted to use a system like SW: Saga, where you have multiple pools, the first of which describes near misses, dodges, heroes luck, inventiveness (regens each battle, the highest 'temp hp' layer in D&D terms), and then a second layer that describes physical damage, harder to heal. Perhaps tack on the 40k idea of 'critical damage' where below 0 every hit you take damages your character in a bad way (broken bones, losing eyes, until you lose your life somewhere between -6 and -10).
Re: The forums, it supports most 'normal' bbcode structure, it just doesn't have them listed in the edit box. stuff like [ list ] and [ code ] work just fine.