Errant Design Deep Dive #4: Renown & Experience

For the duration of Errant's Kickstarter I will be doing a series of posts where I go through Errant, more or less in order, diving into the design of the game and its inspirations. To follow along, I suggest reading the relevant section being discussed at errantrpg.carrd.co. Also, we have a Discord server now.

Diving right in today, we'll be talking about Renown & Experience.

Renown & Experience

I think I just renamed levels to renown because I had renamed classes to Archetypes (because I wanted to emphasize that they weren't narrow expressions of function-as-profession like conventional naming schema that Fighter or Wizard or Cleric imply, but rather broader expressions of purpose; The Violent can be a barbarian or a paladin or any other dude whose primary expression is, well, violence) and races to Ancestries (I am not going to go into all the reasons why "race" is a fucking bullshit word to describe fucking dwarves and elves and shit), and so being a pretentious designer git I decided to rename levels to Renown. Once I did that I was like "oh shit this should actually measure Renown" and so I added the roll under to test Renown. It was originally a 2d6 roll back when the max Renown was 10, but I dropped it down to a d10 when the level cap was reduced to 9.

As for why the level cap went down to 9: I had the standard "XP thresholds double per level" to begin with, but really didn't like the fact that that meant the level 1-2 and level 2-3 had the same amount of XP needed to advance. I fiddled around until I eventually landed on some numbers that I liked, with the amount needed to advance to the next level being 2000 + 2*the last renown threshold. Under that formula Renown 10 would have been 1,022,000 XP which is an ugly number I didn't want in my game. It was a happy coincidence that I ended up discovering all of the Archetype abilities had smoother scaling across 9 levels then they did across 10.

But the big design question here is why: XP for Waste? XP for Gold is old faithful, but when I came into the scene a lot of people (I have forgotten specifics; I feel like Gus may have been one of them?) were doing XP for Gold Spent systems, as a way of investing further in the world. This is what I adopted initially, but two things usually ended up happening:

1) characters would buy all the best mundane gear they needed and then be set for life, pretty much. This had a sort of doubling effect on character power growth as they both got the boost from levelling up and from making their gear better.

2) After that they would pretty much just literally throw their gold away on carousing in order to get the XP they needed.

So the system was already halfway towards XP for Waste already. I just pushed it a bit farther, and in a little of a souls-like direction, with a tension between spending a resource as a currency or spending it as experience. 

Adding in the caveat that items breaking or investments becoming unusable through threat was kind of an attempt to integrate "fail forward" ethos into Errant.  It gave some more mechanical weight to the Quality mechanics around item degradation. It gives another incentive to make large cash investments in things like businesses and domains because they can eventually turn into a passive means of XP whenever they become threatened, and is a better way to scale XP into the late game as eventually the XP requirements become high enough that you can't very efficiently reach them via carousing (the way the XP rules interact with Downtime systems is one of my favourite parts of Errant and the thing I am most proud of as a designer, but we've got a few deep dives to go before we get there [and I have to add the downtime procedures up onto the carrd still]).

As I put it in one of my very early drafts of Errant

The rule by which PCs gain XP for their investments coming under threat is there so as to not discourage players totally from investing in the game world, and also naturally creates an escalating cycle of stakes by which the things the PCs own come under threat, so they must ensure their safety, thereby in the process earning more things which can later come under threat. At higher levels, PCs will find that having their ships or castles be destroyed or come under attack is the fastest way to gain XP, since wasting the amount of wealth required to increase in Renown becomes near impossible through traditional forms of debauchery. You can only throw so many lavish parties before people stop showing up.

I also like the XP for Waste rules as a kind of accidental form of genre emulation; combined with the mechanics for carousing (the primary mechanical form of wasting provided to players), debt (what players are likely to get into when they carouse), and lifestyle expenses (when downtime turns end, halve any remaining money) it creates a play experience where players will get a large score from an adventure, and then immediately blow all of the cash, starting out the next adventure with nothing or significantly in debt, having to scrape by in order to scrounge up the resources needed for the next adventure. It manages to maintain a tension to the resource management aspect of the game that often disappears once your player character's accumulate enough wealth, while also providing a real impetus as to why characters need to keep adventuring.

Its a common formula to the best of adventure fiction, your Cowboy Bebops and your Fafhrd's and Gray Mouser's, stories of fiscally irresponsible, perpetually down on their luck adventurers that, if they're lucky, might fail upwards into positions of power.

Quoting from that same early draft:

XP for wasting gold is meant to replicate picaresque swords & sorcery stories where our he roes often seem to be in a state of constant destitution. Which is not to say that in these stories the characters never earn money, but that we don’t focus on them when we do. Deprivation drives desire, and desire is at the heart of conflict, tension, and drama: all the things we want from a good story. We don’t read stories about Conan when he is a king during peace time, but we would read a story about Conan deposed from his throne and his quest to recover it.

Errant Design Deep Dive #3: Items and Equipment

 For the duration of Errant's Kickstarter I will be doing a series of posts where I go through Errant, more or less in order, diving into the design of the game and its inspirations. To follow along, I suggest reading the relevant section being discussed at errantrpg.carrd.co. Also, we have a Discord server now.

Today is a look at the most sacred and profane cow of OSR play, inventory/equipment management. Today we'll be talking about Item Slots, Exhaustion, and Encumbrance, Weapons & Armour, Depletion & Supply, and Economy. Whew, that's a lot to cover. That's not all though: at the end is a special reveal of a new project in the works for Errant 

Item Slots, Exhaustion, and Encumbrance

What is there to say about item slots that hasn't been said before? They are the de facto  way of tracking inventory limits in most OSR and OSR-adjacent games now and the world is better for it. My first encounter with it was Matt Rundle's Anti-Hammerspace Item-Tracker way back when. For the longest time I made my players write down the location of every individual item in their inventory on their body, but I have now pared that down to just Hand & Handy slots and assume everything else is in a backpack. I also used to have some truly ridiculous fractional items floating around in my item lists; things taking up 1/3 or 1/7 or other dumb amounts. My players rebelled and I standardised to items either being 1 (or more) slots, 1/2 slot, 1/4 slot, or 1/8 slot. Recently after reading Anne's excellent posts on resource management I ditched the 1/8 slot.

I think once you have item slots its pretty intuitive to put other things other than items in them. I put in "exhaustion fills a slot" as a rule very soon after reading Knave, and its an approach that has recently seen much success in Mausritter; Errant doesn't go as full bore into using item slots for conditions as Mausritter does, but the idea of physical exhaustion "taking up" the space you could carry something else in feels fairly straightforward.

Encumbrance levels, as being separate from carrying capacity, was something I did not give very much thought to back in my days of playing the ultra-lights: you can carry this much stuff and do stuff, and if you carry more stuff you can't do stuff. I didn't see the need for granularity beyond that.

When I finally began to dive into the design of B/X though I began to see how so many of these little granular rules that many of the more minimalist takes on classic D&D pared away created the design space for so many of the classic gameplay experiences everyone in the OSR-sphere was talking about and that I wanted to access. Greater encumbrance means slower movement rates, which means you use more torches, and have more wandering monster checks to get across the same distance; you're more likely to have greater encumbrance coming out of a dungeon than you are coming in, since you're laden with treasure, but you're also likely to be bloodied and low on resources, meaning you're less capable of being in a fight if one occurs, and might not have enough torches to get you all the way through to the end. God forbid you have to run from a monster and ditch some of your treasure to be fast enough to get away in a chase. Having granular encumbrance levels rather than a binary "encumbered or not" creates multiple decision points, thereby enabling a wonderful economy of risk vs reward to be measured.

Of course the actual mechanics as written for doing so in those games have always been a little clunky, so my goal was to try and emulate that same interactions but with cleaner rules. In many ways I feel like Zzarchov Kowolski's description of Neoclassical Geek Revival as a "take on classic RPGs to the extent that none of the original mechanics survive" also sums up the ethos of Errant quite nicely.

The specifics of the encumbrance mechanics in Errant have changed many many times, notably because the rules around handling armour and calculating movement speed have had many changes and these three systems are fairly interconnected, but the two main things that its always done is: reduce movement speed (in combat) and increase event dice (in travel and exploration) if you're carrying more than your item slots, which I think ends up replicating the effects of its implementation in B/X and other editions but in a cleaner way.

Encumbrance also adds to the DV of certain physical checks like climbing or swimming, as well as checks for The Occult to see if they can retain their spells. This used to be a function that was related to armour, but it makes more sense to me as a function of encumbrance, especially since there's no weapon or armour restrictions for the Archetypes in Errant; magic users should always travel light and be dignified, carrying stuff is for patsies. 

While this might be kind of a harsh penalty for just carrying stuff (having a full inventory will increase the DV by 2, a full 10% less chance to do something), I will note that it can be largely obviated by just dropping your backpack and the things you're holding before you attempt something strenuous: this is a behaviour that I personally feel is so instinctual its automatic for me in my everyday life, but adventurers never worry about it. Personally I feel like this could lead to some interesting situations also where players are likely to get caught without a bag after shoving open a door and finding an angry group of critters on the other side, who they must now content with while their equipment is all strewn about all over the place.

Weapons & Armour

Armour is a doozy in terms of its design history in Errant; I'm not really sure where to begin. Armour, as I stated in an earlier post, was one of the first things I started futzing with back when this was still a Black Hack hack. Aside from just giving armour points (e.g. an ablative pool of damage reduction that decreased before hp did), I also kind of become obsessed with armour representing damage reduction and damage avoidance at the same time, so I had armour give a DV to attack rolls (back when there were attack rolls) equal to half the current amount of armour points, which meant that as you took damage and your AP decreased your AC decreased as well. On top of that, you took a quarter of your maximum total AP (not whatever your current AP was) and added it the DV for physical and spell retention checks. It was finnicky as hell.

When I ditched attack rolls I ditched the AC functionality and just kept armour as giving AP, though I was still keeping that ugly "quarter of max AP to physical checks" rule. 

I am not actually sure what prompted the switch from AP to the Blocks system that we have in place now. I think it was when I wanted to differentiate shields from other pieces of armour, and so I made them impair damage by a certain number of steps. From there I think I just realised armour was cooler, more active and engaging if you had to make a conscious decision to use it; it also provided a justification for the piecemeal armour system I was using, as blocks require narrative justification as to how you're blocking an attack with a particular piece of armour. I still had the very ugly "quarter of max Blocks to checks" rule for a little bit until I did away with it and replaced it with encumbrance quite recently.

I also like the way Blocks interact with the Quality rule: as you use more blocks to impair damage, an enemy rolling max damage becomes more likely (or inevitable if you reduce their damage to 1), which means that as you use your armour it is more likely to degrade.

Nick once asked me why I had weapons abstracted into 3 categories while I seemed to go into such careful and minute detail to individual pieces of armour. For one I like the piecemeal feel of individual armour pieces and what it does to the setting: you never buy a pristine shiny new suit of armour, your fucking boots wear out and your helmet breaks and you steal replacements from the body of the dude you just killed. My players were constantly finding random suits of armour or armour pieces and replacing their old ones and distributing them amongst themselves, ending up looking like little mismatched dolls wearing bric-a-brac assemblages of bloodstained armour.

The second is that, in my opinion, weapons have several orders of magnitude more complexity in all their myriad effects and applications, which is why I feel like its better to keep them more abstract. In situations like this, I feel like trying to specifically catalogue the differentiations between every type of weapon by tags or what nots actually decreases complexity instead of increasing it; keeping it abstract leaves a lot of room for player ingenuity and common sense reasoning from the guide to prevail. 

Dealing with plus bonuses to weapon was something I struggled with for a while; I run mostly published material so plus weapons show up a lot. Just keeping the flat increase to damage mathed out weird: a +2 dagger, which is a light weapon and thus has -1 damage, would do +1 damage. Plus I wasn't fond of the having to do any kind of addition, as a weird personal hang up. I played around with plus weapons enhancing damage by that many steps, but I realised that giving out enhancement as bonuses on things could skew things quickly because of how quickly they can add up, leading to a disproportionate advantage; plus, I like to save enhancement and impairment as rewards for players making clever use of tactics, planning, and their environment, not something they can just get without having to do anything.

I settled on plus weapons letting you maximize damage a set amount of times because again, I think active abilities are better than passive ones (both in terms of being more engaging and not having to constantly remember to add or do something), and because of the way it (along with the gambit mechanics, which we'll talk about soon) incentivize the asymmetrical nature of combat (Errants have piddly amounts of hp compared to monsters, and because of auto-damage will quickly be outmatched in a fair fight) to be about getting as many tactical advantages as possible, making your damage die as big as possible, and then using abilities like true strikes or combat dice to capitalize on your now huge damage die. From there it was just about giving armour a fairly equivalent effect.

Depletion & Supply

So, originally I had consumables like torches and rations on a usage die like they are in TBH. Even after I switched to using the Event Die system, I was still using usage die, treating rolls of 3, which called for light sources to burn, as a prompt to test the usage die. This was ultimately two layers of randomness, one of which was entirely unnecessary, as well as making consumables last forever. I instead gave them a depletion value which ticks down on a roll of the event die when it is called for. This had two added benefits: for light sources, I could use this depletion value to represent illumination, with how many ticks a light source had left representing how bright it was; second, I could give spells a depletion value to track how long they lasted as well.

The Supply idea is very obviously taken/inspired by Five Torches Deep, though The Wandering Gamist's critique of that system inspired me to make some changes to make it less disassociative:

1. Supply replenishes item on a slot to slot basis. That is, 4 supply take up a slot, and 4 supply is needed to replenish a 1 slot item; 2 supply for a 1/2 slot item, and 1 supply for a 1/4 slot item.

2. It's not tied to any attribute: you can buy supply so long as you have the money and so long as the local economy can handle it (we'll talk about that in a minute).

Two things I like about the supply system.

1. It smooths out the decision making process of item selection over the course of an adventure rather than frontloading it at the beginning. You still have to decide what specific items (torches, rations, potions, etc.) you're going to buy, as well as how much supply you want to bring on the trip, but during the adventure you're making moment to moment decisions prioritizing what's important: another quiver of arrows, or more food to eat. Coupled with restricted item slots, it forces constant evaluation and short and long term decision making over the course of an adventure: do I spend this supply to replenish something now, or save my supply but lose that item forever. A character can still choose to buy multiple quantities of an item that can be resupplied, of course to mitigate this a little, but that's still a choice that they're making and it comes with the drawback of losing the flexibility of supply.

2. It allows me to have a generic option for rolls of 3 (depletion) on the event dice in the situations where rations or light sources aren't pertinent for the adventure. I ran into the latter one quite often: "Ok, we rolled a 3 on the event dice, which means light sources burn, but you guys aren't using any cause this dungeon is lit so nothing happens." Nothing happens is the worst thing to say as a Guide; now I always have the failsafe of "ok, reduce your supply by 1."

Economy

The quality and breakage rules have remained largely unchanged since the earliest versions of the game: it used to be that quality decreased on your weapon on a crit fail attack, and quality decreased on your armour on a crit success attack against you. I've just changed that to be when you roll minimum damage and when someone rolls max damage against you. Besides creating another form of resource to track, it also, as a result of Errant's XP for waste rules also becomes a fairly decent source of XP at low levels.

(I will talk about the XP rules tomorrow but if you want to get the skinny check out this ancient twitter thread)

Regarding the point about it not sustaining a long term campaign, this has been my fix.
Players get 1 xp for every gp wasted, or for when something of theirs becomes unusable through threat.

— 𝖆𝖛𝖆 #𝖟𝖎𝖓𝖊𝖖𝖚𝖊𝖘𝖙 (@yungdumbitch) June 25, 2020

Settlement sizes were introduced in the game as part of the carousing rules in downtime, to determine how much money you could spend while carousing per downtime turn. Reading this post by Rick Stump, however, made me want to expand on the economic aspect of my game more, though I couldn't track it as intensely or granularly (nor would I want to) as Rick does because my game abstracts things like precise weights of items or being specific quantities of individual items like torches and rations (abstracting that mostly by supply).

Thankfully, having an abstract resource known as supply is very useful when trying to create a simplified system for simulating inflation, since supply is one half of the economic see-saw from which inflation arises. 

I like the inflation rules because it provides an associative limit to the amount of supply players can buy, it encourages players to travel to bigger settlements as they rise through the ranks (or make use of the infrastructure rules in the downtime section to increase the size of the settlement they're in over time). It also scales into the late game when trying to equip large expeditions to clear areas of wilderness.

Once settlement sizes and economy/price levels were integrated into the game, it was a short leap to also give items a rarity rating to determine what could be bought where; it was something I had planned to do a while for my home game, but fleshing out this system gave me an excuse to integrate it into the system.

Whew, that was a much longer post then these usually are. Thanks for sticking around (or scrolling) to the end. Here is your reward.

The GanHoggr Approacheth!

The Goose King squats in his great longhouse atop the barrows of his ancestors, feasting nightly on the most succulent turf, rich foreign wines, and the finest lettuces. In the swampy dark outside his kingdom burns and suffers. Supply for the King's swollen armies strip the land of fodder, leaving the meadows and pond untended bare and those who tend hungry. Raiders, beasts and brigands descend on the hall and hamlet, now unprotected due to the levy. 

Even the spiteful gods of the geesefolk have no patience for misrule and while their punishment is cruel it is also sure. 

The GanHoggr comes! 

The great gander of the Claymarshes, despoiler, land devourer, sword-blessed terror bird, maimer of champions, curse of the wrathful stars. The GanHoggr's scream again rips the night in contemptuous accusation, sounding the Goose King's failure, and the dawn of an age of ruin.

Gus L., inscrutable genius that he is, has decided to go even further from his original Goose King illustration and write a short adventure in the style of his recent releases like Star Spire or Broken Bastion for Errant. This is in addition to the free adventure module for backers that was unlocked as  a stretch goal as part of the Kickstarter campaign: Curse of the GansHoggr will be released as a free adventure for the whole entire internet.

And with that, I officially sign off!

Errant Design Deep Dive #2: Core Procedures

For the duration of Errant's Kickstarter I will be doing a series of posts where I go through Errant, more or less in order, diving into the design of the game and its inspirations. To follow along, I suggest reading the relevant section being discussed at errantrpg.carrd.co. Also, we have a Discord server now.

Today is a look at the core procedures of Errant, which are Event Dice and Negotiations (I am passing over Reaction Rolls because a) you know what their deal is b) they tie into negotiations anyhow). Plus, a bonus digression on what the hell is the difference between a Rule vs Procedure?

Event Dice

The inspiration here is clearly, unashamedly, the excellent Hazard System by Necropraxis. There is not much to say about the idea of the overloaded encounter die that hasn't been said before; it is frankly a wonder that anyone was able to play a proper meaningful dungeoncrawl before its innovation. The fiddliness of square by square movement per turn, encounter checks every other turn, resting every 6th turn, keeping track of exactly which turn your torch burns down, it boggles the mind. 

I had experimented with various methods of doing so; first there was the rules provided in The Black Hack; roll an encounter check every real world 15 minutes or whenever the players are noisy, roll the usage die every turn. Of course, I would never remember to check when 15 minute real world minutes had elapsed, and the game provided very little definition of what a turn was. For people who were already familiar with the structure of Old D&D that latter point was likely not a problem, but TBH was my first proper OSRish game and I was fumbling in the dark. I eventually landed on a "turn is like 1 dungeoncrawl-y type action" and printed out turn trackers, but even this was quite fiddly. I think it was with the patreon releases of Knave that I looked at the Hazard System proper for the first time, was instantly converted, and never looked back.

Hazard die provide the entirety of the game-play experience with the meaningful gameplay structure present in combat and often lacking elsewhere. The play-structure of combat is radically intuitive to anyone who has played any type of board or card or most any game: its your turn, you get to do one thing, you decide what to do, then you pass the turn to someone else. The hazard die just expands this throughout the entire game. 

A turn immediately creates meaningful decisions because it forces a constraint; you can only do one thing, and therefore not all of the other things, before the turn ends and something else happens. It creates a clear responsive structure, where one side (the players) gets to do something, and then the other side (the Guide) does; there is no remembering to roll an encounter check or counting down a torch, the game by its structure tells you what to do and when. If classic play D&D is about making meaningful decisions, then the turn is the most natural structure for gameplay to take: a turn is the unit of meaningful decisions.

So many problems of modern D&D play fall away when you take this approach. The "everyone makes a skill check until someone succeeds or everyone fails", the "nothing happens" approach to failing a skill check, these all go away if every action takes a turn.

Two notable changes I've made with Event Dice from the Hazard System.

First: multiple event dice can be rolled. This primarily occurs if party members are encumbered. Rather than reducing the speed at which this forces players to move through the dungeon, such that moving between an area takes two turns instead of one, encumbrance increases the number of event dice that are rolled. This abstractly represents being slower, noisier, and clumsier. The math works out exactly the same, to be honest, in terms of how many actions are accomplished to how many event dice are rolled, but I think it makes it easier to still keep the unit to 1 turn = 1 action then messing about with 1 turn = 1/2 or 1/4 of an action. This idea was originally inspired by this post by Goblin Punch, about encumbrance increasing the chance of a random encounter.

Second: choosing to rest causes you to roll an extra event dice the next turn, abstractly representing weariness, time elapsing in rest, and being an easy target/causing attention when resting. The reason for this is to force a proper decision between choosing to take the rest or choosing to take a point of exhaustion. In a game where your torches or other resources are counting down based on time, spending a turn doing nothing is consequential; however, in Errant torches and other consumables deplete based on the roll of the event dice. That means, barring a scenario where there is another time pressure, there is no reason not to rest, and it just becomes empty time. It leads to "well, you actually don't get to do the thing you wanted to do yet, cause you rest, but then you get to do it right after" instead of a proper decision point.

Negotiations

This system is lifted almost entirely wholesale from Nick, with the modification being mostly that checks are rolled using the core check rather than a 2d6 (and therefore the results for each action are tweaked). Nick is doing layout for Errant though, so technically this isn't plagiarism.

In many ways, this works on the same principle as I was discussing above around turns. A conversation consists of each side doing something in each turn, and you only have so many turns to get what you want from the encounter. For games based around balancing resource depletion, degradation, and deprivation against risk to extract the greatest reward possible (e.g. XP for money exploration games), this system is especially well-suited. Rewards require challenges and challenges require constraint.

I also think it is very cheeky and clever of me to put "having a conversation" as a core part of the game but not the rules for combat. Well done Ava, you have Expressed A Point Through Game Design.

Rules vs Procedures

So what exactly is the distinction between a rule and a procedure? I don't know if I have a clear-cut answer to that. I've stated that "procedures are not rules, but neither are they vague, general guidance. They provide a framework to structure the game." But in truth the distinction can get quite murky.

The inspiration behind most of those procedures is the various thousands of blog posts I've read over the past half decade in the blogosphere; Nick's post on his social system is a great example. Bespoke little systems and mechanics detailing how each individual had decided to come up with and deal with a situation in their own game. Essentially, a presentation of each persons "rulings, not rules" that they came up with, slightly formalised and polished and placed on the internet.

I talked earlier about how The Black Hack and other light minimalist rulesets I was drawn to had a lack of structure that made them hard to run for me, someone new to GMing OSR style games and with a lot of anxiety that I wasn't doing things the right way. The expansion of procedures detailing how to deal with different situations was in large part a way for me to alleviate some of my anxiety at the table while also exploring and figuring out my own individual style as a referee. I would see how someone else did something, tweak it to my own tastes, and then see how it worked at the table. 

One of the most interesting things I noticed about this process is after the first few times I had tried out a procedure at the table, which usually did involve me anxiously checking my notes to make sure I ran it "correctly", I would become much more relaxed and loose when running them, not doing so precisely to the letter of what I had written but enough to achieve the result I wanted. I've used many analogies for this process before: about how you need to know the rules for classical painting before you can go abstract, about learning the musical score so you can improvise, about how once you've internalised a recipe and properly learned to cook you don't need to follow it exactly and instead break it down its component steps and riff on it to achieve what you want with what you have. The core idea is the same: you need a bit of structure in order to actually be creatively empowered to do what you want freely. Developing these procedures provided me with, as Nick puts it in the above linked post, "a baseline which can be adhered to or deviated from in whatever way serves the game best."

I think that last part gets to one of the differences between a rule and a procedure. You can't change the base mechanics of a game (in this case, Errant's core blackjack check) without having knock-on effects on how everything else in the game works, but I often in play will adjust an element of the event dice to reflect the situation we're in (for example, saying the exploration turn is scaled up to an hour, and therefore a torch will fully deplete every turn instead of on a roll of 3; 3 will still lower supply). 

Another difference that is procedures can often be either prescriptive or descriptive. To take negotiations as an example, a player can explicitly say they're trying to make a Giving check, or they can just say what they're doing, I can say or think to myself "Ok, that sounds like a Giving check" and just run it as such. Same with defining actions per turn; I can either call out the start of a new turn and ask for an explicit action, or let players noodle about, and once they've done too many things and ask to do one more thing say "alright, but that's going to start a new turn."

Not every procedure meets both criteria; for example the lockpicking procedure is entirely prescriptive as players have to announce which of the three actions they are taking, but it does meet the first point. And event dice, while being a procedure, are enmeshed in the game's structure enough that removing them would definitely cause changes to the game (though it would still be playable).

And of course, there is much murkiness sometimes. I mean, if a procedure is ultimately a set of instructions for how to run particular game states, all "rules" are procedures also. But I think there's enough of a distinction for it to be meaningful.

In general, Errant vol 1. contains the rules and the "harder" procedures which would change the way the game works if they were removed or changed: that's the core rules, event dice, inventory management, the classes, magic, and combat. All of this stuff can still be hacked and kitbashed of course, but I would say they form the base of the game. Vol 2 features the stuff that is more easily swapped out or around: rules for travelling overland, lockpicking, chases, mass combat, downtime turn actions, things like that. 

Though, that being said, the way Downtime Turn procedures interact with the rest of the game, particularly the XP rules, is one of my favourite things about Errant and I feel the game would lose much of its charm and unique identity if it didn't have those. But we will talk about those at a later date.

Errant Design Deep Dive #1: Core Rules

 For the duration of Errant's Kickstarter I will be doing a series of posts where I go through Errant, more or less in order, diving into the design of the game and its inspirations. To follow along, I suggest reading the relevant section being discussed at errantrpg.carrd.co. 

So to kick this off we're going to be looking at Errant's core rules, namely checks, attributes, and position & impact.

Checks

Ok so, the core mechanic of Errant is to roll a d20 equal to or below an attribute, and above a Difficulty Value. This isn't exactly a revolutionary or innovative mechanic, a variation on the ever popular roll-under mechanic that might be dubbed "roll high, under" or "blackjack"; most people will probably attribute it to Whitehack, which is where I got it from, which uses the same mechanic for making attacks (regular skill tasks are just a straight roll equal to or under), and its since shown up in games like Solar Blades & Cosmic Spells. However, the path I took to get here is pretty illustrative of the design history of Errant.

Like so many nerds I got back into this hobby with 5e, back in 2014, and after a while I quickly found that the best and coolest shit anyone was making for D&D was in this strange 'OSR' community. I made this blog, cause that's what the cool kids were doing, and posted very little of note, all the while wrestling with 5e to try to beat it into the shape of these OSR games everyone was talking about, with little success. The inertia of "first system learned" prevented me from actually going off and playing a proper retroclone, plus everyone I played with played 5e. 

Eventually, however, I got tired of trying to work with something that didn't want to work with me, and resolved to find a new system. Co-incidentally, at the same time, The Black Hack came out, and like many other people I was completely wooed. The elegance and simplicity of the roll-under mechanic appealed to me, and its ultra-light nature was welcoming and accessible compared to what seemed the daunting inaccessibility of most of the retroclones of the day. Errant properly began life as a house hack of TBH, with me bolting on classes and making minor rules tweaks.

One of those very first tweaks that I made was to make modifiers apply not to the roll but to the stats: the Powerful Opponents rule in TBH 1e meant that you added the difference between your level and a monster's HD to your roll if it had more HD than your level. Positive modifiers were bad, and negative modifiers were good. I changed it to be more 'intuitive': if you added modifiers to your stats, positive was good and negative was bad. This seemingly innocuous house rule would have knock on effects.

The most popular blog post on here to this date is me hacking the TBH Powerful Opponents rule to represent variable AC. Eventually I started fiddling with this system enough, and trying to apply it to players, that I eventually ended up in a circumstance where, because I was adding a modifier to my player's STR score to defend, they became unhittable. After that session, I was looking for a solution, saw how elegantly Whitehack solved this same problem (ahhhh, roll above AC and equal/under score!) and switched to that for combat.

Around the same time, I like a fair few others, were coming out of the honeymoon phase with straight roll-under checks. Even with Advantage and Disadvantage, it didn't allow nuance in setting difficulty to different situations, and unfairly privileged characters with high stats.

I opted to use blackjack style rolls to deal with the first issue. One of the things I most enjoy about it is the ability to consider all the different situational factors at play when it comes to a check and allow them all to incrementally add to the difficulty, or vice versa for situational factors that can decrease difficulty. The way this is represented most clearly is in the use of navigation checks.

I know that these are functionally modifiers by another name, but the fact that you decide before you roll and don't have to do any futzing with adding numbers to the dice makes it seem easier and simpler to me. This is probably just perception/delusion on my end, but in the pursuit of subjective pleasure, perception is all that matters. It is still simpler than a similar DC style system a la 5e where both a target number is set and a roll is made with a bunch of modifiers applying to it.

Adding a Difficulty Value also goes some way to alleviating the problem of high stat characters, but I did a little bit of tinkering there also.

Attributes

Attributes in Errant are rolled on a 4d4 instead of the traditional 3d6. Why? Well for one, a 4-16 range seems to me much more reasonable starting stats than 3-18. As well, on a 3d6, you have about a 19% chance to roll a score below a 7 or above a 14; on a 4d4, its about 8%. So the range is both more constrained, and the distribution skews more favourably towards average, playable stats. In a game where attributes matter, these are both important factors (Note: while the earlier version of Arnold K's GLOG used 4d4 for generating stats also, we seem to have arrived at this method independently). 

As well, there are only 4 attributes in Errant, rather than the usual 6. Having a reduced number of attributes tips things back in the player's favour somewhat, to counterbalance the reduction in effectiveness of lower attribute scores and Difficulty Values, as it means that each attribute has a larger impact; as long as you've got one decent score, which is almost statistically certain, your character will be quite effective, and the lower scores are easier to patch up via character progression than if they were spread out over more attributes. 

But why 4, versus the reduced 3 stats common to games like Into the Odd or Troika! I don't know if I can give a better reason than it just feels right; each attribute is important, but not too important, plus each Archetype is associated with a particular attribute (PHYS for the Violent, SKILL for the Deviant, MIND for the Occult, and PRES for the Zealot). 

One aspect of Errant I anticipate might not be super popular is the fact that attributes are not just important in terms of determining character's effectiveness vis a vis the core mechanic of the game, but also affect derived attributes. PHYS and SKILL are probably the two most impactful ones in this aspect, with the former tripling as both your amount of item slots and your HP total, while the latter determines your movement speed in combat. There is a design trend to decouple such characteristics from stats, and I can certainly see the appeal in saying "every adventurer has 10 inventory slots." 

However, I think that confronting deficiencies is a defining element of old school play. Just as your character is almost guaranteed to have one good attribute, so are they also likely to have one bad attribute. This forces a confrontation with the fact that your character has shortcomings, and is never going to be completely self-reliant. In order to overcome your flaws, you are going to have to engage with the world. Don't have enough inventory slots? Give some stuff to your team mate, or hire a porter. Too slow to move worth a damn? Get yourself a mount. Too broke to afford any of those things? Find someone to give you a loan (we'll get into Errant's debt mechanics later...). And of course, once you've got a loan, you're gonna have to scrounge up enough cash to pay it back, or do a favour for your debtor. By making characters bad at things, they are forced to engage with the game space beyond their character.

Position & Impact

The Position & Impact rules are very clearly inspired by Blades in The Dark, but even moreso by this post by Chris McDowall and this post by Dreaming Dragonslayer discussing Chris' post.

I used to have alongside Difficulty Value for checks Advantage & Disadvantage (because that's what all the cool kids were doing), as well as critical hits & failures and degree of success determined by how high above the DV you rolled.

I eventually thought this was all too fussy and scrapped it all anyhow. Advantage & Disadvantage seemed especially redundant alongside DV; why have two mechanics that affect how difficult a situation is? I used to justify it by saying DV represented the difficulty of the situation and Advantage/Disadvantage a character's capabilities, but I think this is very weak, and its more streamlined to have everything represented by DV. Plus, Advantage & Disadvantage go against Errant's "as few rolls needed to accomplish one thing" ethos.

Criticals and degree of success went by the wayside for being finnicky, little used, and not adding much to the play experience. However, there wasn't anything that came along to replace them until I read those posts.

What I appreciate about Position & Impact is, even though I myself very rarely explicitly find myself saying the terms during a game session, they force the Guide and players to properly consider the fictional positioning behind every roll, as well as reinforcing the fact that every check needs to have clear and communicated stakes. With Position & Impact, there is no pixel bitching or gotcha GMing or rolls that do nothing to change the game state; everything is clear, transparent, and consequential.

While these terms or clarifying rolls like this might be a bit different than the way traditional OSR games do it, it isn't anything fundamentally new to the genre: think of Position & Impact as functionally "critical success/failure" switches, or degree of success mechanics, except instead of being arbitrarily determined by the result of a die, it arises from a player's approach and method to their task.

Alright, that's gonna wrap up the first one of these posts for me. I'll be back tomorrow (hopefully) to talk about the core procedures of Errant. Till then!

Building a better Encounter Roll

Random encounters are good, but rolling them by the book sucks.

After you've rolled to check if there's an encounter, you have to roll for what the encounter is (sometimes this is two rolls, one on a subtable, e.g. the first roll is for category of encounter like animal, human, dragon, whatever, and then the second roll for what  the specific encounter is, like bear, wolf, snake etc.), then roll for number appearing, surprise, and encounter distance. That's five rolls to do one thing. Since the dice for number appearing is different per monster and encounter distance changes depending on surprise, you can't roll them all at the same time either. That fucking sucks.

Let's answer all of these questions in two rolls.

First off, encounter checks: condensing the check to see if an encounter happens into the other rolls is too much work. Instead, use the hazard sytem, which condenses an encounter check with like four other things, for maximum efficiency.

Next up, we're structuring our encounter tables like Nick does, using 2d6. In addition to allowing us to create a bell curve probability to determine the encounter, using two dice also allows us to get number appearing, surprise, and encounter distance all from one roll. Here's how it's done.

• The sum of the dice gives you the encounter.
• The first dice indicates surprise. Monsters surprise on a 1 or 2, players surprise on a 5 or 6. This allows you to give creatures different 'stealthiness' levels.
• The second dice gives number appearing. You can add a modifier or multiplier to this for specific creatures. You can also index it to specific results per monster type (e.g. 1: 4 goblins, 2: 1 goblin boss, 6 goblins, 3: 1 goblin boss, 1 goblin shaman, 8 goblins) and just note that down next to the monster entry.
• The first number multiplied by the second number multiplied by 10 gives you encounter distance. You can ignore or modify this if the result doesn't make sense, obviously; of all the rolls, encounter distance is the easiest one to ignore.

To properly understand this, we need to understand what the dice combinations on a 2d6 roll are and design the encounter table accordingly.

2 (1,1). This creature always surprises the party at a distance of 10 feet and shows up in units of one.

3 (1,2; 2,1). This creature always surprises the party at a distance of 20 feet, and shows up in units of one or two.

4 (3,1; 2,2; 1,3). This creature has a 66% chance of surprising the party, and does so in either units of two or three and at a distance of 40 or 30 feet. Otherwise, it shows up in a unit of one at a distance of 30 feet.

5 (4,1; 3,2; 2,3; 1,4). This creature has a 50% chance of surprising the party, and does so in units of three or four at a distance of 60 or 40 feet. Otherwise it shows up in a unit of two at 50 feet, or a unit of one at 40 feet. 

6 (5,1; 4,2; 3,3; 2,4; 1,5).  This creature has a 40% chance of surprising the party, in units of four or five at a distance of 80 or 50 feet. It has a 20% chance of being surprised by the party, in a unit of one, at a distance of 50 feet. Otherwise, it shows up in units of two or three at a distance of 80 or 90 feet.

7 (6,1; 5,2; 4,3; 3,4; 2,5; 1,6). This creature has a 33% chance of surprising the party, which it does in units of five or six at a distance of 100 or 60 feet. It has a 33% chance of being surprised by the party, in a unit of one or two at a distance of 60 or 100 feet. Otherwise, it shows up in units of three or four, at a distance of 70 feet.

8 (6,2; 5,3; 4,4; 3,5; 2,6). This creature has a 20% chance of surprising the party, which it does in units of six at a distance of 120 feet. It has a 40% chance of being surprised by the party, in units of two or three at a distance of 120 or 150 feet. Otherwise, it is encountered in units of four or five at a distance of 160 or 150 feet.

9 (6,3; 5,4; 4,5; 3,6). This creature has a 50% chance of being surprised by the party, in units of three or four at a distance of 180 or 200 feet. Otherwise, it shows up in units of five or six at a distance of 200 or 180 feet.

10 (6,4; 5,5; 4,6). This creature has a 66% chance of being surprised by the party, in units of four or five at a distance of 240 or 250 feet. Otherwise, it is encountered in a unit of six 240 feet away.
11 (6,5; 5,6). This creature is always surprised by the party, in units of five or six, at a distance of 300 feet.

12 (6,6). This creature is always surprised by the party, in units of six, at a distance of 360 feet.

So, the smaller the number is, the stealthier the creature is, the fewer numbers it is encountered in, and the closer the encounter ranges are. The inverse holds true for how big the number is. Makes sense right: stealthy things are hard to notice till they're close to you, large groups are easy to notice from a distance, whether that's by sight or sound.

If you want to do encounter sub-tables inside this roll, then the sum of the two dice gives you the category, and the result of the first dice gives you the specific creature type on a sub-table. Note that this does result in certain creatures always showing up in certain numbers and always having surprise or not. This can be remedied by making specific creatures show up multiple times both within and across encounter sub-tables. Personally that seems like a bit too much trouble, and given that you can roll on a table and a sub-table at the same time so long as they use consistent dice, I don't think it's worth the effort.

I originally wanted to include reaction rolls in this by indexing the result of the second die to reaction categories (e.g. 1: hostile, 2: neutral, 3: friendly, or 1-2: unfriendly, 3-4: neutral), but it resulted in a similar problem to above where certain types of monsters always had the same type of reaction. It can also probably be remedied the same way as the encounter sub-table problem, but reaction rolls feel just distinct enough from the other encounter rigamarole that it doesn't feel necessary; I usually decide reaction or roll it when the first player talks to the creature. And, since reaction rolls are always 2d6, you can also just roll it at the same time as an encounter (different coloured dice help). 

In fact, if you're doing encounter tables with subtables, and you structure them both as 2d6 rolls, you can do encounter category, encounter type, number appearing, surprise, encounter distance, and reaction rolls with a 6d6 roll.

Anyway there's the Hyper-condensed encounter roll or the New! Dove 4-in-1 Encounter Roll or whatever the fuck. Thanks.

Addendum: Anne has pointed out that this roll is probably better suited to just determining surprise, number appearing, and distance and not actually the encounter itself, and honestly I'm inclined to agree. It fundamentally still allows you to roll for things only once as you can roll encounter+ sub-table if necessary+ distance, number, and surprise+ reaction all in one go without having to restrict specific encounter types to certain distances or surprise or whatever. In this case, it's also probably more efficient to just do encounter distance by the book as the sum of the two rolls (2d6) multiplied by 10. 

I guess there's a reason shampoos max out at 3-in-1.

(it's fucking hilarious that dove only makes these 3-in-1 shampoos for men)

Active Armour

As is in Errant, armour works like so.

• Armour gives you AP, essentially an extra pool of damage you can take before it gets to your HP. There are no to-hit rolls, so armour doesn't make you "harder to hit", except in the sense that HP is an abstraction that represents your ability to mitigate taking serious damage.
• Armour is piecemeal, so you can wear a helmet that gives you 2 AP and some gauntlets that give you 2 AP and end up with 4 AP total.
• When you're down to 0 AP, you can use an armour repair kit and repair your AP back to full.
• If you ever take max damage from a hit, a piece of armour you're wearing loses a point of Quality; at 0 Quality something is broken for good.
• Shields work a little differently, so as to create a mechanical distinction between a regular shield and a helmet. A shield instead Impairs incoming damage (Impair means to reduce the damage taken by a die step, so d8 -> d6). A regular shield Impairs 1 while a large shield impairs 2 (e.g. d8 > d4). While this makes shields more powerful for reducing damage, it also makes them more likely to break, because smaller dice size = higher chance of rolling max damage.
• You add a quarter of your max AP to target numbers for sneaking, climbing, swimming, squeezing, or balancing. Swimming while wearing chain or plate torso armour is going to cause exhaustion from hypothermia. Add half of your max AP to the target number for spell retention rolls.

I have a couple of problems with the armour rules as is.

• Once you have all your armour on, the piecemeal aspect is kind of lost as it all gets aggregated into a big blob of AP. It still comes up diegetically enough whether or not a character is wearing a helmet or gloves when interacting with environment, but still.
• Quality/AP disjunction: you track Quality for armour parts individually, but AP in aggregate. It can also be difficult to remember to take Quality damage, because unlike weapons which can take Quality damage when they're used, taking Quality damage to armour is passive.
• Which is the crux of the issue, is that armour is passive, and in general, it is harder and more fiddly to keep track of passive resources which deplete rather than active resources which are used (and less exciting).

So, here is my attempt to fix those problems. 

• Every piece of armour has a number of Blocks. Each Block can Impair damage by 1, but the player has to describe how they use that armour to reduce the incoming damage (e.g. a helmet is helpful if rocks are falling on your head).
• You can use more than one Block at a time; this follows the normal rules for Impairment, where two instances of Impair 1 = Impair 2. Of course, taking a bigger hit with your armour means its more likely to lose Quality (if damage is reduced to 0, that still counts as taking max damage).
• You can only use one piece of armour to Block per attack or instance of damage.
• You can also use Blocks to negate non-damaging harmful effects that make sense (e.g. if a save or die poison needle trap is on a door handle, you can use a Block from your gauntlets).
• Total # of Blocks function the same as AP for physical checks and spell retention checks.

DUNG MANIFESTO

Inspired by Nick's POSER Manifesto and also this dumb tweet. Thanks Nick, for teaching me the importance of being shit.

DUNG MANIFESTO

1. Playing is like pooping: everyone knows how to do it, everyone does it different. Don't make it harder than it needs to be. Do what you gotta do.
2. This is a different space and time from the rest of your life. Drop all pretense and aspiration and conformity. Let yourself be gross, smelly, ignorant, cranky, bloated, uncomfortable, and relieved.
3. Don't play with people you wouldn't shit in front of.
4. Let yourself shit in front of more people.
5. Redefine shit. You are shit. Your work is shit. There will always be a gap between the ideal in your head and what you actually end up doing. There will always be something you forget or mess up or misinterpret completely. This is good. This is not failure. This is you. This is your work. What emerges in actuality is the honest creation of your own body. The gap between what you wanted to do and what you actually did is the space where transformation occurs; it is the difference between mere imitation (yes, even fulfilling what's in your own head would be mere plagiarism of yourself) and honest to god creation. Shit is transformative. Shit is creative. Shit is growth (literally, fertilizer; faeces are fecund).
6. FUCK ELVES. Elves are anti-shit. Graceful, hyper-competent, perfect, stagnant. An elf never has B.O., or farts, or gets gassy after a meal, or muffin tops in their favourite pants, or has body hair or even any bodily fluids. Elves eat kale salad without dressing every day. Elves eat that kale salad in juice form. Elves are what everyone tells you is sexy and good. FUCK THAT. Rejoice in scatological excess. The best parts of everything, eating, sleeping, shitting, fucking, are the grossest parts. Scratch your ass and eat a sandwich and lick your partner's armpit hair and admire the back rolls where the sweat collects and the acne because you guys drank too much last night! Let yourself be attracted to the grossness! The grossness is what makes us human. Fuck anyone who says otherwise, and fuck anyone who pretends they're not gross.
7. You know what a bad shit feels like. Do not let what you think, or what other people say you should think, trick you into disregarding what your body knows does not feel good for you.
8. Be shit at things. Play games you don't know the rules to. Write games you don't playtest or edit. Play games that you wrote but forget the rules that you wrote or ignore the rules that you wrote and play anyway.
9. Shit regularly.
10. Good manifestos might have ten points but this is a DUNG manifesto, it is shit, it is a heaping pile of stinking manure.