Doc Destructo

BASIC Ideas

Added 2017-09-10 00:14:51 +0000 UTC

Better get used to me making these puns, there’s more on the way.

Never get the idea that I’m not the kind of person that self-edits. I know things kinda go to the contrary from what you all have been seeing out of me thusfar, but you should trust me, I do. One of the biggest recurring questions I ask myself with regards to things that should be clear but often aren’t, like “who am I” and “what am I doing here,” is “why even bother with making your own game system.” It’s a fair question, there’s a lot of them out there, and thinking there’s success to be had in crowding a market is tempting hubris.

But that’s a capitalist way of looking at things. I’m not in this to make a product, I’m in this to do art and make science happen, and going by that perspective, this is what I should be doing. Not the least of which becomes apparent when you crack open a modern core book of one of the big, legacy games and see firsthand just how legacy things are. Don’t take me as some hotshot new kid who is about to log the fuck on and start taking foundational works to the mat- I might not know what I’m doing, I remind you, and that’s cool. Thing is, I could do work for a preexisting system, one that has its host of issues and its built-in contingent of haters. Or, I could strive to innovate where other devs, like those working for the big established games out there, might not have that degree of freedom. I choose the latter, because as an unleashed wage slave, I hunger for freedom, and also am the sort of handsome go-getter that would prefer to honestly earn his haters, with a proper day’s work. I’m my own gang, motherfucker.

So. BASIC. Here’s a primer.

Why BASIC?

Body Agility Senses Intellect Charisma. Fallout was an influence. These are your five basic Attributes, rated on a level from 1 to 5, with 1 representing “deficient” and 5 representing “pushing the limits of capability.” Whatever the iteration or the demands of the setting, those five are always right there, synergizing with dice checks and deriving statistics like health and mobility. That’s why it’s BASIC! Well, that and the low numbers, they help, I think.

Two Degrees of Complexity

There’s a lot of stuff I want to do with BASIC, and creating a system that is expandable through modular parts is one of them- what’s better than stuff, but stuff you can plug into your other stuff to make it better? But the other thing I want to do with this project is make something that can be expressed to two different degrees of complexity, a Full system to create and play more long-term campaigns, and a Simple system to whip through scenarios for a group of friends with some hours to burn. My primary focus is going to be the Full system, but that won’t mean I won’t be working with the Simple one as I go as well.

There’s a reason for this, and it’s not because I’m necessarily a workaholic. What I’m more trying to do is keep ideas in a live ecosystem, and I swear to god I give you permission to put holes in me if I ever repeat that in front of a TEDx logo. What I mean by that is that rather than file the ideas I have while I’m working on a project away for later- and that will happen, constantly -I’ve built myself a hopper. This is what you get when you’re big on streamlining; you streamline too far, you get simplified, which is all the more reason for the parallel dev- if I’m going to be doing it anyway, might as well make something out of it.

The Competency Comes Built In

We don’t need to be told at this point that low-level play can suck real bad. “You rolled an 11, again, succeeding only at increasing the ennui of this encounter.” Day 29 in the hideous caves of goblin-related mediocrity. Lots of clever folks have done good work in alleviating this, and with good reason, because anyone that’s ever been there knows.

The BASIC solution to this? Use a dice roll that’s not an outside chance to begin with, so that with everyone at a base competency level of “pretty,” the skills and special abilities stand out better than “the stuff you need to actually be of any use at all.” With that in mind, here’s the two Basic Action Checks for both the Full and Simple versions of BASIC.

Full

Add together an Attribute and Skill that are pertinent to what you’re trying to do. IE, if you’re loosing an arrow from a bow at a target, you’ll combine your Senses attribute with your Shooting skill; if you’re climbing up a rocky cliff, you’ll combine Body with Athletics. These combined two things are your Threshold.
Roll 3d6, keeping only the two lowest dice- your Result.
If the Result is lower than the Threshold, the check passes, the margin of which determines just how well you did. If the Result doesn’t exceed its Threshold, the check fails instead, with the margin determining if you looked like a chump in the process.
Bonuses add to your Threshold, while Penalties decrease it. In addition, it’s possible to gain additional rerolls through various character progression elements, allowing you to reroll the highest die of your result if you so desire.

Simple

In order to pass a check, you need to meet or exceed a result of 6 on a single die roll; you have 2d6 to do this with, keeping only the highest die as your Result.
Rather than having any sort of a Threshold, you just need to hit 6; to aid that, you add your Attribute most pertinent to the check to your Result. For instance, if you’re trying to fast talk a doorman, you’d add your Charisma to your Result; if you were just planning on kicking the hell from him, you’d use your Body instead.
Bonuses add to your Attribute, while Penalties subtract from it, but all you have to do to succeed under the Simple check is hit or exceed 6, with the margins determining how handily you succeeded or how miserably you failed.. Like under full, you can also earn rerolls through character progression.

This gives greater competency in two ways. First off, it gives an extra die to do the job with, so in order to suffer miserable failure on a check you should be at least competent on, you’ve got to have a truly awful roll, not just a mediocre one. Secondly, it gives a quick and easy way of resolving actions, as on non-difficult actions, all the PC or NPC is doing is rolling against a set value.

On top of that, all the Narrator (I’m big on this term as a game master, so that’s what we’re using in BASIC; if I’m ever talking about another system, I’m not gonna try to foist my own term other folks’ work) has to do to modify is add a plus or minus on the end. Under either, anything from a +1 to +3 are pretty solid bonuses. As for penalties, under Full, anything from -1 to -10 is on the table as something within normal boundaries, while -1 to -5 being more the norm under Simple. Thrilling, I know, but I’m trying to show work- the small numbers in this system aren’t the smallest numbers, but they’re foundational. Know your limitations- big numbers and I don’t get along, but small numbers don’t talk back and go where I put them.

Two Spaces in One Game

If you’ve ever homebrewed campaign mechanics for a tabletop system that doesn’t actually have them, you know one of the best ways to adapt a system built for tactical combat into dealing with social situations is “actually, don’t.” That isn’t me being facetious, either, it’s me presenting findings. The venerable giant of this form of entertainment sprang out of that same need to fill a space that was as of yet empty in a broadening format. Their end goal wasn’t a Storygame™, but rather a game that had a story that was more than just the pretext for a bunch of fantasy battles.

I mean, ostensibly. That’s how folks I know use it, but hey, doors are very kickable surfaces.

Thing is, day to day life isn’t a tactical situation, no matter what a lot of folks that self identify as a-types would have you believe. Micromanaging tactical gameplay mechanics in situations where matters should more be about having and pitching ideas for collaborative leisuretime problem solving, better known by its street name “roleplaying,” is only constraining for the sake of constraint. That doesn’t mean I’m saying all rules-light all the time is the way to go. You know, unless you want to go rules light. But ditching any sort of tactical element in a tabletop game is not something you’re likely to see from me, because another of my influences is the XCOM series. That’d make that a hard no on that front, superchief.

Instead, what about differentiating layers of depth as governed by the binary “is this the sort of situation where guns could come out?” This is the basis of the split between BASIC’S Roleplaying Space and the Tactical Space that’s beneath it. The big idea here is that the Tactical Space, where the rules heavy guidelines for shooting people in the flank with shotguns or punching them to sleep from silently in the shadows, live like the kernel of an operating system. When things go life and death, either in the sense of a combat encounter or an otherwise dicey situation (“Combat & Capers” in the lingo), you descend the depths of the Tactical Space into things like initiative rolls and turn sequences and line of sight and that sort of protein. But outside of that, in the outer layer of the Roleplaying Space, it’s really only the basics that matter. Checks occur, yeah, and there’s rules and protocols to observe about what you have and what you can do, and how that translates into a workable plan. But the underlying heavy rules more slide to the back, out of the way, becoming an abstraction- Mobility, a measurement in tabletop inches of how far you can move with a single action, becomes a rough indicator of how fast you are in comparison with other folks; weapons don’t have a specific Intimidation Bonus to when you pull them on someone, because having a weapon pulled on you when you’re unarmed is intimidating whether or not it’s particularly scary looking. Together, these two systems form an organism. At least, so it goes according to my plan.

And those are some auspicious words throughout human history, let me tell you.

What I’ve Been Up to Lately

Otherlore is my primary focus, and it’s also the first setting and module set I’m putting out for BASIC Full. It’s fantasy, with an eye toward legends and folklore, looking to buck the trends of what’s expected in both a game and setting of this type. The Core book features a spread of four playable Peoples, each further broken down into seven Commonalities. Peoples are the sort of thing you’ve come to expect out of a game where you can play someone that isn’t human, while Commonalities fill in more of the picture, both in terms of character and gameplay. Commonalities form the basis of your character’s culture, as part of who they are, what they were raised to know and how they carry themselves in their speech and manners. It also gives them delicious crunchy stats, because of course they do.

The Gremlin are escaped house spirits, wyrd beings forced by happenstance into corporeal existence. They are also flight-obsessed cat-rats who were born done with your shit and use natural sciences to achieve their goal of aerial dominance. Their interests include gunpowder and how far it can throw a crusading knight after he’s been wedged into a culverin.

The Fae are angels of the Wild, one of the three Primal Powers (the other two being the Light and the Dark) which have combined to form the world from roiling yet stagnant chaos-stuff. Specifically, the Wild is the power that was shanked by the other two so that the balance could be restruck as a one-on-one, framed as a struggle between good and evil. But the Wild isn’t dead, it’s just debased, confused- where not incoherent and turned inward on itself, it’s leashed with unbreakable bonds. But the Wild has agents, and the Fae are chief among them, similarly debased, but also blessed with boons, a limited-but-natural grasp of Wild Magic and near-immortality. They’re also pissed at their situation, and perhaps none moreso than these shouty fuckers.

Twenty Sixteen is my secondary focus, and it’s going to be the first setting and module set for BASIC Simple. The premise is one that I’m sure a lot of you will feel: that 2016 wasn’t merely a supremely shitty year, but a metaphysical breaking of seals. Universes have converged, and these encroaching Spheres have unleashed in our reality forces beyond the ken of our worldly understanding. The Baby Boomers promptly complained that millennials are ruining magic.