Tag Archives: Game Design

Articles, Level One Wonk

On Specificity

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Why is Mothership, well, Mothership? Put another way, why isn’t it Basic Roleplaying, or Call of Cthulhu? The core mechanics are all very similar; basically everything in Mothership that isn’t specifically about starships is adapted from Call of Cthulhu in one way or another. And that little starship aside does point to the answer: The reason Mothership is Mothership, Call of Cthulhu is Call of Cthulhu, and neither of them are BRP has to do with the specificity of their missions. Both Call of Cthulhu and Mothership frame their ideal game experience as horror, which lends itself to specific mechanics in the designers’ eyes. Mothership more specifically is science fiction horror, so the designer adds rules about spaceships and space travel. Specificity isn’t limited to genre, though. Mothership is also intended to be light on mechanics; famously the game has no mechanics for things like stealth which means that the adjudication of things like hiding and following are circumstantial and entirely in the lap of the GM. Whether you agree with this mechanical decision or not, it is deliberate and it is specific.

While specificity of game outcomes is produced by having more and more concrete rules (Mothership’s take on stealth is completely non-specific, while a game with one or more stealth skills and a laundry list of modifiers would be much more specific), specificity of game design is much more interesting, especially as there’s an entire class of games that deliberately avoids it. When I looked at QuestWorlds, I saw a game designed to try and do everything, at the expense of doing anything in a particularly interesting or engaging way. It’s hardly the only generic game, and one could make the same complaint and direct it at Fate, or GURPS, or Savage Worlds.

But hold on. If we go back and look at Mothership again we have, broadly, a fairly non-specific game. Yes, it’s about space horror, and the character options are tuned to space horror. The GMing advice is very good. The layout is very good. The game, though? It’s, outside of the space horror part, stripped down Call of Cthulhu. So where does that Mothership ‘vibe’ come through besides the design ethos? A good part of it is the modules (hardly a controversial opinion), but I think a specific and interesting point is that the modules bring with them hyper-specific mechanics. While GURPS has mechanics meant to be at the level of physics and D&D has mechanics which reinforce genre, Mothership has a good chunk of its mechanics corpus supporting specific stories, designed for and included in the pages of modules like Gradient Descent and Another Bug Hunt. And this is kind of important: While Mothership clearly takes inspiration from the DIY and hack-and-borrow ethos of the OSR, it’s presented a bit differently. The modules, in addition to providing the setting and conflict and everything else for a solid few sessions of adventure, also provide the hacked/modified rules to make that adventure feel different or play different than the base game. It does make me think, though: If you’re hacking the rules (or using the designer’s hacks) for every module, how truly different is that from using a generic game? Put another way, what really makes Mothership different from BRP, really? It’s not rules, after all.

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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Inspiration

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Video games don’t make for easy translations to RPGs, especially if the video game isn’t really an RPG itself. For this continuing System Hack I’m aiming to put together a tabletop RPG that plays like a Colony Sim, and hopefully using Cortex Prime to do it. Before we get into any rules design, though, it’s time to look at my core inspiration for taking this project on in the first place.

RimWorld is a colony sim video game designed by Tynan Sylvester, and now supported and expanded through an entire team at Sylvester’s studio Ludeon Studios. The game was released in 2018 but had been in Early Access for five years at that point, and it continues to see frequent updates and support, including several large DLCs.

So how do we take that concept and translate it into a TTRPG? It’s not about the exact setting of RimWorld, though certain hard sci-fi conceits are going to port over. It’s more about understanding what experience the game produces, and then figuring out which elements of that experience could be employed to good effect in a tabletop game. With that in mind, let’s take a look at RimWorld’s premise and its mechanics, and get in the mood for some reverse engineering.

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Audio/Video, Cannibal Halfling Radio

Cannibal Halfling Radio Ep. 25 – Finely Aged Business

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Well, we didn’t want to call it ‘stale’… because it’s not, not really! This chat episode was recorded last year, so a lot has happened since, but there’s still some good stuff here about licenses, bundles, system reference documents, digital storefronts, and other aspects of the tabletop world as viewed through the lens of a business.

Featuring: Editor Sloane TVBand, Aaron, and Seamus

You can also drop by the Tavern of our Discord to chat with us.

If you like what we’re doing with CHR, give us a hand and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify! You can also support us on Patreon.

Music is Sneaky Adventure by Kevin MacLeod
[License], art by Khairul Hisham! Thanks for listening!

Articles, Level One Wonk

Are fewer rules actually less complicated?

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The debate about rules density in roleplaying games is a bit of a mess, frankly. What should be a relatively simple continuum (more, more detailed mechanics to fewer, higher-level mechanics) is conflated with story-first versus gameplay-first, indie versus traditional, and even in some cases old versus new. Actually pulling together a comparison where you’re actually looking at rules density and nothing else is difficult; controlling for these factors is hard because while they aren’t causal, they are correlated.

When it comes to actually running games, though, I’m going to make full use of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines here. Running light games can be very complicated indeed, for the simple reason that anything the rules aren’t laying out for you, you have to do yourself. Now…is that a simple reason? One of the reasons we have seen rulesets trend lighter over time is that the number of ‘things’ that players consider necessary to track or perform in a game session has gone down as games have become more specific. Furthermore, one of the reasons that more narrative driven games often have lighter rulesets is that the number of elements that a ruleset needs to codify in order to maintain fairness and consistency can often be much lower. But, if we’re looking across games of roughly similar style and intent, then we often see that more rules-dense, ‘crunchy’ games can be more approachable. That is for one broad reason.

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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Design Goals

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It’s been a while since we’ve seen an extended System Hack at Cannibal Halfling Gaming. Genesys Mecha concluded in September of 2019 and Cyberpunk Chimera concluded in May of 2020. And yes, neither of them were ever expanded into standalone products; while writing did continue behind the scene the scope of the ambition of both of the projects was simply too high to be completed in the spare time of one or even two nerds who also had jobs (and in one case, kids).

With all those caveats out of the way, I’m trying it again anyway. Both Genesys Mecha and Cyberpunk Chimera provided great deep dives and game design ideas, and with that in mind I wanted to set my sights on something that’s both been a personal quest of mine for a little while as well as something that will add to the game design conversation in a positive way (whether or not the article series leads to anything more). Cortex Prime is, in my opinion, one of the most flexible and powerful rules toolkits on the market. It’s also a toolkit that takes some effort and consideration to set up, which has prevented it from taking off in the same way as the similar but much simpler Fate. Cortex Prime also has many fewer worked examples than Fate, which has the exemplary Fate Worlds series as well as a number of Fate System Toolkits; instead, Cortex only has Tales of Xadia as a fully implemented Cortex game outside of its three in-book examples which are too short and a bit too unconventional to be accessible demos (their genres are police procedural, rescue team, and neo-classical fantasy). A good system hack will walk through the various mechanics, mods, and character options and discuss why each choice is made and how they’re going to work in the final product.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

A (snarky) review of every RPG mechanic

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When I reviewed QuestWorlds last week, I came away from the game concluding that everything was centered around one basic mechanic: A character must roll under their ability rating while the GM tries to roll under the ‘Resistance’ rating of the challenge at hand. It is the character versus the challenge, and everything is defined in that way. And sitting with that, it kind of made me realize that a lot of TTRPGs define everything or almost everything in terms of making a check, only broadening the mechanical palette in specific circumstances.

Does this matter? Well, it depends. If you’re the sort of person who sees RPGs in terms of what exists and what people are already playing, then it’s natural to see the baseline mechanics of the TTRPG as something that’s been refined since the original release of D&D and is therefore fit for purpose. If you’re thinking about role-playing game design broadly, though, you may note that this sort of quasi-simulation of using probabilities to determine when a character overcomes certain challenges is a very limited sphere of the design space, barely larger than the sphere created by making quasi-simulations of using probabilities to determine when characters kill each other. You know, wargames.

For now, though, I’m going to stay in this design space taken up by the traditional roleplaying game (coming up with something starkly different will likely be the topic of a future editorial). There are many things which RPGs try to do, some they’ve arguably been trying to do for decades. For all of these tasks, do the mechanics help or hinder? And, because this is certainly the primary discourse around this topic, do mechanics make the task better?

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Articles, Editorial

So You Want To Slay The NaGaDeMon

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Welcome to November! Welcome to National Game Design Month!

A ‘NaNo Rebel’ that was spun off from NaNoWriMo* by Nathan Russell in 2010, National Game Design month is almost exactly what it says on the tin: a month dedicated to designing games of all kinds by creating, talking about, and playing them! It’s only inaccurate in terms of the first word, since people from all over the world now participate, but ‘slaying the InGaDeMon; doesn’t quite roll off the tongue or conjure images of a defeated serpentine foe.

But how, asks the neophyte game design adventurer, can I slay such a beast? Especially considering such a time limit, and the month has already started? Well, I’m no wizened elder in this regard, but I have fought against several NaGaDeMons and experienced both victory and defeat, so here are my own tips and tricks!

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Articles, Editorial

We Need to Have Another Talk About AI

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For a lot of people I think talking about the negatives of AI is pretty exhausting and trite. In online bubbles that are primarily dominated by artists, you could be fooled into believing that only massive corporations are behind AI, and that basically anyone who isn’t a heartless CEO or an embarrassed millionaire of some kind is firmly against it.

But that’s not the reality. The big news from last month is that Wizards of the Coast wants to use AI more frequently moving forward. It’s an expected move from a giant evil corporation; nothing new to see here. What will definitely receive less attention is that a new rule banning all AI content in /r/OSR has received a not insignificant amount of backlash. This is much more significant to me, because the OSR community prides itself on having a DIY ethic. So it’s about time we had yet another intervention about AI.

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