Unhinged narrative design: What if RPG stats measured weaknesses instead of strengths? (Part One: The Narrativening)

Let's break some tabletops! (By applying videogame narrative design tactics!)

The theme of this garbage fountain was "Ghost," which got me thinking about all sorts of old, weird ideas that have been bubbling around in the back of my head, alongside commercial jingles from 1992 and a vague sense of unease about the approaching heat death of the universe.

Anyways, under the duress of creativity, I decided to once again cheat on videogames and dabble in the forbidden waters of tabletop. (If videogames wanted faithfulness and fidelity, she wouldn't lay off half the workforce every 16 months.)

Plus, the infamous Drive-thru RPG (world-renowned for both being the largest tabletop RPG storefront on the Internet and also committing unforgivable spelling crimes against the Honorable English GH) was having a weird contest, and if there's one things that I love more than ignoring the approaching heat death of the universe, it's participating in weird contests. (Or rather, starting to participate and then failing to finish by the deadline because I get distracted trying to remember what the lyrics were to that song that Little Richard belted from the back of that pickup truck full of beautiful dancing women and dollar menu tacos and when I look up two weeks have passed and all I've accomplished is eating a lot of tacos and starting to grow a mullet.)

ANYWAYS, what if RPG stats measured weaknesses instead of strengths?

I'm certainly not the first person to think of this, but I'd like to think that I'm the first person to think that with this much taco-powered intensity.

One of the things that I really like about the idea of measuring weaknesses instead of strengths is that it really tidies up (brace yourself for impending tabletop terminology) MINIMALIST SKILL CHECK ROLLS.

You see, the traditional way that tabletop RPG's handle the player wanting to do something is this:

L'TRADITIONAL RPG RESOLUTION PROCESS

1. The player says what they want to do. (For example, "I'm going to escape fangorious devourment at the fearsome fangs of this blind dragon by shredding a distractingly epic guitar solo while power-sliding to freedom between his legs.")

2. The DM* running the game assigns a difficulty in the form of a number which must be rolled on a die for the player to succeed, taking into consideration all possible factors which might affect the player's chances of success (such as the player character's 18 skillpoints in GUITARCRÆFT, the smoothness of the floor, the occluding bulk of the dragon's jangly bits as affected by ambient temperature, etc., etc.)

3. The player then rolls the die, and everyone argues.

*Short for "Delicatessen Matriarch," a holdover from the very first Kriegspiel** wargames, which were played at Frau Hassenpfeffer's Schnitzel Emporium, with the titular Frau Hassenpfeffer serving as ultimate arbiter when drunken Prussian war veterans couldn't agree on how many feet of movement penalty high elves received while wearing full plate armor.

**Prussian German for "$1900 and a divorce later, I can finally start playing the game, or could, once I finish painting."

As you might imagine, this becomes quite time-consuming at the table.

So, some bright eyed and bushytailed new minimalist game designers came up with the idea of simplifying things with the ROLL-UNDER SKILL CHECK.

The idea is this:

ROLL-UNDER SKILL CHECK
You have 18 skill points in GUITARCRAEFT.
If you want to do any guitaring, just roll your die. If it's under that number, you succeed!

It's a really quick and simple way to adjudicate "skill checks" that doesn't get bogged down with a lot of difficulty calculation. The higher your score in a particular skill, the easier it is to do. (You can even add varying difficulty levels by requiring that the players attempting something more difficult roll two dice and get both under the target number, or letting players with some sort of advantage roll two dice and succeed if either one is under the target number.)

So far, so good. Everyone is happy.

EVERYONE EXCEPT FOR ME.

You see, deep in the back of my mind, bouncing around with all of the Taco Bell jingles and heat death of the universe anxieties, there's also AN UN-UPROOTABLE BELIEF THAT ALL GAME MECHANICS SHOULD WORK WITH PLAYER'S NATURAL ASSUMPTIONS WHEREVER POSSIBLE.

As human beings of the American persuasion, our natural assumption is that big numbers are better than little numbers.

Rolling a low number on a die feels inherently bad.

This gets especially messy when minimalist games use old-fashioned combat rules, where players have to roll higher than an enemy's armor number in order to hit them. Now, rolling high is good in combat, but bad when trying to play the guitar. I can already feel the gears in my brain stripping. Other people are fine with simply handwaving this. "We'll just teach players that things don't work the way that they expect them to work for this one thing," they say, as the smell of brimstone grows more intense, "It doesn't have to make sense. IT'S JUST A GAME."

...

NOTHING IS JUST ANYTHING.

While I recognize that many successful games – even games that I enjoy – do just this, I cannot accept it for myself. IF YOU HAVE TO SPEND TIME TELLING PLAYERS THAT THINGS ARE ACTUALLY THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT THEY APPEAR, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.

So, what to do? Rolling low numbers feels bad, and we want to work with that instead of trying to retrain the way that our players think about numbers.

Okay, okay, we'll just flip it! You want to roll higher than your skill number in order to succeed at something. The better your skill, the lower the number!

This is even worse. Now rolling high numbers on a die is good, but having high ratings in a skill is bad.

A great guitar player would have a guitar skill of 3 while a terrible guitar player would have a guitar skill of 18. The number is actually just a measure of your suckitude rather than your skill.

This might just be a cursed problem. Either high numbers on dice are good and high numbers in skills are bad, or high numbers on dice are bad and high numbers in skills are good.

Unless…

What was that I just said about suckitude?

Right, what if we were measuring something bad? More of a bad thing is, as Demetri Martin taught us, a bad thing. Less of a bad thing is a good thing.

What if this isn't a stat at all, but a terrible ANTI-STAT?

Clearly, if I want to shred that epic guitar solo, I need to overcome my 18 points in TONE DEAFNESS.

By making stats actually weaknesses, we've managed to force a situation that works with all of the players expectations:

The bigger a number is, the stronger that thing is – but what we are measuring is weakness, so clearly, you want your weaknesses to be as low as possible. Conversely, you want to roll high to overcome your weaknesses, so high rolls are good.

WE'VE DONE IT.

Wasn't that so much easier than taking 30 seconds to explain to players that things don't work the way they seem like they should?

Don't answer that question.

Of course, we're now in an interesting position, designwise: How does this work with player fantasy?

Players aren't going to feel like mighty heroes and swashbuckling rogues when their character sheet just tells them how much they suck. It's hard to imagine Robin Hood or Conan the Barbarian described in only negative terms. (Again, we want to work with players' innate assumptions wherever possible, and it just feels wrong to go off on grand, dragon-slaying adventures as Grimavax the Mighty with 6 Decrepitude, 9 Nearsightedness, and 4 Incontinence.)

So, how can we turn it around? How can we find a player fantasy where being a wretch measured in weaknesses is the point?

Just off the top of my head:

- Dark Souls style cursed kingdoms of the wretched and undead.

- Enlightenment seeking mystics attempting to purge themselves of sin.

- Bubba Hotep-style geriatric supernatural shenanigans (a.k.a. Stranger Things in a nursing home).

- Storm Troopers attempting to battle plucky rebels and Master Jedi. (Or expendable goons trying to take on 80s action heroes, minions in Lex Luther's employ, etc., etc., etc.)

The list goes on and on!

Since the theme of this garbage fountain was "ghost," I decided to take that first one – the Dark Souls style cursed kingdom full of the wretched and undead – and play around with it a little bit.

Since the world of tabletop RPG's is choking to death on new systems (seriously, I think there might be more systems than there are players), there's very little point in creating another one unless it offers the Delicatessen Matriarch the solution to a problem they have. Going back to that "ghost" theme, I thought: "How about a game for playing as characters' ghosts?" RPG characters die all the time – usually in ones or twos, but sometimes in grand, spectacular fiascoes where everyone at the table gets wiped out all at once, an event players refer to affectionately as the "Total Party Kill."

So, why not have a special system for when this happens that lets you keep going? Sure, it's a thing that only happens rarely, but wouldn't it be supercool to have something on hand in case it does? Doesn't it kind of makes you want all of your players to get wiped out?

Behold, This Phantasmal Kingdom Role-Playing Game (TPK RPG – see what I did there?):

This Phantasmal Kingdom Role-Playing Game
Adventures in the liminal land between life and death.

The system for when all of your players died horribly but you decide to just keep going...

This is not Valhalla or Elysium or even the Nineteen Hells.

This is the land of those hungry shadows still trying to claw their way back to life.

Some may even succeed.

____________________

You are not as you were in life. You are a pale shadow of your former self, clinging to this liminal form when every cosmic force wishes to pull you to your final destination. As a wretched shade, you are measured in weaknesses not strengths.

For the 1.5 of you who have made it this far, I'll post the rules (such as they are) next time, complete with instructions on how to take your recently deceased character from other popular RPG's and transform them into a wretched, hungry shadow (naturally, your new weakness-measuring anti-stats are derived from your original strengths). The whole thing is all really quick and sloppy, but hey, it's not called Laboriously High Quality Fountain.

See you at the next geyser of garbage!