#RPGaDay2015 - 11th - Favorite RPG Writer

It's August 2015, and to follow on with the success of last year's #RPGaDay event, David Chapman at Autocratik has created a new list. Each day in August, I'll be posting my "answer" to that day's topic.

This is the toughest question of the month. I had to actually have a conversation with my wife about this one. I started out with five names, and at the end of the conversation, I was only able to narrow it down to three: Shane Hensley, Steve Kenson, and Harley Stroh.

Shane created two of my all-time favorite RPG things, Savage Worlds and Deadlands. He also did a great version of Lankhmar and worked on my favorite D&D setting, Dark Sun, back in the days of TSR. If Shane writes it, I'll buy it.

Steve Kenson wrote what was arguably the first true "next generation" D20 System game, in Mutants & Masterminds. It was also the first supers RPG to rival the classic Champions. More recently he wrote my current favorite supers RPG, Icons.

Harley Stroh is a beautiful, sick and twisted, genius. As one of the key writers for the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, his adventures are consistently the most interesting and entertaining, even to read, let alone run or play. Check out Peril on the Purple Planet, it's pretty great stuff.

@ReverbGamers Master List Number 17

#17: What was the best reward you've ever gotten in a game? What made it so great? How much do you need tangible rewards (loot, leveling, etc.) to enjoy a game?

Probably the best in-game reward was in a D&D 3.x game. Our whole party received custom magic items that leveled with us. Basically new powers and abilities were added as the game went on. The DM gave us a little control (in the form of requests) as to how they changed over time. Mine was a cloak, which was fitting for a rogue. Aside from the leveling aspect, what made it so great was these items tied in to adventurers from history, and their spirits were eventually there to help us beat the "big bad" of the campaign. So having a story tie-in was the main thing.

In general, I like characters that upgrade--new levels, abilities, etc.--but I think that has more to do with conditioning than any sort of need. I played in a FATE campaign, where it turned out I was just as happy being able to swap skills around and modifying aspects was just as gratifying. My character never actually got better. I think this means I'm less about the trappings of change and more about the change itself.

Hmm... There's something to this revelation. I think I will delve into it in a future post.

Player-Facing Rolls

A lot of RPG rules are promoted as getting "out of the way" of the story. Many of them actually succeed. As a GM, one thing I've always looked for is, "what's in it for me?" One feature I'm a fan of is when a game allows (but doesn't require) the GM to make all rolls player-facing. What do I mean, you ask?

In the typical RPG model, players roll dice for antagonists, and GMs roll for everything else. Some systems have options in place to either reduce or remove the need for the GM to roll dice. If a PC attacks, the player rolls to hit; if a PC is attacked, the player rolls to defend. This is player facing. Two systems come to mind for this: Cinematic Unisystem and Ubiquity. They go about it in slightly different ways.

Cinematic Unisystem, the engine behind Eden Studios' licensed properties like Army of Darkness and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, breaks the game's stats down into three scores (by combining stats and adding an average die roll), which provide the check number and target number for anything affecting the NPC in question. To paraphrase my friend Thomas Deeny, the GM and the players are essentially playing two different games. The method Cinematic Unisystem uses could be adapted to a lot of games. In fact, D&D 4E and Star Wars Saga Edition use a similar philosophy to come to its Defense numbers (which replaced the original d20 Saving Throws)--attribute bonuses plus average die roll.

Ubiquity uses a dice pool system with very simple math behind it--each die has a 50% chance of success--so you know if your dice pool is 10, for instance, your average roll will bring five successes. Since the core mechanic is opposed rolls, it's easy to see how a GM would never have to roll. Even if there's an odd number of dice (in which case, Ubiquity rules you just roll one die to find out which way it goes), the GM can simply choose to round in a direction based on the situation--it's basically one more way a GM can set difficulty.

Not all systems can be made to work this way without extensive modification. For instance, no system with exploding dice could be modified to work this way easily. It would just make for too many wonky situations. Systems with no opposed roll mechanics--or at least target numbers derived from theoretical opposed rolls--are also off the table if one is looking for easy conversion to this resolution method.

I'm a fan of player-facing rolls because I find dice-rolling more enjoyable as a player than as a GM. Also, it really does help a system get out of the way of a story and gives the GM much more control over the pacing at the table. Few things slow a table down like waiting for the GM to roll for a bunch of attacks or defenses. And in the case of games with an opposed roll mechanic, it cuts the total number of dice rolls in half. Finally, games without the wild factor of GM rolls tend to be easier to prepare for.

If your system of choice lends itself to this type of change, or if you have a chance to try a new system, I recommend giving player-facing rolls a try.