Another Stab at Armor

In my last post about armor, I discussed the possibility of a system where we introduce different types of attack damage, and therefore different types of armor.  This worked in my mind just fine for the players, but once it came to NPCs and monsters, whom I want to generate and track with ease, it quickly became too complicated.  So we're back to the drawing board.

My latest thoughts have been wandering in the direction of armor as a last-ditch roll to save.  Basically, I first have my players roll to "dodge", and then if they get hit, roll again to see if the attack hits their armor.   This means that the players should have an armor rating of 0-100%, representing how much of their body is covered. I have two ideas for how this will protect the character.

First though, we have to define 'how well armored' someone is.  Let's throw out some numbers, like light armor = 50%, medium armor = 75%, heavy armor = 100%, and ultra armor is 120%.

Idea #1 is that, if the armor is hit, then it soaks the damage, completely protecting the character from harm.  The downside to this is that it's slightly unrealistic; any hit should still "hurt" the player, which is what I was going for in my last attempt.  The upside is that it's so much easier to work with, but still embodies what armor actually means to a character, rather than just adding onto a "to hit" value or having pure damage reduction.

Alone though, idea #1 doesn't do anything mechanically that just having a "to hit" value doesn't do.  In fact, being "fully armored" from head to toe would mean that you are literally an indestructible tank. Obviously that's also completely unrealistic, so we need something else.

Idea #2 is that armor itself should take damage, and get weakened over time.   I know some systems do this and most don't, and I want to know how people feel about it.  The way I'd implement it is that each armor material would have a "hardness" that was pure damage reduction.  For example, nonmetal materials like leather or bone could have a hardness of 2, vs. metal armors that have a hardness of 5.  Then, any damage on top of that would degrade the quality of the armor, mechanically lowering the % coverage.  Now heavy armor will always block the first attack, but any subsequent attacks start having a higher and higher chance of actually wounding the character.

This armor system isn't without its share of problems, and I'm on the fence about it.  It is basically like temporary HP, but when you have a system with magical healing, do you also now need magical blacksmithing?  There's also now extra rolls and calculations in the mix, so is it again simply "too much"?  I like a light amount of crunch in my games, so this feels right to me, but I might be missing something.

How do you feel about having armor degrade? 

One important note is that, despite magical healing, it's really really bad to get hit in my game, because the stats you use to accomplish tasks are also the health that gets damaged by an attack.  In this sense, armor as temporary HP is a god-send to the player characters.

As always, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on the matter, so please leave a comment below!

I finished a game!

Shadowrun: Hong Kong - 9/10

I don't finish very many video games, largely because there's just too many to explore.  I like digging in, seeing what's up, and then most of the time simply moving on.  It's not that most games don't compel me to finish, it's usually that there's the next great thing waiting for me.

This blog isn't supposed to be about video games, but due to this game being Shadowrun: Hong Kong, I felt it was a necessary tribute.   I had a blast, and everything from the character progression, battle mechanics, and story kept me playing.  I could write a couple page review, but instead I'll just hit on some highlighted thoughts I had while playing.

The Good:

• The individually crafted 'runs' is what makes this whole game tick.  There's no generic fetch-quests, no kill-20-things, and no grind-for-gold anything.  Every tick of the game was specifically made to be awesome.
• Hacking required actual quick-thinking and pattern recognition, which felt <right> in an otherwise slow combat tactics game.
• Choices made during beginning runs seemed to have an effect on the end game.  It was really cool!
• The computer game is actually less complicated than the tabletop version, with less to keep track of and roll for.  That says a lot >.<
• Very interesting and diverse characters.  I liked that the game let you pick broad strokes of level-up for them, but you didn't have to micro-manage their skills or inventory, letting you focus on yourself.
• Money was always <just> tight enough. Well done on the economy side.  I honestly felt like a semi-poor shadowrunner, going job-to-job trying to get new tech.
• Goul-Samurai are bad ass.

The Could-Have-Been-Better:

• Unfortunately, the biggest disappointment was that the character relationships didn't matter a single bit.  It didn't matter if you talked to everyone or not (other than getting each runner's own story mission).  I'm not talking romance (although that's always amusing in bioware games), but that whether you were a dick or not to your teammates, the game plays the same.
• Because of the lack of mage or physical adept on the team, it seemed a waste to play pretty much anything else.  Of course, I still played a sniper...
• Final boss was slightly disappointing, but I understand I could have fought it at a much lower karma level.
• No astral-projection/astral vision, which is weird since they included the matrix.
• No hacking of people's guns. Oh well.
• I felt nothing for Duncan... he was kinda just whiny. Then again, me as the player knew - and wanted - that we were going to be shadowrunning.

Fate of the Norns: Ragnarok

Frigid ground crunched beneath fur boots as the hunter stalked through the forest's eternal darkness.  His eyes burned, open wide to the cold, intense wind, ever vigilant in their search for his prey.  The soft, constant slither of fur against bark and brush rippled through the air.  He could feel it.  It was close.

A puff of moisture expelled from his lungs as he spun.  Without looking he heaved the axe upward, and in an instant a mist of blood erupted from the snake's jaw.  He dove, two giant fangs piercing the ground where he had stood only a moment before.  A fistful of fur helped him swing up onto the snake's neck, where he plunged his sword deep within the back of the beast's skull.

No really - there's a fucking giant furry snow snake as a monster in this game.   

That's badass, and the game is too.

Fate of the Norns: Ragnarok is the latest of a series of viking games (all "Fate of the Norns") that received a fairly sizable chunk of kickstarter funds.  With a focus on combat, it pitches the players into the viking world of Ragnarok: a period of time where there is no natural light, and a three year winter before the end of the world is at the forefront of humanity's worries. It's indie, it's unique, and it's complicated as all hell.  They may have blown all of their cash on art though, I'm not sure.

Pros:

• Violence & Gore - good old viking style.
• Hundreds of pages of full color, gorgeous, themed artwork.
• More setting ooze than most setting books (to be fair, it's basically a viking mythology textbook).
• Extremely unique gameplay that uses NORDIC RUNES instead of dice or cards as the randomizer.
• "Rune Chains" let you manipulate your character's actions and powers, customizing their effects to the situation at hand.
• Extreme customization in character building.
• Extreme customization in monster building.  This is probably one of my favorite parts.

Cons:

• Terrible book layout. It's hard to read, understand, and reference.
• Overly complex in some areas (e.g. character sizes), but falls short in other areas (e.g. tactical hex combat).
• Action economy ends up being more frustrating than actually fun.  When you have to spend runes to do anything, each rune sacrificed to minor actions, defense, and condition care feels like a huge loss.
• High amount of GM prep required.
• Requires tons of extra printed material on top of the books.
• High cost-of-entry with the books + physical runes.  Even the PDF is expensive.
• The math of the basic resolution mechanic doesn't add up...

If you dig in, Fate of the Norns can be your dream game.  It's got everything: an epic setting, angry gods, lore beyond lore, monsters, bar fights, heroics in life, and heroics in death.  It starts the players as heroes, turns them into legends, and finally brings them to a demi-god state where they fight with divine powers, all to prepare them for the final battle of Ragnarok.  Everything in this game is unique, except maybe the actual setting itself... but even the way the viking world is presented is unique, given that it focuses on exactly what players of the game need to know.

First, players build their characters with only two simple stats: essense and destiny. From these you pick specific nordic runes and assign each to a variety of powers.  These powers are accessed in a grid, such that when you pick one power it unlocks all of the adjacent powers to be chosen next. Each character class's grids are connected to each other in the corners, so cross-classing is handled smoothly and elegantly.  What you end up with is characters so unique that you could play the same starting class twenty times and have completely different strategies.  There are 10 classes, each with 3 specializations, and each with three 5x5 grids of unlockable powers.  That's a lot of options - making it a very fun and engaging character building system.

And you do this with monsters too.  No two monsters will likely ever be the same.  With random rune selection, even monsters that choose the same set of powers will play differently.  The GM could spend hours creating and tweaking the next session's monsters!  The only issue is... the GM must spend hours creating and tweaking monsters.  Even though it's fun, and trust me it is, this game requires heavy GM prep, rivaling the prep time for similarly crunchy games, like Shadowrun.

That said, let me re-emphasize how awesome combat actually is.

Like any good viking game, the mechanics center around being in combat.  So much so, that even the standard action resolution mechanic changes awkwardly when in combat.  But, the basics of play are fun, and the shifting of runes around your play mat feels a lot like Magic: The Gathering.  Combat even has four phases, that include "draw" and "upkeep".  But it's MTG where you can choose to smash spells together to form unique effects while fighting on a hex grid, and the end result is something so epic that you can almost forgive the game for it's complexity.  Almost.

One of the biggest issues I have with the game is it's core mechanic: draw runes out of a bag to determine success.  Basically speaking, it's ass-backwards from what it should be.  Because you draw a number of runes equal to your destiny, and the number of runes in your bag is equal to your essence... that means that as your two stats increase (from gaining levels), the variance of your character's actions and outcomes increases.  Worse yet, if you choose to gain more essence, all you are actually doing is messing with the chance to pull a given rune type.  So let's say I had 3 physical runes, 3 mental runes, and 1 destiny. I have a 50/50 chance of drawing either rune type.  But let's say I leveled up, and gained 3 more physical runes.  Now, because I became stronger, I have less of a chance to succeed at drawing a mental rune.  That's nonsense - I'm not actually leveling up, just diluting my chances one way or another.  But the absolute worst part is if I always chose to increase destiny to it's maximum; I could have something like 5 runes and 5 destiny.  In this scenario, I always draw every rune I own, meaning there's not a lick of randomness to the game: I will always know if I will succeed in an action or not.

The Rune System for basic action resolution is straight up broken.

When it comes right down to it, I want to love this game.  My friends said they want to love this game.  There's just so much of this game to love!  But... wow is it hard.  The rules are written in a minimalist way, yet it's a game about very specific actions and mechanisms.  The result is a book chalk full of more questions than answers, and a game that screams for more attention.  I have faith that, if we put in a good amount of time and effort (and house ruling), that the payout would be amazing.  But it's hard to get that buy-in when the initial cost is so high, and that's unfortunately where the game falls flat on it's face.  It's beautiful, lovable face.