This is Day 1 of a five-day series of posts about Lost Fools of Atlantis that I’ll be releasing weekly on Wednesday.
Each post looks at an aspect of the game or adds new rules.
Here are some notes about the Balance Engine System for when the players play “system-pedant” or are genuinely and sincerely curious (yeah, right).
Why a D20 rollover mechanic, isn’t that a bit “swingy”?
What do I mean by swingy? Well, the player can plan for success by choosing the highest possible method with the best fit but high-value assists, and due to the large amount of randomness a D20 brings to a roll can still fail miserably (low roll beaten by a high roll) or succeed stupidly well (high roll that beats the GMs low roll of say one or two). The result swings between these two extremes.
Yes, yes, it is, and this is why.
The justification
- Familiarity. People from D20 games familiar with this mechanic will be right at home.
- It’s easy to add, rather than messing about adding or subtracting.
- Also, it’s fun to lose sometimes. In other narrative games, players learn the equivalent of the Lost Fools assisting rule to stack the odds in their favour, meaning that the game degenerates into a boring Play Win All the Time scenario. In Lost Fools, the fact that the players can lose despite trying to make sure they have a big assist (bonus) to the dice roll, can lead to all sorts of awkward social situations, the opportunity to work in slapstick physical results and other interesting outcomes as their Avatars fail forward.
If the swinginess bothers your players, remember they can do the following.
- Work up your Avatar and get a power level. Power Level One and Up never fail; start with success unless a bigger bad with a higher Power Level comes along and bumps them down.
- For Players who fear that a +1 or +2 won’t allow them to game the system, remember assists. Point out that they can pull out assists (so effectively doubling the bonus if they play it right), and if they really, really have to win, that’s what ego points are for.
- Remember Quick Actions. Also, if the GM wants to just give you success, rather than go through the rigmarole of rolling and adding modifiers, you just use a Quick Action, where your character succeeds to the best of their ability (or automatically fails, without harsh negative consequences)
Oh, play it and see!
Why not D20 vs Target Number?
Because as a GM, I like to roll the dice occasionally, and I like the head-to-head aspect of the player’s D20 roll vs my D20 roll. If either I or the players don’t feel up to that, we can use Quick Actions, which don’t require dice rolls, or curb our competitiveness a notch or two.
Why have Defined Methods?
Methods don’t need to be defined. In fact, a lot of the ones that define creature abilities aren’t. If the players and the GM are comfortable agreeing scope by group consensus, then it can be hugely liberating and rewarding to discover what methods do exactly in play.
The main reasons I have a whole chapter on Defined Methods are as follows.
- Some players are lost without them, and I found that they are a quick way of communicating the game’s setting to the players.
- Without them GM fatigue can quickly set in, with the players constantly asking what they do.
So, give everyone an emotional liferaft and quickly introduce them to the setting without having a bunch of gnarly, crunchy rules.
Where are the Hit Points?
First, Hit Points are a legacy system from when you had little lead figures with swords on the table, and you had a system reflecting that physical reality.
RPGs initially attempted to get away from that simple relationship and build in a bit more description, but such systems tended to lead to more complexity and sub-systems. Narrative systems, which usually had a unified dice mechanic and were divorced from roleplaying’s wargaming origins, looked at alternatives to hit points. The Balance Engine continues this approach, and because a conflict can be physical, mental or social, rather than having multiple measures of how much “damage” a character has taken, each “wound” is taken in the form of a setback. This takes the form – a descriptor which describes the sort of wound, be it a “hurt left leg” or “reputation with High society trashed” and a bonus, which is worked out from the dice roll where the setback was gained (ie. the level of defeat), which is then applied to any opposing dice roll where the setback comes into play. When we reach a combined bonus of +10, the character drops out of play – until they are healed – or meets a glorious player-narrated end.
Next Wednesday, Day Two Alternative Social Rules
Has this post piqued your interest in Lost Fools of Atlantis?
