Lichtenstein

Ttrpg combat tends to suck. It's either a crunchy mess invariably buckling under its own mess (and the fine line between codified maths and the freedom of roleplaying) or, in lighter, more narrative systems, reduced to a simple skill check, with half of them games still treating combat as their primary action encounter type, just content in having it be a simple roll-off with no texture.

I've got a lot of thoughts about that, but today I've had a far more specific one: about how spaceship combat is so common, with all the sci-fi systems around, but usually sucking extra hard.

The issue here is that the game wants all the players to have something to do, but with starships being bolted on top of a Space Dudes Doing Dude Things in Space framework, this usually boils down to everyone being responsible for one type of dice roll, granting some bonus based on personal skills. The problem here is that there's usually just two verbs that matter: Shoot and Move, which is not really enough to sustain niches for the entire party.

So we either get designers shrugging and saying "let everyone do the same combat roll and call it an exiciting scene" or jumping through hoops to carve out niches for everyone, oftentimes ending up mushing all of the possible verbs into a singular textureless goop of some samey abstract advantage for the final resolution.

But hey, it just so happens I spent the last year working on a game about managing a sports vehicle and juicing the move verb for all its worth. Some thoughts collided and now I'm left wondering if there would be enough juice in the Wartime Adventures of a Tank Crew little genre to sustain a game?

This week, I began work on the next version of Downforce, my car racing rpg, as the current playtest campaign is slowly reaching the point of fulfilling its purpose. With a few big changes still under observation, I started with the more menial, long-overdue work, such as updating the selection of sample pregen cars to fit the current values.

And I'm glad to report the infamous Ferrari SUV is now in, serving the important mechanical role of being the single most basic bitch build I could come up with.

Every once in a while I like to take a little break to doodle on an experimental side-project I don't really expect to fully commit at the time - just to clear my mind and perhaps gain a new perspective untethered to the framework of whatever main project I'm working on. Like my heartbreaker hacking game about entering command line inputs with Scrabble tiles (somehow it's not easy to develop into a decent shape, go figure).

Anyway, being knee-deep in very boring polishing work on my car racing game, my mind was on the concept of movement and motion in a ttrpg context. So I began doodling a little alternative take focused on personal movement - the parkour of Mirror's Edge and Dying Light, the skating of THPS and Jet Set Radio, the idea of navigating a space as both a problem to solve and means of expression, translated to ttrpg format.

And in the process I found it pretty damn funny to embed this concept to our good ol' framework of dungeoneering. I thought I'm mostly burned out on dungeon crawls these days, but it's just so amusing to imagine a GM rolling up with the Tomb of Horrors and saying "just go speedrun this shit". Whatever content you manage to skip, sequence break of otherwise bypass entirely - good for you and your limited resources.

It's the Factorio Paradox: the point of the game being to avoid playing the game, the content seemingly existing primarily for its negative space, taken to the tabletop (even if neither is really true).

As an aside, I also find it pretty amusing that even if keeping this as a pretty slim and light package, the perspective recontextualizes some of the more ridiculously simulationist D&Disms. Fall damage rules? Yeah, would be actually neat to have some guidelines for those in a parkour platformer. Needlessly fiddly equipment and encumbrance considerations? Hell yeah, make some hard choices for what you keep on hand and what requires you to stop (= reset your motion) to dig through the backpack. Fuck yes, let's Death Stranding the loot - even something as simple as overencumbrance limiting your maximum momentum could make for interesting considerations on how the route back changes for you.

Howdy y'all,

I rarely actually play OSR and OSR-adjacent games these days (just got my fill of killing goblins, you know?), but I do like keeping one eye on the scene, as there are a whole lot of delightful little mechanics people come up with to spice up the good ol' d20 framework. White Hack's chase auction, Black Hack's usage die - all that great stuff transcending the dungeon framework itself.

Likewise, I know there's been some damn good job done with random tables - a tool that might've seemed a clunky relic of the past (it sure did for me, once upon a time). However, this particular aspect is something I need to research a little better.

Not to bore you with details, but I'm doodling on a sandbox campaign... tool?.. thing?.. A pointcrawl-adjacent-but-not-really kind of a deal, close enough to warrant the inclusion of event tables. As I'm sketching the framework out, I'm interested in various ways authors of various sandbox modules have elegantly weighted the tables for some semblance of reactivity - and I'm afraid this is less familiar territory for me.

I'm talking about things like the Chaos Index of Fever-Dreaming Marlinko or the escalating results modifier of depthcrawls or Misty Isles of the Eld. I'm interested here both in varying mechanical implementations and the, uh, their semantic context. What I mean is that both in Misty Isles and a depthcrawl the mechanic is essentially just a stacking +number, but in the former it's just a matter of escalating badness and in the latter it's both escalation and maintaining relative consistency of areas in fluidly changing result ranges. It's all worthwhile food for thought!

Could you lend me a hand and point in some interesting directions?