Accessibility has been Shadow
of the Demon Lord’s design goal from the start and for good reason. Over
the last twenty years or so, I have watched the amount of free time available
to my gaming groups shrink and shrink. Life has a way of intruding on our
distractions—responsibilities of family and career rightly take precedence and
when presented with a choice for how we spend time from the entertainment
budget, we generally gravitate toward those distractions that demand the least from
us. Gone are the days when we can spend hours and hours studying rulebooks,
plotting complex campaigns, or plan out the various ways our characters will
develop over time. Some of you may have the luxury of copious free time, but
the people I know and with whom I game with have left those idle hours far
behind. And as roleplaying games become more work, making greater and greater
demands on our time to gain system mastery enough to even create a character
let alone play, many gamers, once dedicated, have left the hobby behind or
engage it vicariously by just reading the books rather than getting together
with their friends.
To make Shadow of the Demon Lord more
accessible, I adopted a strategy in the design that relied on familiarity and
simplicity. The combination of these things would allow players of varying
experience levels and interest to engage the game with equal proficiency and be
free to focus on portraying their characters, engage the story, and, above all,
have a good time.
So let’s start with
familiarity. Shadow of the Demon Lord embraces
tradition in that there’s a Game Master who manages the story, interprets
outcomes, and decides when to use the rules to determine what happens. Everyone
else at the table is a player and they each have at least one character under
their control.
Most people who
are passingly familiar with roleplaying games expect at least one funny-shaped
die. The 20-sided die has permeated geek culture to the point that I think most
people know rolling a 20 is a good thing. So Shadow of the Demon Lord uses a d20 for task resolution. When you
want to know if your attack with a sword hits the demon, or if you can kick
down the door, or climb the wall, or send the troll sprawling with your shockwave spell, or escape the blast of
a fires from heaven spell, roll a
d20. The widespread use of the d20 is a familiar element and it’s what most
players expect to roll when they play fantasy RPGs.
The game also
uses 6-sided dice. While the game would be simpler just using a 20-sided die,
having a second die adds a bit of texture to the play experience and, most
important, makes other aspects of the game simpler as you’ll see below.
Attributes
Shadow of the Demon Lord uses a set of four attributes to describe
a character’s most basic capabilities. The attributes are Strength, Agility,
Intellect, and Willpower. The names pretty much tell you what they do. Each
attribute has a score, which is a number ranging from 1 to 25, and a modifier,
which is the score minus 10, ranging from –9 to +15. A typical human has a score
of 10 (+0 modifier) for each attribute.
Your score
represents your passive use of the attribute. The GM may judge a task’s success
or failure by just looking at your score or you might use it as a defense such
as when a creature casts charm on you
or tries to tear your bones from your body with a part bone from flesh spell.
When you would
actively use your attribute, such as when you swing a sword at a zombie, fire a
pistol, climb a wall, discern an illusion isn’t real, or cling to your sanity
in the face of some horrific monsters you roll a d20 and add your modifier to
the number rolled. If you’re doing something directly to another
creature—pushing, knocking down, using magic, you compare the total of your roll
to the creature’s attribute score (or Armor Rating if you’re attacking with a
weapon). If you’re doing anything else, you compare the total to 10. If the
total equals or beats the target number, you succeed. Otherwise you fail.
This should be familiar
and simple.
Assets and Complications
Rather than use a scaling set of numbers to model easier
and harder tasks, the game uses assets and complications. For each different positive
circumstance that could help you succeed, you have an asset. For each different
negative circumstance that might prevent your success, you have a complication.
Assets and complications cancel each other out. So if you have two assets and
one complication, you’d have one asset. If you have six complications and two
assets, you’d have four complications. If you have two assets and two complications,
you would neither assets nor complications since they cancel out.
For each asset
or complication, you roll a d6 with your d20. Of the numbers rolled for assets,
you add the highest number rolled to the number you rolled on the d20.
Conversely, of all the numbers rolled for complications, you subtract the
highest number rolled from the number rolled on your d20.
For example,
lets say Mindy is trying to climb a wall in a cave in a ledge. She uses a rope
and grappling hook, so she has one asset. The Game Master also tells Mindy that
there are plenty of handholds and footholds to make the climb easier, which
gives her another asset. Mindy rolls Strength with two assets. She rolls a d20,
and gets a 5. Her Strength is 12 (+2), which brings her total up to 7. Normally
this would be a failure as the target
number is always 10. However, she also has two assets. She rolls a d6 for
each asset and gets a 5 and a 3. The 5 is the highest number, so she adds it to
her total, giving her a 12. Mindy’s gets a success and her character climbs up
the wall.
The function of
assets and complications is to scoop up all the tiny bonuses and penalties one
expects to gain from circumstances into an extra die roll. Multiple assets or
complications have increased chances of rolling a 6, but since you’re only
adding the highest, they control bonus and penalty inflation without having to
introduce flag bonuses or penalties with different types. Best of all, assets
allow characters to reach beyond their normal limits, when fighting powerful
opponents, and complications never take away from the thrill of rolling a 20.
You might sense
that there’s little point in having Mindy roll at all since she has two assets.
After all, she starts with a +2 bonus and the asset should add 3 or 4 (on
average) to her roll. This means she will fail if she rolls a 3 or less on the
d20. Chances are, she’s going to get up to the ledge, so why bother rolling?
Exactly. Assets and complications, combined with a fixed target number of 10, quickly
communicate to the GM when to call for a roll and when to just grant a success.
This keeps the game moving forward. Having a couple of assets for an activity serves
to eliminate pointless rolls, whereas complications may indicate times when
rolling might have an interesting outcome.
Damage
Whenever I run a game of D&D for new players, one of
the big play challenges experienced is figuring which die is which. Even experienced
gamers sometimes grab a d8 when they meant to grab a d10. To keep the game
simpler, Shadow of the Demon Lord uses
the d6 for all damage rolls. When you cast flame
blast, creatures in the area take 3d6 damage. When you get a success for a
roll to attack with your sword, the target takes 1d6 + 2 damage. When you fall
5 yards and land on the bottom of a pit, you take 2d6 damage. The game rarely
has you roll more than six dice. For powerful spells, you roll a small number
of dice and add them to a bigger number, such as 6d6 +20 or 3d6 + 10.
Final Thoughts
The approach I took for the core system design has many
advantages. It is familiar to veterans who enjoy other fantasy games and eases
the transition from one game system to Shadow
of the Demon Lord. It also has the advantage of simplicity for new players.
It just makes sense that when my character attempts to beat your character in
an arm-wrestling contest, I roll Strength against your Strength. A constant
target number of 10, for tasks other than attacks or attack-like activities, reduces
calculations at the table since you’re just looking for 10 or higher. Ultimately,
this simple and straightforward game system allows for rapid system mastery and
permits a range of exceptions gained from character develop without slowing or
otherwise taking anything away from the game play experience.
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