September 2024 - Creating a Pen & Paper System

I've been looking for a good adventure Steampunk system for Pen & Paper for a number of years now, and though I found some of them, they didn't feel crunchy enough on a read-through. Steampunk as a genre is a little troubled in the sense that it's all aesthetics and not a lot of substance. I'm saying this, of course, as a Marxist, who has very particular ideas about the praxis behind things like politics, history, and class struggle. The realms of -punk aesthetics are of course always slightly associated with a surface-level antiauthoritarianism, directed at the vague idea of the powers that be. I myself like approaching any setting like I'm writing sci-fi, because I find it hard to not at the very least pretend that I'm applying historical materialism. At the same time, when I'm running a pen & paper campaign, I like having a variety of factions with complex relationships to weave stories around. Since I already did a fair bit of world-building for the Cloudskimmer, I decided to also adopt all of that into the system, already forcing me to write systems for both airships, and for automatons. This gave me the rough outline for the factions I was going to include (a modernized nobility faction, a worker/automaton faction, and whatever sketchy variant of "courier" Mouse was). Splintering these into the typical game of court intrigues, political tendencies and just across the board weirdos already tends to give enough world-building a fine backdrop when I'm only concerned with micro-scale adventures, which - for this - I think will be fine.

The system that I've grown to love the most over time is arguably Shadowrun 5th ED, since it scales very well with higher power-levels, and while using the system can feel very technical (in a good way), it often times involves entirely too many rolls for actions that will likely happen a lot. This is why combat becomes a slog very quickly, especially, when there are characters involved that are heavily built for it. This set an approximate design philosophy for me for this project: Shadowrun, without all the minutiae that makes things take entirely too long.

In that interest, that there were going to be fewer opposed checks in general. To get there, I needed a way to generate thresholds that wasn't just making it up on the spot, or worse: Setting difficulty classes. The issue with difficulty classes is, that they scale absolutely terribly, if you don't want to introduce a hard skill-ceiling for everything a character can potentially do. Neither is something I want to bother with, because I don't feel like those are fun options. There will obviously be some things that just need a threshold table, perhaps even a table for modifiers, but those are tedious things to write, if only for the options one needs to come up with, and the relative lack of creative fulfilment of writing stats for 5 cm of plywood. Those are also not the problematic situations that are going to drain time and momentum out of a scene. Those are usually checks performed against or "at" another character. D&D introduced something like a built-in threshold for most of these situation in the form of an Armor Class, but since having a universal one is a little bit silly (or tells the players that combat is the go-to solution), I decided to derive four of them as rough guidelines, which can receive modification depending on the situation. This made a lot of sense, since I already came into the system with 16 base attributes that every character is meant to have. The rough idea of the system sees players rolling a d6 for each attribute point, a d8 for each skill point, and a d10 for each specialization point, with every 2 points over four adding an additional success. Capping skills and specialization directly through these attributes would ensure proper builds that didn't have miraculously high skills, but bad defences. Originally I planned to have 1s and 2s subtract successes from the tally, but that proved too punishing, and considering I had already set a standard for fumbles, there really wasn't a point to it, so I decided to strike it entirely from the rules. This was probably going to make calculation a lot quicker as well.

The other central point of design is probably the way this system is meant to handle initiative. Most systems choose not to make initiative matter directly. In D&D, it actually hardly matters since the players are meant to soak damage like nobody's business, and since every turn has a very set number of actions that can be played. Call of Cthulhu has a marginally different approach to initiative, because taking a single hit may reduce the HP of a player character by half or more. In this way, coming first matters. Shadowrun once again has the most interesting approach to initiative, where it decays by 10 each passing turn, with available reactions able to reduce it further. However, this does encourage "initiative builds", and if it weren't for the hard cap of 5 initiative dice, it would very likely be broken. In practice, characters with few initiative dice also may only get two turns per initiative order, while others will average four, meaning that these players will do a lot of waiting during combat. Interesting, but not ideal. To combat this, I thought of a similar premise to Shadowrun, which tallies the number of eyes and has them decay as reactions are taken. However, the initiative cost for these reactions will be higher, but they will also constitute the main body of an initiative round, and each new round will instead generate battle fatigue in combatants. Theoretically, these characters will begin to get worse at fighting as the fight goes on. Because there will easily be initiative scores of 30 and higher on the board, there's little point in waiting until everybody is below a certain hard cut-off, but rather I would have all participants re-roll initiative, once all of them have dropped below the lowest initial score rolled. This also incentivizes players to burn through their initiative as quickly as they can, since everything below that order is "wasted", as the next initiative roll raises the threshold for avoiding combat fatigue. It certainly helps that as the arsenal of weapons is concerned, single hits can be devastating, so avoiding damage is going to be the name of the game where combat is concerned. This can be done through dodging or through tanking and withstanding it, but since dodging for example already costs initiative, the expectation is, that most actual turns of participants are followed by a cascade of reactions that will often involve other characters, and that there will rarely be initiative orders that last longer than two or three iterations.

The first play-test proved very instrumental in highlighting the statistics in the rolls, and where some mechanics needed tweaking. Unfortunately, I couldn't check how combat worked in detail, which was due to the "failures" having too much weight and so meeting thresholds became much too difficult. The contributions of derived attributes were also too high in a test where starting characters had at most thrice the maximum attribute amount of successes on the board. I originally wanted to avoid too much calculation in terms of division and multiplication, especially in combat, but it couldn't be avoided in this case. In the second iteration of the system, I slashed the contribution of derived attributes by half (with a hard rule for rounding).

Having seen character creation in action, I also think that the weapons might be too hard hitting, or rather: I'm missing a less deadly arsenal. To me, this means that the price for the weapons needs to be lifted a little, and perhaps it should be required to spend a set amount of money on amenities and essential equipment that isn't meant for killing specifically. I originally set the price to rent a Steampack (a piece of equipment that functions essentially as a universal battery) very low. I'm thinking of doubling or tripling it, so that a player will start with a less lethal load-out, if they don't plan to go for money above everything, or travel with the weapon as their primary expense. It might also be prudent to set a greater number of them as just straight-out illegal, so that acquiring it during character creation is only fine when agreed to by whoever is running the adventure.

Unfortunately, I didn't get the chance for more play-testing this month, as finding time to do this is already difficult, if you're not already pressed for chunks of free time. This means that concepts like character progression, the contact system and sensible rewards are entirely untested as of now. This leaves me at a dilemma:

I would love to show my work here, but I don't think making a PDF of this is viable yet. I would like to know it works before I do this. The rules are currently in my markdown software, which updates in real-time, but this will also include notes written by me, for me, in the style of a frantic swear-goblin, which I'm not comfortable sharing. I'm going to reserve the product of this months' project back for now, and instead I will make a follow-up, when I've spent another month sanding the edges off - and perhaps when I come around to doing something art-related to it as well. Perhaps this is going to coincide with me making an account on itch.io as well, but I will leave that to the confidence of future me, who has been woefully behind on almost all manner of posts, which is almost an achievement considering I don't have any social media to take care of, and barely reply to direct messages as a rule of mutual respect for ones time.