The Artifact RPG

I had this idea today to make stress, at least partly drive progression. My thinking went thusly. The stress rules in 3e are really transformative to the game but it seems hard to get the players to use it. The idea that a player doesn’t have to fail a roll unless they want to (or are exhausted) is really crucial.

Doing things like lifting weights makes you tired, you’ve stressed your muscles out. So really, taking stress should offer some growth. Only, if you go too far, you’ll injure yourself. There should be a sweet spot in stress that would give growth, but the players shouldn’t go nuts taking stress.

There are three kinds of stress, Physical, Functional and Mental. If hitting a sweet spot gave an experience point apiece, it would seem an acceptable amount. But what is that sweet spot? My first thought is something equal to the attribute, but that may be too high. Maybe something up to the lowest attribute in the stress class but going higher than the lowest attribute negates the bonus. That would allow the player to take one stress and get an experience point, which seems too easy.

If I really wanted to be exact, it would hurt the player to go over the lowest attribute, signifying that they injured themselves. Only, that doesn’t seem like players would really enjoy that.

But this could replace the Active Participant experience criteria. It would go from something subjective that the GM decides, to something the players could prove.

There are bunches of attack moves to spend successes on. Defense consists primarily of negating an attacker’s successes. But what if there was more you could do?

I’m not sure about this idea, but I had a thought that a defense fractional success might be used to cut damage in half.

Mechanically, you wouldn’t want to use a success on this unless you were sure you weren’t going to be able to negate all an attacker’s successes. But instead of an all or nothing winner take all roll, what if the defender could cut damage in half?

The down side to this is that it would make combats longer. Something I’m not keen on. The upside is that it would allow the players to survive longer and rewards a good roll, even if it’s not the best roll.

Being able to negate an attacker’s successes is pretty useful already. This would add a really powerful ability to characters. Perhaps this could be included as a Dodge skill focus? I’d be a lot more comfortable with that.

I’d love the ability to use social interaction and have a tactical system associated with it and not the players simply winging things. I think that players (including GMs) enter playing a character with far too much of themselves bleeding through. I don’t want to take control from the players but I would like something that gave as much texture to social interaction as physical interaction gets.

Being keen on simulation, I research psychology and neurobiology to gain insights into how to model interactions. In my studying there was a particular finding on willpower that fascinated me. In some situations, making choices cost mental energy but for people with strong beliefs on a subject, the choices are nearly automatic, they can resist temptations of certain sorts all day long and feel fine.

Knowing how to describe that in a game would be really useful. I made a crude approximation of it for the 3rd edition system with principles and priorities but I had a new thought on how to model it today.

It involves knowing the desires of a person. Having a desire for something means that a person has to use mental energy to resist a temptation. If a person will be deprived of something they want, they’ll fight to get/keep it. This can work two ways though. Say that I want chocolate cake because it’s a food I like. Then say that I desire to lose weight. The two might cancel each other out to an extent and so making a choice is difficult. It would take an effort.

Now what if I could add things like “really doesn’t want to exercise” to argue with myself that I shouldn’t eat it. Then maybe “hungry” could kick in and “It’s a small piece of cake” could deliver the knock down blow. Resisting now will be especially costly.

What this becomes is a list of draws on the character, not barriers that protect them. However if something takes the character away from one of their draws, the character gets a bonus to resisting. If it goes against several draws, the choice is automatic and can’t challenge the character.

So what this looks like is a system of tags that add or subtract from the argument for and against. The problem is that in any person’s own mental argument, there could be dozens of desires that come into play and naming them all would be difficult to impossible.

So either a simplified list would be needed or some way of intuitively calling them up would have to be created.

One idea that comes to mind is that most desires are in balance, it’s the really strong desires that sway things one way or the other. Then a character could have a short list of desires and only deal with those.

But to have this work well, the players have to see having desires as a net benefit. They need to mechanically benefit the character in most situations and only be harmful occasionally. In part, that means the GM not overusing them to the players detriment. Players may also view it as taking away some agency, so there has to always be the choice of resisting at a cost.

I was tossing around the idea of getting a character to progress not just mechanically but having the story they tell, change over time. I want mechanics involved though, because mechanics are one of the tools the players use to assert their agency on the story.

In some games, the player builds a character out of predefined elements by spending points. Xp are points, so what if the player progressed by spending xp on things that change their character? Cheaper buys would be more of a give and take. More costly buys would be better for the character as a whole. I don’t know if it’s necessary to have dozens of options. The more attributes and abilities you have in a game, the more options you’d need though.

What are we talking about then? My first thought was a buy like “Battle Hardened” where the character gets tougher, mentally and physically but becomes scarred as a human being. Maybe “Pumping Iron” makes the character stronger but their mental abilities of skills drop a bit from lack of practice. A buy where the character becomes more charismatic might mean becoming more mentally flexible and so loose some of their mental toughness.

Implementing this in The Artifact is a little tricky because of the progressive nature of xp buys. If my Constitution is 90 and my Charisma is 10 and I take a buy that boosts Constitution 5 points but drops Charisma 5 points, it sounds like an even trade. I’ve actually made out by a lot because those Constitution points are really worth 3 Charisma points apiece.

I like the idea but I’m not sure how to implement it. It could be as simple as saying one attribute is raised and another lowered the same amount. Instead of the regular 3 xp it costs to raise an attribute, the cost could be brought down to 1 xp.

Equipment ranges are governed by Range Classes in the Fraction Column System. The ranges are based on rough amalgams  of different distances I found in research. In normal use the ranges make sense but in a few edge cases though I’ve become aware of people busting these distances. Very frequently they’re exceptional cases, but they do happen.

I thought about changing the range classes, but that doesn’t seem practical especially at this point.

My other thought is to say, by spending fractional successes, one could extend the range of the equipment. I’m not sure how difficult to make that though. On the low end the thought is that by spending 2 fractional successes, you can double the distances in a range class. That would make tripling the distances in the range class possible if the character gets one fractional success from an advantage.

That seems to be almost right, but it’s an odd process. Do you spend the successes before or after rolling for range impairment? Do all rolls of this type get an extreme range Impairment? Do they get two? I think that requires us to play the rule and smooth out the process.