The Artifact RPG

I’ve casually kicked around the idea of a fourth edition for The Artifact. My first instinct is to convert the whole game over to my Energy System (ES) that’s been getting more and more capable of handling the game world. I’m currently veering away from that though, not because I wouldn’t like the result, but more because of the history the game has. Converting to ES  would massively streamline the rules since it does all the things that the current Fraction Column system does, but with fewer moving parts. The downside is that it would make all the system knowledge that players have built up over decades invalid.

So if I’m not looking at moving to ES, what would a fourth edition do that would make it worth the effort? Let’s look at the things I would like in a new edition.

I would like to clarify and possibly simplify the tech  and survival challenge system.

I’d like to make the infantry system more organic to the system. It’s functional but still requires the player to absorb a very different mindset to employ.

I want to change the role of sensors in vehicle combat. Currently NPCs have a really hard time properly locking on targets and using ECMs. They can take stress to make sure they get the sensor lock but that severely limits them later. We’ve hammered out something of what the new sensor rules should look like and I’ll do a post later on what they’d look like in case anyone wants to use them. As it is, the role of sensors is a little murky in the current rules.

A big maybe

There are a huge number of moving parts in the current game. I know some players really like that, but no one uses everything that’s built into the game. That means there’s a lot that can be trimmed. I’m thinking that some of the in play complications could be helped by reducing the number of attributes, something along the lines of the Physical, Functional, Mental categories becoming the actual attributes. That would be sacrilege to many players though. Maybe characters could specialize in one of those categories and they’d get the attributes in that category broken out for them? That would require a lot of other moving parts to implement, but in play it might make things more streamlined, or it could just swap one level of complexity with another.

Is that enough?

Looking at the list, I’d say no, the third edition is standing up pretty well. That’s never stopped me before though. I think I should approach this the same way I’ve always handled things. I’ll post ideas here on what might work and when I feel like I’ve built up enough changes, I’ll want to rebuild the whole thing into a fourth edition.

I recently picked up the book Universal Principles of Design. It’s a book I wish I had a long time ago but didn’t know existed. I used to think of design as one of those murky subjects that no one really knew what was going on in because I would see designers that churn out wacky or useless items. Maybe I was just seeing the fringe actors that were more interested in grabbing people’s attention. The book, first published in 2003 is research based and although it still leaves a lot of wiggle room up to the designer, it illuminates the ideas that lead to good design.

One of those principles is control. The concept is very simple, there should be a way to use a design for beginners that is simple and consistent and an expert way to use a design that opens up options and adds flexibility. I’ve stumbled on the idea of making simpler RPGs to help beginning players a while ago but the simple treatment of the subject made me take another look at the subject.

The principal of Control is laid out to include the concept of two levels of interaction with a design. This is nothing new to RPGs, in fact it’s very old. You have your Basic book and your Advanced book. I think the thing that turned me off of this concept early on, was that often the rules for the basic book were inherently different than those in the advanced book. This meant that a character made with the basic rules wouldn’t translate to the advanced rules. At least, that’s my recollection. I think the Marvel Superheroes game by TSR had a clean translation from beginner book to advanced.

I tried to give lip service to this concept when I was working on the 3rd edition for The Artifact. In the beginning of the rules, I point to the rules that are vitally important and the ones that are there for added functionality. I don’t think that goes far enough. For one, it doesn’t simplify things in the eyes of the reader. They still feel compelled to read through all the added functions. But even if the idea did work, I’m only making things easier on the GM. I haven’t helped out the players yet.

I have a partial concept of simplifying the character sheet by emphasizing the main useful strategies that an occupation could use. I’m not sure about how to do it yet though.

This is one of my perennial topics. I harp on it because if you were able to remove the entry barriers to an RPG, you might see a lot of people take up playing. There have been a lot of attempts to remove barriers, but they seem to have missed the real thing that keeps people away.

Let’s do a quick list of the things people most often try to fix when it comes to RPGs.

• Too much reading
• Too complicated (too many rules)
• People want story not more game

But there have been games that address these problems. For example Risus has a shorter list of rules than most board games. There isn’t too much reading and it’s not too complex. There are a large number of story games that remove mechanical barriers and allow story freedom. I agree that these things are potential barriers to people picking up a game but they haven’t suddenly produced a huge number of players. This tells me that while these things are nice, they aren’t the main blockade to RPGs being accepted.

What games are the most successful of all the RPGs? D&D, Pathfinder and the Star Wars franchise. Each one of these games has a large buy in to our cultural consciousness. People just know what D&D is, it’s been around long enough to have embedded what it is into people’s consciousness. Pathfinder is a straight out extension of that. A majority of people start playing RPGs in these two games because to many, these titles are synonymous with RPG. In essence, someone says “I’d like to try this RPG thing” and they pick up one of these big titles.

What about Star Wars? This may be the one example of an RPG that draws in a lot of new players that may not have looked for an RPG in the first place. I see a good number of players that talk about starting their RPG careers in a Star Wars franchise. Many of these new players started in the D20 system. This is not a simple system. It requires a lot of reading. It’s very mechanical, often artificially so. It bucks the trend that RPG designers are trying to work toward and bring down the barriers to entry.

What does this tell us then? It’s possible that Star Wars is doing something that people aren’t working toward?

In general, franchises of popular media entities get faster adoption than generic games or new stories. Why? It seems that the barrier isn’t the reading or the rules. It’s trying to fit a new world in your head. If that world is already there, the barriers are far less.

Is that the end of the matter then? No, I don’t think so. I think there should be a way of shortcutting this barrier without having to adopt a big media franchise as your world. As an example, think of video games. There are entrenched media worlds like Super Mario Brothers, but there are also new titles that get picked up, like Portal which is now an established name of it’s own but that started off as a throw away concept game.

In each case of a new world being introduced in books, movies or video games, the world has to start in just the right way.

• It has to have limited options at first. Think of the first Super Mario Brothers, jump run, left, right and a few others. Think D&D, left, right, straight, fight, detect trap (in a  dungeon anyway).
• It has to be vibrant. Questions about what this world is and what happens in it have to be answerable intuitively.
• It helps a lot if the answers to questions are amusing or unexpected. Think about Portal, the unusual uses of the gun that are explored. Super Mario, piranha plants come out of sewer pipes. Star Wars juxtaposes high tech with a priestly order and a cowboy smuggler.
• There has to be obvious first order strategies that will get you through. A focus on brute strength, or raw speed for example.
• Familiarity with the real world helps as an anchor. The world is ours, except for X. Although this takes away from the vibrancy and simplicity of the world because people know the world is complicated and often boring.

These are just some common things that hook people into a new world. These things are inherently limiting, but that’s the point. Potential players are often overwhelmed at the start of trying to pick up an RPG. Making the story options limited by only giving the players a few starting activities that they’ll take part in limits the scope of things they have to absorb. Designing a world that explains itself means less reading and the players will get a better concept of how to move the game forward.

The problem is less with the complexity of an RPG’s text, and more with the complexity of it’s play. Story games have missed the point and often increase the complexity of play by opening up more possibilities to a player that would have a hard time with a dungeon crawl.

Can an RPG be taken down to the complexity of a board game or a video game and still remain an RPG? I think it can. Think of Dungeon World* and how it basically gives the player five or so “buttons” to push as actions. It’s far easier for players to know what to try next when the options are narrowed down for them.

I don’t think RPGs should be limited to this kind of design development, but it would be good to have a race to the bottom in terms of story complexity among a group of writers. It would give a list of easy answers when someone says that they’d like to try an RPG but want to start easy. We need a class of RPGs that really push the boundary between playing like Monopoly and keeping the theater of the mind that an RPG has.

*I feel Apocalypse World limited itself by having an adult theme so is less a contender in helping RPG adoption.