Games and Special Dice: a pondering

First off, I'm sorry for not posting for a couple of months, first university work was more than I'd anticipated and then my group decided Thursday was the best day to meet (which means I shall be moving my The Calm GM series, not certain which day that). But I'm now putting a bottom limit of one new post a week, even if I have to spend the entirety of Sunday evening writing it.


Now why make a post about this? It's certainly a weird topic. Well the reason is simple, I've been hypocritical for about the past year on whether or not games with special dice are a bad thing, and wanted to drill down and give the reasons why.


To start off, I've only played two games which require special dice not in the standard D&D set (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20, and d%), those being Edge of the Empire from Fantasy Flight Games and Fate (or FATE to use the old stylising) from Evil Hat Productions. The thing is, whenever I get onto the subject of the new FFG Star Wars gamed I find myself coming back to one key complaint, and that being 'why do I have to use these special dice to play the game?'


For those who don't know, the FFG Star Wars games have many types of special dice, including two d6s, two d6s, and three d12s. It then throws in a the need for a couple of d10s occasionally, which is lucky because the pot of them I have for playing White Wolf games is wondering why they never get used. The basic idea of the game is that, before you make a roll, you use your Attributes, Skills, and the GM's whim to combine good dice and bad dice to form a dice pool to roll, and then hope you get more good stuff symbols than bad stuff symbols.


The game itself is actually quite fun. There's nothing better than the thrill you get from having your droid hacker changing his memory to pass the blame for the crime onto the guy who not only officially owns you but also always plays an 'assassin' (although I'll save my hate for 'assassins' for another post). Don't worry about the mind wipe, mine kept a backup of his memory on the ship (and my ultimate goal was to transfer my program/consciousness to the ship, because who doesn't love sentient starships?). Sure it bogged down combat a lot, but to nowhere near the slowness of D&D 5e in my experience. The problem was that the special dice added little to the game except the time where I tried to turn a swoop bike into a folding swoop bike so it wouldn't block the hallway and instead turned into the galaxy's first sentient swoop bike, but the game would have been just as fun using two different colours of d10.


Fate on the other hand I've owned and run, and love to bits. The narrative mechanics are simple enough that I can see how they'd be used in play, the Fate Point economy allows the games to have unexpected twists and turns as players start to run low, the system is simple and yet still appealing (no matter what build we use, it being Fate Core, FAE, or even The Dresden Files or Spirit of the Century), and the one type of special dice shared with FUDGE (a lovely game, but not one I would run by choice) I'm completely fine with, so why do I like them here when I don't in Edge of the Empire?


Well the fact is, when I first discovered Fudge Dice I hated them. 'Why do I need special dice to play this game' I wondered, looking through the pdf. But over about a year the mechanics of Fate grew on me, and I realised that I could easily use the dice for other games. Maybe I want to randomly decide if something is positive or negative. If I say that a blank face is 1, a minus sign is 2, and a plus sign is 3, they can work as improvised d3s. And maybe sometimes I just need to roll a d3-2.


But the real thing that made me accept Fudge Dice was the simple fact that I wanted to run Fate. It had been about a year since I had first looked at the book and investigated it on forums, and I not only wanted to run the game but also saw suggestions for alternatives for Fate Dice (most of which appear in Evil Hat's Fate System Toolkit, a book I adore), and so wasn't feeling like I had to buy a set.


So the simple reason I like Fate but dislike Edge of the Empire for using special dice? It's actually because I could have run Fate without paying the writers of the game a single penny. I did, I actually own several Fate books and love every one, but the simple difference is the cost to start running a game. Assuming you want to use physical books and the special dice Fate costs either £17 from my FLGS, or £30, depending on if you want FAE or Fate Core. Drop the special dice and it costs no more than £17 to play Fate Core, or whatever you want to pay for the pdf.


Compare to the new Star Wars games. Assuming I just want to try it out it costs £25 for the starter set, which will give me just enough dice to play. Assuming I actually want to play the full game, make my own characters and run my own adventures I have to shell out £43 for the rulebook (sure, it is a nice rulebook) plus £14 for 14 dice (so £1 a die, about twice as expensive as standard cheapy dice I use for most games and about half as much as a Fate Die per die), but realistically I'm going to be wanting at least two packs for when players raise their skills above three ranks.


To put in in perspective, for the cost to buy the basic materials I need for Edge of the Empire (£57) I could buy not only the Fate Core book (£17), but also the two latest Fate Worlds volumes (£16), and still have the money left to pick up a copy of The Secrets of Cats (if I ever get the chance to pick up a physical copy), and still have a pound left to get a bottle of fizz.


It's entirely the fact that I could sit around for months reading a pdf of Fate Core I spent £0.00 for on DriveThruRPG, and then buy the core rulebook for a reasonable price that made me buy my first pack of Fate Dice (and they are lovely dice). It's that that's made me spent hours planning settings to run with Fate, that that made me spend £15 pounds on a book I accidentally got for free (I seemed to get Venture City Stories on the day before it got replaced by Venture City). It's nothing to do with the quality of the game, it's the simple fact that I already had plans for the dice.

Design Desk: My first Fate magic system.

Well, more GM advice will be posted on Thursday, not because I'm out of ideas but because I need time to organise what exactly I'm going to talk about and whether to go for something abstract and related to preparation or something for actually in-game. Once a week is probably all I'll be able to manage once term starts anyway, so giving myself a specific day will make getting them out easier.

So, for a second series of posts, I thought I'd explain my design process and give some homebrew content by design things as I write the article. I do plan to do other posts on some of my bigger projects, especially the science fiction setting/system I'm currently working on, but I've got nothing past early alpha yet. Also, as I'm an engineer and not a particularly good game designer I can't promise that any rules or setting information I publish here will be of high quality, at least for alpha and beta drafts I'm just looking for 'good enough'.

Now that was a long introduction, I promise I'll have a shorter one next time.

Anyway, I thought I might have a go at designing something for one of my favourite roleplaying games, Fate Core. Normally I'd write this in somewhere between half and hour and 2-3 hours and then post it on a forum for feedback, but I'm actually underwhelmed with some of the offerings for magic in Fate Core. While when using FAE I'm fine with just having magic be the fluff surrounding how you're Cleverly Overcoming the problem, refluffing Shoot in a standard Fate Core game just doesn't feel right to me. The Fate System Toolkit does present two great systems for summoning beings, Storm Summoners and Voidcalling, so I'm not going to be covering that in this system, but there's nothing I like in the way of magic as it appears in most roleplaying games. So what do I want? I'm going to be focusing on the below:

1. Magic is just another way of solving problems, a thief might jump across a pit with his Athletics skill while the mage creates a force field across it.
2. Magic should be able to attack and defend against harm, and serve as an alternative to Fight or Shoot.
3. Different traditions should behave differently.
4. Magicians should be able to have abilities beyond the basic.

Now, the first two are easy enough to solve. Fate does not have a set skill list, the theory is that each group will customise the standard one or come up with a new one to fit the setting, so we can just add a Sorcery skill to the list (I could also use an existing skill, but I'm not for personal reasons). The Sorcery skill can use all four basic actions, Overcome, Create an Advantage, Attack, and Defend. This does make it slightly more powerful than some of the other skills, especially Shoot as attacking with magic also allows you to target people in other zones, so we should limit it somewhat.

This is where item number 3 is useful. Each magical tradition is different, so why don't we have each of them working with one type of 'thing'. We might have Suncallers who can only magically control fire, great for burning down the door but rubbish at crossing the pit, while druids use magic that manipulates plants and bodies and traditional clerical magic can only enhance 'people'. Make a character use an aspect to say what kind of magic they can use, and prohibit anybody from knowing multiple types. I don't want any hard rules for this, as it's the kind of thing that will vary from table to table, and while one group may be fine with Nekomancers (they work with undead cats), another might want to stick to serious schools of magic. In a game like D&D I could never stick to having caster types be so freeform, but specifying more than this works really well in Fate, as it allows the magic system to be comparable to the standard crafting and martial arts systems.

But now we come onto 4, and we need to assign the basic capabilities of any caster. We know that each caster can only use one 'thing', whatever it is, but we've not established what they can do with it. So here's the deal: a character can normally only do with magic what a person could do with their hands. This magic doesn't destroy armies, but it can burn down a house, create a weapon, or attack one person with an attack. Now it might occasionally do things faster or more efficiently, but it can't do something that can't be done another way.

But now we get onto the special stuff people have. One of the reasons I decided to go with making magic it's own skill over any of the other options I could have done, like making it an extra set of aspects or a stunt tree, is so I could do this easily. The stunts can be taken for the Sorcery skill and represent two things: advanced training and unique spells. So if you want to be particularly good at burning down doors, you can be. Things like attacking multiple people with one action would also require a stunt.

Finally, people can take unique spells that are outside the normal abilities of their tradition. There's no limit to the number of special spells, but each is a stunt. So your Suncaller might be able to turn coal into diamonds or cool the surrounding area. While these won't have the raw power of 'advanced training' stunts, each is a new option that a smart player could exploit.

So here's how you play a spellcaster in this system:

1. Take an Aspect detailing what you use magic on.
2. Take ranks in the Sorcery skill, and roll it whenever you use magic.
3. Take stunts to represent advanced training or special spells.

I don't think there will be another one of these for a while, it depends on how long it takes me to come up with another thing to homebrew.