Woo The Moon

The As Yet Unknown Dungeoncrawler (Stats)

The Spiel

This is my dungeoncrawler. There are many like it, but this one is mine. I come from the vaunted tradition of self-taught design, which mostly consists of a grab bag of influences, inspirations, and reasonable doses of spite for strangers on the internet with whom I vehemently disagree but also respect1. As with most things to do with this current stage of my design journey, this particular project is Cass's fault. She had the gall to indulge my curiosity in the dungeoncrawling genre of ttrpgs and possesses a well of knowledge on these things I have shamelessly drawn water from many times over. So when she began talking about a fantasy heartbreaker she was designing for a home game, I thought the idea was neat. Little did I know I would soon be struck with the same bug.

So here we have the As Yet Unknown Dungeoncrawler (AYUD for short). It's very much a work in progress, and will probably never hit the proverbial shelves, but I figure that if I'm going to pontificate on game design and design philosophy, I should put my mouth where my money isn't: on the internet. This is also an opportunity to roast past me for his hubris (certainly not a form of negative self-talk. I don't know what you're talking about).

Any further thoughts/comments on the design decisions will be written in these sidebars.

The Games behind the game

When designing the game, I decided to start by looking at different games. I knew I didn't want yet another retroclone, as I owe no allegiance nor nostalgic fondness for the various flavours of TSR design, either B/X or AD&D. I'm a newcomer to the space, and I have no sacred cows about rules, rulings, or the formatting of a module. I may do in the future, but for the moment I operate with the wild abandon of someone making a nuclear reactor in their garden shed. Thus the main inspirations for this game are the following:

Stats

I ultimately decided I would have stats. Some people prefer skills only (like Cass) but I feel that having a handy number that can help resolve most situations.

Rolling for Stats

Roll 3d6, pick one to be your Luck and one to be your Experience. The remaining die will determine your starting feature. You will get to choose 1 more feature for free at the end of character creation.

This was one of the first decisions I made early on. I wanted to boil down checks to two different circumstances: One in which the character is competent and one in which they're trying whatever cockamamie, one-in-a-million, held-with-spit-and-ducktape, bad idea of a plan concocted by their player.

Starting Feature (d6)

  1. Stalwart Soul: When facing enemies that Frighten you, roll normally.
  2. Steady Hand: If you attack the same enemy twice or more in a row without moving, increase damage by 1
  3. Silver Tongue, Heart of Gold: Once per day, you can give a speech which immediately  restores 1d6 experience to allies who can understand you.
  4. Magical Heirloom : Roll on the Lesser Relic Table as part of your starting equipment.
  5. Grim servant of Death : When you attack a surprised enemy, you deal damage directly to their Luck.
  6. Arcane Dabbler: Learn 1 Basic Spell.

Already I've committed myself to a few things I may regret: Frightening enemies, Days as a unit of time, Lesser Relics (which implies Greater or at least Middling Relics), surprise, and Spells (Basic, Intermediate, Advanced?)

Luck

Luck represents their general ability to do things they are not qualified to do, as well as their capacity to stay alive without any help.

Luck TN

Whenever you attempt something you have no skill in, you must use your Luck score as a TN.

And I do mean no skill whatsoever. Luck is the more vital stat out of the 2, because it lies at the heart of all such foolhardy souls that go into danger for fame or fortune. Dungeon Delving is not something you can foolproof, and at the end of the day and the bottom of the dungeon, all that stands between you and death and riches is luck.

Pushing your Luck

If you fail at a task using a Luck roll, you can reroll by describing how you use an item in a way it’s not meant to work in order to try again. If you succeed, the item is damaged and decreases the TN of all future tests it is involved in by 1. You can repair or patch a damaged item by spending one hour in a safe place with the appropriate materials. If you fail a second time, the item is broken and must be repaired by a person with the proper Specialty in proper facilities before it can be used again.

I wrote this before I knew what equipment did, but the idea of jury rigging your equipment to push your luck appealed to me. Also it meant not spending luck to try out new things, and so now we have equipment that can be broken so your characters can Wallace and Gromit their way out of danger.

Also I suppose that means that this is a roll-under system, huh...

Luck in Combat

 In combat, you may spend Luck points  to escape a grim fate. The amount of points to spend depends on the difficulty of the monster. You can regain 1 point of luck for every week out of danger and free from worry. If you ever are out of Luck, you are in extreme danger of dying. If you are out of Luck and Experience, you are dead. You can increase your luck only through magic items you find in your adventures.

Luck is the Slow resource, which covers a lot of things but recovers slowly and progresses very little if at all. Someone's Luck doesn't change unless something major happens. Spending Luck should be considered either a last resort or a measured choice (which implies that there may be something desirable to spending luck instead of Experience to avoid damage)

Also bonus Monster design tidbit: Difficulty. In this version of the game it means damage, but it may also mean a decrease in TN? I don't know if I want to mess with the TN all that frequently. Holding modifiers in your head to make a mathematical formula is not necessarily my idea of a good time, but... I don't have a better one right now.

Experience

In their life before risking life and limb, your characters learned some marketable skills, which may become  useful someday. Over the course of their career delving dungeons, they gain experience which they can leverage against future challenges.

Experience is not just the knowledge you've gained, but also the material precautions you would normally take as you become aware of the common dangers of your chosen profession. Things that come as naturally as clothes, like a charm or an extra bit of rope tied around the waist, or a ring of skeleton keys.

Experience TN

Whenever you attempt a task that you’ve done many times already or that refers to your specialties,  background, or features, you can use your Experience TN instead of your Luck TN. You can automatically succeed on a test if you spend Experience equal to the Test's difficulty modifier.

This is something I picked up from Gumshoe. As much as I believe in Luck in this game, I also believe in competence. Furthermore, the spending of experience is itself a choice given to the player, who may wish the easy win in a crucial moment only to regret it later. In the world of the game, spent experience may simply mean the loss of a small piece of equipment, the mental strain accumulating as you run out of past experiences to solve your problem. This should happen whenever a test is invovled, so that should mean it is a new situation.

Experience in Combat

In combat, you can spend Experience points to avoid a grim fate. You regain 1d4 Experience by resting for at least 1 hour in a safe place. You regain all of your Experience points by spending downtime out of the dungeon. If you spend all your experience points, you cannot regain them until you get out of the dungeon and engage in downtime. Should you succeed in escaping the dungeon, you learn a Hard Lesson and increase your Experience Score by 1.

Hard Lessons is one of my favored pieces of design, and if I have to cut it I'll cry. This is perhaps the only bit of vertical progression in the entire game that occurs as a normal/regular consequence of play. Everything else is a project of some kind.

Increasing your Experience score

You can increase your total Experience Score by doing one of the following:

I firmly believe in mechanical incentives for players when teaching them a game, which is what rules are supposed to do. I also believe in anchoring those incentives as diegetically as possible. Experience grows as we make things, establish connections, and develop our skills. Experience is also a harsh teacher and often leaves us with hard lessons to reckon with.

Tests

Tests should only occur if a majority of the following conditions apply:

  1. There is a distinct chance of failure

  2. The stakes are high (Failure is meaningful and interesting)

  3. There is some kind of external pressure (Picking a lock during a fight, convincing someone to move out of the way during a chase, etc.)

  4. It is a new or poorly understood situation.

Roll 1d10, if the result is equal or under your Experience or Luck TN, you succeed. If the task is something the character can reasonably achieve, no roll should be required.

When to roll is something you have to learn and relearn. It is basic both because it is fundamental to how the game resolves uncertainty, and therefore important, but also because it is mundane, and therefore unremarkable. I'm hoping here to highlight that a situation should only require a roll when certain conditions are met. I also don't believe in exhaustive checklists

  1. Looking at you Luke Gearing↩

  2. As of the writing of this post Cass has no plans to make this game into a product, so you'll have to trust me that it works the way I say it does.↩