[Atomic Robo] Public Playtest, Round 1

Okay, here we go.

Behold, an ordinary playtest!

If you want to be a part of the Atomic Robo: The Roleplaying Game playtest -- and I think I know you enough to say that yeah, you do -- simply follow these steps:

1. Ask yourself, "Am I going to have a chance to actually experience this with a group of players in the next few weeks and provide feedback?" If your answer is "Yes," proceed.
2. Download a copy of the disclosure pledge.
3. Read and sign it (typing your name on the signature line is enough to acknowledge you've read the pledge and agree to abide by it; no need to put your actual John Hancock on this thing).
4. Email your signed pledge to the email address indicated on the pledge. The subject line should say "ARRPG Pledge."
5. Remain calm and trust in Science.
6. Once we have your signed pledge, you'll be sent a link where you can download the current playtest documents.

The playtest will take place in multiple rounds, and is expected to run through October. This first round of the playtest will include only 20 groups. If you don't make it in, don't sweat it -- the next round will start within a few weeks. We fully intend to include everyone who's able to make a serious commitment to playtesting.

And remember, if you're going to be at Gateway or Dragon*Con this weekend, you'll have a chance to playtest there as well.

On a personal note, I hope you're all as excited as I am about all of this. I mean, I kinda already know you're not, but if you're even approaching my level of excitement, this is going to be a fun time. The playtests at GenCon were really solid, and the rules have only gotten better and tighter since then. It's only going to improve going forward, and that's largely going to be because of playtesters like you. So thanks, and let's do this!

UPDATE: The interest level has been... well, I don't want to say "overwhelming," but it's right up there. As of 8/31, I have all the Round 1 playtesters I need. But! Round 2 still has plenty of room. Please keep 'em coming! Science needs you!

[Atomic Robo] GenCon Playtesters

Hey everybody. I'm just putting this post up here so when I tell the ARRPG playtesters at GenCon to come by the blog and leave a comment, they'll land here and feel special.

Playtester-types: I welcome your comments. You'll have talked to me or your duly appointed ARRPG GM about your feelings on the game, but if you want to say anything else, good or bad, this is a place to do so.

Everyone else: You can just read this and, I dunno, be jealous, I guess.

[ARRPG] Atomic Robo at Gateway!

Did you know that Gateway is just a scant two weeks after GenCon? I feel like that can't possibly be the case! And yet it is. If you're going to be some combination of a) there, b) wanting to play Atomic Robo, and  c) available Friday night, Saturday afternoon, or Saturday night, come on down and playtest.

These playtests will no doubt benefit from ARRPG having been through the wringer at GenCon, so odds are quite good that the rules will be all the better for it. Plus, the public playtest will have started by then, so people may even show up familiar with them before coming to the table. Imagine that!

Here's the extremely non-committal blurb, in case something horrible happens at GenCon and I need to ditch the intro scenario I've planned:

Come playtest Atomic Robo: The Roleplaying Game, currently in development and due for release from Evil Hat Productions in early 2013. ARRPG is based on Fate Core (also currently in development!). New to Fate? No problem. No familiarity with either Fate or higher-dimension mathematics is required. Just remain calm, trust in Science, and roll those dice.

(As you can see, I tend to return to the same gags over and over again.)

I'm running the Friday night and Saturday night games, and a friend who shall remain nameless is running the Saturday afternoon game. No matter what game you play in, though, you'll have a good time.

Event pre-registration begins tomorrow, August 11th at noon-ish. If history is any guide, these games will fill up fast, so get on it!

[Fate Core] Men's 100pg Hurdles

Pictured: My office.

As of... now, the Fate Core chapters I was assigned to revise and/or rewrite have been sent off to Camp First-Round-Edits. They'll be back before the end of the month. I'll miss them, but at the same time it's good to have them out of the house.

So that's one hurdle hurdled, then. Whew! What a relief. Now I can just relax.

Except that before I get on a plane for Indianapolis a week from tomorrow, I still have to bring ARRPG up to the new specs, devise and/or revise an ARRPG scenario, make proto-characters for said scenario, figure out the rest of my Kerberos Club (FATE Edition) scenario, make a few pre-gens for that scenario, and... I dunno... pack, I guess. And for all I know, my Fate Core chapters could come back to haunt me before GenCon, too. So while it's nice to have met a goal more or less on time, it's just one hurdle of many over the next couple weeks.

Incidentally, I made mention on Twitter of a way-too-long sample magic system I wrote for a Fate Core chapter that's already been removed for being, well, way too long. But assuming it doesn't turn out to be the late-night rantings of a freelance writer working on a sleep deficit, it'll see the light of day somehow or other. Might be here on this blog, might be part of a supplemental Fate Core PDF. I dunno yet.

Don't sweat it too much, though. It's not some revelatory thing you can't live without. It's just an example of how to use elements of Fate Core to make a magic system for your game. I mean, I hope you like it and everything, but there's no need to batter down my door to get it. My office is noisy enough as it is.

[Atomic Robo] Minor Repairs

Good news, everyone! Turns out the aftershocks from Fate Core Rules-Quake '12 weren't as severe for ARRPG as I'd originally feared. I mean... they were still pretty serious. We lost a whole thing. But it looks like everything's working out pretty well, skill-wise. It's probably even an improvement, actually.

Let me elaborate on that, because you're probably all, "Hey, could you be less specific about the thing in question?" But, like, in a sarcastic way.

So I'm pretty sure I've mentioned before (at least once) that, in ARRPG, there are these things called modes. You can think of modes as thematic bundles of skills that reflect broad areas of competence. Action is a mode. Science is a mode. Modes make on-the-fly character creation easy, because they don't require you to make a decision for every single skill your character has.

Prior to yesterday, there were a total of five standard modes (among them, Action and Science). Now there are but four. When you make a character, you pick (and rate) three modes. With only four standard modes to pick from, however, what you're also doing (as Fred has pointed out) is deciding which of the modes just isn't important for your character.

Why was this done? A number of reasons -- so many, in fact, that when I wrote them all out I was surprised by how compelling they all were en masse. But the most practical reason is the math.

There are two ways to make a character in ARRPG. One involves making choices. The other involves some simple math. Neither method is better than the other, but the choice-making one is simpler in practice than the math-doing one (an important difference when making a character during play). The thing that makes that no-math one work, though, is the math going on behind the scenes. Thanks to a certain change in the Fate Core rules, that math wasn't working out anymore, which had the potential to be a pretty serious issue.

What with one thing and another, the way to fix this issue was to cut one of the modes. Actually, it's probably more accurate to say that two modes have been merged, but... not that much more accurate, to be honest. Regardless, in the process each of the remaining modes has been made a little more distinct, which is a good thing. (Except Science. Science has experienced no change whatsoever. Science don't care.)

If you're wondering how four themed skill-bundles can possibly reflect everything that, say, Atomic Robo does, or Dr. Dinosaur purports to do, the answer is simple: They don't! Those four modes are just the standard modes, but there are other modes -- weird modes -- that you can make yourself.

I'm not going to get into all that now, though. I have a literal ton of work to do. (Not literally.)

[Greyhawk] Magic Resistance

Spirit of Greyhawk has been proceeding slower than I’d like, though it is still occurring! Now that most of the larger blocks of mechanics have been translated, the challenge has been to keep the Fate’s design fractal intact as I get the point of “filling in the blanks”. In other words, I’ve been trying to avoid creating new mechanics in SoG, even if the source material did.

My most recent instance of this fractal challenge has been Magic Resistance and consistency with Armor.

In the source material, Magic Resistance and Armor effectively do the same thing--make the possessor harder to hit. The distinctions between them are what's being used for the attack and the specific mechanic for that determination. So the attacker has to roll to hit then if the hit is successful, only then do you take damage into account. Neither provides a reduction in damage--only a reduction in the chance of taking damage.

SoG already reflects that Armor reduces the number of shifts of damage done, which seemed important as degree of success and damage are linked to the same roll in the Fate mechanic. While inconsistent with SoG’s source material, it has playtested pretty well. Stated differently, I don’t like the source material’s mechanic for “Armor Class” enough to translate it into Fate as is.

My initial take on Magic Resistance was more consistent with the source material: an additional chance that a magic effect has no impact. Initially I felt it was necessary to bring this assumption over intact because in the world of Greyhawk, the great consensus is that a 20% resistance has as much chance to resist a 1st level spell as it does a 3rd level spell. It turns out that this is not an entirely accurate assumption--in order to play the game as it was written, Magic Resistance is adjusted up or down depending upon the level of the spellcaster (DMG, p. 228)

Reviewing that definition for Magic Resistance gave me the following assumptions about how it acts in the gameworld:

  - Magic Resistance is separate from Saving Throw (i.e., opposed skill roll).
  - Magic Resistance can negate a magic effect BEFORE any opposed skill roll is rolled.
  - More powerful magic users can reduce or entirely offset the value of the magic resistance.
  - Magic Resistance is more effective against less powerful magic users.

So for me there was a decision point in translation: Accuracy or Consistency?

Here’s two different ways it might be handled in Fate. One is more accurate to the source material and one is more consistent (fractal) with existing mechanics.

“More Accurate” Magic Resistance

Translating the Magic Resistance Value

The source material is expressed in the source material as a percentage.  The defender must then roll that value or less.  To turn that into a 4dF difficulty that must be met or exceeded (as per the normal SotC mechanic), you could do the following:

10% Magic Resistance is +4
20% Magic Resistance is +3
30% Magic Resistance is +2
40% Magic Resistance is +1
50% Magic Resistance is 0
60% Magic Resistance is –1
70% Magic Resistance is –2
80% Magic Resistance is –3
90% Magic Resistance is –4
100% Magic Resistance is -5

This means that in its most basic form, something with 80% Magic Resistance must roll -3 or better on 4dF in order to resist the magical effect.

Basic Rule

When a magic effect impacts something with Magic Resistance, the defender rolls the dice TWICE:

The first die roll is to determine if Magic Resistance cancels the magical effect.  If Magic Resistance does not work then the defender rolls again... 

The second die roll (if the defender’s Magic Resistance fails) is for the defender’s Opposed Skill Roll.

The defender rolls the 4dF and if the roll MEETS or EXCEEDS the difficulty the defender is immune to the magic effect.

You could accomplish a similar effect by only rolling dice a single time and then translating that roll in those two contexts, but it didn’t seem to have the right “feel”.

Adjusting Magic Resistance

The skill of the caster has an effect on a defender’s Magic Resistance.  To be consistent with the source material (again, DMG, p.228) and some of the other general assumptions that SoG makes about levels of skill/power, adjust the Magic Resistance (as above) by the following rule:

Subtract 5 from the power of the Magical Effect and apply the difference to the Magic Resistance’s "difficulty".

Examples:

Spell Power +3 - (5) = -2 to the difficulty (makes it less difficult to resist)
Spell Power +6 - (5) = +1 to the difficulty (makes it more difficult to resist)

So putting it all together you’d have the following scenario:

Defender has a “base” 10% Magic Resistance, which means rolling +4 (or better) on 4dF.
Defender is targeted by a spell with a power of +4, which then adjusts the defender’s Magic Resistance to be:
+4 (Spell Power) - 5 = -1 modifier to the Magic Resistance of +4 = +3 or better must be rolled.
Defender rolls +2 on 4dF, so Magic Resistance doesn’t work and then the Defender rolls his Opposed Skill Roll (as per normal).

The Bottom Line

Though this feels like a fairly accurate translation, I don’t think it’s playable “enough”.

“More Consistent” Magic Resistance

Going to back a previous statement, there’s the gameworld assumption that Magic Resistance is similar to mundane Armor.  So this translation considers Magic Resistance consistent with Armor, just used against magical effects instead of mundane attacks.

Translating Magic Resistance

A closer translation of Fate Shifts to a 100% scale, means that each shift is worth between 15% and 20%.  For ease of translation, let’s stick with using 20% = +1 shift.

+1 Magic Resistance equates to Magic Resistance 1% to 20%.
+2 Magic Resistance equates to Magic Resistance 21% to 40%.
+3 Magic Resistance equates to Magic Resistance 41% to 60%.
+4 Magic Resistance equates to Magic Resistance 61% to 80%.
+5 Magic Resistance equates to Magic Resistance 81% to 100%.

By virtue of Fate's different level of granularity, there’s a bit of a fudge factor there especially in the 81% and up range, but I think it’s balanced out during play (see below).  So the reduction in shifts of effect is not entirely accurate with source material, it is more consistent with the changes that were made to mundane armor.

Basic Rule

Magic Resistance applies the shifts in the same way as armor protects from mundane attacks.
Example:

A creature with Magic Resistance listed in the source material as 40% (worth +2 in SoG) is attacked by a spell generated by a Wizard with a Magic skill of +4.
The Wizard casts the spell, the player rolls 4dF and gets +1 for a total of:  Skill (Magic +4) + Dice (4dF, +1) = Magical Power of +5
The creature has an opposing skill (let's say Willpower) of +2 and rolls +2 on 4dF.  Including the Magic Resistance, the opposed result is:   Skill (Willpower +2) + Dice (4dF, +2) + Magic Resistance (+2) = +6
The creature's +6 is greater than the Magical Power of +5 and the spell has no effect on the creature.

The Bottom Line

Though this translation allows for a reduction of magic effect (which doesn't exist in the source material), it is still consistent with what I think is the more important gameworld assumptions, is consistent with mundane armor and avoids the creation of another modified mechanic.

A Double Whammy of Fate

So. Lots of stuff going on. Eventful!

Here's the news: What with one thing and another, Fred Hicks asked if I'd be willing to help Lenny Balsera (along with Bulldogs! co-author Brian Engard) with the development of Fate Core. Uh, yes. Obviously. I want to go to there.

Initially the idea was that I'd let up on Atomic Robo for a few weeks and get back to it in a big way after GenCon. This would've pushed ARRPG back about a month, but whatever -- as long the delay wasn't going to stem directly from me, I was fine with it.

But it became clear pretty quickly that the changes in Fate Core that'd prompted Fred to reach out to Brian and me in the first place are simply too significant for ARRPG, in its current state, to escape unscathed. If I were to leave ARRPG as-is, the GenCon playtests would be... less than productive. They'd still be good for buzz and hype and all that, but the playtesters probably wouldn't be contributing to its development. And that's not really an option, from my perspective.

What to do? We can't cancel those playtests. I don't want playtests that aren't actually playtests. Nope. The only way out is through.

To that end, I'm now going to be working on both projects simultaneously, incorporating as many of the changes to Fate Core as possible into ARRPG before getting on that plane to Indy. If you playtest ARRPG at GenCon, know that you'll also be among the first, for all intents and purposes, to playtest Fate Core. 

You're probably asking, "What are these changes to Fate Core that are affecting Robo so significantly?" No? You weren't asking that? Well, I'll just proceed as if you were. I'm not going to go into that here, because both games are still in development, but I will say that Lenny's taking a really cool, inspired new direction with Fate I really like. And if I like it, it's gotta be good, right? 

To paraphrase Philip J. Fry, "Don't you worry about Fate Core. Let me worry about blank."

Anyway. I'm still figuring out just how much ARRPG's going to feel all this. I suspect it might not require a ground-up redesign of some fundamental subsystems. I also suspect I may be wrong about that. But whatever -- it's all good. I'm up for it. My duties on Fate Core involve writing/re-writing about half the book, so rest assured I'll be at the epicenter of this thing from start to finish.

TL;DR: I'm also working on Fate Core now in addition to Atomic Robo. It's going to be awesome. See you at GenCon.

In the meantime, go back Race To Adventure!