Building Blocks

[bryant]

I’m still trying to fuse the brilliant combat engine from D&D 4e with the brilliant narrative engine from Gumshoe. You may not have known I was trying to do this. But I am.

Let’s skip over the skills question for now and pretend that we have a Gumshoe adventure all mapped out, with the multiple paths and the clues and the major and minor scenes. It’s a flowchart, basically. None of these scenes are directly combat-related, although it may require combat to reach a given scene. Here, have a PDF example. Contains spoilers for the Esoterrorists sample adventure, though!

Now: for each scene, we may (not must) attach either a prerequisite combat, a resulting combat, or both. A prerequisite combat is a fight you need to engage in, or possibly win, in order to get to the clue scene. The clue scene might be really brief; e.g., maybe the fight happens and one of the combatants has the clue on him. Or, say, you have to fight through the kobolds to get to the secret lair in which more information is available.

A resulting combat is when they come after you for finding a clue. Actions have consequences. I think it’s important to make the linkage super-clear for the best narrative effect.

The idea is that by strongly pairing investigative scenes and combat scenes, you reduce any chance that the players will feel like they’re playing two different concurrent games with the same set of characters. This is just a theory right now. I should probably test it sometime.

Another tangential note: you could maybe keep skill challenges as long as you went with the current WotC approach, which is that failed skill challenges result in problems rather than failures. This is attractive in that skill challenges seem to be cool, but I think it’s too much of a departure from the Gumshoe skill model. Or you could ditch the Gumshoe model altogether and make clue acquisition into skill challenges? I don’t know how to run skill challenges well enough to do this, however.

Originally published at Imaginary Vestibule.

Comments

[head58.livejournal.com]

I still don't get Gumshoe, I must admit. Would you be willing to run a one-shot at some point, maybe in the guise of testing out this hybrid abomination you're putting together?

[bryant]

Oh, sure. Probably just run it as a straight one-shot, forget the abomination for now -- that way you're not trying to figure out the Gumshoe system at the same time.

[mcroft.livejournal.com]

This is not the game for me. I want to avoid the fights be being a clever dick.

"Great, we have the clue! Let's get moving!" "We can't, we have to have the mandatory fight."

"OK, we're done here." "How do you know?" "We had the fight..."

[bryant]

Probably not. I mean, if you're not sitting around occasionally going "man, I love Gumshoe, but I wish there it had a strong combat system so I could get my battlemap on some of the time..."

Well. I may be the only person like that, of course. Also I want to run fantasy cops some day, and the gunfight in Heat is really permanently stuck in my mind.

[mcroft.livejournal.com]

I am totally down with you wanting something I don't want and going about making it. I just think it's funny that my response is "Huh, Gumshoe isn't for heavy combat play? Maybe I should look into it..."

[bryant]

Oh, dude! Yes you should. I think it's one of the most important systems that's been published in the last decade. Certainly on a par with (say) MLWM as a paradigm-changer.

[mcroft.livejournal.com]

"Systems published in the last decade" is a Jeopardy category I'd do poorly in, but I won't hold that against it...

[bryant]

I thought about saying "it's as significant as Amber Diceless," but I thought that might be pandering. ;)

[mcroft.livejournal.com]

:) Given Kuhn's definition of paradigm shifts in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I suspect I am a "hold out" for the old paradigm...

[bryant]

(But a more serious note -- "may not must." I think that's an important clause, for all the reasons you implied.)

[mcroft.livejournal.com]

yep. I slid through those three words when I saw "prerequisite".

I want combat to a possible but not required step in the process. Sometimes.

[mneme]

Start by using a skill challenge system that isn't broken (unlike the book, or even post-edit Wizards systems. I'm told the "Obsidian" homebrew system is good).

That said, I think you could use use a two-path flowchart, with "failure" on a skill challenge (all too common/too rare in the wizards systems, but should be possible) taking the low road, and success taking the high one.

Actually, one approach that could work is that clue-finding is often either preceeded or followed by -either- a skill challenge or a combat. Fail the combat, and you end up (following the Gumshoe logic) captured, with a skill challenge to get out. Fail a skill challenge, and you'll usually end up in a combat, but might end up with another skill challenge. If you want, you can try to avoid a combat -- using a skill challenge (we run away from the guards! Chase scene!), and sometimes you have a choice to start with ("do you sneak past the golems or fight them?"). If you fail the "second chance", things move on, but you're now in a worse situation; fail enough and you should have the option of solving the mysteries but not surviving to do anything about it.

[bryant]

Oh, combat or skill challenge is an interesting approach and I rather like it. I'll have to think about that.

Tangentially (and it's really another post), I'm pretty sure that the skill challenge system developed at WotC has very little to do with anything that's appeared in either the rulebooks or Mike Mearls' writeups. I also think the skill challenge system they developed is probably pretty good, but also too complex for novices to use to develop new skill challenges, which may have something to do with why it's not committed to paper.

A quick scan of published skill challenges demonstrates that they're almost all about whether or not you wind up on the high road or the low road; few of them are about success or failure. Also, there's a resource management aspect. E.g., a skill challenge about overland travel tends to have a feature like "someone needs to roll Endurance every hour, or you lose healing surges."

But you can't make the skill challenges as published using the DMG rules, even with the errata. Wizards authors do a bunch of other funky undocumented stuff. Which is OK, you can extrapolate, but everything else in the rules is clear and well-documented, so it really stands out.

This is a subject for a standalone post with more examples at some point.

[mneme]

I figured combat or challenge would fulfill mcroft's desire to be able to avoid combats in an organic fashion.

I'm not sure your intuition about what was developed at Wizards is correct; I mean, clearly good use of it both involves a high road/low road split rather than true success/failure (actually, that one made it into the published version, even if trap-related challenges tend to be very hr/lr). And clearly you really want to add more to the system to make it work; you want a race against time (so Aids are a valid strategic choice, but can be controlled some way other than a hard limit), or maybe a resource management mechanic with similar effects -- otherwise, optimal behavior ends up at odds with fun behavior -- the fundamental disconnect. And to a degree, the challenges Wizards publishes do follow these rules, even though their rules for making them up? Not so much.

But I'm not sure they've really articulated how this should work -- or they'd have coded something like it into the DMG version.

[bryant]

Yeah, the rules for playing through them are accurate. There just aren't guidelines for making up the sorts of challenges you see in modules all the time.

I think you may be right about articulation. The "real" rules probably aren't on paper.