Thread by @AlexandraErin

So I've mentioned that I've been doing a lot of AFK stuff (cleaning, sorting, exercising) since I started my meds, which has given me a lot of time to reflect on my tabletop game design project, kind of galvanized by the fact that I read the Dishonored RPG last Friday.

Thread about that, focusing mainly on the element of it I found so much inspiration in, here:

https://twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1446455193030336514

The approach Mophidius took in Dishonored helped me refine something I was trying to do in my game, with regards to allowing players to define how well their character performs in various areas *without* referring to innate mental or physical attributes.

I had been working on something I called the action matrix, which would be a major feature of the character sheet and perform a function similar to the stat + skill approach that D&D and many of its Descendants & Derivatives use, but it never quite clicked for me.

So the way the action matrix works... the first step in filling it out is now almost identical to the major step of creating a character in Dishonored TTRPG:

You have six actions and six approaches. You assign a rating to each of them.

The "ratings" in my system are dice. There's a standard array of six of them, though a table is free to substitute their own if they want characters who skew more down to earth or larger than life. The default array is d2, d4, d4, d6, d8, and d10. (Repetition of d4 intentional.)

The actions are: Attack, Consider, Defend, Fiddle, Influence, and Move. Fiddle might be renamed; it has previously been Use and Manipulate. It's actions involving tool use, physically manipulating objects in the environment, or fine motor skills.

These are not actions as in "this game has six moves and you must phrase everything you do as one of them" but rather "most things you do which may be contested or have stakes, requiring an action check, can be sorted into one of these six things".

And then the six approaches -- lightly inspired/adapted from Dishonored's six styles and Fate Accelerated's six approaches... are Bold, Clever, Careful, Flash, Quick, and Sneaky.

So you've got a die assigned to each of those twelve things, and when you're in a situation that calls for an action check, the player describes what they're doing and either picks an action and an approach that fits or the game runner suggests what it would be.

They roll the dice indicated by the action and approach, along with any other dice they have from special abilities or modifiers. The highest number rolled is the result; individual dice don't matter. If you have five 1s and a 12, you rolled 12.

I know some people will instinctively rebel against the idea that you could have a bunch of 1s and not be penalized from it, but key to this idea is that MORE or BIGGER dice in a pool will always be an unalloyed good, even if you add a bunch of d2s to a pool with a d12.

The basic scale here, absent any modifiers or some kind of opposed roll, is:
1: Failure
2 or 3: Mixed results, with some options as befits the situation.
4 or higher: Success, with higher rolls translating to more impressive successes with possible side effects.

"Mixed results" could be halfway there, if that's applicable (and not strictly worse than not doing it at all, as in "jumping halfway across a bottomless pit), or success at a cost, or you're in a better position for the next attempt, or you failed but succeeded at something else

Now, if you've been picking this up and taking it apart as I lay it down, you might have noticed that there's a 1d2 in the default starting ratings, and a d2 can't reach full success, which means every character will have one action/approach combo they suck at.

So far, the way the ratings and math involved works inside, this is *very* similar to Dishonored TTRPG. But this is actually ground work for the action matrix, which is a six by six grid with the approaches as columns and the actions as rows.

As you might guess, you fill out the grid cells by putting the action die and the approach die in them. The next step in the character creation process is to "specialize" by taking another copy of the starting dice array and distributing them (limit one per cell) in the grid.

You can use those six specializations to shore up some of your weak spots, like by turning that d2/d2 action/approach into a d10/d2/d2 one, or to double down on your strong points, like turning your d10/d10 grid square into d10/d10/d10.

Having a space on the character sheet for each of the 36 combinations of actions and approaches also gives a way to Wounds (long-term injuries that impair a character until they're dealt with.)

First Wound imposes disadvantage on one grid cell. Second one on two more. And so on.

Serendipitously, that escalation adds up to exactly 36 at the eighth wound... 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 = 36.

My current notion is that when a character takes a wound, they get a saving throw to figure out if they choose which squares get marked or if it's random.

Intrinsic to the concept is the ratings of the approaches and actions *don't* correspond to specific physical or mental qualities of a character; you can have a high Influence because you're pretty or because you have a strong personality or because psychic mind control aura...

...and whatever the story reason behind it is doesn't matter to the game, which doesn't care *why* your character is influential, only how influential they are, as measured in a size of die.

The character creation guide has a line in it to the effect that you don't have to justify the way your action matrix is allocated to anyone, it only has to make sense to you, and then only as much sense as you need.

The last wrinkle to the action matrix that affects all player characters is something I call "star qualities", which are one action, one approach, and one of either that get marked with an *.

Star qualities have both game and story effects. Game mechanic wise, the player can spend a star point (like a fate point or action point or whatever) to add a d12 to the pool of any one roll that uses a star quality, or a gold star point (same but bigger/rarer) to add a d20.

Story wise... players are invited but not required to invent Lore attached to the star qualities, to explain the occasional burst of exceptional and borderline superhuman ability and give cues for how to describe them in narration.

So a paladin character might have Attack as a star quality with the Lore of "channels divine radiance into weapons to smite enemies and a rogue/assassin character might have the same Attack star quality with "targets the victim's weak point with unerring accuracy".

The Lore is a story element that doesn't change the mechanics of how it works, but if you roll greatly in excess of the success threshold of 4 (which is likely when you're rolling a d12 or d20) you can add a bonus effect to your success...

...and one of the purposes of attaching Lore to the star qualities is to give players a prompt for possible boons in that event, such as a character whose star quality on the Fiddle action is "a swarm of tiny helper animals helps" could then have one perform an unrelated errand.

Doesn't really fit the Assumed Medieval-Ish Setting milieu, nor does it strongly convey to me that it's talking about interacting with physical objects and not people.

https://twitter.com/bach_tigh/status/1448098163420708864

Anyway. The upshot of this is that it's a system that, with a high degree of abstraction, can pack a *lot* of character definitions and a lot of abstract and flexible approximations of many standard D&D-type class features into a short and simple bit of character creation.

And I mentioned the Assumed Medieval-Ish Setting a couple of tweets up because I'm specifically developing this for a more character-and-story-focused D&D substitute (I assure you I do not mean Dungeon World), but nothing here isn't setting/genre-portable.

If you want to take it completely out of the action-adventure genre and into something that rarely involves combat you may want to rephrase Attack and Defend as something like Oppose or Interfere and Support, or drop them and split Influence into more specific social actions.

The Action Matrix is a substantial chunk of the character creation process but it's not the whole of it. I mentioned saving throws upthread; having characters roll Defend for all resist/avoid/withstand situations would make it overvalued in a D&D-ish combat game...

...so it's reserved for active defense of oneself or another, and characters have a separate and simpler (no approaches, no grid matrix) set of saves:
Physical Resistance, Mental Resistance, Reflexes, Awareness, Savoir Faire, and Plot Relevance.

Physical and Mental Resistance are exactly what they sound like, with the caveat that again they describe outcomes rather than attributes; a character might be a frail weakling with a d10 in Physical Resistance reflecting bizarre luck.

Basically, Physical Resistance, Mental Resistance, and Reflexes perform the rolls of the three standard saves from D&D 3E.

Alertness is used for saving throws to spot/notice things. It's not *just* for spotting hidden dangers and ambushes, but the fact that it's so often checked passively/reactively is why it's in saving throws.

Savoir-Faire is like the defensive version of Influence; you can roll Savoir-Faire to know when someone is lying to you, manipulating to you, concealing a motive, etc. A Savoir-Faire saving throw will also protect your from committing a faux pas or falling into a social trap.

And then Plot Relevance... characters with a rating in Plot Relevance get an extra saving throw against anything that would take them out of a fight, scene, or story, or deprive them of a major part of their character's whole deal, or infringe on their main character-ness.

It's the Plot Relevance saving throw that you roll, in particular, to find out if you decide what squares on your Action Matrix take the effects of your Wounds.

And that's basically the core of the game. There's more steps to character creation that are basically optional advanced sub-systems; if your table doesn't want to complicate things you can treat things like equipment, background, education, etc. as more Lore.

But if you *do* want to complicate things, there's a skills system (similar to Dishonored's "Focuses"); e.g., if you have a skill in Lockpicks or Pickpocket, you put another die in your pool when you're trying to Fiddle a lock open or Fidel a purse off someone's person, etc...

...and a system for defining specific items and gear your character has and a system for both spellcasting (you know specific spells) and spellcrafting (you can make a series of rolls to try to create magic effects as needed).

But as much as I like my elaborate subsystems and super detailed character creation structure, I *really* dig the simplicity of the action matrix and its appendages, which I think makes a great framework for running a quick-and-dirty game in basically any setting and genre.

I mentioned Lore with a capital L a couple times in this thread. It's my equivalent of what Fate calls "aspects" and Dishonored calls "truths", as my game has a heavy storytelling focus: Lore is big picture stuff that is stipulated to be both true and meaningful in the story.

"Big picture" here meaning stuff that has a persistent or recurring presence in the game. The equivalent small picture version of Lore is called Details; like aspects or truths in the aforementioned games, Details can serve as narrative "status effects" in play.

So if an archer pins someone to a wall with an arrow through their jacket, the fact that they are Pinned To The Wall is a Detail; if they do it through the hand, the hand injury may pass into Lore.

The game text will make the point that the distinction between Details and Lore can be more art than science and it's not necessary to pin down which, if any, every thing that gets narrated into the story is. But the mechanics for a player to unilaterally add Details is easier...

...than the mechanics for a player to unilaterally add Lore in mid-play, so even as more of an art than a science, it's useful for the distinction to exist.

Drafting out my thoughts, I've decided to broaden Defend into Aid, making it a catch-all for physically defending another character, "giving the Help action", treating wounds/conditions, etc.

https://twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1448092399411073029

This way there's a single action that a player can invest in to make A Support Character, the same way they would invest in Attack to make A DPS Character, and there aren't two whole actions that are strongly combat-centric.

The saving throw system I detailed in the thread can handle most cases of "defending myself against an incoming threat", without involving the action system and either requiring players to trade a chance to attack every time they roll to avoid an attack or making one action free.