MULTI% – PART 2

The Journey Continues

This is part 2 of my post exploring For the King’s universal resolution roll. If you haven’t yet, consider checking out part 1! While not necessary reading, its insights lay the groundwork for the design work I’ll be doing here. It’s also a great way to familiarize yourself with the mechanic if you have not yet played the games.

Consider the following an application of that study.

Rolling the Dice

If we wanted to bring FtK’s universal resolution roll back to the table(top), how would we make it happen?

For this exercise I am going to be removing focus from the equation, just because I feel like I won’t bring anything especially interesting to the discussion right now. You can port the digital system into analogue play with little friction. (In the future, if I were to look at it, I would want to mess with its form a little bit and explore a more tactile approach to managing it at the table.)

Despite naming this resolution system multi%, I think multiple percentile rolls are actually pretty unfeasible for any physical version of this mechanic, so we’re going to have to reduce die size if we want to keep rolling multiple dice on a single test.

D20, your next die down, is going to be the most true-to-form option, allowing for a bit of a bit of granularity in terms of adding and subtracting modifiers. Despite this, I can’t help but feel like trying to check 5d20s for whether they are under your target number of 17 is still going to be a bit of a hassle. This is such a silly little qualm but if ease-of-use is the thing we are aiming to improve here, then I think we can do better.

D12 I will discard right away because its probability is illegible without a calculator (unless you can internalize multiples of +/-8.3%). As a result it loses some of that intuitive understanding of what modifying your target number means.

D10 is the way to go, I think. While we’ve cut away a large amount of the granularity, we’ve maintained a pretty quick-to-grasp percentile analogue. Modifiers applied to your target number will have to be a little more sparse, but I think fewer modifiers will incidentally serve the analogue format better by lightening the cognitive load. Plus, to my surprise, you can purchase batches of d10s, so it’s even got points for feasibility.

This is, of course, without any playtesting, so we’ll have to see if things get too swingy in play.

A Numbers Game

To summarize my meandering in the analysis section, a target number is determined through the following:

1. A base number is set by your class.
2. That number is consistently modified by your equipment.
3. You can receive buffs and debuffs that temporarily modify that number further.
4. Certain abilities have conditional modifiers for that specific test.

I don’t want to get into the class design just yet, but I think you could easily create a character by assigning the following numbers (7,7,6,6,5,5) across your attributes (strength, vitality, intelligence, awareness, talent, and speed). The 7th attribute, luck, is always set to 5.

I’m going to see if I can port Male Lesbian, the Stablehand, over to this system I’m going to round all my starting stats down:

Male Lesbian

7 Strength
6 Vitality
5 Intelligence
6 Awareness
5 Talent
7 Speed
5 Luck

In the interest of keeping modifiers infrequent and impactful here, instead of equipping several slots of apparel, you can only equip an outfit and an accessory — arms will come later. This would allow us to split attribute modifiers and special effects into two distinct equipment categories. Let’s start by giving our outfit a form of defense, one +1 modifier, and one -1 modifier.

I played Male Lesbian as a little speedster, so I would look for a piece of clothing that gave me evasion and +1 speed, but this one gives me -1 vitality. A small price to pay. I’ll also equip a spyglass which allows me to scout an extra hex away. Cool!

Buffs and debuffs tend to come up during the course of a session and are much more “temporary” than these modifications, so it makes less sense to track them on the sheet. Let’s give Male Lesbian an injury just for fun though. Let’s say he broke his arm or something, which is gonna give him a whopping -2 to strength until he can receive medical attention.

Now my stats look like this:

Male Lesbian

5 Strength
5 Vitality
5 Intelligence
6 Awareness
5 Talent
8 Speed
5 Luck

Spyglass: Scout +1 range

Not looking too hot, Male. All that’s left to do now is throw him at a challenge.

What test should he be faced with, though?

Abilities for a Living World

In For the King, you do not have an ability to swing your sword, but rather, your sword has an ability that tells you how it wants to be swung. All you bring is your general proclivities for such a task and the agency to direct the ability inherent in the thing you have chosen to interact with.

This is a sharp distinction from other ability-based games. Unlike in other games, your abilities here, with the exception of some passive abilities, are entirely external to the character you control. They exist in your equipment, in your environment, and in the obstacles you face. It takes something traditionally associated with “the character” and transfers it to “the world,” which animates it in a way that is ripe for sandboxy, environment-based roleplay.

The design limitations of digital programming allowed FtK to hone this concept within the scope of its finite, quick-to-complete campaigns, but I think the emergent narratives that arise out of TTRPGs both allow — and even demand — a more expansive application. What does it mean to take the premise that it is something external to the character that determines your abilities and extend it to its logical limits?

More than a Blade

Arms are emblematic of the “external ability” and consequently begs to be extended. As described in part 1, each weapon has its own internal set of 1-3 tests that determine how it can be interacted with. A greatsword might have a basic attack ability, an ability that attacks and inflicts bleed, and an ability to stun a target via pommel strike. A lute might have a basic magic attack that inflicts splash damage on a perfect strike, and a second ability that moves allies ahead in turn order.

What if the same could be said for other tools? Perhaps we play with a logger’s axe with an ability to cleave a foe, sure, but also the ability to fell a tree. Maybe we find a net with an ability to trip a target and an ability to catch fish. Maybe a torch has an ability to light up a dark area and an ability to ignite something in the environment. Maybe I am an artisan who has a magnifying glass with an ability to appraise and a charm with an ability to ward away a spirit.

Each item you can interact with comes with a predefined set of interactions which imply its use. This might be consistent across that category of item, but can also allow for items to define themselves in contrast to these expectations. Much like in FtK, where you might find a dagger that deals magic damage and tests intelligence, maybe this particular torch doesn’t set things on fire at all but instead can be used to reveal something hidden. Maybe this axe can’t be used for logging, but can be used to intimidate or waylay someone.

Systemic vs. Bespoke Abilities

This is where I start to find some real traction in this concept. What I’ve described above gestures to two distinct approaches to designing play for this mechanic. The first is a generalized, systemic approach to designing abilities. When I am designing for a category of subject, whether it’s a sword or a fishing rod, I am designing towards resolving the most obvious interactions with the subject and setting in place a procedure for interacting with that category.

The second, bespoke approach, instead designs towards the unique qualities of a specific thing, sometimes in contrast to a general category of the same thing. Taking a systemic approach and then altering a single result on the results table of a single ability creates a completely distinct choice for the player to consider. This approach is geared equally well towards making things like high-fantasy magical artifacts, storied belongings, and mechanics tied to a specific location as is commonly explored in adventure design.

If you’re familiar with “”The OSR”” you might have recognized that this loosely maps to system vs. adventure design. What I consider to be a unique boon to this mechanic is that it is able to hold both approaches to design and present them cleanly within the same framework. Designing the God-blessed artifact version of a regular sword does not layer additional design work on top of a static concept, but rather modifies the existing rules.

The House Casts Fireball

To demonstrate another way this concept can be extended, let’s push this out of our inventory and into the environment. FtK already does this to an extent. A trap room has 1 or 2 tests you can choose from to cross the threshold, and random events throughout the hexmap will ask you to complete a test as well. When I consider designing whole roleplay environments around this concept, however, I want to explore more nonlinear approaches to play where there is not always a “solution” to getting through, but instead define abilities that, like equipment, suggest how you might interact with a space.

To focus my exploration, let’s take a keyed room out of The Waking of Willowby Hall by Ben Milton and see how we might design abilities for the room itself. The keys for the Inner Sanctum (p.27) are as follows:

Our goals here are not to recreate this key using abilities. Instead, we will define distinct elements and identify 1-3 methods of interacting with those elements, which we will then define as abilities.

Let’s start by defining our core elements. These are the elements that are immediately obvious to the character:

• Alchemy Table
• Floor Rug
• East Wall
• Locked Cabinet

These pretty easily correspond to the four primary keys in this room. Off to a good start. Some of these elements have other sub-elements that are accessed by interacting with the core element. Let’s define those:

• Black Candle (via alchemy table)
• Alchemical circle (via rug)
• “Herculium” potion (via cabinet)
• “Liquid Childhood” potion (via cabinet)
• “Gift of the Worm” potion (via cabinet)

Now we can start designing abilities for these elements. Step 1 is to determine the most obvious modes of interaction and to assign them an attribute corresponding with that action. Let’s start with the alchemy table. The most obvious modes of interaction to me are:

• Examine (awareness) — I imagine this is how you will get access to the candle.
• Brew Potion (intelligence) — an alchemist will want to make use of it.
• Disassemble (talent) — how else are you gonna pocket this expensive equipment?

Then for each one of those interactions, we are going to define a number of dice, the type of result (graduated, fringe, binary, or irregular), and how to interpret the number of successes.

• Examine (awareness), 2 dice.
  • 1-2: Find Black Candle
  • 0: Damage Alchemy Table
• Brew Potion (intelligence), 5 dice. Consumes 5 reagents.
  • Brew potions equal to number of successes.
  • 0: Alchemy Table explodes, dealing 8 physical damage.
• Disassemble (talent), 2 die.
  • Remove Alchemy Table and obtain treasure = 250gp x number of successes.

By now, you should have a sense of the process of designing abilities around environmental elements. You should also be starting to notice some quirks of this mechanic that need to be considered as part of the design process.

For fun, let’s throw Male Lesbian at this Alchemy Table and see what happens.

Male Lesbian approaches the Alchemy Table. He doesn’t have high scores in any of the associated stats with the table, but he has a slight edge with an awareness score of 6, so he’s going to try examining it. It’s not a particularly dangerous roll anyways.

He rolls 2 dice: 7 and 1. This is 1 success, which is enough to find the Black Candle. He adds it to his inventory. Good job Mr. Lesbian.

The Quirks

Below is a list of some loose observations that I think would strongly inform design work around this mechanic.

• Designing abilities in this way means making large amounts of environmental information player-facing. Even if the results of an action are hidden, the player will always know what actions are available to be taken.
• Abilities provide a limited number of “buttons to be pressed”, limiting player-based creative problem solving. Players will instead be encouraged to play towards altering their odds of success using defined strategies in play. There are arbitrary limitations on which actions can be taken which can be applied by game makers in creative ways to affect things like genre of play. The solutions are on your character sheet in this instance… or rather your equipment’s sheet.
• Predefined abilities also limits GM Fiat and emphasizes rules over rulings. This makes this mechanic somewhat more suitable for proceduralizing solo play. If you do play as a GM, you will be collaging elements in the environment as you might assemble a deck of cards, and letting your players discover the deck through play. (I believe building out a deck of elements might actually be the best way to design towards this mechanic).

Escaping the Dungeon

Despite converting the Waking of Willowby Hall for a conversion above, I don’t actually think dungeon delving is the best or easiest application of this mechanic. I said at the end of part 1 that I think I found some diamonds with this mechanic. What better to do with diamonds than to make a diamond pickaxe? 👀

---

BONUS: Early Notes Written While Falling Asleep At 3AM

i think the biggest barrier to using this at the table is just the clunk of the percentile dice, so the goal of the modification would to make that experience less overwhelming. Initially i thought a swap to d6 could be fun but im a bit worried at how swingy that math could be. i also wonder if simplifying the math behind the partial success and doing a fail/partial/perfect grade for each ability would be more gamable?

d6s however are pretty dang legible and easy to access over other dice

i think d10 would have enough gradation to be friendlier for ghe buildcraft but also harder to get a read in the moment. also where does one even find a piol of d10s

could also plsy with dice size as opposed to target number. so maybe suxcess is 1 2 or 3. then hou van maybe downgrade dice somehow? could be unterresting with rhe multiple rolls foo because what if thwy not all the same dicensize

remidns me i wanna draft haste spells on ascending atb inifiafivw wifh diebwrejsy there

we are fhe sodium pony

ince fhe packaging eilla our qeoo be dinle

im hungeh

weml