ars ludi

“Is it pious because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it’s pious?”
– Plato

I was having brunch with Ping and John Harper, so naturally talk turned to the complicated relationships between heroes and gods.

John was saying he wanted Agon to be a game where in the long run the heroes wound up with complex, even adversarial, relationships with their gods instead of just being dependent on them. After all when you’ve got a d12 Name die, is a d12 god oath really that big a deal anymore?

Very cool stuff, but as written the Agon rules don’t do enough to support really juicy god-hero relationships. First there’s a pitfall where a hero has a particular patron god but the Antagonist has set up a quest that will clearly offend that god. What’s a young hero to do, take the quest or be faithful to their god? It’s potentially a cool point of friction, but it only works if it presents the player with interesting choices. Right now it’s either do the quest or reject it and blow a Fate — no fun.

A second problem is that a hero’s relationship with the gods doesn’t change. If you do take a quest that offends your patron nothing happens. You can hand wave the god rejecting you, but it’s all arbitrary. Angering gods is also a big part of the genre, but you have no method of tracking all the gods you cheese off along the way.

Here’s an add-on that tracks your ongoing relationship with the gods. Tick off your patron god too much and maybe you better start making sacrifices to someone else next interlude…

Optional Rule: Wrath of the Gods

A hero has a separate relationship with each god. Heroic deeds and bold words can change these relationships, provoking the anger or affection of each god.

Write down god relationships at the bottom of the Oaths section of your character sheet. Use the box to track any god oaths you have as normal, but after the god’s name write your relationship score. A positive relationship means the god likes you, a negative score means you’ve angered the god.

Pick a patron god at character creation as usual — you start with a +2 relationship with that god. You begin with a 0 relationship with the other gods, but don’t bother to write them all down until you interact with them and your relationship changes.

Serving the Gods — Whenever you complete a quest for a god improve your relationship with that god by 1.

Angering the Gods — If you do something that offends a god, like slaying their favored hero or pet monster, reduce your relationship with that god by 1. Deeds that directly attack a god or its name, like sacking a temple or impugning the love goddess’s beauty, reduce the relationship by 2. Refusing a god’s quest reduces your relationship by 1.

Changing Patrons — You can choose a different god as your patron whenever you want, so long as you make a bold pronouncement about it. Take a -1 to your relationship with your old patron. During Interludes you can only sacrifice to your (current) patron god.

Sacrifice — The only mechanical effect of your relationship is sacrifice. When you sacrifice during an Interlude, take your (relationship - 2) as a modifier to your die roll. You’ll always get your divine favor back, but you are less likely to get a god oath and escape impairment if your patron is mad at you, and more likely if your god is pleased.

Let’s say I start with Zeus as my patron god. After a few quests, the bottom of my Oaths section looks like this:

Zeus +1
Ares +2
Hera -1

Now I’m at a -1 when I sacrifice to Zeus. Hmm, I might have to start thinking of switching to Ares as my patron god.

A bad relationship won’t prevent a god from giving you a quest, but it can and should color things. When an angry god issues the quest it might be more of a threat than a challenge — Hera descends in a thundering cloud and demands the heroes do her bidding or risk her wrath. On the other hand a good relationship means the hero is loved by the god and will be showered with affection and pride.

The Antagonist can (and should) use the evolving relationships between the heroes and the gods to guide future quests. Man those heroes have annoyed Hera again and again. Time for her to get some revenge!

For extra fun instead of just showing the total, put the total positive and negative points you’ve accumulated for the god in parenthesis. Apollo +1 tells you how the god feels towards you right now, but Apollo +1 (+7/-6) shows that your relationship with the god has been a divine roller coaster ride.

Because heroes can wind up with a net bonus for sacrifices if they please their patron they’re more likely to get god oaths. Of course the Antagonists can always throw in some quests against the wishes of their patron god to slow that down…

Heroes are free to switch patrons to take advantage of good relationships that develop but there’s a hidden cost: during character creation a player generally picks a patron god with sacrifice abilities that match their hero’s strengths, but the new god might not match up so well. What’s better, keep the god with the preferred abilities or get the bonus for the good relationship? It’s up to you.

For added zing you could also let heroes pick a second god during character creation that is hostile to them and take a -2 relationship with that god. Your father offended Artemis and you may wind up paying the price. You could also let half-divine characters start with a +4 with their patron but a mandatory -4 with an enemy god.

And yeah, it could use a better name. I would have called it “divine favor” but that was already taken…

For extra credit, take 3 minutes and think how you could use this whole thing as a plugin for any game with lots of relationships with the gods (hint: all you have to do is remove the one line about the sacrifice rules). I knew violating that shrine of Bahamut would come back to haunt me…

One of these guys has already taken 7 hit points of damage. Now if I can just remember which one…

I’ve run lots and lots of games where I’ve tracked the individual hit points of every orc on the battle map. Every GM comes up with their own clever methods of remembering which figure took what damage, but in the end it’s a lot of work for little benefit, and it just gets worse the more critters you add and the later at night the game goes.

A simple alternative is the hit point pile: track the total damage done to similar creatures as one big pile. Ignore which particular creature was hit. Just keep adding up the damage, and when the total is enough to kill one, the one that just got hit dies. Set the pile to zero and start over again (excess damage is lost).

There are twenty gnolls and each has 13 hit points. Fred attacks one for 7 damage, then Charlie attacks a different one for 4 damage — that’s 11 damage on the pile so far. Next Anastasia attacks a third gnoll for 6 damage, which kills it even though it had never been attacked before. The GM knocks over the figure Anastasia attacked and sets the damage pile back to 0. Nineteen gnolls to go.

If you have different groups of creatures use separate piles for each one (one pile for the goblins, one for the wolves). For unique creatures or very small groups just track hit points the normal way.

Because damage is concentrated on a single enemy at a time, opponents die faster when you use hit point piles.

This is less of an issue than it seems, because smart players already tend to gang up on one opponent until it is dead instead of wounding a bunch of different enemies that could still fight back. It’s logical, but unfortunately it smells lame - in the real world a bunch of knights don’t surround one enemy on the battlefield at a time, but without facing rules to penalize you it’s often the smartest choice in d20.

Hit point piles give the players the benefit of ganging up on one guy without embarrassing themselves by actually doing it. Tactical benefit + aesthetically pleasing.

There are a few potential pitfalls of in-game logic and metagaming:

- An unlucky character could keep hitting the same opponent over and over and again but never take them out because someone else keeps getting a killing blow.

- A lowly court jester can take a stab at a theoretically “fresh” enemy and kill him if other characters have already done damage elsewhere (this only seems strange when you think in terms of hit points, not a real fight).

- If your players are tactical metagamers they may try to do things like have a weak attacker go when they think the total is almost enough for a kill so that a stronger attacker doesn’t waste damage on an “overkill,” but if your players are that motivated to track this kind of thing a simplified system is probably not for you anyway.

The solution? Run two piles at a time instead of one. Decide which of the two piles to add the latest attack to as you prefer (or just alternate) and don’t tell the players. Does it seem like Fred has been beating on that gnoll for a while? Add his attack to the most damaged pile. Did a hobbit just kick someone in the shins? Add it to the undamaged pile, not the pile that’s an inch from death.

Running two or even three piles is still simple and fast, and certainly less overhead than tracking individual hit points for each critter.

Player: “… and after enumerating the logistical problems, I finish up by explaining that if the King invades now, he’s just repeating the same mistakes that doomed Badon IV when he marched into these very lands two hundred years ago, a fatal error that brought his glorious reign to an ignominous end.”

Player: “… I roll a 3.”

You’ve seen it happen. A player says something really interesting, really moving in character when trying to use a social skill, but cannot back it up with dice to save their life.

The first urge as GM is just to say “well forget the numbers, that sounded good to me, it works.” Good call, but the downside is that then you are just ignoring character stats entirely, which penalizes players who maybe aren’t so eloquent or pithy but still built characters who are supposed to be charming masters of discourse.

A better solution would be to combine roleplaying and character stats, taking the best of both worlds. How would you do that? How about assigning a virtual roll based on how good the roleplaying was, then apply character abilities to that virtual roll just like normal? Let roleplaying replace the dice instead of having the dice replace roleplaying.

I’ll use d20 as a specific example, but the concept should work for any system that uses dice to resolve social interactions.

When a character roleplays a social action that would normally require a roll, instead of the player rolling a die the GM assigns the result of the die roll based on the roleplaying (”your speech was good enough that we’ll say you rolled a 15″). If you want some consensus democracy you can let the whole group decide what the virtual roll should be, or even just let the player assign their own score — it all depends on what kind of group you have (insert social contract here).

The default is a 10 (aka taking 10) even if you don’t roleplay at all or have nothing interesting to say. This is important because the goal is _not_ to penalize people who aren’t up for roleplaying. You should only assign a number below 10 when the player uses an argument that is particularly bad for some reason (like threatening the king, or unintentionally citing a bunch of mistakes he made recently and is still sore about).

Assign a number that seems right to you. A 15 is nicely done, and a 20 is reserved for really impressive roleplaying (naturally). You shouldn’t have a hard time coming up with the virtual roll, because you’re already used to thinking in terms of these scores — years of gaming have given you a keen sense of how good it would be to roll an 18, for example.

Now that you’ve determined the virtual roll, just proceed to add skill ranks, ability modifiers, etc to the roll and resolve the results as you normally would.

Let’s take a classic diplomatic example:

A PC knight tries to convince a weary king to join the war and save the besieged city. The character has a moderate Diplomacy score, but the player is making really good arguments, bringing in the King’s past, the plight of the people, rah rah rah.

After some consideration everyone agrees the knight did a very good job, and the group decides on a virtual roll of 16. He has a Diplomacy +6, so he gets a total of 22. Not bad.

To make things interesting let’s say another player is against the idea, and her character is trying to point out all the flaws in the plan, how it will mire the country in an unwinnable war, etc. Her priest has very sharp social skills, but the player is just saying “err, I tell him it’s a bad idea. It will go badly. Really badly.”

The priest doesn’t throw in any roleplaying, so she just takes 10, but her Diplomacy is +11 so she gets a 21. Or since she isn’t roleplaying, you could just have her roll as normal.

An interesting side effect is that you even though you aren’t penalizing people who don’t roleplay, you may encourage people who normally don’t roleplay much to do it a little bit more because of the small incentives. A player can say nothing and get a 10, but maybe if he says just a little bit, tries to get in character just a smidge, he could get an 11 or 12 pretty easily.

Is this enough to encourage some players to roleplay a bit more? Maybe, maybe not.

But wait, you ask, why not just give a bonus for good roleplaying? Isn’t assigning a 16 about the same as giving a +6 bonus? No! A bonus changes the possible range of success (i.e. in this case you can a get a maximum 26 instead of a maximum 20 before factoring in your stats), whereas assigning a roll doesn’t change the range at all since you still can’t “roll” higher than a 20. And let’s face it, no matter what kind of bonus you assign the dice are still pretty random.

But what if you like the random? Well in lots of cases there is still randomness on the NPC side of the roll. If the PC rogue is just trying to deceive the NPC king, you are still rolling for the king’s ability to sense deception. There are also whacky things you can by making part of the die random and part assigned (using a d10 instead of a d20 and calling the other half the assigned score part) but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the student.

And then there’s the big question: why just social skills? What about applying a virtual roll to other things the players do? Sure, if the player works out a cunning plan to build his fortress where the marshes run up to the fork in the river to make it hard to storm, assign him a high virtual roll for his War Architect skill. Attentive readers may even now be considering how to use this idea to make decision-driven Spot checks without giving up on having some characters more perceptive than others.

How far can you take it? Try running a bar room brawl where you assign virtual attack rolls based on how interestingly players describe kicking a stool to trip someone up or swinging from a chandelier to tackle a ruffian. Or assign virtual saving throw rolls based on clever descriptions of exactly how the players avoid the fiery dragon breath, or magic rolls based on florid descriptions of mystical mumbo jumbo. You can even mix it up and let some people roll, some people roleplay, as you prefer.

Can you really transform D&D into a cinematic story game just by changing this one rule? Try it and see.

Next time you want to do something a little different but have no idea how the M&M rules support it, try the Universal Combat Maneuver:

1) Think of an appropriate description of your maneuver, including how it's different from your normal attack.

2) Use a Move action to perform the maneuver.

3) Take a +2 on either Attack, Damage or Defense and a -2 on one of the other two. The adjustments apply to your next attack and last for a full round.

The description can be anything you want, so long as it fits your character and at least vaguely describes why you are getting the bonus and penalty you picked. For example:

Stand very still and take careful aim with your bow, shooting more accurately but making yourself an easier target (+2 attack, -2 defense)

Grab a telephone pole and swing it wildly (+2 damage, -2 attack)

Use your telekinesis to hurl a spray of small rocks at your target instead of one big rock (+2 attack, -2 damage)

Throw up a sheet of fire to singe the werewolf and keep him away from you (+2 defense, -2 damage)

Dig in and channel the spirit of the thunder god and throw sizzling bolts of electrical death (+2 damage, -2 defense)

There are as many as you can think of. They can be actions specific to the character (”I'm doubling-down on my wrist gattling guns!”) or they can be based on the situation or the environment (”Water on the floor? Instead of grabbing him I'll lean down and electrify it with my Shock Gauntlets!”).

The same move doesn't have to use the same bonus and penalty each time. It all depends on how it is described. One round Uber Girl picks up a telephone pole and takes a vicious wild swing (+2 damage, -2 attack). Later she picks up a similar pole and swings it in a broad arc that's hard to avoid, but throws herself off-balance in the process (+2 attack, -2 defense).

The idea is to encourage players (and the GM) to come up with creative descriptions in combat, and let them adjust the odds a little bit in the process.

Superhero games are about doing cool stuff. Not just brave or heroic deeds, but fantastic, impressive, and sometimes completely implausible feats. Superheroes throw buildings at people or melt steel girders with their laser eyes.

M&M combat is fun, but in the end it's d20, and that means you are often doing the same thing over and over: rolling the same attack each round and seeing if you hit. Some characters have interesting choices all the time (like those tricksters with their feints, taunts and redirects), but the average superhero archetype has one prominent choice each round: attack!

Tactically that's not interesting. Even worse, because by the rules you are taking the same action over and over again (same roll, same bonus, same damage if you hit) you can get lulled into visualizing the character as doing the same thing too. Instead of seeing a dynamic super-powered slugfest, you're seeing boring punch-punch-punch-punch. When you make tactical choices, you visualize the situation more dynamically and dramatically whether you intended to or not, because you are seeing what is going on and what effect your choices have.

So tactical choices encourage color, but if you make a rule to cover each possible action or interesting move you'll have a big, big book of combat maneuvers, and you'll spend all your time flipping through it instead of playing the game, and you'll still just be telling people what is possible instead of letting them use their imagination. Stifling creativity = not good.

The move action to do the maneuver is in addition to whatever action you normally need to perform the attack. So if you want to punch someone (standard action) you need to spend a standard action in addition to the move action to do the maneuver. Move + standard takes up your whole round. You couldn't run across the street (move action), use a maneuver (second move action), and still attack in the same round.

The adjustment only lasts one round, so if you want to do it again next round, spend another move action to pick up another telephone pole after the first shattered, aim again, etc.

Yes, it gives everyone a weaker version of power attack, defensive attack, accurate attack and all-out attack, but with the added cost of a move action. If you already have those feats you can use them instead. Since the Universal Combat Manuever is only a two point shift instead of the five point shift from the feats, it let's everyone have a little more latitude without radically changing their PL balance (a character who can do 10 damage normally can swing only from 8-12 with the UCM, instead of 5-15 with a feat).

Yes, it replaces or trumps lots of others maneuvers (improvised weapons, aim, aggressive stance, etc). There could still be cases where you'd rather use the existing maneuver because it doesn't take a move action. The advantage is simplicity, which means (hopefully) players will spend more time thinking of cool descriptions of maneuvers and less time figuring out whether there is a way to do what they want in the rules.

No, it does not stack with other manuevers or feats that it logically replaces. You can't use the Universal Combat Maneuver along with Power Attack or Defensive Stance (for example), but you could use it with something like Sneak Attack or Grapple. [added 04/21/07]

Yes, you could use the same idea in any d20 game. If damage doesn't use a d20 the way M&M and True20 does, you'll have to sort out what the bonus should be.

[Open Game License]

The normal M&M Minion rules are great: they reflect the genre and speed up combat. But you are still left dealing with each opponent individually, which can make large battles slow and boring (particularly since the individual minions are not a real threat to most heroes, so there's less sense of danger).

The Field Battle Rules from the back of Golden Age take mass combat a step farther. The concept is similar to the Swarm rules from D&D, in that you take multiple creatures and consider them a single unit for combat purposes, except here you use the base stats for a single creature and apply a “Force bonus” to most checks based on the size of the group. The concept is simple, and it makes a great extension of the M&M Minion rules for any setting, not just WWII.

There are a few pitfalls in the rules as written, so here are some tips for using the Field Battle Rules effectively:

1) Don't mix different size units. If one side is smaller, break up the other side into matching units (so run four platoons vs one platoon instead of one company vs one platoon). Otherwise the increased bonus for combining units is not as good as just making multiple attacks and having separate damage tracks. Combining four platoons into one company changes the Force bonus from +5 to +6, but now you are only getting one attack, and one hit can take out the whole group. Four groups of 50 will always win vs one group of 200, despite being the same number of men.

2) Try to break the force into enough units that each hero can be attacked once per round (assuming you are pitting units vs heroes not units vs units). So if there are four heroes, break a company down into four platoons. Otherwise you get the odd case that the entire force only attacks one hero at a time.

3) Treat all powers as Damage ranks instead of having non-damaging powers do nothing (so Mind Control 10 requires the same save as a Blast 10). This lets heroes do creative things with their powers and it keeps things moving fast. Mind controlling an officer to sow confusion or blinding the troops with a sandstorm does just as good a job of disrupting units as punching or blasting people.

4) Use in-between sizes. The Force modifier is based on the progression table, but the real world military unit examples jump from +6 to +9 because there are no units that match the sizes between, but that doesn't mean you couldn't have a unit at the +7 (250 creature) size.

Used properly you can run large battles with your heroes taking on hordes of agents, giant rats, Atomic Supermen, whatever. And what superhero doesn't want to fight off an army of invading aliens, so long as they don't have to roll a million attacks to hit each and every one?

Because they are in the back of Golden Age instead of one of the core rulebooks, it seems like few M&M GMs have even heard of the Field Battle Rules. I'm guessing most GMs are unwilling to buy a whole book just to get a few pages of mass combat rules if they aren't interested in the rest of the setting. If we're lucky Green Ronin will release them as a stand-alone PDF product for a smaller price, because they are a good tool that more GMs could benefit from.