A few years ago I made a huge, ambitious, and successful sandbox campaign - a true once-in-a-lifetime endeavor! So why not do it again?
Previous visitors of the blog might have noticed that one post that's regularly in the "most popular" box to the right (no, not the inventory one, although that's pretty good too), and my most dedicated fans might have even actually read it. If you haven't and don't want to, then you're gonna hate this one. But in short, I talked about the process I went through for creating a big ol' open table sandbox, as well as the insights I got from actually playing it. This time, I'm writing about something I'm still in the process of setting up, and how I feel about the system in general. If the resulting game gets even a fraction of the play that the first thing did, I'll probably write about how that went, too; and I think it'd be just dandy to have a post to come back to and compare notes wits. So buckle in, because this one is long and meandering.
A long time coming
I love my Stained Fortress campaign dearly, and will probably still have it on retainer for the remainder of my long, bitter life. As time has gone on, however, the creative Starcursed Mass shrieking within my chest has once again instructed me to bite off entirely more than I can chew. And so, I needed something new and fresh to make maps, charts, tables, custom player paraphernalia, minor rules rewrites and one or more overlong blogposts about. The first requirement for this void-filling activity was to pick a new system, because making two huge life-changing campaigns for a single ruleset is just gauche.
The selection process actually took a while! I went through quite a stack of books! It turns out that when it comes to games friendly to sandbox-type play (that is to say, games that are light on rules, heavy on procedure, easy to pick up, relatively lethal and fast-moving, and provide justification for long-term exploration of a dangerous setting filled with cool places, unique monsters and nifty loot), most are either older editions of The World's Most Popular Dice & Webseries Marketing Platform, or one of their many, many unchristened offspring.
My initial frontrunner was Classic Traveller, a game that enticed me with very light rules and brutally short combats, and the notion of a big open sector with a variety of whole planets to explore. The excellent Traveller Out Of The Box Blog Series only further tempted me to make my own dingy little subsector of cosmic thrills and hydrogen spills. However, after much brain-wracking, I simply couldn't find a satisfactory way of creating the same newbie-accessible "anyone can pop in, at any time, and play" environment in a multi-planet, FTL-travel-takes-weeks, on-the-fringe-of-civilized-space setting. If I wanted players to be truly free to do what they want, I couldn't stick them all on a single ship and say "hope you don't mind if someone else gets your character sucked out into the vacuum of space while you're asleep"... but doing basically anything else removed that important feeling of occupying a shared space, and more importantly, the possibility of off-the-cuff adventures with whoever's at the table this week. So for now at least, the sci-fi titan is shelved for future projects, although the aforementioned blog has forever influenced how I read rulebooks (which might just come up a little later).
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| Jamison will have to wait, we've got bigger dice to roll. |
Other games that didn't make the cut include AS&SH (Sorry Hyperborea, too similar to the last game; maybe next time), Ars Magica (Too saga-oriented and narrative-reliant to be a good "true" sandbox game), the original Star Frontiers (Weirdly more fitting for this kind of thing than Traveller, but still nah), Boot Hill (We've all read that one amazing blogpost, don't tell me you weren't tempted too) and Frostgrave (Show me where in the book it says I can't have a big dumb minis wargame as the core system for a freeform RPG campaign... too much work setting up the terrain for each combat though).
The selection process helped me crystalize what kind of setting works best for this kind of campaign. You need a big world with soft borders, one with enough people around to provide many opportunities for trade, conflict and faction play, while still leaving a whole lot of map open for monsters and dungeons to live in. You also need cool stuff lying around, and a reason for why all the cool stuff hasn't been looted yet - either because the existing civilization isn't strong enough to grab it all, because something is constantly creating more dungeon, or because The Mandatory "Fall Of The Great Civilization" event happened too recently and the world is still in the early days of recovery. The last one is probably the most convenient, because it needs the least justification; if the new world is young, you don't have to explain why it is so bountiful. As an added plus, the shackles of a greater, more organized civilization have yet to fall upon the land and render it more ordered, safe and lawful - things that don't make for a good adventuring realm. Instead, lines are more naturally drawn between many smaller and more local powers (which are in turn more easily messed with by individuals, such as the PCs).
Before you say it: yes, yes, this is just Aesthetics of Ruin again, I'm a heavenly hack, I know. But it's still very helpful to clearly establish which parts of that aesthetic really gel with your vision of an ideal adventuring terrarium, to then drop your player-controlled bugs into. And ideally, it helps to pick a system that most caters to that vision!
Eventually I landed on what game I wanted to use, and unless you're one of my many aggressive spambots, your human-or-adjacent eyes can comprehend the post's title well enough to know what the system is going to be. But I know you - you wouldn't be satisfied with simply knowing that I picked That One Game You've Heard Of, Maybe You Know A Thing Or Two About It But Never Looked Into It, Isn't That The One With The Rabbit-People With Guns. No, you want a whole unwarranted history, semi-review and emotional monologue about it - unless you're not the friend I thought you were. So:
Who is Gamma World?
Initially published by TSR in the advanced, apocralyptic wasteland of 1978, Gamma World is a Science Fantasy roleplaying game taking place on your very own green-and-blue planet, centuries after a nuclear war destroyed a futuristic civilization (although later editions featured other catalysts for The Fall, including aliens and the very relevant Large Hadron Collider). Players take the role of humans and/or mutants adventuring on the recovering post-post-apocalyptic Earth, where future generations find themselves in a bright new dark age: people are running around with swords and chainmail and feudalism all over the place, all of them attempting to reconstruct the world of the past, destroy the remains and start fresh, conquer the world that is here now, or to just try and live their best irradiated lives.
Basically, think oldschool D&D, except instead of orcs, dragons and magic you have mutant badgers, hunter-killer drones and retro-futuristic tech that might as well be magic.
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| Can you tell this was big in the 80's |
Getting into details past this gets messy, since the various versions have different specificities of setting and mechanics, and different editions getting pretty much incompatible as time went on. Basically, most editions were D&D-adjacent to varying extents, with early ones being very close to OD&D, then AD&D (complete with a detour into the nightmare realm that is The Color Chart), briefly dipping into forgotten alternative Alternity, then coming back to the comfortable tedium of the d20 system; and, eventually, arriving the most recent 7th edition, which is best described as "D&D 4e, but gonzo and loose".
So to be more specific here: I've chosen Gamma World 2e for my next attempt at big sandbox.
Okay, who is Gamma World 2e, then?
Essentially a slightly updated, streamlined, and marginally more complex version of the first edition, 2e is a game that provides concise-yet-dense flavor and fairly intuitive rules, with some (mostly) well-assembled procedures and tables that are ultimately very open to modification - a classic oldschool toolbox system. The game is such a DIY product that one of the three player "species" actually requires the GM to manually design them and stat them out.
These tidbits were what caught my interest at first, but it was only with a complete read (and re-read) through that I got really into it.
Why Gamma World (2e)?
Gamma World 2e isn't just vaguely appropriate for a sandbox campaign, it's downright built for one.
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| Just look at all that sand! |
The vast non-table majority of the book is dedicated to procedures like exploration, travel, resource management and trade; it also has some unusual-but-thematic bits, such as mechanics for manual identification of artifacts (with potential for disaster and/or hilarity). More importantly, the entirety of the terse GM section is dedicated to tools for creating a large, interactive game world, advice and materials for populating it, and a basic kit to make wandering and adventuring within worthwhile. Half the pages in this thing are just tables and lists, and that's a good thing.
Furthermore, the adventure that comes supplied with the box set is a relatively simple and linear journey into a ruined city and back, with a few encounters along the way and a bit of ruincrawling (with some cutesy parts, such as a hidden room containing a pair of blue pajamas with hoverpads, a forcefield, and a big red S on the front); but it also contains a big garish region hexmap, with a bunch of settlements and other points of interest marked on it, most of which have been described in a lil' gazetteer. The adventure kit also contains a large map of the ruined city of Pitz Burke and a key for the major PoIs - each of which the book nudgingly points out could be an adventure of its own, by the way - as well as some other handy tools, like details of the various terrain features and quirks, even if they might never come up in play if you stay "on the rails", and what their logical gameplay implications are (ex. only 25% of the lakes occupying ancient craters will have drinkable water, but those that do will also likely have edible creatures within). The game also repeatedly and consistently invites GMs to make all of this their own, to further flesh out the loosely defined locations, and to make new ones by themselves.
My point is that this book, at the very least, heavily implies that you should be using it to create your own big dumb world, full of big dumb adventure locales, for players to big dumb explore and get big dumb killed in.
It also implies other things. The book does a commendable job of giving direct, useful advice to players and GMs, including not just telling the GM that they can bend the rules but actually shows you how, like in the page-long example of play in which we see not only dialogue and rolls going on, but also explanations of the GM's thought process. The GM rolls an encounter while the PCs are travelling, and then proceeds to have thoughts like "I'm not gonna have the typical 3d6 enemies show up here because that's ridiculous for the moment, let's just have like 3", "I'm going to roll the monsters' hit dice just once, and then just use the same HP for all of them, because it's faster and there's no need to make a distinction between them" and "I won't roll out any of the monsters' individual attributes unless they end up being relevant during the encounter, because their individual charisma or whatever doesn't matter here". These might all seem obvious to you or me today, but I guarantee that it would have been immensely helpful to me as a starting GM, those many starless years ago; to have a book that just shows me that I don't need to constantly respect every single rule and written number, but to treat them as guidelines as much as protocols. It's the sort of lesson that people still struggle with even today, which makes the section extra poignant.
There's also other parts where I believe that the game is pulling some really interesting maneuvers with its math and rules, but much less obvious way. This is a little hard to explain, but I want to give you an example.
The following 2000 words are an extremely specific aside. Readers who aren't interested in weird math overanalysis and pontification on designer intent should feel free to skip over the following subheading, and just go right on over to the next big one. I won't judge you for it. Promise.
THE LOW-TECH COMBAT MATH RANT
So, here' s how I think that this game's math is pullin' some stuff. To start us off, you need to know that the typical PC has 40-60 HP - a lot, by D&D standards - and that most human-intelligence monsters have relatively high HP as well. For the sake of wasting everyone's time, let's take the game's closest thing to an orc, the Badder, as an example. Badders are 1.5 meter tall erect badgers that tend to be jerks, live in subterranean villages, and often raid other nearby settlements using mostly medieval-era equipment (think axes, chainmail and shields) with occasional higher-tech gear. They also have 6d6 hit points (averaging ~21) and an AC of 5 (remember that this is descending AC).
You also need to know that you'll typically start off with, and probably at times fall back on, similarly medieval equipment. Your dudes will likely be walking around with a sword or flail for their entire adventuring career, because a sword or flail doesn't need batteries, ammo or a PIN code to operate. These dark age-appropriate armaments also have stats pretty much entirely carried over from 1e D&D, which makes for easy conversion but seemingly low numbers: Your longsword will do 1d8 damage on a successful hit (modified a bit by your strength, if it's very high), and against an AC of 5, will land a hit on a 14 or higher with your d20.
If you don't like doing math, this means that for a single unremarkably-statted PC to kill a lone badder in a swordfight, they will need to make an average of 5-6 successful hits. And keeping in mind that a sword only connects 35% of the time, you're looking at a painfully long 13-14 rounds of trading blows to take down one enemy. Sure, averages aren't everything, and good rolls and high stats might accelerate this; but by the same line of thought, middling stats and worse-than-average rolls could easily make it go into an agonizing 20+ rounds. The system also doesn't have critical hits, so that ain't helping us. If you decide you're killing that badger with a mace, you're in for a long, gradual melee.
This is, upon initial investigation, fucking terrible. Who in their right mind would make it work like this? Did they really just have nothing better to do in the late 70's than to sit around, chucking d20s dozens of times, waiting for someone to keel over? The prospect sucks even before you take into consideration that each turn, the Badder is also taking swings at you, with a similarly-statted weapon against a similar AC. This all means that in the typical equipment for a starting PC, swordfighting a single Badder is almost guaranteed to be a lengthy, messy fight and cost you a big chunk of HP; and that against two or more of them, you're likely screwed - it's a "0 HP Means Dead" game, so you don't have any safeguard against getting pummeled to death by a baneful brace of black-and-white brigands.
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| Are you intimidated yet? |
Now that I've explained to you how indefensible this typical combat scenario is, let me defend it.
The first, most obvious point for anyone who even scanned the weapon list is that this is clearly intended to make higher-tech weapons more valuable. When a 5d6 damage laser gun can turn a 15-round opponent into a smoking pair of boots with a single shot, you're obviously going to be much more inclined to seek tech weapons out and use them to take care of problems. Any higher-grade weapon that players find is going to be a big boost over the "basic" stuff, with even the lowliest technoknife hugely outclasses any regular weapon.
There's also a viable defense for (s)lower lethality in this kind of encounter. Having PCs with fairly high HP and easy access to a decent AC means axe-swinging enemies need several rounds to seriously hurt you (unless you're badly outnumbered), which gives you more leeway to make actions other than standard weapon attacks. You might decide that it's worth it to take the time and rummage through your pack for something, or to pull out a fancy swashbuckling maneuver to try and get the upper hand, safe in the knowledge that you're definitely going to be able to survive a few more rounds of melee. This might seem to go a little against the OSR spirit of "every enemy can kill you easily", though I'd say that it doesn't - they can kill you, it's just across a larger number of rounds and presents a different kind of challenge to the type of enemy that actually will take you out in a few rounds, especially if you're not careful.
This is all relatively obvious, but then I got to thinking.
A second look at the numbers scattered throughout the book will reveal some interesting stuff. For example, most of the monsters in the book actually tend to have 6 AC or worse, with values of 5 or better being pretty much entirely restricted to the super-deadly combat robots, the most armored/evasive monsters, and humanoid opponents (they have AC as per the armor they're wearing, after all). Similarly, most of the highest-HP opponents are those same human-intelligence foes. This makes sense. especially if you're a follower of the school of thought that HP as an abstraction of a creature's ability to defend itself and fight effectively, rather than a numerical representation of how much blood and meat you can hack off of it before it drops dead.
Another not-immediately obvious detail is that the longsword, like many other mundane weapons, actually has a damage code of 1d8/D. The /D in there means that, when used against opponents larger than human-sized (which is to say, most non-intelligent monsters), it actually deals double damage. (Certain weapons also have /h appended to them, for half, which is a little disappointing, but I guess makes sense; slings aren't made for bringing down elephants).
It's also worth noting that the game uses 4d6-drop-low for stat generation, rather than 3d6 down the line. You might have some bonuses for your to-hit rolls, damage rolls, or both if you're very lucky - but since the game places the dice bonus range for stats pretty high (16 for a +1, 17 for a +2, 18+ for a +3), it still ain't likely; no character type in the game provides a bonus to STR nor DEX, so you're out of luck there. Even if your PC is amazingly endowed, while the bonus is quite significant (+3 on both to-hit and damage rolls means a 50% chance to hit for 7.5 damage on average, means that they should take typically take out a Badder in a paltry 6-7 rounds), it still means they're gonna be taking a solid few hits for each enemy they take on. And, very interestingly, stat bonuses are only applied to low-tech weapons - your strength doesn't come into play when smacking someone with an Energy Mace.¹
When I take all of this into account, I reach a new, more magnanimous conclusion: Swords, maces and spears are, in fact, actually okay as weapons in the World of Gamma; not as immediately powerful as guns and bombs, but they'll give you a fighting chance against most obstacles you might encounter while travelling, and while it'll be a struggle, a capable fighter will reliably dispatch wildlife and unintelligent foes that come after you. The only scenarios where these weapons aren't that great is against foes that you wouldn't expect a sword to be effective against (such as giant trees or literal tanks); or, more importantly, against enemies who are explicitly equipped with armor, weapons and training made to combat people who use weapons such as swords, maces and spears.
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| This fight looks even, but one of them is just trying to save ammo for their revolver. |
The game has, using some extremely roundabout math, emulated the fact that even low-tier weapons are good for self defense and much better than nothing; but you absolutely do not want to charge, flail swinging, into a melee against 4 armored foes with shields and axes. No matter how tough or strong or fast you are, you will lose. Badders aren't tough to swordfight because there's a math flaw, badders are tough to swordfight because they are good at swordfighting. In the universe of this game, an armed melee is something that takes a while: it's a back and forth, almost swashbuckly with how permissive it is time-wise while still ultimately being deadly. And because of the underlying numbers, a fight against a group of badders ends up being a very different fight to using the same weapons and equipment against a pack of predatory animals, or when you get tracked down by the region's deadliest bounty hunter clad in power armor and toting photon grenades.
This way of doing things came from a now-rare school of thought, where designers created the laws of the game world through kludgy, slightly confusing math that you might not directly internalize, but will quietly guide your play and comprehension of the world you're adventuring in. After a few fights, you'll understand that taking these guys on is a bad idea, and start thinking like a character in the world who understand that as well; you need to avoid taking them head-on, you need better equipment, you need an advantageous position, you need to use your mutant powers, you need to find someone to help you with this fight.
You can argue that any number-based system can be said to have the same ultimate effect, and I'd agree, but I think that this method represents a more successful distribution of those numbers; one where different value ranges correspond to very specific opponents and situations, rather than being a sliding scale of difficulty; especially when you consider that each weapon class has different to-hit charts - some weapons are, relatively speaking, more effective against higher ACs, and some fall off dramatically past a certain point. Because of all this, AC 5 doesn't mean "pretty hard to hit enemy", it means "Enemy that is difficult take on in a swordfight".
If you've read this whole thing, you might be wondering if I'm saying that this is a good solution. My answer is... maybe? It's easy to argue that there are much better ways to get similar results, to guide player action without creating such complex and table-heavy solutions. And if you think so, you might be right! Even with all of this theory and consideration behind it, I'm still not very excited about the slim-but-existing possibility of a dozen consecutive rounds of rolling off at each other in frustrated silence. But despite there being some people that would discard a game that even has the possibility of that happening, I feel optimistic that it'll pan out a bit more interestingly during play. After all, this is not a pure hack and slash game, and players will be doing a lot more than going from room to room slaying monsters; even putting aside the "it's a game of imagination" schtick, this game provides many, many options to resolving a potential fight than to run in blindly like berserkers and hope that the dice do not kill them today. Or, I mean, I guess they can. Some people probably like that. I know at least one, and I hate him.
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| To understand the dice of past,and figure out why they shipped only one d10 with the box set. |
Alright, enough indulgence. Let's get back to the interesting part.
Lessons Learned from Lessons Learned
So now that we know what we're gonna be playing, and we're reading the book, and planning a big ol' game which will use what we learned from the other big ol' game, we gotta ask ourselves some questions: what are the biggest differences to the first system I ran this way?
The biggest differences to the first system I ran this way?
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| The dragons look a lot weirder, for one. |
No innate character progression
You think your OD&D hack does a good job of staying low-power even as characters level up? Well, you've got nothing on Gamma World - this game doesn't even HAVE experience levels or stat advancement!
Possibly the biggest, hardest pill to swallow, especially for a sandbox game, is that you're working with zero built-in power gain: Your HP starts out pretty high for a D&D-based system, but it ain't getting higher. Your to-hit rolls and damage are defined by your weapon, maybe receiving a little boost from your stats if you're still using low-tech gear; and you gain no new abilities or improvement to your existing ones over time. The only exception, at least in the rulebook, is that Mutant characters are able to get new mutant powers... but only through the usage of extremely rare and valuable mutagen injections (so even that is gear-reliant and pretty similar to finding a new spellbook), or by surviving blasts of radiation (depending on intensity, 10-20% chance when rolling on the "save" table, much more often resulting in taking damage or outright death, so not exactly a reliable strategy (although, hilariously, there's a Cryptic Alliance in the game, made entirely of mutants, who just love getting irradiated and more mutated all the time. I opt to read that as the designers just knowing that some players were gonna try to do this, and canonizing it for giggles)).
There is one other avenue for character progression, which is through Status Points and Social Rank, which are the respective XP and Level of reputation that your character has attained throughout their life. You get status points for things that are typically worth XP, like fightin' and lootin', and getting enough status points will advance your Social Rank, which will give some admittedly nice benefits. Each rank improves your odds of being able to find and buy higher-tier gear, and increases how much stuff you can borrow from your home community for a a given adventure. Rank also affects certain things like your ability to gather info, and reaction roll outcomes ("Hey, I've heard of you!" Bzarp Bzarp). But while social rank is superficially similar to your traditional experience levels, these benefits are abstract and don't directly improve your talents at fightin' and lootin', so they don't apply here.
This means that you can only get "numerically" better through getting new gear. But boy, is there a lot of gear.
The artifact and equipment section provides a good variety of goodies to fill your backpack and don upon your robust-yet-vulnerable body; and with the "there's pre-fall loot lying around everywhere" thing going on, it's not that unreasonable to encounter people using some of The Strong Stuff. Not every goblin is running around with a wand of acid, but they might have one. This introduces great variety to the opposition you face, and can make you think twice upon seeing that this particular Badder party's leader has some big shiny tube over his shoulder - but also, if we take that goober on and win, we get his wand of acid, right? We just need to figure out how to take it off him before he reduces us to a puddle...
There's also a great extra twist to the gear progression. The basic low-tech chump stuff is available anywhere, the slightly better stuff requires a little work to find and is a welcome upgrade; and the coolest loot always kicks ass, but is also hard to find and requires continual maintenance to keep running.
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| You also may need fuel, as the situation warrants. |
There is no +1 Sword, a.k.a. Guns Need Ammo, Dingus
That last part is very important. All of the highest tier equipment requires the usage of power cells, ammunition, or both; so if your players want to stay at the top of the power curve, just finding The Best Gun isn't enough. The scarcity of resources means players always have to think about when they want to use their niftiest toys, and keep an eye out for stuff they need to keep said toys running smoothly. This means that once your players enter the Good Equipment club, they have to keep exploring, scavenging and trading to remain members. This is a great setup! All the high-level stuff having limited batteries means that the low-level gear always remains viable and that the low-level threats always remain relevant.
This makes the game somewhat of an outlier even for the OSR space. Traditionally in this kind of system, you will eventually reach a point where goblins are a non-issue unless there's hundreds of them (and even then, all you need is one good cloudkill). Here, however, your personal kill power isn't getting any better; your durability doesn't go up, and you're probably stuck with the mutations you have, so you're pretty much entirely reliant on your gear to become more dangerous. And all the good gear can run out: medkits have limited charges, guns need ammo, lasers and energy weapons and power armor all need batteries. Not to mention that it can just break, which means you'll have to find a new one. I cannot imagine how much scarier a rust monster ambush would be in this game.
Does this all mean that the PCs can never reach the point of ridiculous power fantasy? I would say that they absolutely can reach that point, but that's what it would be, a point; peaks on a graph, sudden dramatic bursts of power to pop when the time is right. It would be a very appropriate campaign finale if the party decided to, say, make a desperate assault on the headquarters of The Friends of Entropy, and stop them before they launch an ancient nuke at the biggest population center left on the continent. The PCs would don their battery-costly power armor, load up their most fusioned rifles and vibratingest blades, call in any favors they have to get some fire support, and bring a few sacks of ammunition, batteries and medkits. And as they run around toting the priciest and most power-hungry of equipment, playing Contra against their enemies, the PCs would be rewarded with an absurd power level for a while. And after they're done, they'll have burned through a massive supply of batteries and ammunition - but what's the point of having resources if you don't spend them?
The example above is an extreme case, of course, best suited to a long-running party that's built up a stockpile of loot and doesn't know what to do with it all; usually things will be more along the lines of "Okay, time to pull out that micro-missile launcher and pepper that group of Thought Masters from afar before they disintegrate our brains". But that's still all part of the game - venerable readers likely already know that I'm a big fan of teaching players to actually use their expendable resources; a long and difficult process thanks to the lessons previously instilled by stingy GMs and overly easy video games. And if everything runs on ammo and batteries, it'll probably be much easier to learn that lesson than it would be with the rare-and-valuable potions, scrolls and wands that you see in systems that have otherwise-regenerating powers.
It's also interesting that there's a few different kind of power cells: Sun-rechargeable Solar Cells (come with their own solar panel even, so you can fill them up while travelling outdoors; basically equivalent to X/Day items from other games), Chemical and Hydrogen cells which require the use of a battery charging device (which means finding a source of electricity), and Atomic Cells, chargeable only by finding fuel cylinders, which are really only available in military installations and the occasional nuclear plant. Different equipment requires different types of cells - you can't put a solar cell in a laser gun that takes a hydrogen cell unless you want it blowing up in your face - which means that the players have to ration out the batteries, but it also means that you could, strictly speaking, swap around the batteries as needed. I kind of love this, because it makes for some real fun decision making: We got only 2 Solar cells, so where do we put them today? Should we save these extra hydrogen cells to reload our laser gun, or do we put them in the hover pads so we can make maneuvering these ruins easier?
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| A few items can actually take several cell types, like this terrifying XCom mainstay. |
Talking to the NPCs is the most important thing you do with them
This, combined with that rant back up there, alongside the social progression mentioned slightly below it, creates a promising foundation for a sandbox environment. In a world where the players can often be so clearly outgunned, outnumbered, outranged or otherwise at serious risk of getting defeated by the locals, it's much more expected of them to use their wits and try to talk, bribe, sneak, barter, bluff, or otherwise escape their way out of tough spots. It won't always work, of course, which is part of the fun - why have a combat system if talking will always get you out of trouble? - but the book takes lengths to equip you for the various forms of monster diplomacy. All of this is made at least a little easier to grok for the typically hack-and-slashier players, especially once they realize that the other guys' teeth, axes, guns and eye lasers are just as deadly as their own; and the fact that their "XP" only really helps them in dealing with social encounters, not combat ones.
The rules delve into, among other things: detailed protocol for NPC reactions and their results, information about trade and deals, and an involved guide to the hiring and recruitment of NPCs, including guidelines for wages, shares of the spoils, length of service and contracts, and what might happen in scenarios such as severe mistreatment of hirelings (what better enemy to have looming over the party than an abused former hireling, who knows all their tricks and tactics?).
Another small, but I feel important, consideration: the game actually gives you all of the social encounter and hireling rules before any combat rules. It might be a coincidence, but I believe that it's a very intentional statement. Combat is what happens when talking is no longer possible. Fights will happen, and are always a threat, but they are in no way presented as the default activity of the game, or even especially more important than anything else, since the preceding encounters and diplomacy section takes up the same amount of pages as the combat rules do. And if you want more design-based proof, the spartan character sheet has an entire third of its single face dedicated to sizeable boxes for writing down your Hirelings, your Followers (yes, there's a difference: Followers are with you because they like you. Hirelings are there for the money), and notes about other characters. The social elements are front and center, impossible to miss.
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| How can you be sure that this won't end peacefully? |
The world is big, dangerous and full of peril, but also full of people. And the natural outcome of the rules is that successful players should, and will, always treat anyone they meet not just as a potential melee opponent or robbery target, but as a potential asset, informant, trading partner, temporary ally, future friend, and maybe dedicated follower. You're not expected to just travel through this land pillaging and doing odd jobs, you're expected to engage with it, and become part of it all. And that's just great.
Communities and Cryptic Alliances
Upon character creation, PCs are "born" into a Community - typically a settlement, clan, or similar society - and future gains of Status Ranks are considered to be attached to that Community, since they're the ones who know you best and reap the most benefits from your fightin' and lootin'. The book points out that communities often have multiple settlements, at any of which players may opt to turn in treasure, get a free place to sleep for a few days (depending on their status rank), and enjoy the other benefits of Being Home. All of this is great, but it also means that your PC is attached to that community for the rest of their life (outside of extreme circumstances like the community getting destroyed or you getting exiled) - Get your rank high enough and people might even know of you outside your home town (your rank can influence reaction rolls), but you only get the one community.
One outstanding type of faction within the game, more specifically defined than the rest, are the Cryptic Alliances: varyingly exclusive and secretive organizations that are united around strong, usually fanatical beliefs or agendas. Examples include a complete rejection of technology and living a "naturalistic" way of life, or the worship of ancient machines as gods; or for some more extreme cases, the formation of a fascist Mutant Animal-only nation, or the downright extermination of all non-human life. Any region of the game should have Cryptic Alliance bases scattered around in addition to regular settlements, and they can vary in size from small outposts to huge enclaves with hundreds, or even thousands, of members.
These far-reaching organizations add a great layer of complexity to interaction with NPCs. Because members could be anywhere, and because of their devotion to their causes, basically anything that a player party gets up to could in some way or another get them noticed by one or more such elusive entity. This is great potential for having recurring villainous groups that are difficult to just downright exterminate, but the book also gives Cryptic Alliances one more unique feature among factions: Players may join one.
Cryptic Alliances allow an exception to the mentioned permanence of communities. They're tricky to get into, requiring effort, a bit of luck, and a minimum Status Rank of 3. If you manage it, they completely overwrite your previous community - your alliance is your community now, and you're in it 'till the bitter end. Joining an alliance does come with perks: these undercover unions usually have access to manpower, technology and/or resources that normal communities just can't provide. They also provide special bonuses for membership, such as new and improved way to earn status points, or for some like the Healers, even new abilities (usually with a cost attached). Cryptic Alliances also come with downsides, such as the enmity of other Cryptic Alliances, and more terrifyingly, becomes just a bit more open to the possibility of getting Exiled.
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| The main advantage of joining an alliance is that you always have travelling partners. |
If you get kicked out for not living up to the Alliance's ideals, or for being a huge jerk to your community, you are Exiled and labeled as a Wanderer for the rest of your life. This means you will never be able to join any community or alliance ever again, and that means you lose several benefits of having a Status Rank - no more borrowing equipment, no more free beds to sleep in, no more turning in treasure to your community to gain status points, and obviously you don't get the various benefits of having a "home" anymore. At least you don't lose the fame (and thus charisma bonus) that your Status Rank provides you, but it's gonna be a bit trickier to make use of it. Being a Wanderer also means that you're fair game for anyone out in the post-apocalyptic world, which is less than ideal. Your life isn't over, but you're gonna have to spend the rest of it looking over your shoulder, and working harder to get the same stuff that other PCs have an easier time with. Even your party might not always be comfortable walking into town and being seen with an exile, depending on where you travel.
Communities are a smart way to provide a home base out in a big scary world, and I love the idea of Cryptic Alliances as game function: You can decide to devote yourself to a sect's ideals to more specific but also more potent rewards (access to higher-tier gear, information, hirelings, etc), at the cost of losing some of the benefits of being in a more general community, and making powerful enemies of other Cryptic Alliances. But I have no doubt that there will always be players who consider the occasional cyborg hit squad a small price to pay for access to accurate treasure maps and bulk discounts on atomic batteries. And hey, free cyborg remains to loot afterwards! What's there to worry about?
Upsettingly straight-forward rules for travel and searching
Terrain, weather, and all that stuff can impact your travel speed, but one of the things you can actually control as a player is your inventory. Encumberment is straight-forward: carry less than your STR in Kilos and you're unburdened, between 1x and 2x STR means you're burdened (move at 2/3 of unburdened speed), and more than 2x makes you Heavily Burdened (1/3 unburdened speed). Worn armor mercifully doesn't factor into weight for the purposes of encumberment. But even then, between all the guns, gear and supplies a party would typically carry, you can expect Burdened to be standard travel speed in most circumstances.
Also important is that players can actually choose what speed they want to travel at. This isn't that groundbreaking or exciting, but GW2e's specific solution makes me feel ashamed of how much time and effort I've previously put into making my own, worse travel mechanics. Check it out.
A travelling party can pick 3 speeds: Normal, Fast, and Slow. The effects are straight-forward:
- Normal travel is normal. It moves at standard speed, the party has the standard chances for being surprised and spotting hidden things.
- Fast travel is twice as fast as normal. It also means you're gonna miss basically everything hidden you travel past, and that you're considerably likelier to be surprised. It can also be risky to travel fast through dangerous terrain, such as rubble, with a chance of injuries for each turn of speeding through it.
- Slow travel is half the speed of normal. While being slow, you're also paying very close attention to your surroundings, and you're only going to be surprised in extreme cases.
That's it. If you don't find this to be as obviously excellent as I do, that's fine; we can't appreciate the same thing every time, and understanding that about each other is what makes our relationship so special.
Having these three clearly defined speeds makes it easy for players to make decisions about their travels in an intuitive and measurable way: do we want to hurry through these deathlands to decrease the odds of some nightmare beasts finding us, at the risk of being caught flat-footed if they do? Can we afford to move slowly and carefully through these crags with our food supply as low as it is?
Searching is also just great, and almost feels like it's a metacommentary on other TSR games: The PCs can spend a Search Turn to...
Okay hold on, I didn't explain Time. The game has 3 time scales depending on what you're doing: March Turns, which are 4 hours each, intended for when you're travelling through the wastes and want to fast forward between the interesting parts; Search Turns of ~10 minutes, when you're at those interesting parts and want to explore the area, mess around with artifacts, and do other relatively quick stuff that doesn't involve immediate threats; and Action Turns, of 10 seconds each, for when a fight breaks out, enemies are encountered, a building is collapsing, or anything else where you're in danger and moment-to-moment actions need to be tracked either in or out of initiative. Okay? Okay.
The PCs can spend a Search Turn to announce that they will, indeed, do a Search. They don't need to announce that they're looking for anything in specific, they just need a 10 minute Search Turn to thoroughly examine a room or confined space. They will also not need to roll any dice - they will automatically find anything and everything that there is to find. Mind-blowingly efficient, right? Characters moving Slowly are considered to be searching as they go, and "will almost always notice anything interesting"²; moving at Normal speed means Noticing Hidden Things requires a stat check, needing to roll below their highest character's int x5 with a d100 (why a d100, why not just a d20?), and a party moving Fast needs to roll against the character's unmultiplied int (oh, that's why).
This is some classic "Intentionally looking always succeeds, passive perception is a chance" design, and I don't have much to say other than the fact that I like it. Moving on.
There Are No Classes, Or Are There?
Players love simple, descriptive classifications for what their characters are. It's just real handy to be able to see a list of options, broadly understand how each of them has unique functions and roles within the system, and decide which one sounds the most fun, or which one the party needs most, or which one is easiest for them to play, or whatever other criteria they pick by. It helps players feel that they have at least a little control before the game starts; when they can say such comforting, confident-sounding things like "We definitely need a fighter, or at least a cleric, someone with good HP and armor to stand in front" or "Maybe we should have another magic user so that we have more casts of sleep". While the grand usefulness of this planning varies greatly from game to game, there's no denying the sense of security they get out of feeling like their choices matter right from the get-go.
Because of this, potential Gamma World players might find themselves aghast to see that upon reaching the character creation section, they are presented with a single choice, between a total of total of three Character Types: Pure-Strain Human, Humanoid, or Mutated Animal. A choice that, on the surface, seems to boil down to whether they want to have mutations or not. And you can't even choose the mutations! How cruel, to rob them of the opportunity to place themselves within a comfortable niche. Mutations notwithstanding, everyone has the same capabilities, with some slight variation through stats. And the game doesn't give you classes, skills, feats, talents, weapon proficiencies, non-weapon proficiencies, backgrounds, quirks, religions, magic schools, vampire bloodlines, questionably useful family heirlooms or anything else that you might want to help you stand out. You don't even get to allocate your stats, so the only other choice you get to make is your equipment, and you're buying that from the same list as everyone else. How limiting.
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| It's brutal that you roll stats after you pick your type. |
Humanoids, as in humans-but-mutated, have no stat ups or downs, and are pretty much featureless other than potentially pissing off robots that see them. The other thing, more importantly, is that they all have a smattering of Mutations, which are realistically one of the main selling points of the game. If you don't see the fun in rolling a few times on the mutation table to see what zany powers, appendages and weaknesses your character will have, then I don't know what you're doing here.
It's also worth restating that all the non-PSH types have a chance of getting new mutations when exposed to radiation; There's a Radiation Table where you cross-reference the intensity of the radiation versus the receiver's constitution, and the results tell you whether you take damage, how many d6 of damage you take, or if you're just killed outright. Mutants have a 2-4 space band on each column in the table, right between the damage and the death, where they get a shiny new roll on the mutations table (PSH just eat a brutal 8d6 damage - they can never gain mutations). One way of looking at this is that Mutant PCs actually have a better save³ against Radiation; a sneaky little stat advantage for the otherwise simple Humanoids.
The final weirdo is the Mutated Animal (MA), and its main feature is its lack of defined features. They are basically blank slates, and the GM is asked to decide on a per-animal basis how they actually work. The only things that are a given for MAs is:
- They are of human-level intelligence
- They always have one or more mutations, and can get new ones from radiation and mutagen as Humanoids do
- They are not considered human by robots and machinery, so look out for that
- They will typically have some form of natural weapons, such as bites, claws, tails or the like
This means that everything else about a given mutated animal species is up to the GM: whether it has any better- or worse-than-average stats, whether it's upright or not, whether it possesses opposable thumbs or the power of speech, and anything else that might be relevant. The only other guideline is that MAs should be of vaguely human size, as to not have stats TOO wildly different from others. Beyond this, you have free reign to make up whatever the hell you want, including an explicit mention to go nuts with unique-to-species mutations if you want to.
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| The Mutant Animal size guideline is only a suggestion, but a reasonable one. |
There's another thing I want to touch on, which is how this game steps away from the typical class structure, and how I feel about that.
Uh oh, here comes another 2000 word digression. Why am I not just breaking these off into separate posts? Anyway, you've been warned.
THE "CLASSES DEFINE YOUR PERCEPTION OF THE GAME AND THE WORLD" RANT
Let's take a second and think back to the oldest, rustiest shovel of the hobby. Consider the function of the classes, more specifically the two most fundamental classes that everything else (arguably) derives from: The Fighting Man, and the Magic User. (I will be omitting The Sneak/Skill Dork and Holy Fight-User for the moment).
By having these be the basic options, from which all other options sprout, the mechanics of the game define themselves around them: What can the first class do, what is it better at, and what does it do that the other class can't? Basically every part of the game will then be seen through the lenses of one of the classes. And this goes all the way down.
Stats are the first thing you see. Strength, Dexterity and Constitution make you better at being in a fight, in some way or other. The Fighter is the one that gets into fights - otherwise the name would be very misleading - so these are the stats that you want to be good on a Fighter. If I roll good Fighter Stats, my character is better suited to being a Fighter. In fact, it'd kinda suck if I took a spellcaster with high physical stats, since my ability to use those stats is more limited. Sure, I can decide to do so, it's a free fantasy kingdom, but I'd know I'm wasting a good STR roll, and so does the rest of the party. Good stats means good Fighter. Magic user doesn't really need good stats for the most part (and benefits less from having them), so if you have worse stats you're maybe better suited to being a Magic User - he doesn't need good stats to read scrolls and cast sleep.
Only Fighters can wear armor. That means that armor is not an MU thing, but a Fighter Thing. What about weapons? Same thing. We have a category of loot entirely for one class. The other one has its own category, wands and books and all that magic stuff. Wizard stuff. What about everything else? Well, the Fighter goes first, so the Fighter gets the "goes first" stuff - she can hold the ten foot pole, because she'll be going in front, because she has has the HP and the armor. The MU has his hands free (because he cannot use most weapons so he's holding a dagger at best), so he can hold the torch. It feels ridiculous, on some level, to say that holding the torch is a wizard thing and not a fighter thing... but do you want to give up having your shield or sword ready in the front line when gandalf back there doesn't need to hold either of those?
Now we're in combat, and we already know who's gonna be doing what: the Fighter is standing in the front because she's got the HP and the armor, and her ability to swing weapons effectively means she wants to be in a position to swing those weapons. The Magic User stands behind the Fighter, because he'll get murdered in melee by basically any monster in the game. He does everything that isn't being in melee: casting spells, using wands and scrolls and other items, maybe throwing that one dagger if he's completely out of ideas. He's doing absolutely everything he can to not be involved in the process of attacking and being attacked, because he sucks at the former and really sucks at the latter. Attacks and maneuvering and loss of HP are normal parts of being a Fighter, and they're terrifying moments of Something Has Gone Terribly Wrong for the Magic User.
I think you get the point by now. This line of thought can be carried through into almost any decision point in the game. Whenever you're deciding on who should do something, you're probably deciding based on their class. While we're skimming sort of an extreme of how this pans out, and most groups are not playing with such calculated machine-like optimization and patience, the influence of this is always there: Your class does X, so you should do this, because either directly or indirectly the game says that it's your job to do it, or at least more than it's my job. Nobody willingly sends in gandalf to kick the door down - nobody would even think to. That's not a Wizard Thing.
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| What constitutes wizard things can vary greatly between groups. |
Now, before I go on, I don't know if it's entirely fair to call this a problem; I can see a very compelling argument for this kind of role distribution being a way to naturally include everyone in the game, and make everyone feel like a needed, contributing part of the team. And I agree that, in a well-constructed system, classes can be an excellent tool. An old friend of mine noted, while we were playing a popular video game about dwarven space miners, that the game's classes were ingeniously designed for cooperative play: everyone can run around, mine, shoot and otherwise perform well at the game's general activities. But because every class also has good and varied weapon functions, and extremely useful utility and support tools that the entire team benefits from, you're always happy to have any of the classes on your team. There is no dead weight, at least not from a mechanical perspective.
However, it's important to note that TTRPGs are not video games, or even board games. They lack that singularly limited and objective-based structure that the other two basically need, and that's a good thing; as a default, TTRPG's greatest strength is the fact that they're so utterly open-ended and freeform. This makes class-based design a double-edged sword: on one hand, it allows you to create interesting, mechanically satisfying and interconnected character types that work well together and complement each other within the game's systems. On the other hand, the more specifically you define what a class can and can't do, the more you're limiting what other classes can and can't do.
The best example of this is our previously set aside friend, the Sneak/Skill Dork. Rogues/Thieves/Whatever occupy a very awkward mechanical position with their iconic skillset. Because they have explicit, defined abilities to use picklocks, find removed traps and hide in sneakers, that now creates a problem for the other classes; does this mean that fighters can't pick locks or find traps? Is the thief's ability to climb walls just supernaturally good relative to others? The game is made less clear by introducing new mechanics for one class. And really, even before thieves, with just the two basic classes, people demanded answers and had to patch gaps. If you have somehow made it this far in your life without even once having to listen to the conversation about how it's weird that wizards can't use swords, I genuinely envy you.
All these points are nothing new, and people have been asking them ever since polyhedral dice have been determining the outcomes of attacks. Similarly, my theory here is far from completely original. Many have previously shared their thoughts on how classes shape games - I'm just an Orbital brick in the Crypt wall, here.
My hopefully original point that I've been building up to, however, comes next: How I Think Gamma World Tries To Solve This.
How I Think Gamma World Tries To Solve This
So there's two things here: solving the quagmire I just mentioned, and the game's answer to the "players want options" thing from before.
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| Both of these will conveniently be solved by the same thing. |
Furthermore, the distinctions that do exist are completely based in the fiction of the setting rather than on vague genre emulation. Why are PSHs not likely to be attacked by robots? Because the robots were programmed to serve humans in pre-fall civilization. Why can only mutants gain mutations? They've evolved whatever organs and alterations are necessary to be able to channel blasts of radiation into growing a third kidney. Why do Medkits have a chance of not working on mutants? Because they're made for humans, and their limited programming doesn't know what to do when it scans the patient and sees seven kidneys in there.
Of course, with enough work you can always find something to classify by - "The PSH could go first since he has slightly higher HP" - but the differences are often so minimal that you're unlikely to make decisions based off just that. And as for the other capabilities and differences, I haven't seen anything egregiously illogical or stretch-requiring from readers, so I think players that accept the basic premise won't have too much trouble internalizing the specific idiosyncrasies of how things work.
Now, for the valid question of "how do I get my choice-loving players to shake the feeling that they've only got three options, which are really only two options?". After all, Humanoid and Mutated Animal don't seem that varied; the only seemingly important difference is that the latter might have an extra bite attack and some difficulty with ladders.
Here's something very important: Humanoids have 2-8 randomly selected mutations. They have no idea what they're going to get, which is fun, but also a little hard to play around. Sure, they're pretty good for the most part (not counting the Intentionally Bad Mutations, obviously), and you can probably make them work well enough with a little effort. But until you're done rolling, you have no idea if your guy is gonna have any offensive abilities, or any defensive mutations, or any anything. You might end up with a ludicrous tank, or you might end up with a fragile, floating telekinetic gas weirdo, or you might end up just being a dude except you can talk to plants and digest lead. Whatever you get is probably going to be cool, but it might not quite be what you wanted. Some might argue that's the point.
Well, I posit to you that Mutated Animals are meant to fill that "know what you're getting" gap. Every member of a given species of MA has the same "basic" mutations - all Badders are empathic, for example - so between determining their stats, natural features and mutation list, you can effectively create your own classes; you're giving players the opportunity to pick something a little more specific, while still having the unpredictability of rolling on the mutation table (maybe with fewer mutation rolls, to compensate for the fact that they get some mutations to start).
So why not make a race of sturdy, slow-moving tortoise people with an acidic bite and severe vulnerability to cold? Or a species of small, telepathic butterfly folk with excellent olfactory senses? Why not go all the way and make a species of scorpion-cats, in every way physically identical to modern housecats except for their somewhat larger size, capability of speech, venomous stinger, and a higher count of mental mutations at the cost of not being able to have any other physical ones? And because you're still rolling for stats and mutations at the end of the day, the capabilities of these MAs can still vary greatly; You can end up with a slim, teensy butterfly folk with superhumanly good aim and telekinesis, or you can end up with a time-travelling butterfly brute capable of literally knocking you into next week.
Some of you might be thinking - aren't these two things in conflict? Isn't the first thing removing the problem of having classes, and then the second one introducing classes? I don't think so. I believe that the role of Mutated Animals, as long as you don't make the mistake of giving them Thief Skill-esque inexplicable abilities/limitations, holds to the ideals of both solutions. They don't make other character types weaker or arbitrarily limited by existing, and they're giving players some of that desired control back during character creation, in a way that isn't any more extreme than the asymmetries of rolled-for stats and mutations provide. You want to have a character who's gonna be better at physical combat off the bat? Sure, but you'll probably have a weaker resistance to psychic attacks to compensate, and maybe need more rations per day or something. The dice will still probably throw you a curveball, but that's part of the game - we're just giving you the option to bunt.
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| Nobody expects a jaguar to steal their car radio. |
As long as your MAs more-or-less adhere to the same general principles and loosely defined capabilities that the game lays out, I think you can't go too wrong here. "Balance" was never going to be the top priority in a game where you can just randomly roll a character who immediately replicates the entirety of a superhero power list, so just have fun with it. Give your players the opportunity to be unique by being a fun weirdo of some kind or another, and simultaneously get them invested in your setting by making those fun weirdos relevant to your game. Don't tell me you're not tempted by the idea of having a potential reward for players be "unlocking" new playable species for future characters, because you'd be a damn liar.
Okay, no more nested blogposts, I swear. Let's talk methodology.
Setting Making Guidelines
We've committed some insights and perpetrated some theorizing, so it's time to somehow put that into an actual game. Here are the guidelines and principles I'll try to stick to when doodling hex maps and thinking of cool names for cryptic alliances.
To start things off, I'll be making a "smaller" game region, of relatively limited scale (while still having places to go and people to see), so I can have something playable ready ASAP. Once I run a group or through this vertical slice, I'll be able to see in practice whether all my theorizing has any basis in reality, and be able to adjust the stuff that doesn't pan out.
NPCs and factions all over the place
As per the book's instructions, I'll be striving to have tons of settlements around, from secluded mountain village to bustling town, and everything inbetween. Having people around to do stuff to is a given, but my last game was in much more of a wilderness, and the NPCs within were sparse, weird and mysterious. So this time, I'm gonna try and shake up at least two of those - and I would ideally like to hold onto weird.
Towards this end, I'm gonna be expending more-than-zero effort to make sure that there are actually people worth interacting with. While I don't plan on fleshing out every individual blacksmith, fishwife and raider's disappointed mother, I want a good combination of procedural encounters (if only you could talk to the mutants...) and pre-existing persons. Type of settlement, approximate size, notable features or figures, all the stuff that makes it a little easier to improvise later - I'm pretty good at making things up on the spot, but it's very nice if, when a friendly Sleeth gives the players directions and points them towards the nearest village, there actually is a village there and I have any idea of what's in it; I can fill in the details of the location later, if necessary. This is a bit of a departure from my typical game, where the usual NPC response to too much questioning is growing suspicion and a hand slowly moving towards the closest gun. I usually treat NPCs as a function of the environment, someone to deliver a given set of info or services and then politely attempt to end the conversation afterwards.
I need to figure out a good balance with this, because (in my experience at least) players tend to spend entirely too much time using every opportunity to try and squeeze all possible information out of every single non-hostile person they meet... but maybe NPCs being less tight-lipped and more immediately "approachable" will counter that instinct, once players internalize the changes.
I'm not planning to go too far into the opposite direction, here; I don't want to make a supplement to my master hex key that is just an alphabetical list of 300 names with associated stat blocks, equipment lists, agenda rundown, allegiance matrix and preferred cocktail reference codes. While GW2e does at least make the stat blocks easy (a character's intrinsic qualities in this game are legitimately nothing but their 6 attributes, hit dice, and maybe a mutation list), I still want to keep things as simple as possible, running most of the locations in the game at practical-but-minimal levels of detail and leaving things up to the spur of the moment. I've seen a lot of tools over the years designed to help people keep track of this kind of stuff, but honestly, I anticipate that a sturdy a5 notebook is gonna be all I need for this. If that proves to be too difficult, I can always expand my notes later.
My current plan is to give each settlement a single-paragraph description, gazetteer style. What's in this hex, who lives there and how many of them are there, what do they want, does the location have any special rules for players (special encounter rules, heavy background radiation, EMP phenomena that messes with tech, etc). Most details can realistically be derived from the one paragraph; if I know what the basic deal of this place is, it's not a big leap to figure out what loot players might find there, how NPCs might react to PCs if encountered, what tech level of equipment said NPCs would be using, and so forth. It's the good old "less is more" system, more for the purpose of expediency and my own sanity than any aesthetic appreciation for minimalism.
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| You never know what friends might look like. |
Some clever preparatory notes should make these things a lot easier in the moment: a tiny faction relationship chart for groups that span multiple settlements or populations, a dedicated sheet/log page for putting in important NPCs plus some spare on-the-spot names to use, and some efficient settlement information notes should be enough. One bit of common wisdom I'll stick to is leaving extra space between hex key entries on my printed master hex list, so that I have room to write in any notes about things that change over time, whether due to player actions or as a natural course of sandbox play. Between that and a well-maintained campaign log to track big changes and ongoing events, it should be smooth sailing.
A World Untamed, but Known
The land is not a complete wilderness, and some regions are more "domesticated" than others. People who decided to make a place their permanent home tend to ensure that the area clear of immediate danger, and usually take steps to make it stay that way. That doesn't mean that you can't have a wolf den or bandit camp anywhere within a 30km radius of a settlement, just that there will be a contrast: brigand and raider bases will be along the outskirts of population clusters, either small enough that they're able to stay hidden, or mobile or large enough that they can't be easily removed by the locals. Meanwhile, the outcasts and weirdos will also be either hidden, fortified, or very distant from the more populated areas, since weirdos and outcasts can't rely on outsider help in case those brigands decide that they want weirdo loot.
Similarly, if people have had time to make settlements and have multiple generations of people live in them, then they've been around long enough to get an idea of what's around them. Villagers, citizens and homesteaders might not travel that much, usually sticking to their local area and only going to distant places for trade, extreme circumstances, or when they need specialized services (not every town has a herbalist, wheelwright or gunsmith). But even if a given NPC doesn't travel much, they hear about it from someone else. My bold, controversial point is, people in the world know things about the world that they're in.
This is something I feel that I could be better about. When you ask a local what you're likely to encounter on the way to the great ruined city to the east, they probably can't give you a detailed rundown of the terrain on your 4-day trip and perfectly up-to-date information about the state of the roads, traffic conditions, weather forecasts or a copy of the encounter table, but they should have some idea of what's down that way. Or, at the very least, they know someone who'd have a better answer.
I was thinking about having some sort of system to emulate this kind of knowledge, something lifted out of my Expeditions Handbook, perhaps - split the map into regions and give each region a few main things that people will know about them, and make the rest a roll. Then I realized that this is completely unnecessary. While Expedition Sites tend to be dense, complex set-stage dungeon environments, a sprawling "living" sandbox hexmap doesn't need that intensity of notekeeping. I'll have the dang map in front of me, I can see the encounter table for this region, I have my notes from last time, I know what's on this road already. I can pretty easily imagine what a random dingus on the street would know about their immediate surroundings, and if I really can't, that's what the dice are for - a roll on the encounter table and I can see what they've had trouble with on the way back from the autumn bazaar last week. Players won't be interacting with information preparation in the same way they would be in an expedition campaign, so I don't need to set up an infrastructure for that if I don't need it. And I don't.
The only thing that'll be important is remaining consistent, which means that the essential importance of notekeeping rears its head once more. This will be especially important for more dense environments, such as large population centers and ruined cities. It's okay to be a little loosey-goosey when it comes to the exact inventory of a sole Archivist sect the players decide to raid out in the badlands, but if a particular location is going to be repeatedly visited by the PCs and features any serious degree NPC relationships, detailed architecture or other hard-to-precisely-remember details like that, you have to make sure that it's written down. If your players get invested in a particular area and want to get involved in the local politics/dungeon crawling, it'll be a real kick in the teeth if they think that you care less about keeping the story straight than they do. So again, Keep Good Notes.
A Grid With Many Directions
This time, there isn't going to be a primary megadungeon that the setting is based around (well, sorta), so I won't have a big thing in the middle for compass needles to point at, and otherwise be a frame of reference for the rest of the map. So, rather than approaching the game area from the outside and heading down a familiar, safe-ish path to the megadungeon, I'll be going with the classic "dump 'em in a village somewhere near the middle and tell them good luck" method of sandbox campaign setup. I might, however, replace "good luck" with something more useful.
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| I wasn't kidding before, this map is packed - those are 1km hexes. |
Home is where the Community is
You remember how in the Stained Fortress game, we used the whole idea of "There's one home base, and you have to start and end every adventure there"? Well, that's a really good structure when your game is set in a relatively small environment where everything is within a couple of days of walkin', but I think it starts being a problem when you've got a setting big enough that your supplies are measured in weeks rather than days. It gets a little trickier to abstract out stuff like "the process of getting back home", too. Fortunately, I already mentioned what I think is a pretty good solution to this.
Since PCs will be members of a Community right from the get-go, and communities can span multiple settlements, this problem really solves itself, doesn't it? Beyond having options for where to end an adventure, there's other advantages to this system. For example, it's not as much of an issue if, somehow, one of their community's settlements burns down, meaning that we easily avoid the problem of a monolithic, untouchable home base. Another, more immediately useful effect is that different settlements will have varied equipment and services available, giving parties more reason to travel around and plan trips, rather than just having a convenient single definitely-safe place with everything they'll ever need. Every base can probably provide food, water and some other basics, but if you want to get yourself a set of heavy armor, the clan's only practicing armorer lives in the seaside village. And travelers say that the southern road's been very dangerous recently...
And of course, this doesn't have to be case for every community. While there'd certainly be large clans spanning big swathes of wilderness, and a fair share of feudal castles-and-village arrangements that might constitute one society, there could also absolutely be some communities that are singular city-states, with no other associated settlements. I honestly think this is fine - players from a city-state would be trading a larger selection of safe ports for a single, better-equipped one.
Ideally though, the PCs wouldn't have a massive selection of communities to pick from; too many options might make the world feel a little too cozy and settled. So I'll probably limit their options to a meaningfully distinct handful of Communities - varying them up by things like character type population, tech level, population, regard with other communities, and so on - and making how they work clear right from the get-go. Perhaps players who work very hard might be able to "unlock" an extra community or two - maybe a little more extreme than the originals - but that's a big if. Ultimately, we have Cryptic Alliances to provide the really desirable stuff in this space, so they'll probably be the ones with all the "really" cool stuff. There's time yet to decide about the specifics. And once they join the CAs, that'll shuffle things up even more - does your Alliance let you bring strangers into their bases?
But how do you immediately involve players into this community-based style of play? Well,
A Flock of Geas
Here's another fun tidbit from the book: PCs actually start the game at Rank 0, the lowest rank in game. Once they complete their Rite of Passage they automatically attain Rank 1. Past that, they gain Status Points and level up their Rank normally. Now this might seem like a quirky little thing that's more at place in a typical single-party campaigns than a large-scape sandbox, but I think I'll actually hold onto this.
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| This art is completely unrelated, I just really like this guy. |
Speaking of being good for newbies, having a mission to start players off is a very good solution to what a good sandbox needs: Player Direction. You're free, you can do whatever you want, but it sure is nice when you have a default activity to fall back on. The classic "Go find treasure" is a real good default objective for players that understand how things work enough and know how Getting Treasure works, but it lacks the immediate and inarguable direction of a straight-up Mission. Once you get the hang of things, you can get around to doing some more general-purpose adventuring, exploring ruins, trading with the locals, or looking around for more jobs to do - which is, after all, worth more XP. Finally, having different rites (or even tables of rites) is a great way to further distinguish the different player communities. A humble woodland village is probably going to have a considerably different Rite of Passage than a nomad tribe from the harsh salt flats.
By the way, I should mention that I think the game's four Status Point-granting activities (Fightin' enemies, Giving artifacts to your community, accomplishing missions and "special rewards" (good ol' "The GM Liked What You Did" XP)) are fairly decent as far as "rewardable" sandbox activities go, but they also create a specific image of what a PC is in this world. You're not getting XP for baking bread and feeding ducks, and you're not getting Treasure As XP (unless you give it as a gift to your community), so loot you hold onto is solely for the purposes of using that loot. You're expected to wander out into the wide world on the regular (something that most people don't really do) and encounter dangerous foes, get fabulous treasures, and perform heroic deeds. You are, in fact, adventurers! Maybe heroes even, some day! But more specifically, you're adventurers that the community wants and appreciates. You get a reputation for what you do, and reputation is no joke; I actually omitted one of the things that Social Rank does: You add it directly to your Charisma. There is no limit to how high your Rank can get, and explicitly, there is no limit to how high your Charisma can be modified by your Rank. You can become the most famous adventurer in the world. How's that for goals?
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| The only crazier part than seeing this in the book, was finding out that it's an actual named character in the book (in fact, the only named character outside of the adventure) |
How many changes/additions to the rules?
Not many, because honestly this book pretty much already does what I want it to. Here's what I'm thinking.
Change some numbers around
Look, I had that rant about what numbers mean earlier, and I completely stand by it. However, the game also has some math that is, no matter how much you try to divulge the designer's intent, just downright silly.
One of the biggest and most obvious examples of this is the armor table. Of the mundane non-tech armors, like half of them provide AC 4 - which is also the best AC you can get without dipping into complex modern-era plastics and alloys, forcefields or power armor. The problem is that these mundane armors also have only two other relevant stats -weight and cost - and even a brief glance at the table reveals that everything is trash compared to chainmail, the apparently highest form of non-artifact armor; which provides the exact same amount of protection in every mechanical and mathematical sense as full plate armor, at the lowest weight of all the AC 4 armors, with a paltry gold cost that's only barely higher than ringmail and still well within "starting characters can probably purchase multiple" range. It doesn't even have a tech level or rarity that makes it any more difficult to use or acquire than the other AC 4 armors; if you can purchase ringmail or scale, you can get the blessed chainmail. Not that the weight ratio matters that often, because once you're wearing it armor does not factor into your inventory capacity. But again, until you find high-tech armor, there is zero mechanical reason to not have an entire party decked out in chainmail ,unless the GM decides to hit you with some of the classic "You will sink faster in heavy armor" stuff. Which is fair, but not really mentioned anywhere in the book.
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| Look at this. Also, don't be alarmed by the H-word in there - they occasionally use the somewhat-dated tearm "nuclear holocaust" in the book, because writing "apocalypse" 50 times would imply a limited vocabulary. |
I chalk these glitches up to the limitations of time and budget. Looking at how the book is laid out, I can see aspirations for a much more involved armor/weapon relationship. I see clear inspirations from the wasn't-meant-to-be Classic Traveller, where every weapon and every armor combination have a distinct to-hit target (trust me, it's a lot less ridiculous than it sounds). They wanted to do the oldschool thing again, of not just saying "Crushing weapons are better against heavy armor", because that's too easy. They wanted to obfuscate that info behind a weapon class that all crushing weapons would have, and have that weapon class do well against the heavy armors' armor class. Sometimes it's easy to forget that "AC" stands for armor class, isn't it?
And I love that they tried, because I love the aesthetics of this, but it didn't coalesce how they wanted it to. So, we have a mostly-functional-but-anomalous math space; where chainmail is the best defense against bazookas, where there's like one armor worth wearing out of the 10 basic types provided, and where the mechanically pointless platemail is worth Infinitely More Status Points than a functioning force shield (which, by the way, isn't actually described anywhere in the book outside being statted the armor table - I think it's meant to be the general value for all forcefields, but I can't be sure). Which is a bit of a shame, but also not that hard to fix.
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| Another "clue" that makes me think that the AC ranges thing is real: shields don't actually increase your AC, they just reduce the attacker's to-hit roll. Small difference, but further in favor of my argument, no? |
One more funny bit about numbers being wrong: in the book, there's two kinds of currency: Gold Coins, which are the standard, and Domars, pre-apocalypse plastic coins of various color, in circulation because they can't really be forged. This is all fine - it combines the fun of multiple currencies with a straight-forward "coin size" thing, with 5 domars to a GP meaning that domars are basically the game's silver pieces. The funny part in the book is that gold coins come in all shapes and sizes, and that they weigh an average of 10 ounces, which for metric enjoyers is a whopping 283.5 grams. Yes, that means that there's just short of four gold coins to a kilo. While this is the hilarious endpoint of the "man oldschool D&D coins were big" running bit, and as much as I'm tickled of the idea of individual gold coins being viable as sling ammunition, I'm pretty sure that this is just a typo. The entire game uses metric measurements, and this is actually the only usage of the word "ounce" in the entire book. So yeah, I think it's safe to assume that they meant "10 grams" and move on.
Combat Alterations?
That's right, there's a question mark on that subheader. And I meant it, because I'm not that solidly decided on it yet.
Here's the thing - I'm okay with non-tech weapons being worse than tech weapons, because that's the tradeoff. I have no intent of redesigning the system to the point where players will find it easy to say "Nah, I don't need the gun, I'll take my chances with my spear." It's pretty clear to me that the game wants getting into melee to be taxing and scary and the existing system provides for that. At the same time, I worry about the potential for the previously mentioned dozen-round melees - I have no problem with fights being a slog, I just have a problem with fights being a slog you can't avoid.
There's a couple of solutions that I could use here, ranging from simple-but-popular critical hits to completely re-mathing the book to adding unique traits to weapons that would help them be more efficient, but right now the most appealing and logical one is to make Surprise Attacks more effective. As it stands, the rules for attacking a Surprised target is that your hit lands automatically (hell yeah), and then you just roll damage normally (boo). While it's a good idea, and dramatically effective with tech weapons - getting automatically hit with a Black Ray Gun means that you're just instantly dead unless you have a forcefield - the effect of knocking 1d8 HP off of a 30-HP enemy before the fight starts is less than whelming.
So, I might implement a simple a little effect: Landing a surprise attack with a non-tech weapon will, in addition to a normal damage roll, deal an extra 10 damage. Math-wise, this means that successfully sneaking up on someone you want to murder means your opening charge will put them on a significant back foot, but usually not killing them outright. I might further append a special rule for daggers to say "Daggers double the surprise attack damage bonus", which I think would give people a reason to actually bring the otherwise-pointless 1d4 damage dagger, since with a damage range of 21-24, they have a solid chance of just immediately killing a surprised enemy.
I'll, of course, also be using other common-sense calls and rulings, like the classic coup de grace solution of "if a character is helpless and has a knife to their throat, there is no damage roll, you just kill them"; or giving players to-hit or to-damage bonuses based on circumstance. I have no problem with giving in-the-moment bonuses as they come up, and probably won't spend much time making a list of situational bonuses or whatever. The only reason I'd formalize the the "sneak attack" rule is because I want players to immediately understand how that works and play with it in mind. On the other hand, it would make getting into fights seem safer and probably make trying to use non-violence a bit less appealing, so I might just not do this, or limit the bonus to "just deal max damage on a surprise attack" and move on. Sorry, daggers.
Slot-Based Inventory
My last inventory system has been extremely well received by my players, creating a very good balance between ease of use and meaningful impact on play for inventory management. It should then be unsurprising, perhaps, that I'm replacing the kilo-based encumbrance system for a new interpretation of the slot thing.
While I still gotta math things out, I'm planning to separate carrying capacity out into 3 categories of slot - Quick, Sack, and Backpack - and spread all three of those across the three encumbrance values. Basically, if you have too many items in any of three slot types, you go up to the next encumbrance level. The idea is that players will be deciding if they'd rather spread the load "evenly" across themselves for the sake of expediency, or put more equipment in "accessible" places at the cost of reducing maneuverability. Really though, I just want to make it easy for players to tell where they're at in terms of load.
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| Nothing in this image is final, especially the amounts and types of slot, it's just to show what I mean. But hopefully you get the idea - you can put whatever you want wherever you want, but if there's anything at all under the orange line you're Burdened, and if there's anything at all under the red line you're Heavily Burdened. |
The big aim here is to have Burdened be the "standard" weight for the typical PC; Unburdened is for when you're intentionally travelling light (carrying nothing but a single weapon, the armor on your back, rations, the and an absolute minimum of other equipment), and Heavily Burdened is for when you're hauling loot or loading up for some foolhardy frontal assault.
I think this system is fundamentally okay, but I'll probably workshop it for a while yet before I'm completely satisfied by it. And to be clear to fans of the original 18 slot deal - the 18 slot one is good and I intend to keep using it, this is a different solution for a different game with different needs.
That's it?
Well, no, I'll probably be making some other tweaks and stuff - I need to slap together a character sheet, for a start, since the default one is a little too Tax Form for my aesthetic preferences. But once I've got all these basic elements sorted out, I'll have everything I need to get that prototype game rolling and see how everything feels. Plus, like I said, I've got to realign my mode of thinking to having a more social game, which will take me just a little bit.
A Lot to Think About
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| The post-post apocalypse. |
The process of writing out this post was not only an opportunity to share my observations and feelings, but also to crystallize some of my own feelings and opinions about what this game is, and what I want the campaign to be. And ideally it wasn't a waste of time for you either, dear reader.
I hope that you reading this has inspired you to perhaps take the time to look at a weird, nifty old game with some big tables and bigger ideas; and if you do, I hope it inspires you in the same way that it did me. Or, at the very least, that you found something that I got wrong and tell me about it, in which case I still win because I got you to look at a game I like.
Thanks for reading. I'll try to make the next one shorter.
No promises though.
Hey look, I acted upon my threat - the mathy sequel to this post is out now!
[1]: This might have an interesting consequence on party equipment distribution, because you'd likely be distributing gear based on who can get the most out of their stats: anyone will zap for a painful 5d6 damage with a laser rifle, but only Egnuk the Fierce has that big meaty stat-provided bonusses for his two-handed sword, so he'll probably be the last one to tier up his gear, since he's the most effective with the mundane stuff. This is a fairly unique situation for this kind of game, and I'm curious to see how it actually pans out when put in the greasy mitts of players.
[2]: This bit right out of the book. I can only assume that they meant that "the PCs will in fact just find everything there is to find along the way, with the possible exception of amazingly and intentionally well hidden secrets" - don't screw your players out of loot for not searching every 30 meters, folks.
[3]: I know what you're thinking: "How is it a 'save' if the game doesn't actually have mechanics for saving throws"? And my answer to you is, it KINDA works like a save, since most things that inflict radiation/poison have their power rolled for (along the lines of "this exposes the target to Intensity Level 3d6 Radiation"). So, yeah? Kinda? It's also amusing that having a higher-than-average Con means that midrange mutations will actually hurt you rather than mutate you, but it also does make some degree of sense - Your system is too stable, so the blast needs to be stronger to affect you.
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