WOOOORDS

SSSS design notes and comments

 

 

Because Chere mentioned it: A "standard die" means rolling d20 and a success on 11-20 and fail on 1-10.

 

 

 

This system is based on my canceled Slightly Less Simple system, but has a lot less depth and fine tuning than originally planned. Why do this? Because it seems no one here bothered to read up on d20 OGL game design and expects some wildly different system to play nicely with the SSS. Of course, you could just abandon the d20 and switch to one of the many many other systems around, but this is the official simplest-possible-skillsystem-for-the-simplest-possible-system from the author of the SSS. Unlike other systems, here I'm focusing COMPLETELY on simplicity and ease of play. Like the SSS, ANYONE should be able to pick up this system and play immediately, no ass long character creation or rule explanations. Unavoidably though, the addition of new abilities adds a (tiny) bit of extra work for the GM, as he needs to know the abilities and how they work.

 

 

Like the SSS, this system is PURELY for combat-oriented PnP. One of THE biggest mistakes you can make in game design is biting off more than you can chew, which is a mistake I see very often in thread discussions about rules. We lack the resources, experience and plain nerve to have a "full encompassing" system. This isn't just a problem unique to us, but a universal problem in PnP. When you try to combine combat and non-combat, either you get funky out of combat mechanics (D&D's Craft skill comes to mind), funky in-combat and campaign design restrictions (Ars Magica's system of year long campaigns) or a completely broken, unplayable mess of 1000 rules (FATAL). As such, I am continuing in the spirit of seperating these very distinct and hard to unite aspects of PnP gameplay. (If you want to see my attempt to overcome this PnP limitation, keep a look out for my first publishing-grade PnP writing a few months down the line. I may of course fail spectacularly, but I am trying an extremely unconventional route in game design that would be amazingly cool if it worked)

 

 

The XP system is 4C-founding-based to not scare off new players. Whoever thinks older players should be more powerful is a nazi. I would feel extremely cheated if I were a new player and my character were weaker than all others and had no chance of ever catching up to other characters. This fosters a sense of elitism and general dickishness ("Adventure today at 10! Please only players with 100+XP!"). Also, to return to the seperating-combat-and-crafting bit, making players spend points that could be spent in mechanical boni in combat for at best semi-mechanical boni in "down time" activity only creates an atmosphere of segregation, where your choice of skillpoints dictates whether you are useful on an adventure or not. Crafting oriented characters would be at a penalty in adventures compared to adventure-specified players, and this is obviously not what we want. The magic of 4C is that today you can be a farmer and a drunk at the inn, tomorrow a heroic adventurer and the day after a politician in town hall. Such skill systems would only impair free expression of RP.

 

 

What though should be part of this system is racial abilities, aka flying and magic. These obviously have huge fluff benefits, as do some other abilities. The point, may I remind you is: "Training in basic abilities like flying, magic and earth pony skills will take half a year to get the basics" Meaning by the point of 6 XP, pegasi should be flying and unis should be casting actual spells without fear of lashback. This system is currently completely unbalanced for I'd say 10+ XP or so, but till then it's fairly balanced. The only unbalanced thing is Earth Ponies, who are slightly stronger than the other races. This is intentional, since even back to SSS days Earth Ponies have been preferred so that mudrace players can have something they are good at. Remember: Everyone playing a unicorn is an asshole. The horrible feeling of not having enough XP no matter what you pick is completely intentional. We said basics, not everything.

 

 

Before we dive further into the SSSS itself, I have about two dozen universal PnP concepts to explain that nobody gives a fuck about. As such I'll keep it (as) short (as possible), but I feel it is essential to finally talk about some things that are blatantly obvious to a long time GM and PnP enthusiast, but less so to newer players.

 

Concept 1: The Economics of Fantasy

This is THE major breaking point of any crafting and market system in a PnP. Economics is in pretty high on the list of things most players do not enjoy at their PnP table, inflation and taxes are annoying enough on taxday. As such, PnP system universally simplify the system in one way or another, often to the point it hardly resembles anything like a real world economy. This can be done in many ways. D&D for example unifies everything, everything has a listed universal price and manufacturing cost/time. This leads to the insanity known as the Craft skill in D&D that can be wonderfully abused to make infinite dosh, or piss off your fellow players and DM because you refuse to adventure until you crafted your new sword. D&D allows you to craft any item you have the skills/feats and resources for. You then spend an amount of money, time and (if the item is magical) XP to craft said item. This, I personally have found, is highly disruptive to fast flowing gameplay as characters are rooted in spot for extended in-game periods. This problem is avoided in 4C since we're basically sedetary anyways. The "limiting factor" (a concept we will come back to in a moment) in D&D is the money and XP, since actually wealth and XP are usually given in a specific, predictable fashion. Every level of X-level will have similar amounts of gold and XP, as such the DM can control their access to items by monitoring those levels. Even if you really want a 20th level staff at level 10, you simply won't have the XP and gold to make one (leaving our skill for a moment here). 4C does not have this strict limitation on wealth (and no XP at all), certain players have literally nothing to their name and others have, well not a lot, but technically infinitely more than others. A huge mistake was giving players regular access to the Equestrian market, which is such a D&D-esque unified market that always has everything in stock and avalaible. This means that crafty players could import say, raw iron, then refine and craft it into swords and resell that for 5 times the price. Wait you may say, that's awesome, that's how an economy is supposed to work! And you are right, if it works that way, cool. But crafting/economy mechanisms in fantasy are pretty damn funky. What would the value of say, a human made gun be? You think the military would pay handsomly for that? How would you go about crafting a magical item or importing one? What determines their price, availability and function? What basic resources are required to make such an item? Could we import a "Magic Item's for Dummies" guide and mass-produce weak but functional magical items? The fact is that making a working and dynamic economy requires a massive amount of lore, basically the whole second half of the Dungeon Master's Guide is dedicated to it, along with a good portion of the Player's Handbook. And even then, the D&D-esque economy is extremely stiff, prizes never really change...unless the DM intervenes. More on that in just a moment. And unlike 4C, D&D has the regular, predictable income. If one wants to have a SEMI balanced crafting system, it needs at least one predictable, mathematically constant limiting factor and you have to derive all other functions from that variable. For 4C, I would suggest time. Unlike games such as D&D and Ars Magica, 4C does not skip time, OOC and IC time is in synch. This makes a beautiful limiting factor, as even if you somehow munchkind your way up to making a stupidly powerful weapon, it may take you months of actual OOC time to make it, which is also more than long enough for other players to notice you're abusing the system (more on this in a bit). So closing words on this subject? Making an economic system that includes outside Equestria that doesn't need to be painfully fine tuned to every single transaction ever will require massive amounts of pre work, of working out prices and the mechanics of resources, their consumption in crafting and more, including a detailed working out of how magical items and substances function in this economy. Anyone ever thought to import some healing potions, hm?

 

Concept 2: Lack of an Over GM and abusing the system ("munckin'ing")

4C is a PnP, everyone that says otherwise does not know the definition of a PnP. It's not necessarily D&D (yet), but it fills all the criteria. You have an in game character with certain traits/possessions and you interact with other players and NPCs in a natural language based setting. What is highly untypical of 4C for a PnP is the lack of one, singular, ultimate GM. In basically every other system, there is always one highest judge over everything. This is totally good and game designers know this. When designing a game, at some point (quite quickly) you reach a point where you just can't write down everything. At some point, you just need a thinking, logical human to be the judge. PnP is VERY different from video gaming, as you probably have noticed by now. PnPs allow vastly greater freedome in expression, all powered by the most powerful game server known to man: Your GM's brain. In 4C, we don't have the luxus/fascism of having a dedicated GM watch over our every move. This has it's ups and downs. On the one hand, you have yet even more freedome of expression and can interact with the world even without such a GM present, normally if the GM's out, the world's out. The downside is of course that this freedome brings in chaos, and abusability, in our case it has manifested as rabid retconning and constant shitflinging whenever fucking anything happens at all, good or bad. If you have one GM and you do something stupid, he stops you dead in your tracks and there's no shitflining at him, if you piss him off, the game's over for you. Here, that doesn't work, which is the cause of the massive shitstorms we see frequently. But many people want to be able to reliable do things without having to fear retribution for rules that were never written down (which is what people bitch about really, breaking a setting that is written down nowhere) and as such want a system to do certain things. Such auxilliary systems include bestiaries, lore books and crafting rules, just rules and setting information that can be used as is without having to justify yourself. That's the point of rules really, allow you to act without rubbing anyone wrong. So I see why people want a crafting and character system. But, rules are only as good as you can enforce them. It would be exceedingly easy to simply claim I rolled a 20 on my crafting roll, who would check? The GM? While this can be circumvented, it will ultimately still require someone to be checking up on other players, which is a drag for that player and may annoy the other in turn. One would need to write a system that is so all encompassing and extremely clear that it can never be misinterpreted and needs no one to carefully check. This is obviously next to impossible. So under the line, if you want a working crafting system you either need a very rational GM that never ever sleeps or one that is rediculously complicated and sophisticated (A single "craft roll" won't cut it). Of course you could just ignore my advice, because that has always gone so well to date. (And don't get me STARTED on how rediculously INSANE a research or inventing skill would be)

 

Concept 3: Egoism and Segregation

The SSS had no character creation for a very, very good reason. Not only to make it easy, but also because 4C, back in ye olden days, was about a COMMUNITY, it was about the town gathering resources and growing and evolving. It wasn't about what sword you had or what armor or what colored hair ribbon, those were only secondaries. You may remember that I always swiftly armed any players in my old PnPs, so they had their weapons and could participate in the fun. But my adventures where never World of Warcraft, where you had to farm harder and harder bosses over and over to get better equipment, or well, "numbers on your equipment" to farm even harder bosses over and over so you had even better numbers so you could compare your numbers to the numbers of other players until you had the highest numbers and you became fucking king of the numbers. Woohoo, 10/10 Gameplay - IGN. 4C, at least in my eyes, was not about elitism. It was never about one player having more or being more powerful than the other. Everyone got a house built, everyone could run for council, everyone could join any PnP. Introducing character generation and crafting WILL change this. It will change the relationship between the game and the player. A player investing more time into the game can gain direct mechanical boni from it and become stronger than those that come later. Late comers WILL have worse equipment than older players, or, god forbid, have less character points to spend. This may well create a segregation where newer players feel discouraged from participating, how many times have you read new rollers writing "too late to join?". Well, to date that was never the case, but that may change if rules are implemented in a wrong way. Beyond that, behavior will change in response to having a character you can "groom". This is normal PnP human nature, I know what I am talking about. Once you have YOUR character that can become stronger by training or crafting, there WILL be those players that will invest heavily into that and focus solely on that, not giving a flying fuck for the community as a whole. Because why should they? Game mechanics direct the behavior of the player, if all the rules and mechanics are based around your individual ego-centric character design, people will focus on that. What else should they do if there are no more interesting rules and games to be played on the town level? As such I find the want to introduce character rules at best misguided. One should rather focus on implementing rules that concern the town, figure out the economics of Equestria, magic rules, all what was said above, and limit characters to the SSS-esque cookie cutter templates that WORK in combat, but their flair and personality comes not from what skill tree they pick, but from how they are RPd, which is ultimately I believe what we should be working for with our system, RP expression, not seducing woman by rolling high on diplomacy. Would you like to be forced to ERP with Silver Tongue because he put all his points into diplomacy and rolled high? Didn't think so. So KEEP COMBAT MECHANICS MECHANICAL AND SEPERATE FROM FREE RP. If you want economy, expand the current, depersonalised system where every character contributes to the community in work and the community then decides how to work with it, which is far easier to control since each action goes through many many people. Say it with me kids: "I will not have out-of-combat and in-combat skills be based on the same system." Don't do it, it's a trap, as mentioned further up already. Concluding this thought, remember what you are appealing to through your game design, the SSS was appealing to not having numbers define your character, but cour social interactions and personality, only using numbers when absolutely necesarry (in combat).

 

Concept 4: Combat roles

Now to completely throw that out of the window, here's a discussion of how PnP combat works, fantasy combat in particular. The SSS is based on the d20 OGL system, the same D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder are based on. Every combat system has it's quirks and oddities, this one is no exception. Traditionally, the spellcasters are the tacticians, and the melee combatants are the high-stat brutes in PnP. In traditional D&D-esque PnP, there are 4 roles in combat: The Tank, the Glass Cannon, the Skill Monkey and the God (Many would also add a healer, but in vanilla D&D, healers are actually severely underpowered). The tank is a high base stat character focused on sucking up punishment and dealing moderate but very reliable amounts of damage, this is usually a fighter or similar class.  A Glass Cannon is a character that does very high damage in short time but has few defenses and needs other characters like the Tank and God to protect him from danger while he rains hell on enemies. The Skill Monkey is a catch-all category for characters that solve unusual problems and have many skills that are not used quite as often, such as lockpicking, stealth, climbing, balancing or anything of the sorts. The God is the battlefield control and arguably strongest character role. Basically always a magic user, the God focuses not on dealing damage but on hampering enemies and aiding his team members through anything from changing the terrain, teleporting comrades to strategic positions, buffing them with spells or cursing enemies. Earth Ponies were designed with the roles of tank and glass cannon in mind. With high toughness, they can take a lot of damage and with damage buffs, they can dish out vicious and reliable punishment. Pegasi were designed with the roles of Skill Monkey and Glass Cannon in mind. They're hard to hit and get a debuff in combat, along with having more points left over to spend on damage upgrades and such. The lightning bolt is not extremely strong when compared, but it's still a ranged attack, one that with some luck can be absolutely devastating, making it a valid choice in an extended battle where the tanks can keep the enemy off your back. With their flight, they become the SSSS equivalent of a Skill Monkey, since they can now solve many problems that would be insurmountable to other races, such as a cliff face. A pegasi with high toughness would also make an EXCELLENT tank with their high AC. Unicorns were designed with the Glass Cannon and God role in mind. Unicorns have the best ranged attack, one that IGNORES ARMOR (and doesn't take 2 turns to cast). That shit's crazy powerful, which is why upgrading it is so expensive. You put a Unicorn with a decent magic score 100ft away from a super-tough Earth Pony and that Earth Pony is down before he even reaches the magician. As such, the melee and ranged classes are balanced by mobility, which is completely typical for d20-esque PnPs. This is not saying the system is perfect or even good. I think Unis need more spells to make more effective Gods and Earthies need some form of mobility upgrade I feel, but I didn't want to stray far from obvious things a pony could do. The only way you could make Earthies more versatile would be to redesign them from the ground up or add Tomb of Battle-esque maneuvers and stances and such along with higher mobility, or something "Earth Magic" like. Maybe Zebras could be designed to use potions as buffers and/or battlefield control? (Throwing potions of fire to create barriers, poisons etc) Bat Ponies have an obvious fluff towards being hit-and-run glass cannons in my head. So all in all, there is still work to be done, but you can see the concepts I looked to when designing the roles.

 

Now, back to the actual system. Note that I still need to actually run the numbers through some good simulations to test if they are actually balanced mathematically, but I'll get to that when I'm not drowning in homework and bad health.

 

The Perks: The idea is that any pony should be allowed to take up a more tank-y role if they want, as such the basic passive combat abilities are all here and open to every race. Not just pegasi are fast and not only earth ponies are strong. All of these boni are modest and scale with level. The first level always gives a bonus to a "secondary combat stat" (not damage, hit or AC) or in the case of Combat Training, negates a self imposed penalty. The second levels give a bonus to the "primary combat stats", of which AC is generally the best and the third give boni to a good stat and a secondary stat, or in the case of Combat Training, double a really good stat.

 

Earthies: Hands down the best abilities mechanically, both 1 and 2 are better than any other abilities purely from a mechanical view. 3 is mostly flavor but makes 4 a lot better, both combined make a very deadly combo. The idea is that a 6+XP Earthy should always either go for an all out or a buck, the all out being a bit more risky while buck gives a more reliable damage and the possibility of stunning an enemy, a valuable ability. If anyone is getting nerfed in the next version, it would probably be these guys, even so tactically, they are balanced by not having ranged attacks or mobility.

 

Pegasi: As said above, flight is your friend. The SSS flight needs a bit rebalancing, higher bonus or similar. Will do mathematical simulations soonish. Wing Buffet level 2 is one of the best abilities in this system, as it can knock out multiple enemies at once. The Lightning Cloud is generally not worth it, unless you are a larger group and you are fighting a very tough, high AC enemy. The tanks can hold it away while you charge the AC ignoring attacks safely from behind, gnawing away diligently at enemy health. Being able to fly is one of the most gamebreaking abilities in any PnP, there's a reason it's called DUNGEONS and Dragons, so that the fuckers can't fly away from your oh-so-cleverly crafted traps and monsters. Seriously, one of the strongest traditional monsters in D&D, the Tarrasque, is rendered absolutely harmless by a fly spell. Nothing much mechanically, but damn if you even have a single IQ you can think of a hundred ways this can be powerful.

 

Unicorns: Also called the eater-of-XP. If you want good magic, you're paying a high price. Magic is difficult and takes YEARS, even a lifetime of training. This category could still be vastly expanded. I thought of instead of having spells be maneuvers, have maneuvers based only on general boni and having a seperate Spells section where you can buy spells with XP. I will actually definitely do that next revision, so see this version as temporary. This would give Unicorns the classic versatility of magic users in PnP, which I think we can preserve. What we should try not to preserve is the traditional OPness of magic users. This can be accomplished by rabidly harsh rolls for more difficult spells, along with hilarious and deadly side effects on a miscast! One of the few things I like about Dark Heresy (the WH:40K PnP) is it's Psyker system, which is MERCILESS. Oh? You want to make a tiny pebble float? TOO BAD YOU ROLLED BAD; YOUR SOUL IS SUCKED INTO THE WARP AND REPLACED WITH A CHAOS DEMON THAT ATTACKS THE GROUP, ROLL INIT. Hilarious hijinks occur at every turn. On the subject of how powerful and logical Equestrian magic should be (Hi Liven!), I recently discussed this with Cherenkov, a bit paraphrased, some good thoughts in here:

 

"(Discussing what kind of tech level Equestria is)I'd call Equestria  "rubber science retrotech ", which basically means the overall tech level is in a lower level, but there are bizarrely some highly advanced technologies that neatly coexist with less developed techs. And by "rubber science" I mean that I think a lot of the "technology" is based on largely undefined infrastructure and technologies that are very different from normal human tech for the sole purpose of fitting what the writer needs at that moment for convenience, therefor it's "bendable" or "rubbery" science however the writer happens to need it, hence "rubber science".

 

And on the topic of "intermediate level 2 magic user"(Twilight is described as such in the comics), one word: lel. Changing your face(Done in a comic page he showed me by one of the teachers) in D&D isn't too hard, Alter Self is a 2nd level spell. Animating a combat ready statue(Also happened in same comic) would be Animate Object, a 6th level spell, maybe Minor Servant (7th level) since that bunny seemed much more useful than a normal animated object. The simple fact is Unicorns in canon are ridiculously OP, like, not even funny. Hue, for my one irl pony campaign, the X-Files-SCP-esque scientists wrote this about unicorns:

 

"Seem almost oblivious to their gifted status, use their abilities almost exclusively for own personal comfort. Most likely dominant race." - Dr. Adams

 

And also:

 

These creatures have shown a very mature, civilized society, capable of complex language, art and science. Their technical level matches ours on some levels, such as public health, social security and transportation. In others, most notably weapons technology, they lack significantly.

 

"Sounds like a hippy colony to me." - Dr. Bright

 

Hue sorry, I am embarrassingly proud of that line. Twilight if going by in show description alone is easily a 13th level wizard, if not 15th. (Turning birds into oranges, Polymorph Any Object, 8th level spell) A more accurate description may be a high skill Ars Magica Magus, or a 600 point build mage in GURPS, which is ludicrous. It's a simple fact that Unicorns outshine the other races in absolutely every way, everything others can do, Unis can do better. The implications of this are blissfully ignored in show writing for convenience. In 4C, I've always done my absolute utmost to nerf unis at every single turn of the way, if only to let out spite against wanna-be powergamers. Remember: Anyone playing a unicorn is an asshole. In my irl D&D campaign I also try to neuter mages at every turn by being very liberal in what I let my melee classes do and play and giving them great anti-magic loot. It still pans out to: If the wizard is far away, he wins, if they're in melee, he's getting #rekd. Which is fine really and what I was going for with the SSSS. So for balance of 4C I think it's already solved, and if we go with lore-as-written (LAW from now on), we can describe our inability to do anything but blow things up as our noobishness at being pony (or human nature of blowing shit up). Alternatively, we can interpret LAW as cartoon-o-vision and disregard and reinterpret it, which we have to do if Equestria is supposed to have any sort of semi-logical tech, social and economic system. Uni magic, Discord shenanigans, overabundance of gems and such all belong to this category of "should consider reinterpretation"."

 

 

 

That's all for now, my brain is smoking and I'm sure I missed a ton of shit. If you don't like my system and concepts, well, it's only an idea and a lot of ideas and observations from a veteran here, take what you want, I'm not saying the SSSS is even very good, but a lot of the thoughts in this document are REALLY worth considering.