The Artifact RPG

For the longest time I’ve wanted a good helping mechanic. In most RPGs, the way you help is by subtracting some Hit Points from the monster the other character is fighting. But what about telling a story, playing a song or fixing a car? Most RPGs don’t have any way of combining effort to do a better job.

I’ve thought of various ways to help. like adding the characters skill check values together (we roll under difficulty ratings here). That works for things like lifting large objects but that increases the value of a helper too much for things like repairing vehicles. I played with adding skill values together for a while but no matter how much I monkeyed with it I couldn’t get it to work satisfactorily.

There are two aspects to helping that I wanted to be able to capture. Sometimes help is not very helpful and how many helpers can you have.

When help is no help

Have you ever had someone try and help you but their efforts or suggestions were either so bad or so uninformed that it took more effort just to get past what they were doing? Like if someone was trying to figure out how to get their car to start and someone kept insisting that there must be a problem with the key. That’s the kind of thing I’m referring to.

There’s a reason I want to capture that. Some players will reason that if one helper is good, eighty is better (I would have, recovering rules lawyer here). I don’t want to introduce a crowd surfing mechanic, I want a helping mechanic.

How many helpers?

That limits the number of helpers but for some jobs, having dozens of helpers is possible. For example, playing a song. If you have five helpers, start a band. If you have forty, start an orchestra. Things like piloting an ocean going ship are in reality the effort of a dozen people or so (it is getting smaller these days) some in the engine room, some in the bridge doing navigation and then there’s the guy at the helm.

So there are some tasks that not only could be helped by multiple people but some that would require it.

What kind of task

So when helping, it’s important to understand what kind of task is being done. In a lot of jobs, especially in construction there are people that are paid to be a helper. Usually these employees are under skilled to start out and they get paired to a skilled worker. Then there are nurses that assist a surgeon. They are skilled but the surgeon has a specific skill that they usually don’t have.

Then there are tasks that dozens of people can work together on, like lifting a heavy object. What’s the difference between these tasks? At first I would say skilled vs. unskilled effort but that isn’t really true. It actually comes down to how many hands can actually work on a task at once.

I should mention that I’m not talking about a project that multiple crews can work on all at once. For example, building a house. You can have twenty people working on the house and they’re all working on different aspects of the house. Each one would be passing or failing their own skill checks but each skilled worker can have his own helper that does the heavy work and makes him more efficient.

So the task is defined by how many people can touch the job that skill is being applied to (even if it’s just raw strength). If one person can fail while another can succeed as when two carpenters are working side by side and one hits the nail while the other misses, then each one is a regular skill check. However, if one person is trying to fix a toaster and another is offering ideas on what might be broken and holding a light, then they’re helping. If ten men try and lift a car they are collaborating.

Where are we?

Whew! Let’s distill this a bit now. As we’re discussing, a project is then a large body of effort that can be broken up into different skill checks. Here a job is a body of effort that the character must attempt to complete in a single skill check. For instance, a playing a single song would be a single check, it’s either done well or badly. On the other hand, a concert is made up of skill checks for each song. For each song a large number of people can help to make it sound good. If the song is performed by thirty people is it ten times better than if it’s performed by three people? Probably not, but it could be somewhat better. To simulate that effort, the lead musician (singer? conductor?) rolls and all the other musicians modify the difficulty of the song. For simplicity, the helpers could roll first, consult the following table and their results are added together.

For The Artifact RPG I think the modifier should alter the chance of rolling under fraction columns as I outlined here.

For collaborations, like ten guys lifting a car, it isn’t really the effort of one person being helped by nine others it’s a collaboration. In that case each person would roll and according to the table below and their effort is pooled.

So if my character’s STR would normally allow him to lift 100 Kg and I failed my roll, he’s really only lifting 30 Kg. If I roll his 1/2 he’s lifting 80 Kg for the group.

How’s that? Clear as mud? I may have to revisit this one. I’m a bit rambly here. I like it, it’s just not very concise. Any thoughts on this?

In most games, characters start off as blank slates. Over time the players find a niche with them and maybe sculpt out a personality. Given the danger most characters face, that personality tends to be grim and practical. The character doesn’t trust anyone and will use any resource available to them, even if it makes them a villain.

A lot of games do start off the characters with some background information. Unfortunately in a lot of situations that background can be ignored. I start them off with an attitude that the player can try to use to give the character a flavor. That’s worked reasonably well but sometimes the player just can’t imagine playing a character that they rolled “Depressed” for.

Another thing that’s made an impact on the character’s stories is a limitation that can be rolled saying that some high ranking person has a vendetta against them. That’s mostly useful for the GM to come up with a reason they got the dangerous assignment. In one case, a character was arrested because a corporate official’s son had died and he was convinced it was the PC’s fault. It gives the GM a hook to work with.

That’s why I’ve been considering elective traits for the player to choose from. Either the traits have to give the GM story hooks to work with or they only give a benefit to the player when they incorporate the trait in their play. So let’s look at some examples.

The Principled Character

The player comes up with a principle that the character will never cross. For example, ” Doesn’t hit girls.” could be one but the GM would also extrapolate that to mean if the player doesn’t hit girls he also would never attack them. If a female were to attack the PC, he would be forced to only defend and attempt to disable or immobilize her without doing any damage.

Another example of a principled character would be “Never lies”. This would mean to the GM that the character never tries to deceive anyone. The player can’t try and bend it and say “Well, I wasn’t technically lying.” The character has to stick to the spirit of their principle and not just the lettering of it. The player may allow others to lie but should be upset about it and not let it go lightly.

Those are just two examples of any number of principles a player could adopt. Obviously the GM should agree to the principal and how to apply it before the player goes ahead with it. So what does the player get out of it? At first I thought about a stat bonus but that didn’t make a lot of sense and the player could ignore the principle and just get the bonus. That’s why I think the PC should get a special XP bonus after each game they don’t break the principal. If the PC ever does break the principal egregiously, the GM can rule they loose the XP bonus permanently.

Friends and Enemies

This one is a little simpler to apply. The player picks a friend that will stick with them through thick and thin. They also pick an enemy that will not stop trying to harm them. The more powerful the friend, the more powerful their enemy must be. The GM should discuss this at length with the character and flesh out the benefits and consequences that the player is looking for.

Got A Job To Do

This player has a personal goal that they want to accomplish. “Save the whales” could work if your setting has whales. The character must spend most of their effort to accomplishing this task. The benefit is a XP bonus similar to the Principled character.

Any others you can think of? Post them in the comments.

While playing a one hour game yesterday, the players were in a situation where someone had sabotaged their vehicle so that it was leaking fuel. Despite not being mechanics and not having any parts to repair it (they did have tools), they managed to repair the leak (lucky roll). Now they were in the middle of nowhere and weren’t sure if they could make it back or to their destination. The question came up if a pilot could fly the vehicle in a way that would be more fuel efficient. I thought this was a great question and so I wanted to make it happen. Not for that game though, I needed them to run out of fuel for the plot.

The question is, how much fuel can a pilot save? There are two factors as I see it, the vehicle and environment. For the vehicle, I know that by driving very carefully a car can get better fuel efficiency but what about a helicopter? That’s what I’m not sure of. Then as far as environment, driving on a flat road (or downhill if possible) will get you further than going up and down hills. Airplanes and helicopters can get help from thermals so I think it can be done, it’s just an issue of pilot skill. Now the question is how much can be saved. There are some efficiencies that can only be gained by special maintenance I won’t consider these because they’re outside of what a pilot can do. I will discuss two choices players can make to be more efficient however.

Reduce Weight

If the vehicle is carrying any cargo the pilot can get more fuel efficiency by jettisoning it. This effect would be highly variable and there’s no way to accurately say how much efficiency a vehicle would gain without getting into weight ratios. In this case I’d give a simple rule that assumes the vehicle is carrying a significant amount of cargo (including passengers). If the PCs get rid of half the cargo, they get a 5% distance boost, that is they can travel 5% further. If they get rid of all the cargo (aside from the pilot), they can travel 10% further. If they start tearing things out of the vehicle to reduce weight (chairs, interior body panels etc.) they get another 5% distance boost.

The first thing a player is going to do with that is say “I always get a 10% boost when my vehicle isn’t carrying any cargo.” I’ll leave that up to the GM. Usually the players have their personal effects and themselves, so there’s always something.

Reduce Speed

If the vehicle travels at about on third it’s maximum speed, it will travel more efficiently. This is also highly variable according to the vehicle but should be generally true. To keep things simple, if the pilot travels at one third the top speed of the vehicle they will get a 10% distance boost. If they travel at half their top speed they get a 5% distance boost.

Your Mileage May Vary

Lastly, by taking into account coasting down hills with the engine off, picking up thermals and the like, the pilot’s skill is the determining factor. This is the meat of the issue, I can only use what I know about driving cars and trucks to gauge this so it could be way off for airplanes, boats or anti-grav vehicles but I’m generalizing.

There are a lot of environmental factors that this embodies. The roll simulates not only the chance that there are favorable conditions to drive efficiently but also that the pilot recognizes them and successfully executes the proper method of taking advantage of them.

The pilot takes a piloting skill roll for the vehicle they are in and then consults the chart below to see how much of a distance boost they get.

In Total

So if the pilot does all these things and did it all perfectly the vehicle will travel 40% further. That may be a bit much but I don’t think it’s excessive. What do you think? Are the numbers too high? Too low? I’d especially love to hear from you if you have experience with a different form of transportation like flying an airplane or helicopter.