In my latest post I went over the basics of how I’m going about designing Hawk Tales and taking inspiration from Physics. Despite being about constructing game mechanics, it was still heavy into how to simulate a world using game mechanics and building its fundamentals. This time it will be about making things function, the mechanics that makes the game tick, its game loops. From a round in combat to how the world evolves over eons, to what happens in between. A game system needs to quantify and regulate at a multitude of levels simultaneously in creative and interesting ways to make for an interesting game that can stay interesting over the long term, at least that is one of my core goals with Hawk Tales FRP.
D&D came out of wargames, and one of the key aspects of wargaming that I’m still fond of is their “simulationist” approach. The downside of that approach is that it is often executed with a love for detail and a nerdy interest in how something works in the real world. For wargaming that might strike a good tone for a large part of its players, but for a TTRPG today there are only a very small number of players who want that, and I haven’t played or really been interested in wargaming for decades. So, for me a more nuanced approach is needed, not a table heavy system simulating a fantasy world is minute detail, something else. But what?
The reason science simulates things like the climate, black holes or the economy is to try and predict outcomes, figuring out how something works or what aspects are important. Simulating things means you make a simplified model of the thing you simulate so you can run things faster, using up less resources and still get relevant data. The key bit being simplified, which is what I want to bring to my design of Hawk Tales, and I want to phrase it as: simulate outcome, not process. I have a vision of how I want my campaign to play, what kind of adventures, outcomes, events, actors and environment I want to have and visions for how they should be able to interact. Instead of add up all the factors that could determine the outcome of events, and how they interest, design a set of rules as simple as possible that will create a similar range of outcomes, with a minimum of fuss, using interesting and relevant building blocks.
This sounds easy, but is hard and makes difficult compromises a necessity, which is probably why most games avoid this route. It is not the way to commercial success, and I know it, but I’m not designing Hawk Tales to be a commercial success, only to be a really good tool set to run my games, and maybe yours too. With that out of the way let’s investigate some of these hard compromises I’m making and why, let’s start small.
Most editions of D&D use the 6 second round, dividing a minute into 10 rounds. Simple and straight forward, keeping a base of 10 makes for easy math and compatibility with D&D so 6 second rounds are what I’m going with. Next part of to determine is what a creature can accomplish during a round, and here we have numerous versions of actions sets from vague old school to a myriad of standard, full and swift actions of 3E, and the ad hoc Bonus Action of 5E. Here I’m opting for simplicity, creatures ought to be able to do one thing and move each round, that’s it, nothing more. It is a good standard but leaves little to no room for cool combats and interesting game play. I’m going for 1 action plus move your rate each round and try to innovate within these limits. An action can be, retrieving an item from your backpack, casting a spell, attacking, move further and much more. The key is to keep the flow of the game moving while still allowing for a bit of tactical choices, small but useful chunks of gameplay each round. Three Action Economy, Tactical Points and more, the list is long of great games with cool ways of handling encounters, one of my main criticisms of these, and its D&D variants are that they take too long, giving the player lots of choices to make during their turn. I want to create a system with faster turns and try and force payer choices to happen between turns, having players dwell on what action to take between turns, and then execute that action during their turn.
One action per turn, how do you handle powerful warriors and creatures capable of attacking faster, using multiple weapons or attacks simultaneously? I approached this dilemma in two ways, as long as it attacks a single enemy, make a single attack and add on more damage, speeds up the process and minimize die rolling. Have each attack has a listed dice and modifiers, and creatures have a combat capability rating that determines how many times it can dole out that amount of damage. Each round a combatant can deliver that amount of damage, all to a single target or spread out over several targets. I call combat capability Prowess and it determines a creature’s ability to attack, but also how skilled it is to defend itself, using Prowess together with its natural talents in the form of Ability modifiers and the equipment used creates an enormous range of outcomes using a few key variables and few die rolls. More on this in a future post.
Who goes first and when can you stop someone from doing something are another key aspect of encounters. Initiative systems are both important and a source of slow game play. My first issue with initiative is that it often signals a shift from a story and immersive type of game play to a tactical and rigid one, my second is that it should not only be down to luck alone to who goes first. My approach is, depending on the situation, to let different skills of abilities determine who goes first in combat, no rolls at all, the GM just keep the story easing into the encounter. Players who want to try and improve their place in the initiative order can spend Exertion to contest the initiative and it will be up to an opposed skill check to see who goes first.
Each combat round forces you to determine what your character does and where it spends its precious number of actions and attacks, spells and Exertion. Hawk Tales is a classless system so I needed a mechanism to regulate the uses of all the cool stuff characters can do, magic, turn undead, rage, smite and much more. Each character can be a narrow specialist or a broad jack of all trades, and by creating a common bucket called Exertion as a way to measure effort. Exertion, which is a term borrowed from A5E which I implemented differently, as a general meta currency for character special abilities and magic use. Using Exertion to compliment Hit Points as a pool to fuel extraordinary things a character can do, from special combat actions, turning undead, cast spells, heal and more. As long as you are using Exertion you keep your full survival potential, when you run out of Exertion you can take the risk and tap into your Hit Points. Less effective and it will make your character more vulnerable, but it is a gritty option to keep going when it gets tough.
Health of a character is divided into 5 categories, healthy, bloodied, injured, dying and dead. Healthy are when you have more than half your Hit Points which means you can regain full health with a Long Rest (or a Reverie). Bloodied means you have still Hit Points left, fully capable but you will need more than a Long Rest to heal up naturally. When a character runs out of Hit Points, it is injured and starting to face severe limitations like no spending Exertion, Concentrate and risk dying.
Injured creatures must get help or will face its mortality; this is where a creatures Presence as well as Exertion matters. Players decide when to take a Death Save, and they can be risky, but not always, and some creatures doesn’t even get them depending on their Essence, but that is for another blog post. Here we assume a creature with a soul, like most characters will, at least start out with and then maybe sell, or loose later (again more on this). As long as you have Exertion left you spend it all and get an Extra Death Save, meaning a levelheaded adventurer keeps some reserves and can have a brush with death daily without immediately risking it all. With that option used up, it is time to make a real Death Save and if you make it, good you can stabilize and start to slowly recover naturally or use magic to speed things up. Failing your Death Save mean you loose a point of Presence and gain a point of Taint. A characters Presence start out at 1 and you gain 1 more per level, so loosing a point can be a big deal. Taint accumulates as a record of a character’s experience with death, necromancy and various forms of evil. Taint will make your Death Saves harder, but it can also be used to blend into bad environments, so it can be useful.
Dying is a big transition for a character, and depending on the circumstances of death, like location, enemies precent, and Taint levels compared to Comeliness what is left of you will face different destinies. A “pristine soul” of a good character (high Presence and low Taint) is a huge price for any fiend to drag of to the lower planes and feast on, so don’t die near places where that can happen. On the other hand, you might be valuable for your deity who will quickly send out a someone to guard you. Regardless of what happens, there are rules for how to continue to play a petitioner or fail even that, just linger on as a vengeful creature fueled by that residual Taint. The lesson here is to plan ahead with regards to your afterlife, who to worship, what to preserve, sacrifice and where to go vs. avoid. Another way of doing it is to make sure your character seeks a glorious death, giving it all for glory and leave very little behind.
Character improvement is a big part of every roleplaying game, and what keeps most players coming back to it. Hawk Tales has no classes, but it has levels, 20 levels plus the potential for improvement beyond 20th level. No classes means that the path of a character is wide open at first and then slowly narrows as it progresses up the levels. XP is the meta currency regulating this, spend it on learning new things, or improving what your character already knows, and it also includes basics like ability boots, skills and optional ancestry feats. When adventuring and gaining XP you can make Learning Checks to try and improve, or if milestones are used add the new features after each milestone.
XP can also be used in the creation of powerful magic items, from swords staffs to artifacts sacrificing XP (along with other ingredients) to create magic items to aid in adventuring.
I plan use a Wealth Level based economy, so instead of having to track individual pieces of coin a character will have a starting level, let’s say Copper. This means that you have at least 1 CP and don’t need to track coins below Copper, and things priced in these coins can be bought without the need to keep records. When you run out of Copper, your need to start keeping track of Bronze instead. If you manage to gain 100 or more of a Coin type your Wealth Level jumps up to that level. Wealth Levels range from 1 (Destitute), where you must track all your coins, to 8 (Platinum) where you are dealing with Kings and High Nobility and their purchases and you only need to track your Platinum.
Coins are based on a modified Greyhawk model, with standardized conversations of 100 up and down, but kept the names. So far, all the examples have been about characters and single creatures, so let’s look at the bigger picture.
Just like individuals’, places and factions have a Wealth Levels as well, guiding how much resources are available, services, items and so on for a settlement. Factions can have a set of mechanics as well, guiding how they affect the campaign and interact with the characters Still working on the details for settlements, with a set of stats for them as well like D&D3E and PF1 had.
Creatures change and so do the world around them, changing in a natural way with weather, seasons and so on. Just like with creatures’ areas of the world thrive and decline, and just like with creatures this ties into metaphysics and the multiverse. A temple dedicated to a good deity are constructed and the area is influenced by it, enhancing good divine magic and senses. Tear it down and the benefit goes away, construct a temple to an evil deity and the evil divine spellcasting benefits instead. Influence and control ebbs and flow across the lands over time, build momentum, gets countered, recedes, lingers, or fade into history. What happens during gameplay can spill over into the long-term story of the lands. Power struggles like this play out locally, regionally and across the multiverse, short term and long term with consequences thematically but also mechanically. This affects spellcasting, recovery, price levels, senses, magic items and more.
Using all these mechanics when writing lore, background stories, game prep and then used during the game sessions makes up your campaign. Hawk Tales are designed to work as a scaffolding supporting all these aspects of your games. Not as a set of rules set in stone, but more as a set of guidelines that you can adopt and then start tweaking to suit your needs. Key parts of this are its CC -BY licensing and distributed in Markdown format making customization built in.
