[MADcorp / world gone weird] how to make a monster
Marshall Burns:
Daumantas,
I'm really liking that approach. I like the idea that the monsters are so Other that most rules don't apply to them. (I probably wouldn't fuck with the way they deal damage, though. The When Animals Attack table is nasty enough, let alone the other special damage tables.)
Regarding divorced-from-fiction tactical combat, I think that's just a timeframe thing. Fighting without trying to game the situation isn't viable over a longer timeframe, because it's too risky; any deadly weapon has a 5% chance of inflicting a fatal blow on an unmodified damage roll, and while you can Gamble it (in the sense used in the Step on Up essay) and hope that you roll that 5% before the other guy, sooner or later you're going to catch one between the eyes. That's the idea with all the lethality and maiming in the rules: to require (eventually) that the players start making sure that things are slanted firmly in their favor before engaging in violent conflict, whenever possible. Otherwise they're just gonna keep losing dudes, and probably get frustrated with all the random, meaningless deaths.
Stefoid (Steffen? Stephen? I can't remember),
I don't know that I'd consider the game crunchy. The idea is to be concrete, so that reference & judgment with regard to the fictional situation can be made clearly and in clear terms. There are very, very few things in the rules that produce an effect without first requiring reference to the situation. The skills and stuff that the character classes get are all about what situations they thrive in, and what they can do to re-contextualize problems.
Except the monster rules as they stand: those are crunchy as fuck and all ate up with numbers and balances and extra hit points. I hate it. Especially the extra hit point thing: if the system as-is requires you to put extra stats on a monster to make it threatening, then something's wrong. That's exactly the kind of boring-ass weak-sauce escalation of challenge that I've railed against for years. As Daumantas points out, it's much better to simply say that you don't hurt it at all unless you do it the right way.
(By the way, the way to handle that in play is the player describes how his dude attacks it and the Ref says sorry, that doesn't work, and the player says oh fuck. With no rolls involved, because that's the rule for resolving impossible tasks.)
David Berg:
Hi Marshall,
I've achieved exactly what you're looking for with demons in Delve. I'd like to say I have a perfect system to offer you, but my success has been based partly on how I GM, and the work to translate that into rules is still ongoing. So I'll just touch on a few bases and see what you think.
1. Have a secret logic behind all monsters. Provide an appropriately alien set of motives, methods, and perspectives that define all monsters. Example: demons seek to destroy organization and hijack communication, they do this with some intelligent planning but also compulsive taking advantage of every opportunity, and they see the world in a way that views physical matter as the enemy and anything chaotic or magical as a friend.
2. Each individual monster's capabilities provide a specific way of doing the thing all monsters do. Example: this demon eats memories and regurgitates them into inanimate objects.
3. Randomly generate one way to beat the monster. Pick a tarot card or something. Example: there's a cage on this card... so the situation includes a cage designed to hold this monster. So the players need to learn of, locate, and figure out how to use the cage, and then chase the monster into it. Hey, that could be today's adventure!
4. Take the specific weakness implied by the previous step and generalize. Example: if this monster can be trapped in the special cage, perhaps it can be trapped in other ways as well. So perhaps this creature is impossible to damage, but it not infinitely strong, so can be pushed around. And maybe it's not too bright, so can be lured into places.
5. Take your understanding of all monsters and this monster into the game, prepared to ad-lib based on it.
6. Here's the part that is specific to Delve. I doubt this is an option for MADcorp, but I offer it just to show how I make the previous monster stuff work in play, in hopes that it might give you some ideas for how to integrate it with MADcorp.
Remain loyal to the pre-established stuff, and refuse to solve anything for the players; but, within those constraints, try to help them solve the puzzle of your monster. Feed them clues, hints, physical evidence, info from previous monster-fighters, etc. until they come up with an approach to the monster that isn't suicide and that you can use to give them even more useful info. And if they come up with a plan which, based on your knowledge of all monsters and this monster, seems like it would work, then it does.
This is extremely fun and easy for me to do as GM, but I designed it, so no shocker there. As for supporting others to do it, I continue to test out combos of rules and presentations. Can't really offer you anything concrete yet, alas.
If I remember right, the "evil plot" approach you were using for Hex Rangers (fka Witch Trails) successfully produced quality puzzle-monsters. Maybe you could distill that stuff into something tighter, where the monster's story is played out in its lair or on its body, rather than throughout the whole town?
Callan S.:
Perhaps you pitch to the group to describe what their characters have heard of, of the monster (which is to say, to make up these things, but doing so through a characters perspective). All the PC's describe what they've heard of it. You note all of this, then modify it somewhat, determining what is truth in the description, what is false, what wasn't mentioned at all (ie, stuff you make up and add on). Obviously this is a huge departure from preperation before play.
What are 'monsters', anyway? Just there to make something to do? Does the monster get a preplanned solution on how to beat (and beat presumably means kill) the PC's? How long term is gameplay - a real conflict is long term gameplay Vs genuine capacity for PCs (even all of them) to die. Often the latter gets axed to enable the former - but when the PC's can't die but the monster can...it almost makes the PC's the monster and so monster creation loses its savor as it's more like creating a lamb for the slaughter.
Marshall Burns:
Gameplay is long term. In MADcorp, long-term victory conditions are fixed, but in the as-yet untitled sandboxy world-gone-weird game (built on MADcorp's system), players set their own victory conditions (retire to my own private island, become king of Kansas, whatever). PCs get cacked all the time, generally in random, gruesome, and meaningless ways, if the players aren't careful. But you play multiple characters, generally with one as your 'main' whose goals you actually focus on.
Players choose what risks to face and which ones to avoid; learning to choose well in this regard is a central part of the challenge. Therefore none of the challenges are necessarily 'fair' or 'balanced.' If you think the Sears Dragon will eat all of your dudes, then stay the fuck away from the Sears Tower.
For this type of player determinism to work, the choices have to be real. The options have to be independent of what the players want, and magician's choices and palette swaps are cheating on the part of the Ref. Which is one reason why random generation procedures are also needed.
David, I'm really liking that approach. Thinking of monsters as a mini-situation all by themselves (or not-mini, depending on the monster) is a good approach. You guessed right about #6; clues have to be handled differently in this game. Either you have to experiment, or discover something on your own, or you get lots of clues that are conflicting and have to suss out which are true.
David Berg:
I love experiments! I think the most important thing there is feedback. Whatever you do, whether it works or not, should tell you something. Another key is the ability to be wrong but live to try again.
Videogame boss fights are good models here. You have to avoid Bowser until he comes out of his shell and then jump up into his belly when he's in midair to hurt him. You have to kill the WoW demon tree's beehives so they stop regenerating any damage you do to the tree, even though the hives take forever and are the least threatening to the characters of all the enemy targets in the scene.
Ye average videogame lets you fail, learn, and try again via multiple lives. Ye average tabletop RPG needs another method, such as multiple escapes. "Get near death, run away, heal" has been the interlude in most of my learning-and-experimenting monster battles. Despite multiple characters, I get the impression that the experiment-and-learn process in MADcorp is probably a better fit for multiple tries per character, right?
It can be tough to trot out some intimidating monstrosity, let the players try something stupid/ineffectual, and respond by not killing them. I try to get around this by hitting them somewhere that hurts other than death. I do better with baffling creepy mind-sucking metal-eaters than big strong deadly beasts.
One trick I use to help inform the players to perform useful experiments is to piggyback on their existing knowledge. If they learn a little bit of my demon metaphysics, the next demon they fight will probably be designed with their knowledge as its weak point. Educated guesses = fun, shots in the dark = suck.
Pardon the flood of generalizations. Once you whittle down your approach a little more, maybe I can contribute something more specific. Are there any particular technical/mechanical/system constraints here? Anything you're aiming for a monster encounter to do in those terms?
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