Now it's GenCon time again and Firefly has yet another RPG coming out: the newest iteration of Og, designed by Robin Laws. Robin has been writing a design journal for the new game over at Firefly, and with Patrick's permission we're also reprinting it here, as part of the Behind the Curtain column. -ed
When I signed on to revise Og for its new edition, Firefly Games President Patrick Sweeney presented me with an overriding design goal—to create a version of the game that people would want to play more than once. Accordingly, every change I made to Aldo Ghiozzi’s classic game of caveman mayhem addressed that basic aim. In this, the first of three essays of designer notes, I’ll discuss exactly how I set about doing that.
As I read Aldo’s Og¸ I came to see it as a brilliant indie game concept that well predated the entire indie aesthetic. Its central conceit, in which players can communicate with one another using only a handful of words and whatever grunts and gestures they care to summon, subverts standard assumptions of roleplaying in a way that’s at the same time challenging and hilarious. At the same time that it puts you on the floor laughing in mirth and frustration, it forces you to look at the form from a new, upended angle.
To my mind, the hallmark of a great roleplaying design that it contains play features that clearly mark it as different from any other game. Og has that in spades. Uniqueness of play is now a standard value among the indie crowd. In 1993, when Og was first published, most of us were still chasing marginal variations on a more-or-less standard template established examples of D&D, Champions, Basic Roleplaying, GURPS, and so on. Og was a solid decade ahead of its time.
Perhaps because its concept was so forward-looking, the rest of the game seems oddly out of tune with it. Reading the game, I found that central conceit surrounded by a set of profoundly old-school rules structures straight out of the hack ‘n’ slash playbook. Characters advanced by gathering huge numbers of experience points. A detailed equipment list included various types of ablative armor.
Granted, this was all part of the goof. The Banging Caveman, for example, first levels up after gaining 50,000 experience points. The biggest, baddest creature in the game, against whom beginning characters have virtually no chance of survival, is the T-Rex. Assuming you do luck out and manage to kill him, he garners a whopping 8,000 xp—which, of course, must be split between the entire party. Assuming a four-PC party, that’s twenty-five tyrannosaurs before you get to second level. It’s like D&D, except you have to kill Asmodeus repeatedly before you get another hit die.
This element works on the page, but the whole point of the joke is that the long-term structures of the rules are unplayable. The game obviously does not expect that players will ever level up—or want to.
Since I was supposed to make Og playable for multiple sessions, I had to replace the funny but intentionally unwieldy rules, stripping out anything that related to outdated common assumptions of what an RPG should contain, even as a take-off on them.
A new, simple, rules-lite system would better support Aldo’s core conceit, getting out of the way so it, as the game’s point of unique differentiation, could be the center of attention. Like early AD&D, the original used a gloriously sprawling, disconnected set of resolution mechanics. It included both a long set of skills, and a second series of skill-like abilities derived from your characteristic scores. For example, you had a Figure Things Out score, derived from your Brains stat, which was expressed as a percentile die roll. A Brains score of 6 gave you, for example, a 14% Figure Things Out. On top of these, you had skills, which sometimes allowed you to succeed automatically, and in other instances had special resolution rolls attached to them. For example, the Build Something skill required a roll against your Brains stat to succeed.
Simplifying radically, I ditched the derived stats, and the attribute scores that went with them. These make sense for very crunchy systems, but here if a number didn’t directly pertain to what you could do, I didn’t want it on the character sheet. Derived stats considerably increase the length of character generation. Some people may not mind spending the bulk of their first session on character generation when prepping for a potentially long and serious-minded campaign, but for a comedy game quick and simple had to be the watchwords. I wanted an entire group to be able to generate characters in fifteen minutes or less. (My group clocked in at nine minutes for four people.)
Now you have a few combat stats, like your Attack and Evade values, your Unggghh points, and the Damage you deal. Other than that, everything you attempt to do in the game is accomplished with an ability. All rolls are made against a single 1d6. I’ve always felt that the choice of dice to be used in a game is more than a mathematical question. The designer’s selection should convey something about the game’s tone and approach. Nothing says simplicity like a single six-sider.
I made sure to keep Aldo’s simple, accessible character classes—the Banging caveman, who hits things. The Fast caveman, who runs well. The Grunting caveman, a sort of proto-shaman with an unpredictable Luck power. The Strong caveman, who—well you can guess. I turned the Healthy caveman, who in the original occasioned a series of Richard Simmons jokes, into the much more macho-sounding Tough caveman. The Smart caveman class got split into two: the Learned caveman, who gets more abilities than anyone else, and the Eloquent caveman, master of primitive vocabulary.
Playing Aldo’s Og, I discovered that much of the game’s humor lay in its absurdly punitive treatment of PCs. Our beginning party of prehistoric lunkheads experienced a total party kill before even emerging from their cave. They were killed by a swarm of bees! That ended our session kind of abruptly.
Next time I’ll talk about how I adjusted the game’s lethality and generally punitive treatment of PCs, and also about the combat system and the approach to prehistoric creatures.
