This is the second part of Robin Laws' Og Design Journal, which highlights Firefly Games' newest RPG.
In my first set of design notes on Og, I described my overall goal: to heighten the brilliant central conceit of the game and simplify the rest. The last essay ended on a note of doom, as the characters in our initial test of the original rules experienced a total party kill from a swarm of bees, and never made it outside their cave.
With that grim and truncated experience in mind, I went back to the drawing board to create a new set of stripped-down rules. They needed to give the PCs a bit more of a chance to go out and do things before their hostile environment rendered them extinct. Getting stomped by a brontosaurus is still an exceedingly lethal affair. Come to think of it, stegosaurs, triceratops and T-Rexes are all best run away from. But now a bee encounter isn’t necessarily a recipe for mass carnage.
Aldo’s Og squeezes much comic mileage from the complete haplessness of the characters. For example, there’s no Swim skill—just Float. These cavemen are too primitive to achieve half-decent locomotion in the water. Again I felt this was an area that was funnier on paper than it was in play, so I backed off from it. To me, it seemed that players would find it easier to move from one amusing situation to the next if they were blessed with a modicum of competence. My experience has always been that the more the PCs can do, the more trouble they can get themselves into. For that reason, the new version has a full-on Swim skill, allowing the characters to swim out of—and into—danger.
It does not, however, jettison the comedy of haplessness entirely. The old system had a Forget How percentage; you rolled it before using a skill, to see if you had completely lost all recollection of how to perform a heretofore simple task. Having removed the stat-derived percentile rolls, I transformed Forget How into a straightforward fumble mechanic. Now you Forget How whenever you roll a 1 on your d6. It happens enough to be fun but not so often as to completely blunt the story ’s forward momentum. Failure, when it happens too often, is the enemy of the GM as well as the players. Although it can sometimes open up entertaining new consequences for the PCs, it just as often bumps them up against a narrative dead end. Also, humor depends as much on surprise as it does on the exploration of stupidity. If big failures happen constantly, they lose their power of comic shock. Used more sparingly, they become funnier.
Where combat was concerned, I tried to take simplification to a level so dumb even a caveman can understand it. Like nearly every combat system, it takes place over a series of rounds and uses an initiative roll to determine who goes first. Almost everybody deals a single point of damage on a successful blow. The hard-hitting Banging caveman dishes out twice that. Some creatures deal even more damage. A single stomp from a brontosaurus will permanently flatten nearly any PC.
During playtests, fights most often broke out between PCs as communication broke down (or never got revved up in the first place) during disputes. The cavemen were quick to settle any and all problems, from who got the piece of fruit to which one got first crack at the comely cavewoman down by the river, with their pummeling fists. With one point of damage as the default result, combat unfolds in a comically thudding, repetitive, and boneheaded fashion.
This is funny for the first few times around but after several sessions had elapsed, my players were crying out for at least a nod to tactical decision-making. Always eager to please, I included in the rules a series of combat add-ons. These are maneuvers any character can choose to execute; unlike D&D feats, you don’t need to buy them and write them down on your character sheet. In addition to such workaday maneuvers as Disarm, Grab and Distract, the combat add-ons include the ability to shake off damage, the dreaded Purple Nerple, and the intimidatingly self-harmful Skull Thickness Demonstration. The cost to use a combat add-on is typically the loss of a subsequent combat action.
The old level-based experience system was swapped for one recognizing that words were to Og what treasure is to D&D. Now you learn a new word as a reward for play—and want to come back next week to make use of it. “Now that I have a conjunction, I can rule the world!”
The previous emphasis on getting experience points by killing things was beside the point of the miscommunication conceit that makes the game what it is, so I dropped it. Now you can gain new abilities by establishing to the GM that you’ve done anything entertaining. Having a good time is more important than old-fashioned monster bashing. You can now advance just as easily for a session of mate wooing over at the clan across the river as you could hunting down ferocious cave bears.
I deemphasized a lot of elements of old-school gaming found in the previous edition. In one area, though, I reinforced a core component of the good old days of roleplaying. The new Og now lavishes suitable attention on the creatures of the prehistoric world.
Although I consider myself reasonably acquainted with dinosaur basics, I can’t say that I have the relative scales of the various creatures imprinted in my brain. For that reason I thought it essential to supply heights, lengths and weights for the various beasties.
The game previously disposed of its creature descriptions in a single page-long table. You might argue that this was in keeping with the radical simplicity I was hoping to foster in my revision. My feeling was that a mere list shortchanged one of the inherent geek pleasures of a prehistoric game. Many of us who want to play such a thing are still dinosaur-loving kids at heart, and the act of paging through these descriptions should carry with it a memory of childhood enthusiasm. To heighten this, the creature stats gained a mild layer of extra crunch. Now the creatures get different degrees of accuracy and damage with their various attacks. Also I just had to supplement the preexisting cast of dinosaurs, by adding the giant mammals of prehistoric megafauna. They may not be the sexy A-listers that the dinosaurs are, but I wanted to give these funky and underrated critters some love. (The original had mammoths and mastodons but skimped on the rest.) What caveman game can do without sabertooth tigers, cave bears, and giant ground sloths with claws that would make Wolverine jealous?
In the final installment of my Og design notes, I’ll get a little high-faluting, with a look at the relationship between reality and comedy, and how that influenced my design choices.
