Tales from the Rocket House
Part One: Common Language Systems: What’s What?
So what the heck is ‘The Rocket House’ anyway? Well, if you ask LiamtheRuiner or Gloucester, they’ll tell you “The Rocket House is Love. The Rocket House is Passion.” In more mundane terms, the Rocket House is a gaming community that started at Tulane University and has moved online as its members graduated and moved to different locations. Though we’re known for everything from shinai-fights on Annunciation Street to Cat’s catastrophically caustic chili, roleplaying is the thing that binds us together.
As a gaming community, the Rocket House keeps at least four games going at any one time (on alternating Fridays and Saturdays) and maintains a wiki and two Livejournal communities where we talk about everything from who’s going to be running what each weekend to theories of game design and proposed changes to our “common language system,” which has come to be called “The Tarafore System,” after the setting it of the first campaign we ran with it.
Another perfectly reasonable question might be “Just what does this yahoo mean by lingua franca?” A “common language” system is a flexible set of game mechanics that can be adapted to fit the range of games, genres, and campaign styles the gaming community in question will want to play. Beyond that, the common language will convey the community’s philosophy of gaming: a rules-heavy system with “crunchy” character creation, combat, and advancement (like GURPS or the HERO System) will exert an entirely different influence on the actual play experience than a rules-light, largely freeform system (like FUDGE). I think all of you who’ve played in a variety of systems know what I mean (if you haven’t, I heartily suggest you do – you’ll either find something you like better than what you’re using now or come back “home” with a much greater appreciation for the system you love).
What Are the Benefits?
Having to learn and write dicebots for a new system for each campaign would be troublesome, to say the least, especially with four games going at once. A common language helps GMs, especially new ones, jump in and develop their games. It also helps new gamers: having to learn one intuitive and well-made system once instead of several is not only easier, but increases clarity and focus, especially if the player in question is involved in multiple campaigns. Imagine being a new gamer, just learning to love the clatter of dice (or the click of keyboards in a chatroom) … now imagine you’re simultaneously trying to learn the World of Darkness, D&D, GURPS, and FUDGE while playing in four different games. I don’t know about you, but I’d have run screaming from the room.
The common language system’s attribute scale can itself become a sort of common language for a group. I can’t count the number of times Rocket Hausers, myself included, have half-jokingly used game Traits to describe real-world objects or events. From LiamtheRuiner’s assertion that the Ramones have “25’s across the board” (a superhuman trait level) to my rating my hunger from 1 (“Ridiculously Easy to resist”) to 22 (“It would take a Legendary act of will to resist eating”) as a part of a weight-loss program, a scale you all know and understand the probabilities of conveys information (and sets up in-jokes) instantly.
Having a unified to core to build on ensures a level of quality for the game mechanics. I think we’ve all bought promising games only to have the rules and systems break our hearts. We’ve all seen dinosaurs that don’t seem to have learned anything from the last three decades of game design, cumbersome crunch-fests that deliver insufficient (if any) benefits to justify the complexity, gimmicky one-note systems, maddeningly poor fits for the genre of the game they’ve been hammered onto, and systems so mathematically incoherent that the GM needs a supercomputer, a PhD in calculus, and a short stay in Arkham Asylum to calculate a character’s chance of success on a basic skill roll. While converting a setting to the common language system takes time, if the system is coherent, intentional, and familiar, you can at least know that the results will be worth the effort.
How Is a Common Language System Made?
Because the common language system sets the tone for the bulk of the community’s games, it’s vitally important that it be user-friendly, well-made, and created with your community’s goals and styles in mind. The point of a common language system is to remove obstacles to effective gaming, to let the players learn something that’s not only intuitive and easy to learn, but robust and expandable enough to handle whatever the group wants to do … and then get on with the game.
Part Two: The System in Question
So what makes the Tarafore System exceptional? The short answer is, “intentionality of design, an intuitive, flexible, unified central mechanic, simple yet realistic combat, and a character creation process that fosters trust and communication between players and GMs while allowing virtually any campaign-appropriate character to be made quickly and easily.”
Intentionality
Prior to creating the Tarafore System, I’d internalized a fairly huge knowledge-base of game mechanics and game theory (thanks to a large gaming bookshelf and several years worth of rec.games.frp.advocacy’s heyday). I’d also written more mechanics and settings than I can remember, so I had a lot of failures to learn from. When I wrote the Tarafore System, I did it out of the sheer joy of creation. When I revised it, my eye was purely on what worked. I didn’t feel a need to reinvent the wheel or become a “great pioneer of gaming,” just make something that worked really well, with no clutter, system artifacts, or distracting gimmicks.
The Central Mechanic
The Tarafore System’s central mechanic is simple, mathematically coherent, produces a wide range of “quality” results, and gives the same success chance regardless of whether the acting or opposing characters player rolls the dice. Simply take the trait (10 is considered average, and 3 is one standard deviation or benchmark up or down), add 1d10, subtract 1d10, and compare the total to the difficulty or opponent’s trait (some cases, like Initiative and musical performance, typically call for a “performance total,” in which you generate the total and then compare it to the benchmarks to see how well you did, or set it up as a standing difficulty for others to beat). Traits, Skills, Difficulties, and Performance Results are all rated on the same scale, which further unifies the game system.
When rolling tests, a tie typically means a stalemate or marginal success. A margin of success of 1-3 is a “Basic Success,” a margin of success of 4-6 is a “Special Success,” and a margin of success of 7 or above is an “Exceptional Success” (failures use the same margins, so a margin of failure of 5 would be a “Special Failure”). This die roll and the “Basic-Special-Exceptional” structure is the backbone of the entire system. Applied in different situations and subsystems, it can cover everything from extended disease resistance rolls to etiquette to combat.
Combat
Our combat system is uses the simple central mechanic to deliver realistic (if somewhat abstracted) results. A successful attack leads to two opposed tests to determine its effect, one for stun and one for wound (Special and Exceptional hits, of course, give bonuses to these tests). As in real-world combat, a character may be mortally wounded and not feel it for some time, or may be stopped by the shock of a wound that later proves to be minor (if you read up on the stopping power of various firearms, you’ll find accounts of people being shot through the heart and continuing to fight for 10-15 seconds, people taking multiple shotgun blasts and still fighting, and people passing out from being shot in the foot). Most of the Rocket House’s games have called for this gritty type of combat system, but there are add-on subsystems that can alter the tone considerably, and we’ll discuss those in later columns.
Traits and Skill Definitions
Traits and Skills tend to be broad and contain multiple possible specializations within them. For example, “Strength” covers “Hurting People,” “Lifting/Carrying,” “Toughness,” and “Wrestling.” Specializations can be further sub-divided, so “Strength(Wrestling[Escaping Holds])” is perfectly acceptable, as is “Music(Singing[Rockabilly])”. Traits are typically “final,” meaning you don’t have to add things together before you roll (other than gear, situational modifiers, and a few powers). If you need to hit someone, just take your Prowess Trait or the appropriate Specialization, roll +1d10/-1d10, and go from there.
The Big One: Character Creation
Character creation is perhaps the part of the Tarafore System that stands out the most. Games have traditionally used either a series of random rolls or a point-based system (with or without pre-made archetypes, levels, and classes) for character creation. In addition to rejecting classes and levels, as many games have, we rejected point-builds and random rolls. The Tarafore System was created with the idea that the players and GM should trust each other and work together, and that the typical safeguards put in place to prevent players from gaming character creation not only don’t work, but actually make things worse by fueling an adversarial relationship between players and GMs.
Though there is a template-based character creation process, we’ve only used it for quick NPCs. The player characters are created via the “Subjective Character Creation Process” (SCCP), essentially a conversation between the player and the GM, aided by a fairly extensive questionnaire and the Trait benchmarks.
At first glance the Subjective Character Creation Process may seem like a recipe for powergaming and munchkincraft, but in practice, the social contract of not screwing up the game for our friends is far more effective than the most complicated point-cost scheme ever written. To be fair, I’m part of a wonderful gaming community, but I’ve used this system for years with purely positive results. The only munchkin character I ever witnessed happened before I inaugurated conversation-based character creation, when I was still using a point-build system. In fact, I more often find myself suggesting the players increase their characters’ traits than lower them.
Subjective Character Creation is also faster than point-build. If the player knows the system and the general setting, she can run the concept by the GM, see if it will work, think through the details and trait numbers, and then see if those will work. If the player is new to the system or setting, the conversation can take longer, but even then the process is more about learning what’s expected from the campaign than mastering the system.
The SCCP also serves the system’s stated goal of flexibility. If a player wants to move a specialization from its default Trait to another Trait (say, moving Unarmed Combat from Prowess to Strength, because he visualizes his character as a massive brawler), there’s no problem. Just remember where you parked it, and make sure the rating is campaign-appropriate. If the player wants her character to have ten different sub-specializations of “Gunfighting” skill, including a higher rating when using his grandfather’s World War II issue Colt 1911 pistol, it’s no problem. If you want to break your character’s “Cooking” skill down by cuisine type, with 27 different entries, go for it – just organize them alphabetically so you don’t hold the game up looking for your “Creole,” “Hibachi,” or “Soul-Melting Chili” score.
To Sum Up
In short, the Tarafore System is not an attempt to reinvent the wheel, but rather to make the best tires, suspension, axles, and wheels possible for the widest range of driving conditions. I have no illusions about being a legend of game design – I just wanted to make something that would be easy, fun, and rewarding, not frustrating, to run. In the columns to come, I’ll show you in detail what’s “under the hood” of the Rocket House’s common language system and walk you through what I’ve learned about system and setting creation. Hopefully, we’ll discover some insights you can use in writing your own games, whether they’re to be common language systems or not.
As we say in the Rocket House: “Car! Game on!”
