Friday, April 26, 2019

Harvesting the system from City of the Crepuscular Queen

I'm interested in systems that resolve combat in a less granular or faster way than, say, 5th edition DnD, but still give a sort of DnD feeling. I think gg no re's City of the Crepuscular Queen does this quite well - the system in it, I mean. It's very similar to Dungeon Squad or In the Light of a Ghost Star, though the way HP works is very different, and combat resolution can be a lot faster. Admittedly one can speed up combat the way those systems do - just give everyone few HP and let damage be fairly normal, and combat will be fast! But I am nothing if not a magpie for systems. Here is what I have harvested from the mind of the fellow who made the system, Daniel from Detect Magic.


General resolution - you roll a d4, d6, d8, d10, or a d12, and you want to roll 4 or more to succeed. You never modify the roll. If you would normally roll a d8 and have an advantage, you roll a d10 or d12.
You roll a d8 if what you're doing is related to your class/profession. You roll a d6 if, say, you're a rogue in a stand-up fight, or the wizard trying to sneak around. You roll a d4 if you have really bad odds - maybe the wizard sneaking through a brightly-lit prison. You roll a d10 or higher if you have special equipment, lots of time / little stress, if you're a fighter and other fighters are helping you, etc. Wizards roll to cast their spells, rogues roll to sneak (if sneaking is actually dangerous in the situation).
You have 9 'hit points,' which I call save points, because they're not like HP. If you fail a roll, generally you lose 1 save point and you start rolling the die you just rolled, and you keep losing save points until you roll a 4 or higher. So, a fighter fighting, you rolled a d8 and got a 2. You lose 1 hp, and re-roll the d8. You keep losing 1 hp at a time until you roll a 4 or more. This means dangerous things can take you out - if you're fighting, you got hurt or killed, if you cast a spell, it ate up your health and you had a magical mishap, if you were sneaking, you got ambushed and attacked.
However, if you succeed, you will take out lesser foes or do serious damage to greater foes. You don't roll once per attack, the system is closer to rolling once per major part of the combat - taking out a lesser foe if they're in a group, lopping off some part of the big monster, casting a spell to demoralize a bunch of enemies and have them flee, killing the low-level solo critter and winning. There's no 'lose 4 HP out of 35, next round' moment.
Armor would give you some extra save points in a fight, good weapons can help you fight better, and so on. Encumbrance is a list of up to 20 things you bear, and if you get into a chase, you need to roll a d20 over the number of things you have to get away. I would give strong-ass fighters (ie any fighter in this system) a +3 to that roll. 

It's definitely possible to roll and not lose save points - say, if you lie to someone, you don't immediately lose save points. But the situation should change for the dramatically worse.

Also the CCQ episodes have ideas of Moments, where you narrate a slice-of-life bit of what's going on during a rest, or you reveal things about your character's past, or relieve a burden. A burden is something that drives your character. Relieving one has no mechanical benefit but it's something that they're trying to do. The idea with these is there's no mechanical reward or 'evaluate other people's role playing', thank God, but it's just something baked into the system that one does, in order to flesh out one's character more. 

I made a very simple character sheet for this system and am going to give it a go with some folks soon.

May wind up doing more of the Dungeon Squad warrior/rogue/wizard stats and use these rules for advantage / disadvantage, focus on how CCQ's system runs combat - which I think Daniel expounded on more in Simple Fights

1 comment:

  1. I really like this! I may end up stealing it for something in the future... hm. Yeah, it's got the old brain-cogs spinning. Thanks a lot!

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