SP117: An Item For Fantasy Games

The Item Itself

The SP117 is a wand with the approximate size, shape, and color of a yellow highlighter and the approximate weight of a gallon of yellow paint. There may be various insignia on it, usually matching those of a well-funded army, or a group of protesters that stole it from an army. It has “117” printed on it in bold, uniform type.

Someone familiar with it would offer you approximately the price of a nice piano for it, probably looking to pawn it off on a government or war historian.

When used, it transports any being capable of being injured, and anything they’re touching, to another plane. (The floor won’t come with you, but your bag will, and the rug might.) This looks like vaporization to the untrained eye. After each shot, the wand will prompt the user, by way of an inaudible magical whisper, to “shake or fire again to continue”. If the wand is not waved or fired again within five seconds, it will then transport anyone holding it, and anything they’re carrying other than the wand, in the same way. The wand itself will try to teleport to a nearby shelf or table in the original plane, or, failing that, fall to the floor.

SP117 has five charges. It takes anyone trained in magic worth their salt about ten minutes of repetitive, intense work to charge it up again fully.

The Sanctuary

SP117 transports beings to a gigantic hexagonal room, with mighty, glossy metal walls and floors. It smells as if every scent molecule more interesting than “faint sickly-sweetness” has been eliminated. There is a 10-foot circular rug on the floor, decorated with geometric patterns. It is cheap, but incredibly comfortable.

The text “SP117” is printed along one wall. Below it is simply encrypted text that reads ALUR DEATHTAKER, WITH MUCH RESPECT: STAY OUT OF THESE WALLS when deciphered.

To the right of the labeled wall is a contraption with an interface of buttons, a basin at the top labeled “HOLY SYMBOL OR FOCUS ITEM”, and several smaller drawers, labeled and stocked with common components for healing spells. When operated it allows one to cast a spell hands-free. The interface is difficult to learn, but is barely a hindrance when mastered.

Moving further right, there is a door labeled EXIT. It takes approximately six minutes to leave, most of which is operating well-known magical machinery. Those who leave will arrive in the original plane, in the same room as the wand.

Directly opposite the labeled wall is another door, leading to a room with identical dimensions. In it lie nine adjustable bedframes without mattresses and parts to a tenth, a bookshelf with long, vapid books, and a comfy loveseat. It also contains a stall with a toilet and a kitchenette stocked with a magically never-ending supply of water and palm oil soap. A compartment with a trash receptacle contains a broken but salvagable wand of brisk shrink, a cumbersome wand which causes an item to shrink to pocket-size for approximately ten minutes.

Another wall has an ancient interface embedded in it. By pushing blocks labeled “1”, “2”, “4”, “8”, and so on in and out, it provides a binary representation of important stats of any being standing on the rug-- height, weight, a number corresponding approximately to how many thwacks from a club it would take to kill them, and so forth. It also provides numerical codes corresponding to the strongest curse inflicting them, the last kind of magic they cast, whether they are allergic to various families of healing spells, and so on.

There is a secret compartment below this interface, triggered by pressing one of the blocks with the digit worn off by fingerprint oils. It contains six healing potions, each diluted with seven parts water.

Along the last wall is a locked door labeled NETWORK. To unlock it would take entering a 6-digit passcode. Entering three incorrect codes springs a trap that has long run out of ammunition. It would take a little less than 30 hours to brute-force. What could lie beyond it?

Weapons and Variety (a Weekend Workshop solve)

 Yesterday I posted the following prompt to Twitter:

In your friend's game, to do the basic "attack" move, the attacker rolls Xd6 (X depends on weapon size, skill, etc). For each 4+, they choose an effect from a list in their playbook. They complain that weapons feel the same, and small ones are useless. Can you help?

The responses were real good. The most common one by far was a tuning of "well, separate the playbooks by weapon", but they were far from uninteresting, and it was far from the only response. You can see all the responses here.

I've had a day to think about it, so I wanted to write what I would do, and my answer doesn't fit in a thread of any reasonable size. If my thing resembles your answer and I don't explicitly talk about it, I swear I'm not plagiarizing you, we just both thought an idea was good.

First, establish what it means to have your weapon outside of combat. Kazumi's very good answer touches on this. Their argument, which I take here, is that, rather than try the weapons such that they're equally good at hitting things, we should attempt to construct situations where the worse weapons shine. I'll reword that slightly: People pick weapons because they have an idea of what it looks like to use them. Let's let them do so.

If you have a dagger, you want to stab people in the back, right? So let's do that: if you've set up the perfect situation, you can backstab people, no rolls no shenanigans. Similarly, if you pick a shield, you probably find a theme of protection resonant-- so let's say it makes people feel safe around you. I'm picking up PbtA/FitD vibes, so let's say you can roll the Act Under Fire equivalent for them.

If you have a big ol' axe, you're communicating to the table that you want to have a lot of combat scenes, right? So let's say you can't conceal the axe, ever, in any situation-- you leave it at home or you send a signal to everybody at the dinner party or whatever that you like to cause problems on purpose. And so on, and so forth.

There might be multiple options for each weapon, or these might actually be class traits, or it could just be the one thing. I don't know enough about my hypothetical friend's game to have a preference.

Anyway, this is good, but it only half-solves the problem. So far we've let people use weapons in the situations they want to. However, within actual combat, the weapons feel samey. Worse, they feel like strictly better and worse versions of each other entirely.

This may seem fine to you-- after all, the player gets to make a trade-off between combat abilities and other abilities! I have a story in response: Back when I played more Magic, I did a bunch drafts with my then-girlfriend. The variant we did was pretty feast-or-famine, and it led to a lot of matchups that were fun, but lopsided. Despite this, the only time anybody ever conceded mid-match was when we went for the same strategy (storm) but one of us, by sheer luck, did it better. Players like being weaker than their friends or adversaries; very few like being strictly or basically objectively weaker.

Anyway-- we have a dice pool, which is a canvas that allows for a lot of expression. The most obvious way I can think of to proceed is this:

• Different weapons use d4, d6, or d8 dice. Daggers and such are d4s, big dumb swords are d8s, for "that's what they are in D&D" reasons more than anything else.
• We already have a "Choose one for each 4+" picklist, so let's keep that as is. This is generic stuff like "Impress, dismay, or frighten" or "Do 1-harm" or "Defend a position" or whatever.
• Weapons also have another stat called EDGE. Edge is the maximum number of picklist options you can choose by roling 4+. Flavorfully it represents like, potential backstabbery ability. Large-die weapons have Edge around 2 or 3, small-die ones have more.
  
• Finally, each weapon has "combos" that trigger on patterns in the numbers. For example, a d4-based dagger might have an additional effect when you roll triples or when you roll a 1, 2, 3, and 4. An enchanted d8-based mace might have a boring damage-boosting effect if you rolled an 8, and it might start whispering to you if you roll double 1s. Stuff like that.
  
• To actually attack, roll some number of your weapon's dice (derived from your skill and the fictional position and whatnot). For each 4+, choose one option from the picklist, up to a maximum of MAX. Then, check to see if you rolled any combos, and apply those.

The benefits of this system off the top of my head:

• The daggers and whatever feel weaker, but they do feel cool and distinct, and if a player says "I want a dagger that can actually pull its weight in combat", the table has the tools to make that happen.
• The players who have signaled that they want to be better at combat (i.e. the big-die weapons) have more consistent success. It's real easy to roll 4+ on d8s, actually.
  
• But those high-die players are still doing cool things-- it's not like 5e and whatnot where you have a fighter with "Deal d6 damage. Special ability (1/day): Deal 2d6 damage".
  
• Similarly, it's real easy to make a weapon enchanted, or really old, or poorly-made, or if you wanna break out the d10s really big. Furthermore, all those enchantments will feel different, because caring about rolling 1s vs saving dice vs anything else you do with the dice pool feel different in a really tactile way.
  
• Edge lets you kind of give people whatever buffs you want. That's its main function-- your marginal skill increases from "high" to "really high", your weapon becomes more consistent as opposed to end-the-world powerful.
• This system generalizes nicely to non-weapon combat actions. Remember, we kept the picklist of generic combat goodstuff intact, free for the "throw sand at your enemy" move or an improvised "drop down from the chandelier" move to use.
  
• I used a lot of words, but the stat block for a weapon isn't that big? Die size, edge, like two combos, an out-of-combat effect. Boom. If you wanna go really rules-light you could probably ditch the edge and just promise to be very judicious about giving people skill buffs.

There are downsides, too, but I'm kinda sleepy, and also I'd really need to see this played in a broader context of game to verify them. That's the kind of impartial reporting you've come to expect from Natalie Libre Bigstuffedcat.

Anyway, if I have a broader design point to wrap this up, it's that dice pools are real expressive. They let you differentiate things in a way that feels more tactile and fundamental to me than, say, swapping out picklists in a BoB game. They're like a really intimidating synthesizer with a thousand knobs and settings that theoretically can imitate any instrument in existence, and several not in existence. My benediction to you is to turn those knobs more.