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rockwoodOne thing that I always get asked is how, exactly, the Serenity RPG differs from the later editions of the Cortex system. So I thought I'd start off my jabbering here on LJ with a more in-depth discussion of those differences than I usually give.
In this series of articles, I'll cover not just the changes implemented between Serenity and the Cortex revisions, but also some of the motivations and the design philosophy that led to those changes. I'll also be happy to take questions on such things, but...
DISCLAIMER: I'm not the owner of Serenity, the Serenity RPG, or the Cortex System. While I wrote a good portion of the later Cortex books (BSG, Demon Hunters, and the generic Core Book included), I'm just a freelancer. The opinions expressed in these articles are my own. When it comes to the design philosophy I discuss, I try to present what I understand to be the 'general consensus' of the Cortex developers and the design goals of the owners, Margaret Weis Productions.
Warning, this is a long and detailed article. Hope you enjoy it!
Now, all that said, those aren't the only changes made to the way character generation and advancement work between Serenity and the later Cortex revisions. Next time (tomorrow, hopefully), I'll go over the changes to the Trait system. After that we'll look at Plot Points and Advancement Points, and then we'll be on to other aspects of the games.
Hope this little series of articles will prove helpful to some folk. Questions? Comments? Criticisms?
Blessed be,
~Nathan
In this series of articles, I'll cover not just the changes implemented between Serenity and the Cortex revisions, but also some of the motivations and the design philosophy that led to those changes. I'll also be happy to take questions on such things, but...
DISCLAIMER: I'm not the owner of Serenity, the Serenity RPG, or the Cortex System. While I wrote a good portion of the later Cortex books (BSG, Demon Hunters, and the generic Core Book included), I'm just a freelancer. The opinions expressed in these articles are my own. When it comes to the design philosophy I discuss, I try to present what I understand to be the 'general consensus' of the Cortex developers and the design goals of the owners, Margaret Weis Productions.
Warning, this is a long and detailed article. Hope you enjoy it!
Character Creation and Advancement: Attributes and Skills
How Serenity Did It
Character generation was one thing that we knew we wanted to change a bit. Serenity utilized a flat point cost during character generation: an Attribute of d6 would cost 6 points, an Attribute of d10 would cost 10 points, and so on. The same went for Skills, only with an additional pointbreak for Specialties: a Skill of d6 cost 6 points, but each Specialty only cost the difference between its die type and d6: a d8 cost 2 points, a d12 cost 6 points. This was meant to account for the fact that you'd already paid for the first 6 points of each Specialty by buying the General Skill at d6.
We organized character generation that way to make it fast and easy, and to let players start with a wider variety of Specialties than they would be able to otherwise. Unfortunately, this arrangement also caused problems. Character advancement used a different cost system, one that scaled upwards: whenever you wanted to advance a die type, you had to pay for the full new die, rather than just the difference between the new and the old. This applied to both Attributes and Skills, the result being that the Serenity rules encouraged you to create extremely focused characters who started with a few Attributes and Specialties at d12, and most at d4 or d6. You could then buy up those lower stats almost immediately, and far outstrip 'balanced' characters in ability for much less experience.
This slipped through the design process because both character generation and advancement, individually, made sense. We wanted character generation to be fast and easy, and it seems logical that it should be easier to advance low-die Attributes than it is to advance high-die ones. Also, at first glance, it might seem acceptable to reward specialization to some degree---I mean, otherwise all the characters would be identical, right? If it was 'best' to make a completely well-rounded character, they'd all have the same levels in each Attribute and Skill, and similar Traits.
The Problem
But then we saw the results when the game was published: instead of rewarding specializations that made each character different and unique, the Serenity rules rewarded total and complete optimization for whatever single function your character undertook. While there were a few different character types, they essentially broke down into four categories: the combat character (guns or melee), the technical character (doctor or engineer), the pilot character, and the social character (Companion or psychic). While these categories were very different from one another, the characters within any given category were practically clones. And this isn't because the players lacked imagination; it just made sense. There were flat-out, obviously superior choices, and it wasn't long before everyone was making them.
Now, this is where the design philosophy comes in. Some game systems are meant to encourage optimization. d20 is the most popular example: combat is the focus of almost every ability in the game, and the requirement/prereq trees of Feats and Prestige Classes make it vital that you optimize your character from the start. You need to pick certain Feats at certain levels or you wind up unable to maintain effectiveness later on. You need to maximize one or two abilities and stick with those.
From the start, this was something MWP wanted to avoid. The Serenity RPG is not meant to be a tactical game. The rules are meant to be secondary to the flow of the plot and the speed of gameplay---
---which does not mean that the rules are unimportant! The rules are very important, and they do, in fact, show you how to make a character who is good or bad at a given task. However, game rules that allow for heavy optimization detract from the design goals of the Serenity RPG.
Firstly, the 'arms race principle' applies. If one player optimizes their character and the others don't, in a game that rewards optimization, then the other players have to either also optimize or be left behind. While some players might not mind being mechanically less powerful than their fellow player-characters, others might feel frustrated at having to change their character to 'keep up,' or feel upset when their character turns out to be much less 'useful.' And then, if the GM arranges for the circumstances to make life easier for the well-rounded characters, the players who optimized might feel either frustrated because 'things are too easy', or annoyed because the GM is 'picking on them.' Either way, someone has less fun, and that can drive off players. I, for example, try to avoid playing in games that mechanically reward optimization, since I enjoy playing Jack-of-all-Trade characters. So, because Serenity and the Cortex engine are meant to facilitate fun group play that doesn't rely on character power levels, the rules need to avoid handing out points as a reward for such things---or, at least, they need to scale it back considerably.
Secondly, optimization slows down both character generation and play: if it is vital for your character that you make certain choices at each step of the process, you'll have to keep cracking open the rulebook and double-checking those choices. If you rely on a specific rule or loophole or 'ability combo' regularly, you may have to look those particulars up a lot to make sure you're doing it right, especially if your character is built to focus on it. In sessions of d20 games, character gen can take hours (looking through five to ten rulebooks and sourcebooks, depending on your game and GM), and combat can half an hour or more per round (looking up the spell you're casting, making sure you know the rules about charge, knockdown, and stun, or just confirming the damage type of your weapon). Because we wanted the Serenity and future Cortex games to play quickly, with a combat round taking a minute or less to resolve (for example), the rules need to avoid special-case incidents that characters can be built to exploit.
The Fix: Cortex Changes
Ok, so we need to knock down the support structure for optimization that we accidentally created.
Because the problem arose primarily from the split between character generation and character advancement, I changed the one to match the other. Specifically, during development of the BSG game, I re-wrote the character advancement rules to work in the exact same way the character creation does. When you want to increase, for example, a d6 to a d8, it costs you 2 points. If you want to change a d10 into a d12? Also 2 points. This means that characters with well-rounded Attributes and Skills will still be able to advance at the same rate as those who started off heavily focused in one or two areas, but it also doesn't 'punish' players for choosing to focus.
Now, this change does make it (perhaps unrealistically) just as easy to increase an already high-level ability as it is to increase a low-level ability. However, the decision does fit with the design goals of the Cortex engine. This way, players can build the starting character they want---and still advance it in the ways they want. If you want to play a crack-shot but feel it would be so much more awesome to start out with little or no training and learn it over time, you can do that. If you'd rather be a hardened soldier with an eagle eye from the get-go, you can do that, too. Both characters will have the same total point value and be 'equal' in overall ability, whereas formerly, the character who started out with a low Guns Skill would have to spend 4-5 times as many points catching up.
How Serenity Did It
Character generation was one thing that we knew we wanted to change a bit. Serenity utilized a flat point cost during character generation: an Attribute of d6 would cost 6 points, an Attribute of d10 would cost 10 points, and so on. The same went for Skills, only with an additional pointbreak for Specialties: a Skill of d6 cost 6 points, but each Specialty only cost the difference between its die type and d6: a d8 cost 2 points, a d12 cost 6 points. This was meant to account for the fact that you'd already paid for the first 6 points of each Specialty by buying the General Skill at d6.
We organized character generation that way to make it fast and easy, and to let players start with a wider variety of Specialties than they would be able to otherwise. Unfortunately, this arrangement also caused problems. Character advancement used a different cost system, one that scaled upwards: whenever you wanted to advance a die type, you had to pay for the full new die, rather than just the difference between the new and the old. This applied to both Attributes and Skills, the result being that the Serenity rules encouraged you to create extremely focused characters who started with a few Attributes and Specialties at d12, and most at d4 or d6. You could then buy up those lower stats almost immediately, and far outstrip 'balanced' characters in ability for much less experience.
This slipped through the design process because both character generation and advancement, individually, made sense. We wanted character generation to be fast and easy, and it seems logical that it should be easier to advance low-die Attributes than it is to advance high-die ones. Also, at first glance, it might seem acceptable to reward specialization to some degree---I mean, otherwise all the characters would be identical, right? If it was 'best' to make a completely well-rounded character, they'd all have the same levels in each Attribute and Skill, and similar Traits.
The Problem
But then we saw the results when the game was published: instead of rewarding specializations that made each character different and unique, the Serenity rules rewarded total and complete optimization for whatever single function your character undertook. While there were a few different character types, they essentially broke down into four categories: the combat character (guns or melee), the technical character (doctor or engineer), the pilot character, and the social character (Companion or psychic). While these categories were very different from one another, the characters within any given category were practically clones. And this isn't because the players lacked imagination; it just made sense. There were flat-out, obviously superior choices, and it wasn't long before everyone was making them.
Now, this is where the design philosophy comes in. Some game systems are meant to encourage optimization. d20 is the most popular example: combat is the focus of almost every ability in the game, and the requirement/prereq trees of Feats and Prestige Classes make it vital that you optimize your character from the start. You need to pick certain Feats at certain levels or you wind up unable to maintain effectiveness later on. You need to maximize one or two abilities and stick with those.
From the start, this was something MWP wanted to avoid. The Serenity RPG is not meant to be a tactical game. The rules are meant to be secondary to the flow of the plot and the speed of gameplay---
---which does not mean that the rules are unimportant! The rules are very important, and they do, in fact, show you how to make a character who is good or bad at a given task. However, game rules that allow for heavy optimization detract from the design goals of the Serenity RPG.
Firstly, the 'arms race principle' applies. If one player optimizes their character and the others don't, in a game that rewards optimization, then the other players have to either also optimize or be left behind. While some players might not mind being mechanically less powerful than their fellow player-characters, others might feel frustrated at having to change their character to 'keep up,' or feel upset when their character turns out to be much less 'useful.' And then, if the GM arranges for the circumstances to make life easier for the well-rounded characters, the players who optimized might feel either frustrated because 'things are too easy', or annoyed because the GM is 'picking on them.' Either way, someone has less fun, and that can drive off players. I, for example, try to avoid playing in games that mechanically reward optimization, since I enjoy playing Jack-of-all-Trade characters. So, because Serenity and the Cortex engine are meant to facilitate fun group play that doesn't rely on character power levels, the rules need to avoid handing out points as a reward for such things---or, at least, they need to scale it back considerably.
Secondly, optimization slows down both character generation and play: if it is vital for your character that you make certain choices at each step of the process, you'll have to keep cracking open the rulebook and double-checking those choices. If you rely on a specific rule or loophole or 'ability combo' regularly, you may have to look those particulars up a lot to make sure you're doing it right, especially if your character is built to focus on it. In sessions of d20 games, character gen can take hours (looking through five to ten rulebooks and sourcebooks, depending on your game and GM), and combat can half an hour or more per round (looking up the spell you're casting, making sure you know the rules about charge, knockdown, and stun, or just confirming the damage type of your weapon). Because we wanted the Serenity and future Cortex games to play quickly, with a combat round taking a minute or less to resolve (for example), the rules need to avoid special-case incidents that characters can be built to exploit.
The Fix: Cortex Changes
Ok, so we need to knock down the support structure for optimization that we accidentally created.
Because the problem arose primarily from the split between character generation and character advancement, I changed the one to match the other. Specifically, during development of the BSG game, I re-wrote the character advancement rules to work in the exact same way the character creation does. When you want to increase, for example, a d6 to a d8, it costs you 2 points. If you want to change a d10 into a d12? Also 2 points. This means that characters with well-rounded Attributes and Skills will still be able to advance at the same rate as those who started off heavily focused in one or two areas, but it also doesn't 'punish' players for choosing to focus.
Now, this change does make it (perhaps unrealistically) just as easy to increase an already high-level ability as it is to increase a low-level ability. However, the decision does fit with the design goals of the Cortex engine. This way, players can build the starting character they want---and still advance it in the ways they want. If you want to play a crack-shot but feel it would be so much more awesome to start out with little or no training and learn it over time, you can do that. If you'd rather be a hardened soldier with an eagle eye from the get-go, you can do that, too. Both characters will have the same total point value and be 'equal' in overall ability, whereas formerly, the character who started out with a low Guns Skill would have to spend 4-5 times as many points catching up.
Now, all that said, those aren't the only changes made to the way character generation and advancement work between Serenity and the later Cortex revisions. Next time (tomorrow, hopefully), I'll go over the changes to the Trait system. After that we'll look at Plot Points and Advancement Points, and then we'll be on to other aspects of the games.
Hope this little series of articles will prove helpful to some folk. Questions? Comments? Criticisms?
Blessed be,
~Nathan
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-23 02:12 pm (UTC)You've put your finger on the thing that had me feeling something was wrong...but wasn't able to voice it. Thanks!
Now, my question: Will these changes affect how you buy off complications after character gen and how you buy assets after character gen?
Looking through both books, there was a tantalizing line about buying assets later, but though the book went on to describe how a character could pay off a complication to get rid of it, it didn't make good on its impliplied promise to reveal how one bought an asset later on.
I've combed through both editions of the rules book and it just doesn't have it in there. And this sorta-kinda ties in with the changes you've explained above.
Characters are supposed to be fluid. Nobody is really set in stone from the get-go. We all change and grow and evolve. Our character skills, assets and complications should reflect that.
Just recently I had to buy an asset for my character in my husband's campaign, to reflect a month-long period of slaving away at a shipyard's dry dock. She learned a ton and was happy as a clam to do it, but Ken and I figured that would be best reflected as a Talented asset rather than bumping up her skill dice. After all, we all have latent abilities that we carry around for years before something happens to trigger them and force them to the surface, whereupon we can start using them. The situation I mentioned for my character, above, is just such an example. So how could I reflect that with Trait acquisition?
So I hunted through the book to find out how to buy that asset post-character gen and got *nowhere*. I hope I can find out how to do it when you cover the changes you've made for Traits.
As for the needs of the campaign, Ken decided to just give it to me--but only after he worked my character to the bone. (No, really. She pulled double 12-hour shifts, regularly missed weekend liberty dirtside, ate crappy tofu-based food every day, slept in a coffin-sized capsule bunk, and had to put up with the Boss From Hell. But she did it. She wanted to play with the big shiny toys *that* much and Hell Boss's toys were the shiniest....)
But surely, there's got to be a better way to reflect the organic development of Traits, yeah? I'll stay tuned to this channel to see what you say next.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-23 03:15 pm (UTC)In terms of the Serenity system, the 'pseudo-official' patch was that Assets cost 10 AP for a Minor and 20 AP for a Major, and required the GM's permission to purchase (which might or might not include justifying the Asset beforehand). I believe this patch was later made official by virtue of being yea-ed by Jamie, but I think the post for that was on the Waves in the Black forum, which is now gone, so I can't verify.
Blessed be,
~Nathan
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-23 08:32 pm (UTC)I need to brush up on my pronoun reference rules and read it again.
This clears everything up perfectly. Thank you for this. ^_^
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-23 03:24 pm (UTC)That's a good story to show potential playtesters, thanks for sharing. Any feedback yet on how the new version is working out in practice?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-23 04:16 pm (UTC)Blessed be,
~Nathan
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-23 10:04 pm (UTC)Was there any consideration of taking it in the opposite direction, making character generation work in the same way the original mechanics for increasing skills did?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-23 11:35 pm (UTC)I examined the system as it would have worked if we had required a scaling series of costs at both creation and advancement. While that would likewise balance out the disparity problems, it also made character generation longer, more tedious, and also very limiting. To elaborate:
Most characters (in Serenity and Cortex both) start at the lowest level, with enough Attribute points to buy the following: d8/d8/d8/d6/d6/d6. With the Serenity system, and with the flat costs of the Cortex evolutions, that's 42 points. If we price that as scaling (so you have to buy each Step separately), that same Attribute spread is worth 96 points. Unfortunately, those 96 points don't go quite so far, so to speak.
In Serenity and Cortex, you can drop any single Attribute by one Step to increase any other by one Step, sliding them around as you wish. With a sliding scale, that gets less simple. You have to keep track of awkward numbers of points; if you want to increase one of the d8s, you have to decrease two other stats, and you wind up with points left over. While you CAN balance out the points into spreads other than the example I gave above, the math involved can slow things down, and can be confusing if you're introducing new gamers to the concept. And, even if you can deal with the math without flinching, and are ok with holding on to leftover points until later advancement sessions, that still doesn't compensate for the greatly restricted number of possible Attribute spreads.
On the other hand, with a flat scale, the 'sliding' or 'toggling' image fits quite well (handy for introducing new players). You never have leftover points, limiting the number of things you have to keep track of. A much, much wider variety of pointspreads are possible---and, now that a flat scale is also used for advancement, none of those possible choices are actually 'worse' than any other. All these things fit in with the design goals we had for the Cortex system, so it was significantly preferable to run with a flat point cost.
Whew...I'm waxing verbose. That make sense to anyone else? :-)
Blessed be,
~Nathan