Category: RPG

My two new RPGs both use my Energy System (ES), why am I using it and what is the system good for?

ES is designed to play a game that tells the story of characters exerting themselves. The core of the system is that each character (or really any entity) has a certain amount of energy to exert on the world. Traits say what the character is good at and makes the energy they spend more effective.

Why ES and not some other system?

ES handles a number of things organically that other systems need special rules for. It was developed with the question of “What might an RPG look like if they didn’t stem from war-games?” For example, there are no Hit Points, a staple of war games. The closest thing a character gets to hit points is their Energy Dice. There are no separate rules for combat or other skill challenges. They’re all handled the same way. This results in a game that handles any type of in game challenge using the same rules. The only special cases are more like examples of how to use the core rules in specific situations.

What is different about playing ES?

One main difference is the approach to storytelling. This is not a storytelling game as some RPGs have sold themselves. The game dictates what happens in mechanical terms, then the player interprets the game result and tells the story from that. Players are free to tell exciting and impressive tales about their character, but are constrained to make the tales fit the game result. This is a very different experience that some love but others find alien.

Another big difference is in the pacing of the game. Often many dice are rolled at once for each turn. One of the original design criteria was that my players wanted to use a range of dice types so ES obliges them. The important thing to remember is that, rolling the dice is not telling about a single action, but is a stage of a challenge. A character in the ES doesn’t swing a sword, they enter a duel. They don’t dodge an attack, they engage in defensive maneuvers. If players try and explain their rolls in terms of single actions as most RPGs do, the story of what goes on in game will seem very short. If the explain the game results in broader efforts and tell the story of how those efforts went, the game is fuller and will feel properly paced.

At it’s core ES has two main elements to the rules, Agents and Traits. Player Characters are not referred to as an Agent, but are in fact special instances of an Agent. NPCs are Agents but so is equipment, vehicles, and even things like super powers. An agent is anything that has it’s own pool of energy dice. Traits make the dice the player will roll bigger, making the numbers larger and the results higher (on average). There are different kinds of Agents and Traits, but the whole system boils down to those two elements. In play, this sometimes takes players a little bit of getting used to, mostly to unlearn all the baggage that many games require.

ES simulates a large number of situations and interactions with it’s simple ruleset. For vehicles, fuel tracking is handled by their Energy Dice. Weapons ammunition are handled by their Energy Dice. A gun jamming is handled by the Energy Dice. Encumbrance is handled by Energy Dice. At the same time Energy Dice are how the characters get things done so they aren’t tracking several different values, it’s all managed the same way. Social conflict, survival situations and combat are all handled in the same manner.

Is the ES a universal system?

The ES is flexible, but it’s not universal. In each application, the ES needs adjustment to set the proper tone. In most cases, specific types of Agents are considered special to the setting and get special rules. Character creation also has to happen differently to handle different genres.

I’m a simulationist. When I make a game, I want it to handle the situations that I throw at it and I want the whole thing to be elegant. The problem I have is, I’m always adding more situations that I want my games to work under.

For example, in the Energy System (the system that is powering Protector and Jump Temp) the function of things like vehicles is pretty simple. The problem I’ve been having is how many passengers a vehicle can carry. On the one hand, I could just say “use common sense.” A motorcycle can carry one or two people and a car can carry four or five and be done with it.

But then I wanted to throw a light airplane in the equipment list. How many people does it carry? One? Four? Twelve? How big is a “light” airplane?

That’s a bit of a minor issue, but not simulating things like passengers properly leads to weird issues. For example, a motorcycle is probably a little faster than a car, but the car can probably travel further. As things are, they kind of balance each other out and motorcycles cost about the same as a car, which is an odd result.

That kind of thing really bugs me. There are structures in place to handle this kind of problem, but the system handles everything in terms of challenges and I’m not sure what kind of challenge “passengers” are and if I want to spend time in game even handling that.

I could write it off and say “Adding one passenger costs one die” and that could work. The problem with that is it’s one more rule to add to the system.

I had to half add a rule for money. In reality, all I did was explain how to handle money in the existing framework, but it had to called out and explained. I’d rather not have to add a special rule for passengers.

I’ll work on it. . .

You can have your bumpy headed aliens that you’re likely to see on shows like Star Trek, but if you’re serious about your science fiction, you want to have alien aliens.

With that in mind, the aliens in Jump Temp are not humans with bumpy heads. Not only do they look weird, they’re darn hard to communicate with. Considering an alien is likely to have very different thinking than humans, it would seem unlikely that they would speak languages that we’d easily translate. The closest thing we have to an alien language on earth is whale song. So if it’s hard to talk to a creature that breaths air like we do, imagine how hard it would be to understand a creature that breaths ammonia at pressures that would crush our lungs.

There are three races established in the Jump Temp book. Two were discovered before they achieved space flight (no prime directive here!). One, the Neamasta, have their own starships and maybe a different FTL technology. They’re being very secretive and although humans have allowed them into our space, they have not returned the favor. What are they up to? What are they hiding? The book leaves that up to you. I know what I’m going to have happen in our gaming group, but the idea is to establish the world and then let the players find their own way.

We’ve been playing two games that run on the Energy System lately. Jump Temp is a space opera that’s near future maybe 50-100 years from now. Protector is alternate history where aliens attack earth and super heroes save the world, are idolized, take over the world and then are hated.

We’re having fun in both. Jump Temp had the players transporting an alien government official which I would have loved to spend more time on but it was getting late after character generation. In Protector, the heroes were investigating a newly formed volcano off the coast of Scotland and found a giant lava snake and lava coated robots. Pure fun! I’m looking forward to continuing both games.

My last post was about getting larger numbers represented in the system and that’s really opened things up as far as functionality. It’s also brought a lot of clarity to the system. The thing is that the Energy System just plays differently than any other system I’ve played. As GM I have to keep reminding myself that small challenges are ok. The idea that a hero is invulnerable to small fries hasn’t happened yet. I have a feeling that we’ll get there, so I’m working on tweaking the system so that it doesn’t.

It also paces itself differently and I’ve been struggling to not fall into old habits formed from every other game I’ve played. I’m starting to feel the system’s flow a bit now and that’s good. I wonder how other GM’s would handle it though.

Although I tried to keep the concepts in the game to a minimum, they are a bit alien to players but after a play or two they’re starting to get the ideas. Heck, I’m trying to write the games using the simple concepts and I don’t always get it right. Things like money are a challenge to handle but I’m getting that nailed down.

All in all, the game takes adjustment, but it does things that I’ve always wanted in a game. It organically handles normal RPG fare like combat, but also deals with something like a space flight being mentally fatiguing. Most of our last Jump Temp game was the new crew dealing with two transits they had to make. The interesting thing is, the players enjoyed it! The Artificial Intelligence character wasn’t challenged by the trip though and the player lamented that he wasn’t getting in on the action.

So we’re having fun and the Energy System is maturing. Watch this space!

I was having a problem with large numbers in the Energy System. The problem didn’t show up until I started to work on a super hero game using the system. In it there is one vastly powerful superhero that is part of the background story. To use the character in a game required rolling 30 or more d20s and adding up all those dice. It plainly didn’t work.

This is mainly a problem because the system doesn’t scale to things like simulating a WWII battleship or a starship. It was beyond the system, until now that is.

To give you an idea of how the system works, a player gets abilities that grant them die steps. For instance, a skill with four die steps would take a skill from a starting d6 up through a d8, then a d10, then a d12, and then to a d20. Each step making the roll more effective, but d20 was the practical limit of dice steps since most people don’t own d30s or d40s.

The solution is to make a second tier of dice steps. That may sound overly complicated at first, but in for most characters it doesn’t come up so it’s a special case rule. If I was making a space opera, it might be needed more frequently to simulate vehicles or space ships.

So how would a second tier work? If a skill has 8 dice steps, or the equivalent of 2d20 it equals a 1d4x10. If another 4 steps (another d20) is added, the die becomes 1d6x10 and so on. If the character or equipment has 28 dice steps (7d20) they get a 1d20x10.

Is there anything past that? Of course! If you combine the total of 56 dice steps (2d20x10) it becomes 1d4x100. Add another 28 steps for a total of 84 steps* and it becomes a 1d6x100 and so on. 196 steps equals 1d20x100, two of those then flips to 1d4x1000 ad infinitum.

There is one problem with this though. One of the core concepts behind the energy system is that when you roll a die and get a one, the die depletes and can’t be used again until regenerated. That still works under the system, but one of the big draws of higher dice steps is that they deplete less often. A 1d4x10 either never depletes (since it never rolls a 1) or it depletes far more often than a d20.

I could say that if you rolled a 1d4x10 and got a 10, you then had to roll a d10 and if you get a 1 on that die, you deplete the die. The problem is, even though that technically works, it’s kludgy and adds a step for something that is going to be pretty rare. I think it’s better to say, that the die can take damage (which works similarly) but not deplete on a roll of one.

*This is a totally ridiculous number at this point, but I’m offering it to show the system could handle very very large numbers if needed.