Breaking the Rules (Tales of Hogwarts 2)

Having one of those "What's the frelling point?" days today, looking at WILD and feeling like it's all nonsense and that no one will ever want to read it or play it. One of the problems sometimes of having too many ideas and not enough motivation or the means to go through with it.

The t-shirt I was wearing for last night's Tales from the Loop game -
Bonus points if you recognise the 80's movie it is from!

As a means of distraction, I've been continuing my thoughts of using the Tales from the Loop system to create a Harry Potter RPG. We had another excellent game of Tales from the Loop last night, resolving one of the plots of the many we'd uncovered in the mystery landscape.

Last post, I started discussing how the Pride and Luck rationing could be tweaked to better reflect the Kids' time at Hogwarts, rather than out in the field filled with bizarre technology and weirdness.

The next stage is taking a look at the Attributes and Skills used in Tales from the Loop and seeing what needs to be changed to suit Harry Potter.

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It's strange, but I had weird flashbacks to Star Trek. A couple of years ago, when I first started talking to Modiphius about working on Star Trek, they told me it would be done using their 2D20 system and I should take a look at that and see how it could be adapted to suit Star Trek.

The first thing I did was look at the 2D20 games they had published, or were in the works, to start "breaking the rules" - so to speak. Breaking the rules down into their components to see how it works. A sort of reverse-engineering.

I looked at Mutant Chronicles, Infinity, Conan and John Carter, knowing that they wanted a level of complexity in the middle of the range (if Infinity/MC was the complex end, and John Carter was 2D20 "lite"). First thing I did was make notes of what Attributes and Skills were used for each incarnation of 2D20, and see what related to what.

My original notes during the early phases of Star Trek Adventures development
looking at the various incarnations of 2D20

I also took a long look at the previous incarnations of Star Trek - the FASA, Last Unicorn Games and Decipher versions - and looked to see what they had considered essential skills and attributes in their interpretations of Trek.

More of my original notes, looking at the previous versions of Star Trek
and how they broke down the skills and attributes.

Eventually, I came up with six Attributes, and the six "skills" (which were basically the posts on the crew, two for each Star Fleet Division). The Attributes were Bravery, Control, Empathy, Presence, Reason, and Resilience. And the "skills" were Command, Conn, Medical, Science, Engineering, and Security.

Those Attributes changed shortly after I left the project, but you get the idea of where I was going with it.

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I started doing the same with Tales from the Loop. I knew the system was used by a couple of other excellent games - Mutant: Year Zero, and Coriolis - so I thought I'd look and see what Attributes and Skills were used for each of these games.

However, looking at the Attributes and Skills gave me the same feeling I had when I first started picking at 2D20 for Star Trek...

FREE YOUR MIND...

And by that, I wanted to take the ties off. One of the first things I suggested for Star Trek was to untie the relationship between Attribute and Skill. Sure, it means that some players will want to always use their strongest Attribute to do anything, but the situation will determine if a certain Attribute or Skill comes into play.

I used a simple example for this -

Say you want to lift a rock. Bear in mind, this is for the original Star Trek Attributes, not the ones they went for finally as I'm more familiar with my version...

If you want to lift a rock to hit someone with it, you'd use Resilience and Security (as it's combat).
If you want to lift a rock off of someone who is pinned, you'd use Resilience and Medicine.
If you want to lift a rock off of someone while lava is approaching, you could use Bravery and Medicine.
If you wanted to lift a rock to see what is underneath, you'd use Reason and Science.
If you wanted to lift a rock to by wedging something under it and levering it free you'd use Resilience and Engineering.

You get the gist.

Looking at the system used in Loop and the other games, the skills are firmly tied to an attribute... I'm quite keen to break those ties as the first stage.

I'd also like to use similar Attributes to Tales from the Loop - but Tech needs replacing. Next comes the big issue which I'll be pondering over the week - what should replace Tech? Would a Magic Attribute be too powerful?

Hmmm... I'm going to think about that, and look in depth again at the breakdown of Charms, Jinxes and Curses ready for the next post. (As well as going back to writing WILD - after all, there's a lot more chance of WILD seeing the light of day than there is a Harry Potter game!!)

Until next time, stay multi-classy!