System

Tabletop Highlight: Converting Your Game to a New System

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There comes a point in most Game Masters’ lives when the game they are running has outlived the system in which it began. Sometimes that’s the result of a new set of rules coming out that make the game easier to enjoy. Other times it’s because the old system is incredibly dense and difficult to get into whereas the new system is much easier on new players, who suddenly make up a significant potion of the people in the game. Maybe everyone got a little tired of the old system and agreed the new system is going to be much more fun to play. Whatever the reason, you now face the difficulty of helping your players transition from one system to another while also trying to change your notes for future sessions, bad guys, and house rules so they all fit into the new system. A monumental task that makes creating a dungeon seem like a simple job.

I’d recommend doing this during a hiatus or at least planning on missing two weeks worth of sessions since you don’t want to go into this half-cocked, especially if you have a lot of house rules. If you’re good at Fudging It, you can skip the house rules and the overall process will be easier, but you probably shouldn’t skip if you can avoid it. Having house rules the players depend on changed to the new system is important because it helps them set expectations for how things have changed. For a lot of systems, these kind of changes are pretty simple. Converting a Dungeons and Dragons campaign from edition 3.5 to Pathfinder is a simple task since Pathfinder was heavily influenced by 3.5 and most of the numbers are the same from one game to the next. Changing 3.5 to fifth edition is not nearly so easy, even if it seems easy on the surface. House rules about critical change because there is no rolling to confirm critical hits in fifth edition, but that’s easily resolved since you would just drop house rules about confirming critical hits. House rules about treasure, though could change. Fifth edition magic items operate on a very different scale than magic items in 3.5, and the same goes for pretty much any numerical roll. Skills have lower numbers and the difficulties of checks are lower since rolling high in fifth edition is rolling a thirty. If you’ve got a bunch of custom checks mapped out for skills or actions the players regularly use, you’ll definitely need to rework those.

Additionally, there are a lot of balance changes that happen from one game to another. In edition 3.5 of Dungeons and Dragons, fighters tend to be focused on combat skills or utility. In fifth edition, what they focus on changes depending on their specialization and they can wind up as anything from excellent tanks to damage-dealing monsters. Someone with a highly specialized build will need to do a lot of changing as well, perhaps to the point of basically having an entirely new character. If you have prestige classes in 3.5, chances are good that you won’t have them or anything directly related to that specific skill set in fifth edition. And that’s from one edition of a game system to a newer edition. At their core, they’re still the same d20-based game, but what if you make a bigger change?

If you’re running a Dungeons and Dragons campaign that focuses mostly on roleplaying and storytelling, your players might find themselves frustrated with combat and certain skill applications since they tend to bog down a bit once it is time for everyone to start rolling dice. If your players don’t particularly care about the system you’re playing, it can be incredibly beneficial to switch to a Fate system since the skills and combat are much more narrative-based and tend to resolve much more quickly. However, there isn’t a clear class system and the conversion from class levels in Dungeons and Dragons to skill points(the main display of a character’s power) in Fate isn’t a super clear one since even the skills don’t really represent the abilities a Fighter or Wizard might have. It can be done with enough work and the thoughtful participation of all parties, but it definitely won’t be easy. There are other d20 systems out there as well, some closer to Dungeons and Dragons and some decidedly less so, that could be used to take the game in a more Sci-Fi direction, but converting to them is going to run into a different version of the same issue.

While you’ll be missing a couple of sessions while you work out how most of the numbers, power levels, and custom rules will convert, you should include the players in the process. You can use normal session time to do it, or you can start a texting group to get their thoughts. It’s good if you find a way to convert the numbers that makes sense to you, but you also need to consider the players and how they view their characters. No one is going to want to go from feeling incredibly powerful to feeling weak or useless. You can avoid that by working with your players and offering solutions to their feelings of powerlessness, even if it makes the character seem more powerful than they should be. For the most part, it’s fine if the players wind up with powerful characters and it’s even possible that something that seems incredibly powerful will wind up not being as useful as you thought once you start playing again. The best part of any kind of conversion is the knowledge that you can always go back to tweak things as the game continues since no one in their right mind would hold it against you.

Changing systems is a lot of work and, if you’re open and clear about it with your players, they’ll help you find solutions and be more ready to forgive any mistakes that crop up while you’re still ironing out the fine details.

Tabletop Highlight: The Dresden Files RPG

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I’ve mentioned my love of the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher before. I’ve yet to go into it at any real length–I’m saving it for a longer Wednesday review–but I wanted to write about something a little tangential as it has gotten popular enough to have related games and comics. There’s a card game now, a few board games, and a RPG that uses the Fate system. I haven’t played any of the board games yet, or the card game, but I’ve run the RPG and I have to say it was a lot of fun.

For those of you who haven’t played a game using the Fate system, you build a character using a point-allocation system for attributes and skills. You can use points to buy skill modifiers that give you extra ability in specific applications of that skill, but the result is ultimately decided by how many positive modifiers you have after rolling a set of what are called “Fate Dice.” Fate Dice have 6 sides, two of which have a “+” mark, two are blank, and two have a “-” mark on them. “+” adds to your end result, “-” takes away from your end result, and the blank sides are do nothing to your end result. The whole system is fairly low on numbers, compared to most RPGs I’ve played.

Most of the character sheet is actually taken up by what we call “flavor text” in D&D, except the Fate System relies on all of this color and characterization to focus your character. You have to pick strengths and weaknesses, which have the potential to affect your skills and dice pools (how many dice you can roll for a particular check), and almost all of the skill checks amount to a Pass/Fail system with the only real modifications on that being how well you’ve succeeded. The whole system focuses very heavily on storytelling rather than number-crunching, which means it can be either super forgiving or very harsh depending on how your Game Master prefers to run it.

The whole system feels super different from everything else I’ve played since almost all of those other systems are heavier on the numbers side of thing. All of the numbers feel super reassuring to me as both a player and a GM, since math comes easily to me and I’m comfortable enough with the rules as a whole to know when to fudge things, so the Fate System was almost like having to learn an entirely new language rather than just playing a different game. That being said, I don’t think a number-heavy system would work very well for a Dresden Files RPG.

While the book series has a lot of elements that would fit into a more hard-math rule system and shares a lot in common with many of those same systems, it ultimately fits best into the story-driven Fate System. There are many times in the Dresden Files were a character digs deep within themselves to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, but it is hard to have something like that play out in a rules system that has clear results because of numerical dice and hard math. In the Fate System, there is literally a mechanic for saying “actually, I succeeded that because I’m a determined son of a bitch/really good at this one thing that helps out unexpectedly/got extremely lucky that the one thing I needed just happened to be in this little cabinet here.” Those are aptly called “Fate Points” and they allow a player or GM to insert an element of story into one of the times when numbers would otherwise rule outcomes.

Fate Points are allotted to a character based on how many points they have left after their character is made. This means that a higher-powered character has fewer opportunities to fudge the numbers and just succeed than a lower-powered character. In the Dresden Files RPG, this means characters who have no magical abilities or affinities can wind up steering the plot or showing up just in the nick of time to save the bacon of a powerful shape-shifter or wizard. Just like Butters has done for Harry.

The game does a very good job of balancing power levels by placing additional restrictions on higher-powered characters and giving a wide-variety of cheaper powers to non-wizards so that they have the opportunity to contribute and compete with the wizards for the spotlight. If you want to make a wizard and are starting as low-level characters, chances are good that your character won’t be able to do much at the start, whereas a shape-shifter can already transform and use specialized aspects of their powers outside of their transformation.

That being said, the lack of hard-numbers means the GM needs to be rather proficient at making things up as they go along without a precedent to go off. It can be difficult to resolve combat if no one is spending Fate Points to swing it one way or another. I recommend reading the book thoroughly rather than just skimming like you can with some of the hard-math systems. All of the information you need is in there and talking it through with other people who’ve read it or run the game before should be all you need to clear up any confusion.

If you really enjoy the Dresden Files and want to play a game in as close to the book-world as you can get, I definitely recommend picking up PDFs of the books. Some of them even include character information for the people from the books and all of the books will tell you from what point in the series the information was obtained. You don’t need to have read all of the Dresden Files in order to join it, but having read some of it is definitely helpful.