Game rules that lead to ridiculous results

One of the problems with game design is that the rules you come up with may have unlooked-for consequences. Well, I say it’s a problem; actually it can be rather satisfying. Early playtesters of Deus Ex realized they could get out of a maze by planting a limpet mine on a wall and rocket-jumping off it. The designers accepted that as a rather neat bit of lateral thinking. Not a bug, a feature.

Early Dungeons and Dragons was a whole other matter. The world it presented was ostensibly medieval, but if you really plugged those rules into the Middle Ages then you’d get something unrecognizable. I don’t mean because of elves and dwarves. It’s the rules themselves that skew everything. The different physics. One lone paladin confronting a regiment. Magic users firing off spells like 19th century artillery.

That’s why I made magic extremely rare in Dragon Warriors, so as to make it credible that the world looked and behaved like the real Middle Ages. Or you can go the other way, as Professor Barker did with Tekumel. He worked out how many powerful sorcerers a city or a nation could deploy and worked that into the fabric of Tsolyani society. You haven’t been in a real battle until you hear your own lines beginning the chant for a Doomkill.

The biggest source of counterintuitive behaviour in my own games comes from GURPS’s attempts to have a set of rules for all worlds and all times. I’ll give you a recent example. I was planning a commando scenario set in 1943 and the players wanted to equip with flak jackets. In the real world that’s utterly insane. Flak jackets of the period were bulky and restrictive, not to mention mostly useless against gunfire as they were designed to stop slow-moving shrapnel inside the body of an aircraft – and weren’t terribly good at even doing that.

But here’s the snag. GURPS lists flak jackets as weighing 20lbs and stopping 7 points of damage. That means a moderately strong character (ST 13, say) can have a flak jacket plus all their other weaponry and still count as completely unencumbered. Which is nuts. And that jacket won’t just stop shrapnel; in GURPS terms it will stop most handguns. In fact, if you just went by the GURPS rules, you may as well go on your commando raid wearing medium plate (DR6, weight 20lbs). Hey, you should be able to parachute jump wearing that, right?

In a 19th century campaign of ours, some of the player-characters actually walked around in plate armour. You can't blame the players; under the rules as written that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but that was the end of the road for me and GURPS. If a system that claims to be believable throws up results like that, it's really not worth the effort of memorizing all 570 pages. I went cold turkey with the much more enjoyable (and more realistic, even) Sagas of the Icelanders and haven't looked back.

As it turns out, the British did experiment in the early 1940s with infantry body armour weighing just 3lbs. The US Army took a look at this and, to nobody’s surprise, concluded that:

“…all reports indicated that any advantages of such armor would be very slight as compared to the overall loss of combat efficiency and to the increase in the soldier's carrying load.”

And, yeah yeah, you’ve seen videos of re-enactment fellows doing press-ups in full plate. But listen to the impressively scary Stan W Scott explaining why “travel light is travel right”. I wouldn’t argue with him, would you?



It’s annoying because I don’t want to have to say to players, “You can’t have that item.” The rules should rule; on that I’m with Hammurabi. If it's going to come down to arbitrary decisions by the umpire, why bother with game rules at all? Yet if the rules are supposed to be generic and universal, then they should not lead to wildly unrealistic tactics.

Yet… we don’t want more fiddly rules. It's bad enough that you need to fire up Excel just to create a GURPS character sheet. At least that's all in the prep, but nobody likes book-keeping in the middle of a nail-biting game session, which is why encumbrance and fatigue rules tend to be more honoured in the breach. Hence the rules for them are often quite abstract. But it would be very simple for GURPS to factor size into the weight of armour, as Runequest does. I say simple because the weight of armour for a given protective value (ie thickness) goes up with the square of linear dimension - and so too does strength, more or less, being a function of muscle cross-section. So twice as strong means almost twice the weight of armour to carry.

Another factor that many game systems ignore is that even modern body armour is hot. It may not matter in a ten-minute engagement, but it would certainly tell in the course of a ten-mile yomp over the Brecon Beacons. And that aspect is independent of strength. Indeed, greater muscle bulk heats up more, because the surface area goes up with the square but the mass goes up with the cube - meaning that the guy with bigger muscles already loses heat less efficiently, and thus gets fatigued regardless of how easy it is to lift that gear, with or without armour. How might we represent that without continually having to cross off fatigue points? One solution could be like the Psychic Fatigue Rolls in Dragon Warriors. When you fail the roll, you’re fatigued by one level. It’s a little arbitrary, but people do have some days when they’ve got more energy – and the virtue of that kind of rule is that there’s not much book-keeping.

And then there's the restrictive nature of armour. However well articulated, full covering is never going to allow the full fluidity of movement possible without armour. And armour cannot perfectly replicate the weight distribution of the human body, meaning that in effect there should be a separate skill (with defaults, of course) for fighting in armour. Again, that’s not too arduous to factor in – especially not in GURPS, with its veritable thicket of default skills.

What about your games? Have you ever had by-the-letter rules interpretations leading to bonkers results? Georgian adventurers with chainmail overcoats? Private eyes going around ‘30s New York armed with flame throwers? Medieval footmen using longbows like sniper rifles? Share the craziness below.

"The Right Duke" (a Shakespearean World War 2 scenario)

Even by the standards of my group’s seasonal specials, this scenario is an odd one. The specials, held four times a year, are used for epic events in our regular campaigns. At least, that was the original idea. But one of our campaigns involves a group of immortal Spartans, and as that campaign plays out slowly over the centuries, we decided it would be fun from time to time to have non-canonical specials that would allow us to fast-forward in the characters’ lives. So, while the campaign is actually now up to the eighth century AD and the characters recently met Alfred the Great, in various specials we've played them in Victorian times, 1930s New York, a ‘60s spy adventure, and even policing the mean streets of Mega-City One.

As you can see from that list, not only are the Spartan specials non-canonical, they’re usually an excuse to play around with tone and genre in a way we don’t tend to do in our regular campaigns. The adventures don’t even have to make strictly logical sense. You know Moonlighting? The Taming of the Shrew episode? Like that.

Before I go on, there are spoilers ahead. If you’re going to be playing in this scenario, better look away now. Still here? Okay then…

There’s a reason I mentioned Shakespeare. This scenario was set in World War Two and followed on from events in the Immortal Spartans campaign that happened two millennia earlier. Back then, Julius Caesar had heard of a ruined city across the Atlantic where there was a marvellous device (alien technology, naturally) that could make him immortal just like the player characters. He and Cleopatra tried to use it to raise themselves up to be gods over mankind, but the characters thwarted that plan and Caesar seemed to be dissolved in the heart of the machine.

Fast forward to the 1940s. My idea was that on a mission to kidnap Mussolini, the characters would stray through a “tempest” created by an experimental atomic device, arriving not in Milan but in a parallel pocket universe where Caesar, exploiting the consonance between his shadow existence and Mussolini’s isolation as a puppet ruler, now imposed a different reality in which he was the exiled duke seeking a return to power. The characters are sucked into this pocket universe where “Il Duce” = “the Right Duke of Milan” and unless they can stop Caesar from completing the final ceremony, his reality will overwrite our timeline. All the centuries in which he was trapped as a shadow, his “gold complexion dimm’d”, will never have happened and he will become the immortal ruler of all as his original plan decreed.

As for tone – exiled dukes, mistaken identities, storms that warp reality, a magical unity of place and time. It had to be Shakespeare. Try and do some of the NPC dialogue in Elizabethan style. It doesn’t have to be the Bard, but just a few touches will add a lot of flavour. Of course, to use this scenario at all you’re going to need to do a lot of rejigging, even if you run it for one-off characters. Your best bet is probably just to read through it for ideas and then remake it in a form that suits your group. Let us know in the comments how it plays out. 

PLAYER BRIEFING 

[This is how my players came in, but you may decide to ditch the immortal Spartans thing entirely.]

It is the summer of 1943, and you have lived for nearly two and a half thousand years. You are healthy but, having seen so much, inevitably some experiences are hazier than others. Sometimes you wake dazzled by the blazing light on the brass walls of Athena’s temple, or with the taste of a fresh fig plucked from the groves beside the Eurotas. Early memories are always sharp. Others may come into focus for a while, uncertainly poised between recollection and dream, as each successive era sees you in new clothes, speaking a new tongue. Who knows how many loves and friends and foes you have forgotten, how many once-cherished experiences are lost forever in the unstopping torrent of your lives?

And now mankind, whom you have lived among like gods, is on the verge of harnessing the power of Apollo. What wonders the rest of the 20th century may bring, if the world survives the dark abyss of conflict into which it has lately fallen.

You have 480 points to spend. We are using only the two core GURPS 4e books: Characters and Campaigns, both to keep things simple and on the basis that some of the later books break more than they fix. So if it isn’t in those two core books, it isn’t in the special.

Also, no cinematic or paranormal abilities. Exotic abilities are probably okay, but we’ll look at those on a case by case basis rather than list them here.

Stats: IQ should not exceed 14. Other stats can go up to 20, and you can buy Lifting ST and Striking ST up to +5.

Skills in excess of 16 are capped by your IQ. For example, with IQ 12 you can have two skills at 22, or three at 20, etc. Your attitude to modern skills is up to you. Spartans despised long-range missile weapons such as bows as cowardly, but twenty-five centuries is a long time in which to moderate your views.

You have no disadvantages or quirks – at least, not that earn you any points.

Your pooled wealth is already assumed, so you don’t need to allocate points for that.

You don’t have to bother with allies and contacts; as the setting of a special is so limited it makes little sense for you to pay for them. I will automatically assign you contacts if appropriate. However, if you want to specify contacts, in full knowledge that they may not be accessible, feel free to do so.

You should decide if you have sympathy with the Axis or Allies, or are neutral. For the sake of this scenario, it’s assumed that in June 1943 you are at least purporting to be on the side of the Allies and so taking status or rank in the Allied forces may make sense. (If you choose to be a double agent, pay only for your status/rank on the Axis side; their intelligence resources will have arranged equivalent rank for you among the enemy at no cost to you.)

Languages: you have Greek, Latin, English and one other modern language free. You probably will need more. Area Knowledge could also come in handy. (The adventure will take place largely in the European theatre.)

Equipment is mostly going to be standard WW2 kit. Assume that you can have one weapon or other piece of gear of fine quality (adds +2 to skill) and the rest at good quality (+1 to skill). Rationale: this is a time of constant missions, so there’s a lot of churn on the gear you’re using, and not always time to resupply with the top-quality stuff between operations.

Body armour just wasn’t practical for field use in the early 1940s. You might put a bulletproof jacket under an overcoat if you were expecting an assassin to take a potshot at you, or don a flak jacket while aboard a bomber (they are effective at stopping slow-moving shrapnel, not high-velocity bullets), but you’d be lumbering about like Iron Man with his power switched off. The only armour usable on active duty is a helmet (DR4, weight 3lbs).

Your airship, the Apollo, is 250m long with a duralumin hull and seventeen helium gasbags. It is powered by four 1250 hp engines with swivel mounts allowing them to be angled in almost any direction. It has a top speed of 85 mph and a range of 7000 miles.

The bridge and radio room are in the control gondola located at the fore of the hull, with a secondary main crew/passenger area molded into the lower deck area further back. The main quarters include kitchen, dining room, sixteen two-person passenger cabins, further cabins for forty crew behind a bulkhead, and an observation lounge. Access between the control gondola and living quarters is via the interior deck.

The control gondola can be detached from the hull in extreme emergency, deploying chutes that allow a controlled descent to the sea.

Observation nacelles are located fore and aft on the upper curve of the hull. An observation pod called the Eyrie can be lowered from the midpoint of the vessel to keep lookout when hovering in cloud.

An internal hangar holds five single-seat Curtiss F9C Sparrowhawk fighter planes: Phobos, Deimos, Thanatos, Aidos and Aite. These can be lowered for launch by means of a trapeze mechanism, onto which they can hook to return to the ship.

Act I:

TESTING THE DEMON CORE

Summer 1943. We open over the North Pole, aboard the characters’ airship Apollo, where they are helping Dr Otto Frisch and his assistant Auberon Farley conduct tests using the Lady Godiva Device. The aurora borealis is like being inside a glowing curtain. When Dr Frisch turns on the device, the aurora intensifies and bends in towards the ship. Realizing that the Demon Core of the device is going critical, Farley reaches in and pulls out a component, deactivating it just as the glowing plasma flows through the ship.

They receive a message to proceed to Dounreay Castle on the northern coast of Scotland. The message is tagged “Blenheim”, indicating highest urgency.

THE BANNERBOYS

En route to Scotland, the airship is attacked by a squad of Bannerboys (Blutfahnejugend). These are young (16-18 year old) Aryan super-soldiers created by a process (“Der Agoge”) developed by Nazi scientists of the Thulë Society in the early 1930s. Bannerboys refer to the Spartans as “Die Golemen” (to distinguish them from so-called Übermenschen).

The control gondola loses contact with the observation nacelles on the upper part of the hull. (Snipers in the Nazi glider took out both spotters.)

The Nazis are attacking in two waves. Inside the hull, commandos are planting bombs while a machine gunner covers them from by the Sparrowhawks. The LMG takes a few rounds to set up, so if characters move fast they will only have three covering snipers to worry about.

The second wave attacks the passenger gondola with the aim of stealing or destroying the Lady Godiva Device. They abseil down the hull, blow the windows with concussion grenades (HT-5 to avoid stun) and move in.

During the attack, the Lady Godiva Device begins to activate. Physics roll at -2 to deactivate it.

BRIEFING AT DOUNREAY

The characters get their initial mission briefing from Winston Churchill. The Allied invasion of Sicily has been brought forward and will begin imminently. They are to abduct Mussolini to prevent Hitler from continuing to use him to legitimize Axis control of northern Italy.

ARRIVING AT MALTA

Upon arriving in Malta they are greeted by Rear-Admiral Gareth “Bay” Bayswater and his staff.

In Bay’s office they meet an operative called Rasenna who gives them a plan of the Italian coastal defences, and tells them that “Il Duce” is in Milan. They will need to grab him there before he returns to Salo, where the German fortifications will make the job all but impossible.

They need to decide how to equip for the mission. The plan is to parachute near to the city. Bay’s people advise that mostly they should be in civilian gear, as military patrols are more likely to be questioned or even co-opted by superiors.

Two of the party could go in as an Oberstleutnant (Wing Commander”) and Feldwebel (Sergeant) of the First Fallschirm-Jäger Division (“the Green Devils”). As Luftwaffe special ops, they are not subordinate to the SS officers they may run into. They can be supplied with forged papers that confirm they are under orders from General Kurt Student.

The civilians will have to make do with concealable weapons. The two German officers can carry SMGs or FG42 automatic rifles, but need to be careful not to attract undue attention (no actual machine guns!). They can also wear steel Fallschirmhelms (DR 5 on skull).

Incidentally, we use GURPS 4e for the Immortals Spartan campaign. Why? Here’s why.

There is an Italian agent whom they should attempt to contact at a nightclub called Il Fungo a Mezzanotte on the Via del Fieno. They are to ask for the head waiter and say (in Italian) “There is no chance of a mint julep, presumably?” (“Non vi è alcuna possibilità di un Julep di menta, presumibilmente?”) and the agent will contact them.

The agent will know Mussolini’s whereabouts and can provide them with whatever clothing and papers are needed to get access to him. Failing that, they should return to their radio set (wherever they leave it) and request new orders.

Act II:

THE TEMPEST

As per orders: take the Apollo over Milan to parachute in, seize Mussolini, and bring him back alive across the Swiss border 50 miles away. It’s midsummer night.

A fierce storm is raging over northern Italy. This is where they discover a saboteur (Frisch’s assistant) has planted the Godiva Device in the upper rigging of the Apollo and set it to go critical. As they jump, a vortex of glowing light surrounds the city and they leave a “vapour trail” of sparks as they descend.

If they try to get away from the city, they’ll find a force field now surrounds it at a distance of a couple of miles.
(This list of some of the major Milan landmarks may be useful to provide colour.)

AT THE NIGHTCLUB

The nightclub is called Il Fungo a Mezzanotte – the Midnight Mushroom. The agent they have to meet is Mira. She unrolls from a carpet and does a slinky Egyptian-style number. (Eidetic memory identifies her as Cleopatra, but not right away – say “she reminds you of someone”, then later give them an IQ roll.)

Mira tells them “Il Duce” will be at the castle tomorrow morning for a state proclamation, but that he will be heavily guarded by SS troopers then. She will try to find out his whereabouts tonight, when it will be easier to kidnap him, but her informer hasn’t got in touch yet.

“They say his agents are out searching for something called the Proserpine Key. I don’t know where that is, but if you find it then you may find him. I was given this ring, which is supposed to be a clue of some kind.”

As they talk, there’s a raid on club by the police, whom Mira calls the Calibanieri (sic). They might try to fight it out, but Mira hurries them to the back door. “They’ll call for Pineborn and Il Brute. Go to the Love-in-Idleness café near the cemetery. I’ll join you there.”

If they demur, have Il Brute and Mr Pineborn arrive. (See later for stats.)

THE RING

Mira’s ring is a large diamond on a silver setting. Scrutinizing it closely reveals a tiny imperfection inside the gem. A Vision roll at -10 allows them to see the “imperfection” is in flux.

To view the image, they either need a magnifying glass (could break into a jeweller’s) or hold it up to a bright light like the lamp on the side of the Cathedral plaza. The image shows Cleopatra and Caesar as glowing figures. (This is a good point for someone to realize that Cleopatra is Mira.)

The ring itself is not the Proserpine Key. Mira herself is the Key.

THE CATHEDRAL and THE INFORMANT

It’s likely that on the way through from the Via del Fieno to the Love-in-Idleness, they will pass by the Cathedral plaza.

The image of Mussolini is projected onto the side of the Cathedral at night, hundreds of feet high. Except… it’s not Mussolini’s face, it’s Caesar’s. 

The informant in a guy in a trenchcoat who they need to spot (Vision at -5 for the darkness) across the plaza. As they see him (100 yards away) he ducks into a telephone kiosk.

The informant’s phone call summons the Calibanieri – unless they shoot him, in which case the shot brings a patrolling SS jeep.

BARON GLAUER

They’re fleeing from police cars (why? maybe they pursued and killed the informant) and are cornered, until Baron Glauer pops up from a manhole cover and leads them to safety.

Baron Glauer is a psionic of the Thule Society. He tells them that he can see both worlds, theirs and Caesar’s, having the ability to send out his astral form between realities and even teleport by Tibetan meditation. He promises to help the characters, warning that they must find the Proserpine Key or Caesar will use it to replace their time line with his own. He says that as long as they stay within five yards of him, he can cloud the minds of ordinary patrolmen not to notice them.

In fact Glauer just wants the Proserpine Key in order to have a bargaining chip with Caesar.

THE CAFÉ / CEMETERY

Mira sends word to them at the café to meet her at the cemetery nearby. Her note says, “I will wait at the  grave of Signor Einstein,” which refers to Hermann Einstein, Albert Einstein’s father.

At the grave they do indeed find Mira waiting for them. She tells them Caesar is at the Cathedral. “He is getting ready for some kind of ceremony at dawn.”

However, Baron Glauer recognizes Mira as the Proserpine Key and teleports her away with him just as Mr Pineborn and Il Brute arrive for a big fight.

ENCOUNTERING IL BRUTE AND MR PINEBORN

Some special effects for if/when this happens:

◦         Lights flicker – that’s the “they’re here” warning.

◦         Pineborn may put lights out altogether (both he and Il Brute can see in the dark).

◦         Il Brute can rip out tables and use them as shields or to throw.

◦         Il Brute can throw Mr Pineborn at someone -- a highball special.

As the characters race to the Cathedral, they’ll see that parties of workers in many streets are decking out Il Duce’s statues with purple robes and laurel wreaths, as for a Roman triumph.

 

Act III:

STOPPING THE RITUAL

Caesar is conducting a marriage ritual that will transform him and Mira into full immortals and replace our reality with his. The characters have to disrupt the ceremony.

They face Caesar and his bodyguard – not as tough a fight as the one earlier, unless the bodyguard were alerted to use gold bullets. [The Spartans can regenerate most damage, but gold weapons disrupt this ability so that they heal from such injuries only as fast as normal men.]

If the characters successfully disrupt the ritual, this pocket universe reverts to real-world Milan, Caesar becomes Mussolini (alive) and they will need to reach the Swiss border. Baron Glauer could help if they haven’t killed him, though he can only teleport so large a group a few miles.

Get ready for Osprey Adventures

My own role-playing campaigns are frequently set in historical periods rather than outright fantasy settings. The research is half the fun, and usually the first place I'll look is Osprey's military books, a series I started collecting as a board wargamer. In the last couple of years Osprey have woken up to the overlap between wargamers, roleplayers, history buffs and SF readers, leading them to buy up punky sci-fi imprint Angry Robot. And now they're launching a couple of new series under their Osprey Adventures imprint.

Myths and Legends (quoting from the 2013 Osprey Books catalogue now) "examines the great stories that have echoed down through time and have helped to shape our cultures. Each title in the series focuses on a specific legendary figure, such as King Arthur, or upon a collection of myths, like dragon-slayers, and presents their story in a straightforward, entertaining style. Alongside the narrative is factual information about the history behind the stories and how these legends developed and changed over time. The books also contain Osprey’s usual array of illustrative material, including specially commissioned artwork plates."

This is actually almost word for word a concept that Jamie and I came up with fifteen years ago. We called it Legendary Sourcepacks (previously discussed here) and spent the better part of a year pitching it to publishers. In hindsight we would have had more success if (a) we hadn't started with medieval Japan, (b) had waited at least a decade, and (c) approached Osprey first! But every cloud has a silver lining, and the way it turned out we don't have to write the books, we can collect them instead.

The other series that's launching Osprey Adventures is Dark Osprey. These are titles such as The Nazi Occult:

"In the dark dungeons beneath Nazi Germany, teams of occult experts delved into ancient and forbidden lore, searching for lost secrets of power. Ordered by Hitler to discover new weapons that could be unleashed on his enemies, the occultists experimented with dark magics, mystical artifacts, and creatures thought only to exist in nightmare. This book tells the complete history of the Nazi occult programs, from their foundations in Hitler’s early esoteric studies and the quests for the Ark of the Covenant, the Spear of Destiny, and the Holy Grail, through their experiments with lycanthropes and zero-point energy. It also includes sections on the shadow war fought in the dying days of the Reich as the Nazis sought to stave off defeat through pacts with diabolic entities, attempts to preserve the Fuhrer’s brain, and the deployment of the strange flying saucers that battled to save the final Nazi stronghold in the Antarctic.  For years, the Allied governments worked to keep this information from reaching the public, and sought to discredit those few who dared to seek the truth. Now, using a combination of photography and artwork reconstructions, the true story of the most secret battles of World War II can finally be told."

Now, even in a fantasy, it's not really feasible for the Nazis, who were the batty New Agers of their era, to have got within a million miles of investigating zero-point energy, having kicked all the good quantum physicists out of Germany in the mid-thirties. But the other stuff sounds coherent and should fuel an alternate WW2 role-playing campaign if you like Hellboy or Iron Sky.

Abenteuerspiel

Jamie has spent the last couple of weeks working with my Mirabilis co-creator, Leo Hartas, on an Escape From Colditz game intended to publicize re-runs of the old BBC/NBC show. You can play the beta (slightly buggy but still fun) on Leo's own site. The spot-on WW2 movie pastiche soundtrack is by the uber-talented Frazer Payne, and one of his tracks is in the beta, so it's worth a look just for that.

Bizarrely, the marketing folk at the TV company wanted Jamie and Leo to squeeze the game below 1.5 Meg so that people could email it to each other - y'know, like you do with Flash games. Well, that's marketing for you, bless 'em.

Anyway, while Leo has been playing around with Flash we started looking at mini-adventure games like Death in Sakkara and visual novels such as The Flower Shop. There I was resisting - I'd rather be writing more episodes of the Mirabilis comic than designing a game - but inspiration struck anyway. As it so often does when you're trying to work on something else. So now we have an intriguing hook for a Mirabilis adventure game and I just know it's going to lie there gnawing at my subconscious until we get on and do it.

The working title is Timber! and the only question now is whether to do it in Flash and give it away for free or to put a bit more care and attention into making an app version.