[Halberd System] A very different approach to a lot of mechanics.

[T. Ettinger]

Hello,
    I have been working on one system in various guises for almost 4 years now, and now I am getting ready to actually write a book using it.  It's a simulationist system meant to be light enough to learn quickly but deep enough to loosely express a wide array of characters.  This is the Halberd System (or just Halberd), and it has no grid, no dice, and leaves very little up to chance during combat.  The core of the system is based around the concepts of moves and pools.  While some of these mechanics have been done before, many haven't, and most haven't been done in a way like mine at all.
    A pool is just a collection of counters (usually coins), all of which are identical.  Characters have 5 pools plus their Health; the names of the pools can vary based on setting, but there are always 5.  The pools are primarily defensive, but they can be used offensively as well.  When you are attacked, you usually lose counters from a pool instead of from your Health; this makes the pool/Health system much like Vitality/Wound Points in other games, but breaking up "Vitality" into 5 distinct variables.  In one of my games, the 5 pools are Soul, Toughness, Evasion, Agility, and Mind, and unless an optional rule is being used, each one acts like the rest in all ways except for how moves treat them. 
    A move is any action a character performs.  There are 3 kinds of move: Action Moves, Boost Moves, and Defenses.  An Action Move can be anything from a gunshot attack to a healing prayer to a flying swoop; the defining trait is that these moves require you to be aware of your surroundings and able to move around, but these moves should not require any other character to do anything.  Boost Moves are similar to Action Moves, but they can't target other characters in most cases (some versions of Halberd would have Boost Moves that can, but they must be unlocked by certain Action Moves).  Defenses are a special kind of move; they can only be used when an opponent's attack would damage you, and they typically let you lose counters from a pool of your choosing instead of from Health.
    Moves can try to deal damage to an opponent (which triggers a Defense), reduce or increase one or more of a target's pools, restore a target's Health (which is difficult), or do a few other things.  Every move has a cost in counters (which is usually variable and can be set by the player), a range (Long, Close, or No Range), and a Domain (characters who try an action that their character should be able to do but isn't described by a move on the character sheet can use any move in their Domain, but with a penalty to effectiveness).  Moves depend closely on pools to function; a not-unusually-complex attack move might cost a certain amount of counters from the user's Evasion pool, reduce an enemy's Toughness pool, deal damage (triggering a defense), and increase the user's Agility pool.  All moves automatically "hit;" although attacks don't usually deal Health damage, they do exhaust or deplete the resources of a targeted enemy.
    Every character gets to use a move on 8 occasions in a round of an encounter.  These are the counts, and different characters can use different kinds of moves on different counts.  A character's Combat Schedule is a list of what type of move (Action or Boost) can be used on what count; every schedule has 4 Action Moves and 4 Boost Moves in varying orders.  On any given count, every character uses a move (players announce their characters' moves publicly, the GM notes his moves secretly), with Boost Moves happening first and Action Moves happening in a random order between the acting characters.
    The problems I see with this system as we speak are mainly that I may have simplified parts of moves enough to make them boring, that pools aren't interesting or different enough from each other, and that the concept of a Combat Schedule remains untested and may not work well.  I realize I may not have explained all these concepts thoroughly enough in this post, but if you have any questions, ask away, and if you have any suggestions, I would love to hear them.  Thanks for reading.

[dindenver]

Tom,
  The combat schedule seems reminiscent of Champions/Hero system to me. Have you played either one before?
  I think Pools "could" be interesting depending on how they are used aside from absorbing damage.
  If everybody has a chance to act in all 8 phases, why have 8 phases per round? There are other games out there with multiple phases. But the goal of most of them is to differentiate between fast and slow characters (fast characters might get to act every phases, while slow characters might only get to act 1 in every 10 phases). I understand this will give you different and interesting schedule combinations, but I don't see the advantage of it to design or play. 8 phases and 2 move types means that there are 256 combinations. No one will ever be able to explore all of those in any meaningful way, why not shorten it to 2 or 3 phases (you should be able to emulate most comboes that you get from 8 phases in 2-4 phases depending on how thoroughly you have mapped all of the comboes)?
  You claim to want to build a lite system, but this seems kind of crunchy. What is the lightest system you have played and enjoyed? I think the answer to that might help others respond to your concerns more effectively.

[hoefer]

Tom,
   I also have a game (Century's Edge) where the characters are continually relying on resource pools.  In my game, the pools represent a sort of "gusto" for the attributes they are aligned with (Health, Lucidity, and Spirit) as well as being a vitality marker (Like hit point –but read on!).
   The problem I have run into and that you may find is the tendency of a GM to want to use pools just like hit points or just like resources and not getting the idea of what they mean within your game.  For example, a character loses 6 out of 36 Health Pool points when shot in combat and the GM wants to describe the wounds as if it were 1/6 deadly (if you get what I mean).  Or the character utilizes 20 points of their Health Pool to gain bonuses on jumping a chasm and the GM wants to allow them a first aid roll to recover the points.  Where I'm going is, that using pools dually for both damage and "umph" sets up a lot of tricky situations that must be handled contrary to the way most "old school" RPGs are played.  I had to add a section to my GMing Chapter to deal with how to narrate/judge these situations.  You may need to really plan out how you would approach this –it is tricky.
I saw in your post where you said all moves hit but don't necessarily do damage.  How will this effect the "excitement level" of the game?  I know one of the things I never could stand about the WEG D6 Star Wars Game is that you could sometimes hit a creature but not harm it (yes, I know it takes stun...but...).  It was so deflating to land an attack with a lethal weapon that did nothing.  Just something to mull-over...



Louis Hoefer
www.wholesumentertainment.com

[T. Ettinger]

Thanks for your speedy responses, I will get to both of you.
    Dave, I have not played either Hero or Champions, but I have certainly heard good things about Champions.  You're probably right about the counts/phases; I can cut them down to 3-5 without much difficulty.  I might add in a rare "your choice" phase where you can select either kind of move (I could call it an Option Move).  In that case, there could be 5 phases, with 2 Action, 2 Boost, and 1 Option Move in a round.  I am considering whether or not to have gaps in the actions a character can take, just like you described for fast/slow characters.  The main issue is that faster characters have an undetermined advantage over slow ones; everything in this system should have a numerical value (usually equivalent to counters), and that makes balancing characters much easier.  Hopefully, balance is good in Halberd; at least in theory, any two characters of the same level facing a diverse set of opponents of the same level will do close-to-equally well.  The problem with theoretical balance is that actual players could make poor choices, may fail to end encounters when the end is possible, might underestimate or overestimate enemies, etc.  The reverse is true as well, and an unskilled player and a highly skilled player might think the system was at fault for making one PC "better" than another (and at least partially it is, because it lets all this happen).
    I guess you are right about this not being as-light-as-possible for an RPG, but it isn't my goal to make a paper-thin set of mechanics that allow lots of situations with "make something up and hope it sticks" as an answer.  I realize those systems can be lots of fun (like with donjon, for instance), but they are also far less realistic and a lot more prone to interpersonal problems at the table when a certain kind of group is playing (the more gamist crowd, I suppose you could call them).  Several of my friends who have brainstormed with me on this system are hard-core gamist role-players, and they have influenced the design somewhat (what can I say, I aim to please).  Admittedly, they aren't the exact target audience, but I do hope I could win them over enough for a playtest, something I haven't gotten to do yet.  Back on topic, the lightest game I have actually played would be either a mostly-ad-libbed game of D&D before my group was particularly familiar with the rules, or a playtest of an older game of mine with a far-too-video-game-inspired system that was not balanced at all, even though I tried to make it that way.  I would rather not make Halberd closer to the latter, but I have modeled some features of the system after the former (no grid, no dice necessary, a decent enough GM can come up with characters on-the-fly...).  I am not aware of any really-light systems that would fit the settings I have for Halberd, so I'm going with one that I know how to balance.
    Louis, you bring up some very good points about pools.  In Halberd, I'm trying to go for a movie-combat kind of feel -- gunslingers get shot at but not hit for a while, lightsabers swing for minutes without injury, kung-fu masters block most punches but don't even flinch for long when they are hit, etc.  When a move costs 10 counters from Toughness, for example, it means you have exposed a vulnerable part of your body, fallen onto the ground, and so on, but only if your Toughness was already close to 10-15.  If your Toughness is high, then you are expected to use up counters from that pool to make moves stronger because you can afford to let off some of your guard and still be fine defensively.  The difference is that in the first case your pool is low afterward, and in the second it remains high enough to allow a Defense to use it as a buffer against damage.  The point is, when your pools are low you are in a bad position or vulnerable state, but you are not necessarily injured.
    Some pools make more sense for being "umph" and some make more sense as a defensive element, but they share the fact that certain moves make the user more vulnerable.  A shrill mechanical noise might deafen living creatures nearby, but the robot using that move becomes obvious to those around it and can't hide as easily.  That move costs Evasion counters.  That robot could turn a cloaking device on as its next action, which would boost its Evasion significantly, possibly at a cost to its Magic pool or whatever the device uses for power.  I was going to have 8-10 pools at one time with half being defensive and the other half offensive, but I figured that all I really needed was 5, with each pool representing a combination of defense and offense.
    The excitement level of the game is something I really can't judge without playtesting, but every move does something even if it doesn't do Health damage.  Because of Defenses, every attack that tries to do Health damage removes at least the same amount of counters from the target -- just from different pools.  Because I am aiming for the cinematic feel that I mentioned before, killing major characters (friend or foe) is difficult.  Just attacking a random enemy repeatedly won't win a fight; it either takes strategy or teamwork to bring down an enemy.  One reason for this is that two characters of equal strength can sometimes enter into "karmic deadlock," where each character removes x counters from the foe's pool with an Action Move, then uses a Boost Move to reverse the loss the other guy caused him; this stalemate can't be broken for a long time unless an outside character intervenes.  Another is simply that it's faster to focus on killing/knocking-out one character than it is to spread out attacks to every enemy at once.  Because of the challenge involved in bringing down a target, it should be all the more gratifying to actually defeat a powerful foe.  More importantly, describing the action as if every attack is vital (and they usually are at least useful) is the most important thing in making players feel involved in the fight.
    I was kind of rambling there, but I hope I answered some questions.  Thanks again.

[hoefer]

Tom,
Your last post really clarified the whole pool thing to me, its doesn't seem you'll have the issue I was thinking you would have.  However, semantically you might consider calling the Health pool something other than a pool just to designate its ulterior function.  It sounds like a neat concept -by the way.  I'm not usually into "diceless" mechanics (what can I say, I'm a fan of the chaos), but this does sound different.  Good luck!


Louis Hoefer
www.wholesumentertainment.com

[T. Ettinger]

Louis,
    How does Health Rating (HR) sound?  Also, there isn't anything preventing a diceless game like Halberd from getting dice added -- just replace a value of 5 (5 damage, 5 lost Toughness...) with 2d4, a value of 7 with 2d6, a 9 with 2d8, etc.  Or, when you would have a value of 1, just roll 1d6 and treat 1-4 as a negative number and 5-6 as positive (this requires at least positive 4 points in the effect before the die is rolled, unless you allow backfires).  Parts that don't fit neatly into these kinds of numbers would still have to be non-random, though.  It seems like some diceless systems can get dice added just fine, but I don't think most randomized (fortune-based, I think is the phrase used here on The Forge) systems can become diceless easily at all.  Dungeons and Dragons lets you avoid rolling dice when you take 10, but it gets to be a real problem for a designer to replace critical hits on natural 20s, randomized damage for single dice rolls (or rolls of dice of different types), and (in 4th edition) recharge times.  I have some mechanics that could replace critical hits though -- I could make them a choice on the part of the user, but have them use up some resource, or just let a weaker kind of special event happen once every few rounds (as simple as "you can use two moves in phase X").  I'd love to hear some more feedback -- what The Forge has given me so far has helped a bunch!

[hoefer]

"Health Rating" will probably help with clarity -IMO.  I think you're on to something on the diceless to dice verses dice to diceless conversion.  Frankly, I would never waste time converting one system to another -I know a lot of GMs who do this ("Let's play Robotech using the Storyteller System"), but I don't know where they get the time/motivation to undertake these conversions.  All and all, as a GM, I want to use my time developing adventures for my PCs not doing conversions...but I digress...

Louis Hoefer
www.wholesumentertainment.com