Caravan Crawl

I wrote this article about a year ago and it’s been sitting in the bin for a good long while. It’s been in the bin for so long, in fact, that I don’t think this article even mentions Space Marine 2, Our Golden Age (OGA, the new UVG), or Dungeons & Dragons 6th Edition. I feel like there has been some major gaming news and I don’t talk about it here. I’ve gone through and removed much of the content relating to me complaining about not finishing the article, which apparently is how I start all my writing projects, but I’ve kept a lot of the mechanics analysis and game indexing.

In a past article, I had a paragraph about tracking ammo for a six shooter. I was talking to a friend and I realized that the mechanic actually has more meat on the bones than I realized. But, in typical Caravaneer fashion, I have to take a running leap into the topic. 

The Coolest Game I’ve Never Played

In 2008, a company called Fantasy Flight Games got the license from the suddenly defunct Black Industries to develop a role playing game in the Warhammer 40k world called Dark Heresy. From 2008 to 2017, Fantasy Flight created a number of different settings and systems for the game and expanded the scope from investigators in the Inquisition to everything from space-faring merchant-marine Rogue Traders to Chaos-worshiping warlords. The core mechanic was a percentile system with advancements adding or subtracting multiples of ten to the role, and a combat mechanic called Righteous Fury that allowed you to continue to reroll tens on damage dice. In 2010, they released Deathwatch.

As an aside, sometime in 2012, your humble author presumably ran afoul of some kind of pagan practitioner of dark and obscene magicks and every time I touched the Dark Heresy core rulebook ill fortune and disaster befell the group I intended to run it for. I can skim the PDFs alright, but if I even begin to imagine that I could run a session of DH, people get fired from jobs, lose longtime girlfriends, get into car wrecks. One guy’s apartment caught on fire right before a game started. As one friend who was supposed to play in a DH session told me after I came to jump his car after it died before a potential game of DH, “I’m not superstitious, but [the Curse] scares me.”

Deathwatch was designed from the start to be a combat slog; players played Space Marines who were optimized both lore-wise and mechanically to be excellent at shooting and stabbing the enemies of mankind. Sessions were divided into explicit “missions” with tactical goals for players to complete. At the start of each mission, one player would be chosen as the team leader, who was responsible for a mechanic known as “cohesion.” Cohesion points could be spent to move players from “solo mode,” where they had abilities based on their chapter and specialization, to “squad mode,” where the leader could announce an action (sometimes a special action that other players could normally perform) and the other players could opt into performing that action in addition to their own turns. 

For example, let’s say there was a stealth mission where the squad had to sneak into an enemy bunker and plant demo charges. The players talk among themselves and decide to let the Raven Guard player, the Space Marine chapter who specializes in stealth, be the squad leader for this mission. The Raven Guard player doesn’t have the greatest Fellowship Bonus (the charisma analog in Fantasy Flight Warhammer games and the attribute that determines cohesion), but does have access to a special squad mode that helps with stealth. During the mission, the Raven Guard player spends cohesion to activate his squad mode ability, everyone chooses to take the action, everyone passes, and the group is able to sneak into the bunker and plant the charges. This system actually fed well into another system in Deathwatch called Cohesion, which represented how well the different characters worked together in the squad, with low Cohesion meaning everyone wants to use their special thing to do the mission, a way to foster “role” playing in a very “roll” play heavy game.

The Fantasy Flight system would go through some major changes over the years, and in 2014 they would begin work on the second edition. Fantasy Flight made the decision to organize their game development somewhat like video game development: they released a “beta” of the rules and allowed members of their forum to make comments and suggestions to improve it. However, the first beta release was such a departure from the old rules that players felt that the old content they were used to would be invalidated in the new direction Fantasy Flight was going and proceeded to complain loudly in beta feedback and forum posts. Ultimately, Fantasy Flight appeased the fans and made the decision to remove much of the new (and arguably needed) content and returned to many of the old system rules. Fantasy Flight would lose the rights to Warhammer after a handful of releases for 2nd Edition and Games Workshop transferred their roleplaying rights to Cubicle 7 Games. Their Dark Heresy successor, Imperium Malidictum, released in 2022. It’s got some interesting elements such as the benefactor mechanic, but serves as a return to the halcyon days of old.

Okay, keep this in mind, we’re going to jackknife ourselves into a ditch. 

High Speed, Low Drag, Go Fast, Kick Ass

In 2016, a game called Titanfall 2 came out. I didn’t play it then, but I picked it up on sale sometime in the last few years. It’s gained a bit of a cult following in that time, and I can say it’s completely deserved. The boots-on-the-ground pilot combat is fast and encourages zipping around the map at incredibly high speeds and the mech combat slows things down in exchange for heavy fire power. I feel safe in saying that a lot of games that came out since then took inspiration for the fast run and gun gameplay. And as with every video game I’ve ever played, I started trying to see how I could bring it to the tabletop. 

Obviously, a first person shooter and a tabletop game are incompatible, primarily because the skill sets are so different. An FPS is all about reaction time, clicking on a spot on a screen as soon as it appears. Regardless of how fast-paced and frantic a game at the table might get, it never reaches a point where a player’s reflexes are at play. An argument could be made that you could incorporate a ten second hourglass timer to encourage players to make quick decisions (especially during combat and especially if you’re having problems with players focusing on combat when it’s not their turn), but this seems like punishing players for not playing the game your way, and also 5th Edition combat usually sucks. There’s a difference between making a snap decision in a tabletop combat and extreme eye-hand coordination. 

The work around I could see was something like this: characters have a momentum meter, from one to six. One means you’re standing still, two means you’re moving tactically (checking corners, opening doors slowly), five means you’re at a full sprint, and six means you’re wall running and jumping around all parkour. To build up your momentum, you have to move your max speed, which for D&D 5E usually meant 30 feet a round, or six spaces on a typical “five feet a square” map. If you chose to build up momentum, your minimum speed was increased and you both unlocked and locked different kinds of actions. For example, to perform the “Aiming” action to decrease the difficulty of an attack roll was locked to Speed 1 or 2; you had to be standing still or moving slowly to aim down the sights. The action “Action Kick,” to launch a melee attack where to kick someone at full speed, in contrast, was locked to Speed 4 or above. How fast you were moving determined what kinds of actions you could take, and more importantly, what actions you couldn’t. 

Ultimately, the logic was this: moving fast meant you could deal more damage, but you also took more damage, along with the danger of having to move to a place you might not want to move. Moving slower locked you out of more damaging actions, but also prevented you from taking too much damage: going to ground and ducking behind cover were slow and safe actions. Of course, there’s one serious limitation to this kind of system: you have to spend a lot of time on level design. If the players are going to make meaningful choices around speed and momentum, you can’t just put them in 30×30 square dungeon rooms. As Patrick Stewart says in Silent Titans: “Remember: in times of immediate danger, every spatial decision is also a moral decision.” You have to make urban environments with plenty of walls to run on and buildings to climb, or at least long, linear, and potentially circular levels. Games like Lancer encourage this kind of level design with the wide amount of enemy types and abilities to synergise (and I expect Icon will do it even more once it releases).

As I’m writing this, I realize there’s another issue, one that I’ve been running into as my UVG game drew to a close (something you can read about that here). The players chose to optimize speed over carrying capacity, which meant they were fast, but they had to be meticulous when tracking how many rations they have because if they made a mistake and lost a car, they were dead. This meant that some obstacles were more challenging than others. A river that was risky to drive across or switchbacks down a canyon were more threatening to them than a giant monster redwood tree or a horde of cyber-ghouls because they could just drive away from any encounter that didn’t trap them there. Likewise, if you’re running a system for players whose mechanically important choices include the ability to fuck off at mach five, how do you keep them from just saying, “Oh, guy is shooting at me? I leave.” For UVG, I have a solution below, but for “Momentum the Game,” I’d have to go back and think on it more. 

There’s two games I want to call out here. The first is that for all this thinking about momentum I never really had a system put in place and polished enough to bring to the table. Imagine my surprise when a game I kickstarted, the Survivalist’s Guide to Spelunking, had a complete momentum system included in their Underdark adventure game, along with incorporating it with initiative and even segmented spellcasting, like the old days. If you’re reading the last few paragraphs and thinking “man, that sounds cool,” picking up a copy of Spelunking might be the way to go. The other game is called VeloCITY, a /tg/ homebrew system that was “designed to replicate the feel and freedom of running around an urban playground and going anywhere.” (Usually homebrew out of /tg/ is more hit than miss considering its role as an unofficial alternative to the Forge, especially in the early days. Games like Engine Heart and Los Magos Del Tiempo most definitely deserve a mention.) It uses a dice pool mechanic, but I haven’t dived into it deeply enough to talk substantially on it. However, I’d be worried that it slips into the “Pokémon Problem” of tabletop game design. 

A Quick Aside: The “Pokémon Problem”

I’m not going to spend a crazy amount of time on this, but I just want to quickly touch on what I see as a common problem in amateur tabletop game design circles. I first noticed it as I was collecting and indexing homebrew systems, most evidently in people who wanted to create a Pokémon tabletop game. For people who have been living under a rock for the last thirty years, Pokémon is a video game where you capture and train creatures called Pokémon and force them to fight in battles so you can be recognized as the top dogfighter in the nation. This premise has not changed in three decades, which has let Game Freak skate on a codebase that hasn’t been updated since the early 2000s. 

It’s a fun video game, but what happens is that aspiring game designers who love it decide they want to make it into a tabletop game. So they sit down and they begin making the game that everyone on earth plays first: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. They write about ability scores and strength checks and how to use charisma and how to fight in combat. They put in all this work, and they forget one tiny thing… they’re supposed to be making a Pokémon game! Where do the Pokémon come into it!? How does my trainer catch Pokémon? Or train them? How does battling work when the game is being run by something other than a computer? Can I do other things than battle, and if so, what are the mechanics!? One generation allowed you to put on dog shows for your Pokémon, what would the rules be for that? Another allows you to cook food for your Pokémon at a campsite, what are the rules for that? What’s the core mechanic? What’s the gameplay loop? How should a DM run a Pokemon game? Hell, from a worldbuilding perspective, what about the world changes because there are Pokémon to do all the labor, and how does that change the rules of the system? All of these questions are put by the wayside as the game designer marches on to make a shittier D&D. 

When you’re inspired by something and want to bring it to the tabletop, dissecting and deconstructing what about it is so fascinating is important. Is it something you can bring to the tabletop another way? 

Bullettime Mechanics

Okay, that’s a lot of words, where are we driving to? Like I mentioned in a previous post, one of the places I want to start taking the Long Rim in is towards a western vibe. I had a throwaway comment about how “at the beginning of combat, everyone places a d6 in front of them, on 6. As they make attacks, they advance the die down until they reach 1. After they reach 1, the next attack they make is their last until they spend a round to reload. At any point in the combat, they can spend a turn to reload and put the die back at 6.” It was a simple way of tracking the all important ammo counter that six guns would use. And as I mentioned, it wasn’t a particularly original mechanic: I found it used in a Dark Tower inspired indie game called We Deal in Lead. In it, you can also use Special Attacks “unique to each gun type” like “Fan the Hammer” for six guns. I was actually first inspired by the talents system in the more mechanically antiquated Western RPG Aces & Eights. 

But as I was thinking about it I had an idea of melding all of these systems together. One of the common complaints surrounding D&D5E combat is that it’s hard for players to help one another, even outside of combat. Each roll is a spotlight for a single member of the party, and a player who wants to “help” gets a help action and not much else. Likewise, there are no “fastball specials” in 5E. 

Everyone is a cowboy, right? Six shooters and sand dunes. When you get into the inevitable gunfight, you have more connection with the people who have the same amount of bullets in the cylinder. When you shoot a single shot, everyone who’s aiming down the sights like you gets a chance to shoot. If you’re fanning the hammer, you can all fan the hammer together. Gunfights are hectic messes, and as you play out the combat the initiative of who goes before who goes out the window. Likewise, each attack adjusts the ammo counter differently, which means you can lock certain kinds of attacks behind the ammo counter. You can’t fan the hammer if you’re not at six, and you can’t make a single snapshot if you’re not at one. 

If you’re working as a team, you can all shoot in tandem, reload in tandem, all that good stuff. If you want to, however, you can break from the group to do something on your own or target a specific enemy, but that comes with the risk that the enemy might move before you or do something you don’t expect. The enemy, for his part, should always be thinking about how to disrupt the party: do they set a building on fire to see if you’ll split up? Do they try to ambush from all sides? Do they throw out a moral quandary that splits the group? Also, the less bullets in the cylinder, the more damage you take. 

“This isn’t very realistic,” I hear some of you say, just above the people who are murmuring that “if you take more damage the less bullets you have, what prevents us from shooting once and then reloading” and “why can’t we make a single snap shot with a full cylinder” and yes, I agree, its not “realistic,” but at this point this article has been sitting in the box and I’m tired and I want to be done. Reading back on it now (and realizing that it could better be incorporated into another Alternative Super-Lite OSR Mechanic), it’s fine, and a building out of a movement system to go along with how guns work would be a strong step into integrating a fully fleshed out idea. But now I actually want to think about another mechanic.

The Cattle Crawl

One of the things I want to do before I go is write up some rules for the Cattle Crawl, a cattle drive where players are able to make lots of money for moving cattle from one place to another. It’s a form of travel and exploration that forces the group to move at a slower pace. One of the things I’ve been struggling with, especially as my UVG game came to a close, was the ability for players to simply leave a situation. If they got ambushed by zombie bio-weapons, they would look at each other, shrug, and then slam the gas of their post-apocalypse dune buggies and skedaddle. If they’re trying to sell a hundred head of longhorn at the next market, their ability to simply leave a situation is lessened. It also might encourage them to actually have scouts or make an effort to know what the surrounding area looks like. 

Unlike the early editions of Boot Hill, Aces & Eights from Kenzer & Company had an entire section devoted to the cattle drive. These old western (westerns that are old, not old west westerns) RPGs were always concerned in making sure that players had things to do, unlike more modern rules-lite additions to the genre like Frontier Scum or The Great Soul Train Robbery. Because of the hex-based nature of the game, players would need to scout ahead, and each hex would change the quality of the cattle herd, either increasing the quality of the beef or forcing the party to deal with dangers such as wolves, poisoned water, and cattle rustlers. While this approach works well for a hex-crawl style game, a point-crawl would need to be modified slightly, though not by much. 

These are the procedures for both Aces & Eights and UVG. Instead of daily, you could easily modify the procedure to the weekly scale of UVG, and instead of hexes, you could allow people to scout an area abstracted for a week to improve water and grazing checks for the beef. It also solves the problem of speed skipping encounters in UVG: you can’t just drive away from your big payday, you have to solve the problem to proceed.

A Western Index

I want to take a quick second and share some Western RPGs I’ve dug into during the research for this article. There are a lot of different games, many rules lite, but with enough time and dedication you could carve some interesting situations for your table out of them.

Boot Hill is the obvious progenitor of a lot of the genre. There were three editions, and a lot of articles in Dragon magizine included how to import and export characters from Boot Hill into the first and second editions of the Great Game. I’ve mentioned Aces & Eights, which is probably the best RPG to dig for content. Aces & Eights goes for a more traditional “alt-his” setting, with a still-around Confederacy, an independent Texas, a Mormon Deseret in Mexico, and explict Indian nations. (There was an old western setting called Wild Cards from the old 1d4chan archives that also does this, with the American Civil War being the first “world war” with mercenaries and military units from Europe and Latin America all fighting on the continent and becoming bandits when the war ends, a decimated Union and Confederacy that exist but have no power and a west that’s up for grabs. The setting is more about the Devil giving people magic guns in poker games that correspond to playing cards.)

I’m not going to talk about Deadlands.

Speaking of Mormons, go play Dogs in the Vineyard. While it might not be thematically western, the saga of being kids given guns and enforce doctrine of a theocratic state is way too much fun not to play. The escalation system is great, a lot of the DM advice is stuff I still use to this day (“…You always can tell when you’re watching a movie who’s lying and who’s telling the truth. And wouldn’t you know it, most the time the players are looking at me with skeptical looks, and I give them a little sly nod that yep, she’s lying. And they get these great, mean, tooth-showing grins — because when someone lies to them, ho boy does it not work out…”), and there are enough hacks and tweaks other people have made to make the game run smoothly. It’s not a western in that it’s not about a world that is being left behind as much as it is about a world being born on the fringes, but you can’t get away from how awesome great coats and gunslingers are.

Black Powder Black Magic is a three part “zine of six-guns and sorcery” for use in DCC style games. There’s a 0-level funnel that takes place on a train taking you west that is great, and includes mechanics for DCC like Mighty Deeds of Arms like fanning the hammer and Patrons like secret Thor in America. It also has a list of trinkets that can inform players about their characters and the game world, which is nice. I feel like I wrote something about how tables like this (especially “I loot the body” tables where you’re listing what ordinary people have in their pockets) are a way of introducing worldbuilding and lore to players. There’s stuff to steal that’s easily modifiable, though it continues to fall into the same trap that a lot of western media falls into. There’s this thing where the western can’t be played straight, that you have to add zombies and ghouls to your sixguns and showdowns for anyone to engage with it. It’s one of the reasons I’m not going to talk about Deadlands.

Frontier Scum continues the Mork-Borgification of the hobby, though I appreciate anyone who’s seen both Dead Man and Little Big Man and considers them both to be weird westerns. The world is a mess, the end is near, pain and suffering rule, and did you know you don’t need rules if you blast enough doom metal at the table? These “people” (Porkburgers, I call them) forgot that smoking weed and listening to metal at the table is the sub activity and playing the game is the main activity. Or they’re latching on to an aesthetic they don’t actually participate in, but here I am indulging in the great metalhead past time of calling other people posers. The character generation for the game is fun, with goofy choices and crimes that make for interesting characters to inflict upon the world and enough tables to actually make something gamiable at the table. I’ve mentioned in the past the variant of the OSR “Shields Shall be Splintered” rule that if a character gets hit by an attack, they can choose to ignore the damage if they lose their hat, with a luck roll after the combat is over to see if the hat survived, which is amazing. However, it’s very unabashedly about it’s own thing, so your mileage may vary.

In the Light of a Setting Sun is a 3d6 roll under attribute system that has a couple of useful tables and interesting bits. The interesting mechanic is renown, where gunfights and duels can be modified by a gunfighter’s notoriety on a dice ladder a la the Usage die from the Black Hack. I remember reading someone saying that “rules light games are actually more advanced and difficult tabletop games, not easier” and I think that’s correct. What’s really interesting is the creator is also working on a hexcrawl called the Ghosts of the Sierra Verde, “heavily based on Wolves Upon the Coast by Luke Gearing.” It’s extremely barebones and needs art, literally just pencil sketches of gunfighters, but I think if there was a group of western RPG fans just writing up their own “states” and you could drop and play in Disco Elysium inspired fake history of our world, that would be amazing.

Arizona Goes to Hell continues the Darkbad approach to the western by emphasizing the evil deadness of the Western wasteland. Apparently it was originally written for the Hateful Place, which is a roll under, three attribute, rules lite system. This rewrite brings it more in line with OSR sensibilities and includes some interesting hex-crawl events you could modify for your game along with a couple of tables that might be useful. 

We Deal in Lead does the other typical western RPG thing games like to do with their setting: ask “Why didn’t Steven King just play the The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger straight? Is he stupid?” People read about knights with sixguns and the lord of Gilead and “forgot the face of their father” and were like “fucking bet.” One page RPG 21 Guns and highschooler’s notebook scribbling of band names Inevitable both build on the setting of “Dark Tower but not Dumb,” though I will admit they do miss the deeper point of King’s work by doing so. While Inevitable is a dice pool system and 21 Guns is… well, I can’t really describe what 21 Guns is (the Forge was hard on all of us), We Deal in Lead is three attribute, d20, and rules lite, with the interesting stuff buried under a lot of the usual rules these kinds of systems have. We Deal in Lead and Inevitable both have mechanics derived from “quests,” though I think Inevitable‘s are inspired from more Powered by the Apocalypse style games.

Song of the Sixgun is a much more traditional percentile game, taking inspiration more from spaghetti westerns than ghouls and goblins. It has a full six attributes with combat (fighting and shooting) being a determination between two of them. There are a couple pages of combat “moves” that might be worth taking for a homebrew combat system, and the book is full of art from old western comics that give it the pulpy feel it’s going for.

Arabian Horses, Samarkandland Camels

I was going to have a section of worldbuilding here, but I think I’ve covered some serious ground and I’m going to stop here. I still need to flesh out the Cattle Crawl mechanics, dive into some of these other western RPGs, maybe make a priority list of what’s unquie and what you can steal, add it to the worldbuilding pot I’ve been stirring for the last few articles, and baby, you got a stew going.

Here’s a new core dice mechanic, hot off the presses: when you need to determine success, you and the DM roll 3d6. If the numbers are closer together, you succeed, if the numbers are further away from each other, you fail. 

Imagine that your character is trying to pick a lock. The DM decides this is an easy skill check, so you need to roll within 6 steps of one another, meaning if he rolled a 6 and you rolled a 12, that’s still close enough for you to succeed. You and the DM roll 3d6. If you roll a 10 and the DM rolls a 12, you track the absolute difference, which is 2, smaller than the threshold for success, and you succeed. On the other hand, let’s say this was a particularly difficult lock, and the DM decides you need to roll distance 2. You and he roll, you roll a 20, and he rolls a 6, which is more than 2 away, so that’s a definite fail. 

I was listening to someone talk about Dave Arneson and his original game, both system and setting, and I remember that he and M.A.R. Barker shared similar philosophies when it came to player/DM arbitration. For them, if you and the DM disagreed, you roll a d6, and the one who rolled the highest gets their way, with a compromise on the fiction if you’re close.  

This system serves a couple of functions. First, because you’re more likely to roll the average on dice, there’s a lot more room for success, so it makes for a more relaxed, laid-back system. There’s a reason you move the bandit on a 7 when playing Catan, because on 2d6 the 7 is the most likely result. For 3d6, there’s something like a 66% chance you’ll roll between 8 and 13, which means there’s a greater chance you’ll succeed. Second, it’s relatively easy to determine if you succeed or fail with a quick glance of the dice. Most of the time, if you roll, see a couple of 3s, and glance over to the DM who has a 5 and 6, you know you don’t have to count it out and play can continue. However, when it’s not clear, there’s a sense where the game slows down a bit and tension builds: did I succeed? How close am I? And then the rush of success. Third, the rules mechanic can fit narratively into the setting of the game, as if you and the world are harmonizing for things to be accomplished. I can imagine a setting with lots of words like “resonance” and “synergy.” Also, rolling 3d6 means fun times on the 666, which is both the highest you can roll and also only showing up on a half-percent chance. I believe this is a more explicit mechanic in Infaernum, but even Mork Borg had that scripture table where you burn the book on 7:7.

Speaking of, I imagine that this would be a good, quick mechanic for a mashup game of Ryuutama/Mork Borg. It’s not a super in-depth mechanic, especially because I think adding D&D5E style attribute modifiers would make the system a lot more clunky with players having to look at their sheet to find their modifiers and then applying them to the roll, but the setting is all about traveling at the end of the world. Things aren’t as black metal and brutal as they are funeral doom metal and sad, like ending a long journey or sharing the last sunset with a group of friends. You succeed when the world aligns just right, but more and more you fail because you’re out of sync, out of alignment, out of touch, and the world you lived in is passing on and you need to as well. (Also ironic that Ryuutama, a Japanese iyashikei game about traveling, contains more rules than the blacker than black metal Mork Borg.)

If you wanted a bit more complexity, you could assign a theme to the high and low numbers. For example, if high numbers were civilization and order and low numbers were wilderness and chaos, the way a player solves a problem could be modified depending on where the numbers land on the scale. Imagine a player says “I want to open this door.” A success on a high number (“We both get 16,”) is order flavored (“You mechanically and orderly pick the lock,”) and a success on a low number (“We both get 3,”) is chaos flavored (“You light the door on fire,”). 

If you and the DM roll the same number, that’s likely some kind of critical success, being exactly in line with the universe, and if you roll the exact opposite (the player rolls 111 and the DM rolls 666), something really bad happens and you can’t talk anymore because you’re dead, Black Leaf. 

I’m sure this could use some more mechanical meat on the bones, but I thought it was neat enough to mock up.