Welcome to the third post in a series of Design Diaries for Rangers of a Broken World by the creator Leon Richardson:
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After a long time spent trying to spice up a pretty traditional combat system, I got a 2 AM message from Kathleen (producer of Sword of Symphonies as well as a cast member) that sent me on the road that would end in the Crisis system.
If you’ve ever had a long-running playtest then you may know what this is like. It’s virtually inevitable, I think, that a tester will send you a message at some odd hour with an idea for an idea. Actually, in Kathleen’s case, it was an idea for an idea that amounted to a little game design necromancy.
At that time, believe it or not, Heroic Chord (The game’s original title) had a much crunchier combat system. It involved the enemy making attacks that had Openings, or opportunities for the players to interrupt or prevent the attack. It was fast-paced and tactical, which I enjoyed, but I felt it restricted the players too much, since they had many more ideas for how to interrupt an attack than I had planned Openings! Every combat, I would have to say “No, sorry, that’s not an Opening” or “Okay, I guess that kind of counts”, when all I really wanted to do was truly set the players loose.
Not only that, but I was in an iconoclastic mood and felt like breaking the mere idea of hit points. Sometimes I get in that kind of mood, and there’s no stopping me until I break something, for better or for worse.
Before getting a text message from one of my playtesters, I agonized over what to smash and how. I could feel that combat needed to change, I was tired of running it, tired of saying no, and tired of planning encounters in the old system. But, when it came time to write a new one, I was drawing a blank! (I get very theatrical when this happens, making lots of annoyed growls and dramatic gestures and flopping around. It’s a lot.)
Kathleen’s text was pretty simple. She just thought maybe it could be something like how we used to do survival challenges in the beginning.
In the earliest drafts of Heroic Chord there used to be a system for facing survival challenges. Players would build up resources in the form of survival gear, and then spend those resources to avoid consequences. It was an interesting system, at least I thought so, but it was difficult to weave into the story, and as a GM I found it tiresome to plan for, so I ended up never using it. I left it in the game for a long time, ignoring my own rule that “if no one uses it, it needs to change”, until finally cutting it out.
Here is where the magic happened. The necromancy, to be precise.
In unearthing the dead survival challenge system, I found a whole new interesting way for players to face challenges of all kinds! With a little tweaking, it could be adapted to a combat situation, and with a little more tweaking, it could also be used to solve problems nonviolently. The new system was renamed the “Crisis” system, to emphasize that it can be used in many different kinds of dangerous situations.
Sometimes, you end up shelving something not because it isn’t good, but just because it’s in the wrong place for what it’s trying to do. It helps to take items off the shelf as much as it helps to put them there in the first place!
And in the end, the Crisis system could still be used to play out a natural disaster, something I’d given up on in my earlier drafts.