Building Fabula 1: Why?

Deep in my underground (ground floor) lair (office), I’ve been hacking away at the Warhammer 40,000 RPG system in an attempt to make it more streamlined without losing some the more interesting thematic elements of it.

This are my adventures.

Please imagine a super flashy credit sequence here. I’m diving away from an explosion, writing some formulae on a white board, looking pensively through a microscope and finally punching a guy in green body paint before making a thumbs up to the camera.

Oh hey, welcome back.

The Warhammer 40,000 Roleplaying System is the engine that powers games such as Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, Deathwatch and Black Crusade. It’s a strange and rather crunchy beast built around a d% system with a focus towards simulation.

My group has used it several times, playing everything from a Deathwatch kill team holding the line against a Tyranid invasion, to intrepid colonial conquerors commanding the lives of thousands aboard a tall ship in space.

On its best day it is a system that opens the door to an amazing and expansive setting full of evocative characters, arcane rituals and more pomp and circumstance than you can shake a taxpayer funded golden boat at.

On it’s not-best day however it’s a system that can throw speed bumps between the story you’re trying to tell and the mechanics that underpin it.

The route cause of this is the mediation between the tabletop wargame, the mechanics of the system and the desire to portray events through mechanical simulation. With Rules as Written this causes a somewhat slow system with a significant amount of bookkeeping. That bookkeeping is absolutely essential though, as without tracking weight and ammunitions meticulously certain items or weapons get out of hand very quickly.

If you’re not counting shots why not always use a meltagun?

Personally I was never fond of bookkeeping. Never fond of systems where I had to look up rules when I pulled the trigger. Never fond of systems where it felt like I was navigating through the rules rather than bending them to fit what I needed.

Take for example a Needle Sniper Rifle. For those of you not ‘in the know’ this is a sniper rifle which fires a dart of condensed, frozen poison. It has two attributes, Accurate and Toxic. Accurate does more damage for each degree of success, which is every full ‘10’ by which you rolled under your ability score. Toxic makes your target roll their own test or take even more damage, with the test modified by the amount of damage the target has already taken from the initial shot, and whilst none of this is maths we can’t do we’ve rolled twice to hit, once for damage and tallied everything up three times before we even know how much damage we’ve done. Oh, but wait, we forgot to subtract armour and toughness from the initial damage, which we have to do before the toxic damage because that ignores toughness and oh my god why hath you forsaken me!?

For me RPG rules are a tool that enable GMs to build challenges, players to defeat challenges and helps both build a story together.

In our game of Rogue Trader we managed this, but never with the rules, always in spite of them. The best sessions were those where we barely rolled dice, where we made decisions and plans and played out their consequences. It’s not that the 40K RPG is opposed to a more narrative style of roleplaying, but it also doesn’t have any systems underpinning it that support narrative play.

In many ways the system itself is designed in a similar way to the Imperium of Man, a jumble of ad hoc systems that works in principle until a small part of it comes apart. Full of contradictions and exemptions it’s an ungainly thing. It would be an interesting conceit for a system if it weren’t directly in the way of what I want it to do.

Time to break out the hacksaw! No wait, CHAINSWORD!

Mid show break, hopefully with that advert where Giles from Buffy doesn’t sleep with that lady because they spend all their time looking moody and discussing overpriced coffee.

For some reason I am now stood in a set that looks like a kitchen that could exist in now house. I am holding a mug of what is almost certainly water, and looking smug.

Having explained some of my issues you might wonder why I would try to build my house on sand, to borrow from a parable, when I could instead hack something far easier and with less mental gymnastics out of, for example, Apocalypse World. To that I say… Uh… Damn actually that would be really good.

The reason I’m building out of 40K RPG is because I can, partly because it’s an interesting exercise in taking apart a system and understanding it’s specific foibles, but mostly because my players were used to it and it offered a blend of mechanical complexity and evocative setting that kept my varied group entertained.

The result has been something of a compromise system. Trying to maintain the shape of the thing whilst slowly stripping out the insides until it’s held together by an entirely different frame. Still there are elements I couldn’t get rid of entirely without gutting the system of its charm, and I’ll speak more of them next time.

 

The first step though was to work out what made the 40k RPG work and what could be stripped out, Extreme Makeover style (Home Edition, naturally) and we’ll get into what I kept and what I ditched in the next edition of Building Fabula.

Until next time, good hunting GMs!

Credits roll over and outro sequence as I turn and talk to my special guests, Big Bird, the ghost Lyndon B. Johnson and Grant Howlett.