Rules for the Ruleless (thoughts on mental stats)

warning: rambling ahead

INTELLIGENCE!

what a weird idea for a stat. imagine playing a game that's entire appeal, challenge, and format is the in the form of challenging your mental capacity and problem solving skills, then adding in a mechanic that measures how smart.... your game avatar is? 

the majority of the time intelligence is used for either spell casting or answering the question of "do i know this?". and crafting i suppose. huh and languages. anyway, considering the quantum knowledge question, id say that irl most people know things related to the things theyve studied, and dont know much about everything else. and in analogue adventure games we know that information is an incredibly valuable asset to any foolhardy ne-er do well, and that information is vital for being able to make informed meaningful choices (remembering that the entire game is choices).*

* not to say that players need to always make well informed choices. just that you cant make choices if you have no information, so erring on the side of more information is generally better.

Manifestations of Ink by Jack T. Cole

anyway, rules. KNOWLEDGE!

if you can see it, you can know it. give players as much information as possible about things they can interact with and observe, and that the average person would reasonably know about.

otherwise, start the game with a list of things your character knows about. backgrounds and classes count towards this (if you were a farmer then you know farmer things), but also consider stuff like..

esoterica. these are the versions of skills that are about knowing things instead of just doing things.

d12

1. Mythology, sagas
2. Courtly decorum, heraldry
3. Poetry, folksong
4. Monstrumology, folklore
5. Cosmology (underworld, astronomy)
6. Glyphs, runes
7. Architecture
8. Law-wise
9. Botany
10. Undercity anti-law
11. make up your own. these are just suggestions doofus

you can expect someone to be an expert on the subject of their knowledge. if in doubt, give more than you would to your players, and give it for free. otherwise, for that deep lore that wont break the game for you to keep secret...

HIDDEN knowledge is known on a 2in6 - or else you know where to look
truly FORGOTTEN knowledge must be quested for. thats why we play the game yeah? go explore that damned world

WHERE TO LOOK...

1. in the nearest place of academia there is a hidden tome, the lorekeeper there wants you to tell zir a secret you have uncovered in return for borrowing it (book heist is, as always, a joyous alternative)
2. you have heard upon the wind that in the nearest enchanted forest or haunted woods lives a weird ancient hermit sage who is obsessing over the very subject you wish to learn. theyd probably just be happy for some company
3. children have a 1in6 chance of knowing what you search for. if its really gnarly knowledge then you probably only have 1d6 kids before the clan starts asking uncomfortable questions back to you about why youre being a creep and poisoning their minds with such thoughts as "why does the moon know the name of every sparrow and what process is needed to allow a heart to continue to beat even without a soul to house it" and such
   
4. consult the trees.
   
• or else the stones, but the trees will be jealous
5. the nearest important wizard knows wtf is up. you will accrue a debt of magic
6. youve known it would be there all along. it must be down there, maybe somewhere deeper, it cant all be for nothing. carved on the walls of the nearest haunted cave or darkened dungeon is the answer to what you seek... and more, so much more

wouldnt you say that makes more sense than a general intelligence score? in terms of integrating it more into the game, if you have a skill system then just split it between practical skills and knowledge skills, or say fuck it because obviously alchemy is both a knowledge skill and a practical skill (like, have you seen a chemist?). or just let players pick 1 esoterica, maybe 3 for wizards or other learned types. or just everyone picks 2 but the nature of which is limited by if you grew up studying or if you learnt things from the trees and the stones? lol what if you rolled a d6 and got than many esotericas or languages, hows that for random char gen viability gambling. 

for doing things that you could imagine keying off a characters in universe intelligence, consider: wtf? i didnt address this earlier but literally wtf is a high intelligence character? people arent smarter or dumber irl, they just either know more about academic stuff or they know more about other stuff. if you need to roll to see if a character can succeed at something that requires using their brain, do a flat roll that simulates normal human thinking, and then let them auto succeed or add a bonus if theyre knowledgeable in the field. **

the main point is that each character will have a selection of things they have some deep knowledge of (be it from classes or skills or backgrounds or whatever), and this should just let them get specialised information for freeeee, and then otherwise you can lock deep arcane knowledge behind some simple luck roll and/or a quest.

every time you roll dice youre introducing the offer that chance will make a choice for you. sometimes its because you dont know the answer, sometimes its because you look forward to being surprised by the answer. remember then, if your game is going to grind to a halt on a failed roll, consider: do you have to roll (can it just.. happen for free)? can you roll and accept that sometimes players will fail on a coin flip if they havent found a way of not ending up at such a risky choke point? can you just reshuffle how your situations are designed so that they dont have such big choke points (multiple solutions, multiple directions, more opportunities for the player to avoid rolling through clever play) ***

crit! double all damage!

PERCEPTION!

also known as wisdom for some G_dforsaken reason.

(i originally wrote this section with the intention of making a system for determining the chance of noticing things based on conditions like obscurity and lighting conditions and attention paid etc. but yeah nvm, heres just some advice and thoughts)

perception. common OSR wisdom is to say FVCK THAT! because more information is always better right? its important for the players to be able to make informed choices about the risks they encounter, and having a chance of just not having information about the environment because of a random roll kinda sucks. also, theres the thing of hidden information - OSR stuff is very much in favour of providing hints of hidden things in how descriptions and environments are structured. thats a good and just thing!

so... then why have perception as a mechanic? well, basically, just the question of if you want there to be circumstances where you dont know the answer to the question of "can the player find/see/notice this" and dont mind the answer sometimes being "nope". alternatively, you could think of it like a chance for a bonus hint?

importantly, if you have a rule like this then it should accompany hints built into the environment and descriptions that invite investigation and interaction. you dont need a "find secret doors" roll if the players look behind the only tapestry in the room. 

with that in mind, i think the main circumstances where perception does make sense to be handled randomly would be

• getting lost in pathless places
• foraging (food, arrows, random junk piles)

basically, things that requiring an astute eye but that we dont want to pixel bitch for by giving out hints and seeing if the players can turn them into something useful. isnt that funny? people should clearly be adding their perception bonuses to these

anyway sorry for the non-answer lol.

BUT WAIT WHAT ABOUT SNEAKING AROUND???

its a game. if there are monsters sneaking up on the player, describe the shuffling sounds, a glint of scales in the darkness, a heavy wet breeze that comes in waves, a hulking shape draped in a cloth with some strange oil pooling at its base. i really dont know if i care for the idea of bad things happening purely randomly, the game is about choices, so if the only valid choice is either dont go in the dungeon or constantly tap everything with a pole all the time then youre not making any choices

heres some examples of hints. its particularly difficult to integrate secrets when discovering them would interrupt an otherwise monotonous time skip, but i think the solution is to either obscure the hint next to a bunch of other unrelated details with some reason to pause on them in world, or to make the existence of something hidden very obvious but not the solution to finding it

Dungeon Maiden: The light of your torches flicker up the walls illuminating firm pillars between which are deep shadowy alcoves. There is a rotting stink in the room, and occasionally your torchlight catches a flash of reflection from within the dark corners. 

or

Dungeon Maiden: While resting, Princess Saltrose you find yourself softly drifting awake late in the night. Owls call, the leaves roll like whispers, a smell of smoke drifts on the air across the camp, and you can hear the familiar heavy breaths of your companions. 

(alternatively, for assassins you can just have one person/everyone wake up just before they get jumped, but with the problem of oh shit im not wearing my armour, quick wheres my weapon fuck i cant see)

or

DM: Partway through your travels within the Well Woods the smell of petrichor begins to stir heavy in the air, and you come across three carved stones scattered in the leaf litter haphazardly. One stone is carved into a snarling face barely visible under moss and dirt, the other a bulging bare stomach, and the last a coiled serpentine tail.

From the Hobbit, art by António Quadros

CHARISMA

tbh, this is kind of just a post on why you should only roll dice if the players do something dumb and risky, or you dont know the answer to a question as a GM.

if you want something from someone, and they dont have any reason not to give it to you: yay! you win!

if they do have a reason not to help you then:

1) if you solve that reason, yay! you win!

2) if you kind of solve that reason, usually by offering something else that they want, and it is unclear if that new thing outweighs whatever the problems/values the NPC has then yay!!! you can roll dice and maybe fail!

3) if you dont provide a reason that addresses any of the values or concerns or interests of the NPC, or do but are utterly unconvincing, then you fail

most of the time the OSR world uses a reaction roll for this, which is fine. kinda cool even. i personally think that binary results are fine here, because either the NPC agrees to help you or they dont right?

but then you run into the problem of consequences of failure !!!! and people often have the problem of "why cant players just keep trying different things until they succeed"? 

welllll for starters, you cant try the same thing twice, theres no way that convincing harder works. 

for seconders, this is largely where you decide the difficulty of this problem. who the NPC is, what they want and what youre trying to achieve, are all things that decide the stakes of the encounter. some NPCs dont have much patience for putting up with bullshit, so maybe you only have a couple of attempts to convince them, or maybe theyre just some friendly wizard who you are pestering. Maybe divide morale by 3 and thats their patience level, x2 for being your friend and half for being your enemy. slowly going down on the reaction roll levels would also work well. 

also, something weird that this reveals is that dice checks are either for discovering if luck and effort was enough for a given attempt, or if the means and power of a character are enough for a given obstacle. to some extent, the latter is like the dice deciding the difficulty of a task. weird huh? maybe that could be the basis of a resolution mechanic...

anyway, LYING

1) if all the evidence the NPC has access to supports your lie, then they believe it! this includes if they only have your word to go off of, and the lie aligns with their perception of how the world works

2) if there are inconsistencies or unaddressed details, then the NPC will ask about them. better have a good reason!

3) if it sounds contrived, time to face FATE and roll the dice

4) obviously if it doesnt make sense then you fail lol

if you dont have a charisma stat on your character sheet...

easy rolls are auto succeeding, we already skipped those parts

difficult tasks are a coin flip

borderline doomed tasks are 1in4

NICE! done.

** cosmology note: in my game things are either people or animals or otherworldly beings. either you can think and talk and have free will, or your a bundle of instincts and emotions, or youre.. idk bullshit superscience enlightened weirdo. in biblical cosmology, angels are made of pure souls, animals are made of pure flesh, desire, emotions, and humans are a being of desire who also have a soul - this is what grants them alone free will.

(to clarify, irl i believe that animals should kind of just be treated like people too, but otherwise its the same, as in humans are all free thinking sovereign beings of HUMAN INTELLIGENCE etc. dolphins are smarter than you though)

*** i assume everyone knows the drill by now: only roll if 1) theres a meaningful chance of failure or chance of success 2) the consequences of failure are meaningful, there should be a reason why the character cant just keep trying until they succeed (either because they get one shot, or theres a reason to revaluate after each failure). if you can just keep trying till you succeed, skip the roll and just let time some time pass. 

interestingly, this actually supports rolling as much as you want in combat, because every failure is a big important opportunity cost because time is a precious resource that you loose as a consequence. its also why old school x-in-6 checks for opening doors and searches and stuff make sense, because in a way theyre just a measurement of how long a tasks takes in an environment where every failure/waste of time is an etch against the encroaching doom of dwindling torch light and wandering horrors.

BLAH BLAH TAX!!!

SIEGE ENGINE CLASS

Equipment: 1 mechanic, 2 operators, 1 captain, 4+d4 rockets (takes a turn to land, turns target to ash, d6 damage against anything nearby), 2d4 combat turns worth of machine gun ammo (d4 exploding dice damage as a reaction to taking damage), 3 repair kits, no instruction manual

Skills: 1. gardening or farming, 2. half remembered academia (roll on esoterica table) 3. formalised military education

1. AUTOMATIC

You churn and you smoulder and you scratch and claw at the earth and trees and stone walls until you leave nothing but rubble and ash. You have no ability scores

- Automatically succeed on tasks requiring mortal strength or intimidation, coin flip on tasks requiring industrial strength or intimidation 

- Automatically fail on tasks requiring subtly or grace

You can heal d6 HULT POINTS (HP) using a repair kit

You eat trees as rations. anything organic works, you just need enough

2. MURDER

You can now use humanoids as repair kits

3. MACHINE

You now count as organic for the purposes of magic

4. LIVES IN MY HEART

Youve discovered a terrible secret. If you can eat another SIEGE ENGINE (or an equivalent grand machine) then you can install disturbingly articulate wings.