Stormbringer Redux #24 - Stormbringer and (Dis)Associated Mechanics

Once again, Ben over at Questing Beast has a corker of a video on his YouTube channel, this time on associated vs dissociated mechanics in roleplaying games.

(His video is HERE)

Basically, Ben differentiates between abilities that exist INSIDE the gameworld and those that exist OUTSIDE it.

Inside abilities, which Ben notes are called ASSOCIATED abilities due to their gameworld or genre connection, include things like spells. Outside or DISASSOCIATED mechanics are Luck points or bennies as in Savage Worlds, and have no connection whatsoever to the genre, gameworld, or what we would call reality. Ben states his preference for associated mechanics as disassociated mechanics take away from immersion, in his opinion. I have to agree to a point, as I found Savage World's bennies distracting, but players around me simply loved them and the game of chance element they added to the session. Since I bang on about the evocative aspects of old Stormbringer, I am all for improving associative mechanics, without ruling out appropriate or entertaining dissociative mechanics.

Ben also notes that some make the distinction between the roles these mechanics allow players to take, whether as ACTORS, AUTHORS, or DIRECTORS of their character's fate. This shows that the question of associated vs disassociated exists not on a binary of extremes, but instead a spectrum of gradual movement from gameworld-limited or connected autonomy to autonomy that supersedes the reality of the gameworld. This resonates well with Stormbringer, both fiction and game, as non-noble mooks are relegated to actors, while Agents / Champions have more power to become authors of their fate, and may even be offered to become directors in exchange for serving Lords of the Higher Worlds.

All fascinating stuff for discussion. How does Stormbringer fare in this regard? I'll be taking a look at the Elan system and Luck to see how it handles associated AND disassociated mechanics.

The Elan System

Stormbringer's Elan system, which I thankfully reviewed a few weeks back, has several functions.

1) It is a form of XP, but with access limited to Priests and Agents. It is accumulated by serving the patron deity of the character, so very associated in terms of emulating the gameworld.

2) It unlocks certain static powers (ie double HP for Lawful agents and lowered Summoning rolls for Chaotics), which is traded off by several flavorful limits to behaviour. This makes a character more than just an Actor, but upgrades them to Author of their own destiny.

(Just my opinion, but I always preferred the Elan system to D&D's blood and treasure XP. Accumulating Elan just seemed to fit thematically better than D&D's one size fits all XP system, where Fighters who wade into combat and others who avoid it are equally judged on their ability to take down foes. Considering older versions of AD&D had optional classes like the Healer, I always found this unsatisfying. Add to that only Agents & Priests involved in the saga of the Young Kingdoms get XP, whereas more pulp characters living day to day don't count in the cosmic struggle, then I find this very evocative)

3) Elan can increase POW, useful for sorcery, a staple of the game. With greater POW a Sorceror can summon and bind entities with greater ease, and also resist supernatural attacks.

The increase of POW also brings us to another staple of BRP games, the Luck roll, which seems fairly disassociated or what Ben calls 'meta' at first glance. As we shall see, it inadvertently connects to the gameworld in interesting ways.

The Luck Roll

As far as I can tell, the Luck roll is not in original Stormbringer games and first appears in Elric! Notwithstanding, there are arbitrary DEX x 3% or CHA x 4% rolls all over old Stormbringer, so there may be a nascent Luck roll in there somewhere.

Luck roll from Elric!

The Luck roll is given as POW x 5% to have a lucky occurrence, although there is no details as to how often it can be used, or under what other conditions. The description of "being in the right place at the right time" or "escaping the consequences of being wrong" seems ripe for abuse. It has become a staple of BRP games, appearing in the Big Gold Book, and I suspect it first appeared in Call of Cthulhu.

Luck roll from the Big Gold Book

In my experience, there are several ways to use The Luck Roll.

1) Luck as Divination. As a GM, I ask for Luck rolls all the time and use them for NPCs to determine things. Does the downed guardsman have the keys to their cell? Luck roll!

2) Luck as Saving Roll. BRP suffers from the old school tendency for a string of unlucky rolls derailing a game, leading to no fun. In such a case, as GM I sometimes allow a Luck roll for a narrative solution to the problem.  Get shoved off a cliff and hope a bush breaks your fall? Luck roll!

3) Luck as Bennie for Characters. This is the use described in the BGB, and is closest to players' hearts, as it can directly benefit them. Unfortunately, the rules descriptions are rather vague, and although older players mostly use this rule fairly, I find younger players raised on newer D&D try to game as much as they can out of a constant demand for Luck rolls. Luck roll every five minutes!

At a glance, the Luck roll seems quite meta or disassociated. If we remember that Sorcerers and Agents can increase their POW through the accumulation of Elan, we also realize that they are luckier than non-magic characters. Since Elric's foe Thelab Karna often escapes through luck, and as this is a staple of pulp fiction that inspired Moorcock's tales,  the Stormbringer designers inadvertently made Luck rolls a lot more associative.

However, the Luck roll does have its problems, which I turn to next.

Flaws & Fixes for the Luck Roll

As noted, the Luck roll is unpredictable and prone to being abused. To remedy this, I institute the two following rules.

1) Pushing Your Luck - I agree with Ben that an arbitrary limit of once a day on these powers takes away from immersion. Instead, I reduce the modifier for Luck rolls by 1 everytime they are used in a session. For example, the first Luck roll for a character in a session is POW x 5%, but the next x 4%. then 3% and so on to x0%, or "Your luck has run out!". This makes players more wary of pushing their luck and feels every more triumphant when they succeed despite the odds. The modifier reverts to x5% the next session.

2) Degrees of Luck - To further add to the feel and effect of Luck rolls, you could implement Criticals and Fumbles. If we take the rulebook examples of remembering to bring rope, being helped by a stranger, or having a monster attack hit your mount instead of you, we could get something like this.

Critical (1/10 of Luck) - Lucky enough to turn the tide! You not only brought rope but also a hook; the stranger is wealthy and takes a liking to you; the horse instinctively kicks and gets a free attack on the monster.
Success - A lucky chance, though not supernatural. You did bring rope; the stranger gives you directions; the monster bit your horse instead.
Failure - Nothing happens, player must face consequences of actions.
Fumble - In addition to not being lucky, a complication arises. Not only did you forget the rope, a hole in your bag has lost your half your rations; the stranger is a follower of an enemy cult; the monster strikes you and the impact forces you to make a Ride roll to stay in your saddle!

Of course, the GM should keep in mind the concept of falling forward and, where applicable, look for ways to turn these failures into opportunities of some sort. The ripped bag could incite NPC kindness; the monster could lead you to its lair where some treasure has accumulated; besting the enemy cultist could give you a lead on how to progress the scenario. 

3) Luck Rolls or Pools? - Although Ben largely dismisses Story game systems, they have made some innovations that are worth stealing in OSR games. Case in point, the Gumshoe system, which is used for CoC a la Trail of Cthulhu and Stormbringer a la Swords of the Serpentine, allows Players to use pools to buy special effects instead the unpredictability of Luck rolls. The same thing could easily be implemented in Stormbringer and take the whiff factor out of Luck rolls.

I posted about this a long time ago HERE, but may rejigger this at some point.

Conclusion

The Elan system is a great associated mechanic, and one that even inadvertently makes the meta mechanic of Luck rolls more in line with the genre trope of lucky sorcerers. If you're looking to bring disassociated mechanics more in line with your game, once again old Stormbringer shows the way.

OSR Style Problems, Stormbringer, and D&D

Ben from Questing Beast just did a deep dive with This video about OSR style gaming. I think one of the reasons Stormbringer has lasted as long as it has with minimal changes is because it meets lots of the requirements he outlines.

Is Stormbringer OSR?

First, he notes the characteristics of an OSR style game:

1) The System Needs to be Incomplete

(As I've noted, original Stormbringer is almost rules lite in its lack of rule minutae)

2) System Supports Rulings via Disconnected Rules

(Elementals, Elan, Demons, all pretty disconnected and again rules lite)

3) System Has A Way To Resolve situations

(skill system)

Stormbringer's Crunch

Ben also notes that 'crunchy' systems don't allow OSR style gaming, but what do we mean by crunchy? Crunch, in my estimation, implies two things:

1 - There is a number or stat for everything

(Contrast the statted out Arioch of D&D's Deities and Demigods, who is a 10th level Bard for some reason, versus the paucity of stats for any god in Stormbringer)

2 - All effects have been laid out, leaving no room for interpretation (ie rulings)

(In D&D, all Arioch's attacks and abilities are clearly spelled out, conversely making him more limited in power. In Stormbringer, summoning an avatar of any Chaos lord makes them have all attributes at 10 x that of the summoner, with SIZ and shape at will, and as we are told, "Lords of Chaos may accomplish anything up to the destruction of the world... by fiat." This means power is effectively unlimited, as a god should be.)

Deities and Demigods shows up the difference in the D&D and Stormbringer / OSR mindset. In the Melnibonean Mythos section, all gods are given stats. This means they are killable.

"To a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Hit points imply combat, and feats & powers limit action to what is on the character sheet.

By this metric, Stormbringer 1E Elemental rules are very OSR, while demon rules become less so from 1E to 4E and its laundry list of powers, which is a very 90's thing.

Stormbringer has accumulated some crunch as it aged, witness the jump from 1E rules lite demons to 4E catalogue of powers demons, and Elric! spells. But this still pales in comparison to modern D&D.

Rulings Not Rules

Next, Ben asks, "How do you support the rulings not rules principle at the adventure level? You give players problems that can only be solved with innovation." He also notes, "I've noticed that fairytale and mythology frequently contain great examples of these types of problems."

What Ben has hit on is the narrative aspect of old school gaming. This is the influence of the source fiction, where triumphing comes from being inventive, not just the game of whittling down hit points of enemies. Moorcock's stories are very mythic, witness the golem Aubec defeats by showing it its own reflection, or how Elric uses elementals to escape the Sack of Imrryr, which is emulated in the Elemental rules' lack of heavy simulationist crunch. In game design, I think we forget the source fiction to our detriment. Part of the reason D&D went down the crunch for crunch's sake road is that it made its own (to me) lukewarm settings that I never got into, and that had no guiding narrative constraints for its designers. Thus D&D became its own game-narrative genre unto itself, an ouroboros eating its own tail.

This may be why Dragonlords of Melnibone failed - it is hard to have Moorcockean mythic stories in a game of preset feats and spells.

Zeroing in on OSR Style Problems

Ben then resumes OSR style problems according to the venerable Goblin Punch blog:

1 No easy solution

2 Many difficult solutions

3 Requires no special tools

4 Can be solved with common sense

5 Isn't solvable by ability on character sheet

Here is where Stormbringer falls down a bit. As I have noted, original Stormbringer is schizophrenic. It has stats and skills for characters, but none for Elementals. Some of its published scenarios are nothing more than reskinned D&D dungeon crawls, but even the starter adventure, Tower of Yrkath Florn, has hints of the mythic OSR style in it. The demon trapped in the tower can be bypassed, fought, or bound, depending on what the players feel they could or should do. This is a stark difference from the norm of monster = combat from other games.

Another way to express this dialectic is "Is the GM a computer, or is he a philosopher? Are the players bean counters, or fellow storytellers?" Stormbringer's inherent mode of combat = avoidable, emulated in the lethality of rules and inspired by the source material, pushes this question to the fore.

Ben calls the  principle "Create Problems Without Solutions" and notes that it is the players' job to find solutions, with or without GM help. Readers may remember I touched on this in my Moorcock bestiary, in which I changed the Kay from boring Kobold stand ins to mobs of psychic crabs, and wrote:

"How can the PCs defeat an innumerable enemy? I don't know. That is their job to figure out. Maybe their sorceror-noble can call on the Lord of Crabs, or use flaming oil, or start a Cajun crab cook up."

I agree with Ben when he notes, "For me as a game master, I just love seeing players find a way to bypass these OSR style problems." In my Laughing Tower playtest, young players unfamiliar with Moorcock / Stormbringer tried to emulate skills by rubbing mud on their face for camoflauge, while older Moorcock-loving players interacted with NPCs in unforeseeable ways to get what they wanted.

Conclusion

I agree with Ben when he notes, "Anything that gives you a numerical bonus is not an OSR style tool. What you want are tools that allow innovative problem solving, that stretch the brain." Stormbringer has tons of such tools in its Exotic Treasures section, all ripped directly from Moorcock. But its Elementals, though lacking hit points and other crunch, provide very flavorful yet unpredictable ways to solve problems.

As Ben says, "If OSR problems are problems without solutions, then OSR tools are solutions without problems." And this is a lot easier to do in Stormbringer than other games, due to both its system and source fiction. 

For this reason, in my next Stormbringer post, I will be looking closely at how the game mixes a minimum of stats with a modicum of narrative options in its Virtues vs 1E Demon rules, a dichotomy of power I have unfairly overlooked for decades.

Thanks to the Glatisant!

So, it looks like The Glatisant has given this blog a signal boost. For those few who don't know, Glatsiant is the blog / newsletter of Ben Milton, also known as the Questing Beast, the author of Knave. Although I am currently not interested in D&D, I really do appreciate his rigor and enthusiasm for classic gamestyles. He is a breath of fresh air that reminds me of the early days of the OSR before it became a marketing dumpster fire for WotC.

Ben included my post "The Stupidity of Social Skills in Combat" in one of his weekly link roundups. Looking at my analytics, which I never do, I see that it has jumped 10 x in readers.

Thank you Ben! 

I doubt Ben needs the signal boost, as he is a compelling game theorist and expert marketer, but I exhort my readers to give his YouTube channel, his blog, and most importantly, his books a good look. I have some friends who are smitten with Knave, so I'll have to pick up copies when I get some life stability again.

So whether you like D&D or other old games, give Ben a listen.

HERE

(PS Thanks for calling out my error Gordon)