"Heroes & Heretics" Tabletop RPG

I don't have many opportunities to play Warhammer 40,000 and (as can be seen by the low number of painting & modelling posts!) I don't paint as much as I should. Obviously, the background and lore of the 40K universe is where my interest really lies - and a good way of immersing yourself in that (in addition to writing history & background) is with a good old-fashioned tabletop roleplaying game! So, here is a post about the game I ran, and some thoughts on game design and playing philosophy!

A group of friends were starting a Dungeons & Dragons game and some others, who hadn't really played RPGs before, were interested. So, I offered to run a game - my plan was to do a bit of bait-and-switch, with the gameworld being a late-medieval / early-renaissance setting but this to actually be a backwater planet of the Imperium of Man and have the wider galaxy be gradually revealed! So, the players would be "classic" RPG characters (rangers, knights, warriors etc.) in a futuristic world.

Rather than use an existing ruleset, I modified a ruleset I had written about a decade before for a game called Gotham Knights (a DC comic-book hero game). That ruleset was based on Decipher's CODA system (used for the movie-tie-in Lord of the Rings game and - I believe - a Star Trek RPG), but was both stripped-down and also added in some mechanics from other game systems.

For the 40K ruleset (which I decided to call Heroes & Heretics in the alliterative mode of Dungeons & Dragons and others!) I stripped down Gotham Knights even further, pretty much everything except Attributes and Abilities.

You can read the rules here (this is a Google doc, and so will be updated as I make changes to it - it is a "living document" and experience in running the game will necessitate changes and clarifications) and read the 40K setting specific rules here. Feel free to leave feedback in the comments on this blog post - I'd love to see what you think - and if you run a game of it, please let me know!

A few notes on my design philosophy; I've run a lot of RPGs in my time (and played more) and, while complex systems with many special and specific rules for classes, races, feats, etc. etc. provide a lot of detail and can be fun, they can also distract from what I think is the most important part of an RPG - telling an interactive story. To my mind, ten minutes spent flipping through three different books to find all the relevant rules which culminates in knowing it is a +2 rather than a +1 is wasted time; a competent GM could have just decided that in a second; at the end of the day, remaining immersed in the narrative rather than being pulled out of it is worth minor inconsistencies or a lack of realism.

Furthermore, I long ago came to believe the shelf-full of books RPG companies produce serve only one purpose - to sustain their business model. A good RPG (with an imaginative GM and players) can be run from the core book - that should contain the rules for the game, rules for players and foes, and the gameworld background. Books of additional rules or classes or magic etc. can be fun - but they gradually become more and more niche and more and more specific. I understand why companies produce them; RPGs are (in theory) an inexpensive hobby . . .

Image h/t "The Jungle" Facebook page

. . . so the companies producing them need to make supplements to keep the business afloat. They need new products because people only need to buy one of anything - they do not consume the product. This explains, in some measure, why RPG companies go to the wall - there comes a point where the majority of players simply say "I've got enough books and I do not need the latest, exceptionally niche, handbook".

So, I made Heroes & Heretics exceedingly simple. There aren't rules for "edges" or "flaws" or special abilities. There are no classes, no races. The subtleties of different weapons are smoothed away - how big is it, and is it sharp? Armor is light or heavy - there is no difference between chainmail or plate or lamellar except in appearance.

I also wanted to reflect my gaming philosophy in the ruleset; while the kind of game you run (or story you tell) is set by the GM (it is hack-and-slash, mystery, horror?) the ruleset has a significant impact on that. A game with highly realistic rules for injury (including infection, bleeding out and permanent injuries) plays very differently from a game with simple hit-points that are recovered very easily. Similarly, a game with complicated skill trees or similar plays very differently for one with a generic "Knowledge: Science" stat.

In addition to wanting games that are simple to play (so you can spend more energy on telling the story) I like games about heroes; good people doing good things in a bad universe. I like games where heroes do dramatic heroic deeds, where they can defeat hordes of faceless enemies but struggle against the "end of level boss" so to speak. Heroes should not die unless they sacrifice themselves - the story is about them! In many ways, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is the perfect exemplar of this - the interest comes from the heroes' internal conflicts and dramatic, set-piece battles where they do great deeds but only truly struggle against the grand enemy. Judging by the popularity of these movies, a lot of people agree with me!

Accordingly, I not only designed the game to be easy to play, but also to make the player characters heroes. The central mechanic which achieves this is combat damage; "brutes" (the faceless minions of evil) are taken out of combat with a single hit - don't even waste time rolling for damage! (This mechanic was not my idea originally; I think I borrowed it from Feng Shu.) Additionally, there is no death mechanic - characters (both PC and NPC) are taken out of combat with sufficient damage, but death is determined by the GM according to narrative necessity. I made it very easy to recover from damage so PCs can get back into the game quickly and easily, keeping the story going and sustaining the heroic narrative.

There are also a couple of mechanics I am rather proud of, although I am sure I picked them up from other RPGs.

Characters are built on points - nothing original there, but the points are spent on both Attributes and Abilities. So, there is no issue of a player being able to min-max a character by biasing their expenditure to one or the other; if you are 45 point character, you have 45 points in Attributes and 45 points in Abilities.

The core mechanic is 2d6 + Attribute bonus + Ability score - very simple indeed. This generates a Test Result compared to a Target Number. The Attribute bonus is not the Attribute score, but rather generated with a mathematical formula. The formula is pretty complex, but is based on a triangular number progression (and there is a table to reference so you don't need to do math!) The triangular number progression gives diminishing returns, discouraging min-maxing. Furthermore, the number of actions taken per turn is based on the lowest Attribute bonus, further encouraging even advancement.

The triangular number is used for missile combat, too - which means there is no maximum range, but the chances of hitting drop off dramatically. This philosophy of "no limits but the law of diminishing returns" allows for HUGE power differentials using the same system.

Damage is based on flesh wounds being turned into dramatic wounds; this happens when a Resist Damage check is failed (with the TN being the number of flesh wounds taken). So, it is possible to be hit several times before any "real" damage is done. Additionally, armor does not reduce damage taken but rather adds to resisting damage - so, one takes down an armored target by gradually beating it down. This is unrealistic, of course, but creates a dramatic situation (this mechanic, while likely appearing in other RPGs, was inspired by a Batman comic where Batman is being shot and his dialog suggests his armor works by gradually being worn down!)

I've never been happy with shield mechanics in any other RPG - they are either far too good, or simply not worth having. I made the mechanic simple here - you can generate your TN to be hit using the hand-to-hand combat Ability rather than dodge . .  . allowing characters with shields to gain double benefit from their melee score and avoid having to point so many points into dodge.

Inspired by wanting to run medieval characters alongside futuristic ones, I scaled the game so it modern and futuristic weapons (particularly firearms and armor) can exist alongside older ones. Often, games don't scale well - a game where a character might be killed by a sword should, in all honesty, always have them be killed by a raygun. The damage mechanic (where minions are taken out of combat immediately and where heroes only take at most a single dramatic wound per hit) allows for suitably damaging modern weapons (and suitably effective modern armor) without ruining the heroic setting.

I also designed the game so it could be played without book-keeping during the game; while any game can, in theory, be played with tokens rather than scribbling down running totals of damage or willpower etc. I specifically intended this one to be played this way. That is intended to allow the players to keep immersed in the story, rather than being taken out of it to do math.

I think the first session went well - everyone had fun and "got" the idea of an RPG. The system worked very well and people were not distracted by the mechanics of the game. The reveal of the 40K setting was dramatic (one of the characters was an amnesiac Sister of Battle found in a crater in the forest, who was presumed by the other characters with her "magical" (power) axe and "magical" (power) armor to be an angel of the God-Emperor . . . which isn't far off) and fun. Further sessions will, of course, test the game engine more - but I think it was successful.

Let me know what you think!

=][= Danforth Laertes