#ultimate campaign

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Subsystems and You 13: Relationships

(art by barn-swallow on DeviantArt)

What sets tabletop RPGs from the video games that have tried to emulate them over the years is that a GM can tailor the roleplaying experience in real time. Characters will react to the heroes in real times like a real human being because they are portrayed by a real person, rather than playing along the story beats that a script writer assumes that the player might find interesting.

And with that flexibility comes developing relationships, either positive or negative, between your character and the NPCs, which can be a great way to emotionally tie oneself to the campaign and the setting. Emotional investment, after all, being what every storyteller seeks to elicit in their audience.

Now, oftentimes the roleplay itself can be it’s own reward, or at least lead to other rewards as NPC allies tend to be helpful to their new heroic friends. Conversely, rivals or enemies may be the inciting incident in many an interesting plot thread, which leads to other rewards.

However, maybe you wanna directly reward roleplay in your game. Perhaps the group is newer (or older) players that need some encouragement, or maybe you want to emphasize building relationships as part of the campaign. Either way, we have the Relationships subsystem from Ultimate Campaign!

With this system, the GM keeps track of how the party interacts with their allies and enemies in order to track how the NPCs react to the heroes as well as dole out xp for the party taking the time to advance that relationship, be it a positive one or a hostile one.

The way it works, Each NPC has an initial relationship score determined by the charisma and likeability (or like-to-punch-them-in-the-face-ability) of the character in question. Through their interactions, the characters can grow to like or detest each other more, which changes the relationship score, which has certain thresholds that grant xp rewards, though only once. (sorry, no grinding xp by alternating between insults and gifts)

Note that this score is not a positive-negative slider, but rather a measure of the passion of the emotions that the character feels towards the hero. While simply knowing the character is basically the same regardless of what the specifics are, as they grow to care about or detest the PC in question, the score rises.

Exactly how you manipulate this score comes in a few flavors, such as time (represented by leveling), actively going out of your way to do nice things or not so nice things (termed gifts and insults), as well as simply roleplaying your character and doing things that the NPC in question would like or dislike, such as saving their child, or utterly destroying them in a tournament.

Because the score is a level of passion, rather than being two ends of a spectrum, it is possible to flip between being rivals/enemies or friends/companions, though obviously the efforts to do so will reduce the passion after the flip. After all, betraying a friend to make an enemy is bound to leave them conflicted and confused, while befriending a rival leaves them hesitant.

While this system can be useful for those seeking a way to add a direct reward for RP, on the other hand, I know a lot of players and GMs would actively avoid using this system because it “game-ifies roleplay”, and they are right to be concerned about that. Having a manipulatable relationship system feels very video-game-y in a bad way. More specifically, it feels very “dating sim”-esque, which is a whole other can of worms.

Still, if you think you can make it work, go for it, but I don’t see it getting a lot of play, honestly.

That will do for today. Tune in tomorrow for the final subject of this week!

[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

Ultimate Campaign - Taxation - Harsk Pays by Roberto Akeiron

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Subsystems and You 13 Bargaining

(art by lafemmedart on DeviantArt)

With adventuring comes loot, and with loot, there comes things that are cool, but the party doesn’t necessarily want, and with that comes selling that loot to get money for the things you do want.

By default, most goods, with the exception of trade goods and fancy treasure like gems and art objects to collectors, are sold at 50% value for balance purposes as well as the sake of berevity. Nobody wants to get bogged down discussing the specifics of pricing for a cure light wounds potion for an hour when there’s adventuring to be had, after all.

However, for those that want a little more control over the final pricing of what they buy and sell, there is the Bargaining subsystem from Ultimate Campaign, which rewards you for actually putting points into Appraise, Bluff, and Sense Motive to help determine the value that you get out of what you buy and sell.

That being said, you probably shouldn’t use this system all the time, only for significant purchases and sales, such as that last piece of gear to complete your perfect ensemble, or getting a good price for selling the relic staff to the local mage’s guild and so on.

This system starts with both the seller and the buyer rolling to appraise the item or read the buyer to determine if they’re overcharging for an item, as well as setting that initial asking price.

Then, the buyer attempts a check to undercut the seller (one must make a profit, after all), the degree of success determining their base undercut percentage.

It is then that the buyer sets their Initial Offer and Final Offer, which is essentially the lower and upper limits of what the buyer is willing to pay, which is determined by how fair they think the original asking price was and the undercut value.

Once all of that is settled, both parties will haggle back and forth with opposed skill checks to determine the final price until an agreement is met.

Depending on the rolls throughout the process, this could either see the character getting a much better deal than the normal 50% sale or 100% buying, or it could be a bit worse, depending. However, it does involve a lot more math to figure out the percentages. If that appeals to you, however, you can certainly have fun with it.

That does it for today, check in tomorrow for more!

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Subsystems and You 12 Retraining

(art by Joseph C-Knight on Artstation)

 Folks who have been fans of this blog for a while will probably know that I have opinions about this subsystem, but this is the first time I’m actually talking about it as a system in full detail.

It’s an inevitability in RPGs both on the table and on the screen. Sometimes you’ll not be happy with the choices you made during level up. Maybe an option sounded cool but is mechanically not paying for itself. Maybe you realized that you made a mistake. Heck, there might even be an in-game reason why the character might not be what they were previously anymore.

This is where retraining comes in. With it, your character can take some downtime to train, swapping out the offending option, whether it be feat, class feature, or even entire class level or class choice, and replace it with a new, legal option in it’s place.

On the one hand, this signals to players and GMs that they can work together to make a character the best version it can be, making it fun for the player to, well, play.

On the other, the idea that you can just magically forget an entire skillset and replace it with another can completely shatter the immersion for some players.

Like, I get it, when it’s something small like a feat or a spell known, you can flavor it as them trying something new, but it not working out, so they drop it and focus on a new technique. But racial traits? Class features that you’ve had for a long time… an entire class level???

You can see where this might start to make my eyes twitch.

If it were just a player and GM working together to rebuild the character better, I’d be ok with that. Sure, their may be some differences with the players’ memories of events and the character’s current abilities, but they’ll adjust and revise the way things happened as needed. But the fact that this subsystem requires you to spend money on retraining… i.e. tying this whole revision of a character’s abilities to the mechanical and “actually happening in the game” layer of the game is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, and in most cases, I would not use it, at least not usually with the price tag.

 So when would I use it?

Well first, I would forgo the price tag entirely unless it made sense in the moment, and I would have it take a lot longer in terms of downtime unless it’s just a quick fix of replacing something that the character took last level but decided they didn’t like. Again, there are exceptions.

The act of retraining itself I would also use if it made sense for the character. Consider that there are archetypes out there that have alignment requirements, such as the dark elementalist kineticist, or that require atonement to remove, such as any of the ex-class archetypes from Antihero’s Handbook. If the character’s ideology or circumstances change, they often lose class abilities, so being able to retrain for free into a different archetype or even an archetype-less build is important, as well as the reverse. Alternately, if the character wishes to change to a similar class, they may spend downtime there, such as paladin into antipaladin, or fighter into paladin.

Another example is the game with a childhood origin introduction session, or a “before the call” session. In which the characters play young or otherwise non-adventuring characters playing in a sort of introductory session where some formative event happens to all of them. In this case, they might start playing level 1 characters in an NPC class, and then retrain out of that class once the real adventure begins.

 There is also one example of using the retraining rules to gain something without losing something else in kind, and that is using downtime to learn a new language, the gold being spent on resources and tutors to learn it. This is the one area where I would recommend using the gold price for retraining, as it actually makes sense, and I would also use this as the basis to homebrew one spending money to increase physical ability scores through exercise, though I would put long downtime requirements and an upper limit on it to prevent exploitation.

 In the end, the idea of retraining characters to be different is fine with me as a thing that occurs between player and GM to fix mistakes and get the character you want out of things. Having it be a downtime activity that characters do in-game and costs money to do makes no sense to me and breaks my immersion, but maybe it’s right for you and/or your game. Maybe you’re playing a game inspired heavily by certain Final Fantasy titles where people change classes or “Jobs” as easily as putting on a new outfit (often literally!).

That will do for today, but we have some fun subsystems this week, so stay tuned for more!

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Subsystems and You 11: Downtime

 In a campaign with a lot of downtime, where the party might take weeks, months, or even years between in between adventures, it can often be hard to manage exactly what characters do during their downtime due to how vague and glossed-over such a time is.

Today’s subject, from Ultimate Campaign, seeks to help with this by codifying the most common types of downtime activities and how long they take, as well as rules for building buildings and organizations that the party might use and rest in.

Note that the more unique parts of this subsystem do feel most rewarding to players that enjoy base building, NPC interaction, and bookkeeping. For everyone else, you can probably just limit players to the more typical downtime actions as need be.

 In general, these downtime activities include many classic options like crafting magic items, replacing a familiar or companion creature, adding spells to spellbooks or other repertoires, researching spells and rituals, gathering information, and the like. However, this also includes things like earning capital resources for more complicated parts of this system, earning experience points on minor jobs to catch up with the rest of the party, healing others, and various activities to keep a business running or using capital to hire others and build/upgrade buildings.

Speaking of which, this subsystem provides rules for building buildings, room by room, which can be used for businesses, bases of operations, humble farmsteads, or even entire settlements, each having different costs to upgrade or build, and special caveats like turning fertile land into farm for nearly free, and so on.

Of course, once you have buildings, you need to staff them. Things like homes usually don’t need staff unless they are large mansions, but everything from thieves guilds to arcane academies to bazaars need people working them, whom will all have their own upkeep and output when you manage them. However, it is important to remember that businesses slowly lose capital when you’re off adventuring at a weekly rate, but you can mitigate that by hiring on a manager to keep things going, cutting that rate of attrition in half. That being said, if you don’t want to punish players for not keeping up with their own businesses, you might forgo that attrition entirely if they have a manager.

Of course, your businesses and hideouts don’t exist in a vacuum, and things might happen to them. Things like fires, slow days, and illness might be negative events, but there are also good possible events like being visited by a celebrity patron, good productivity, and so on. There are even sub-tables for random events specific to building types, such as alchemical accidents in a lab, a strange guest showing up at the inn, and so on.

Beyond random table events or anything to do with the rules, however, is all the fuel that this system might give the GM. Hiring a manager and workers means new NPCs. Owning a building means the party getting motivated when the baddies target it to get at them. Being part of a community means having lots of excuses to engage with that community, and so on.

 While this system is not necessary for every game, it can be fun for those that love a little slice of the sim game, but if you want large-scale sim qualities in your Pathfinder, I’d recommend the Kingdom Building rules, also from Ultimate Campaign, which we will go over some other day.

That does it for today, but I hope you enjoyed this week! Tune in next time for more archetypes!

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Subsystems and You 8: Mass Combat

 Whether it be between rival nations or against the armies of darkness, occasionally armies will clash, which can be a problem because Pathfinder is not well-suited for running combats with hundreds of participants.

That’s where the mass combat rules come in, a simplified battle system for simulating large numbers of foes facing off against each other, be they true armies, or perhaps small battalions of larger foes, or even terrible mighty beasts.

What’s interesting is that tabletop RPGs pretty much evolved and budded off from wargaming, so in a way rules systems like this help things come full circle, though these simplified rules no doubt are not intricate enough for the average wargamer’s liking.

 At its base level, mass combat is basically rolling Offensive value against defensive value and translating the excess into damage against the enemy army, possibly causing them to rout if their health is too low, but it only gets more complex from there.

Strategy also comes into play, as the commander of each army must decide how offensive or defensive to battle, granting bonuses and penalties based on that choice.

Armies can also have special abilities based on what sort of creatures make them up, such as a squad of alchemists having bombs, or a platoon of spellcasters, or even immunities to certain negative conditions the enemy might impose.

Additionally, if the mass combat in question is part of a kingdom or a settlement game in which those rules are used, there is also the possibility to bolster it with commander boons, tactics, and other improvements as well.

There’s also the matter of building the armies themselves, both in terms of stat block and in terms of funding them via the settlement rules should you be running that sort of game. Otherwise mass combat might ignore those rules and the GM might simply provide an army for the party based on story reasons.

At the end of the combat, an army is either victorious, routed, or defeated outright. A rout merely weakens an army’s morale in addition to losses inflicted, but a total defeat means the army is lost, likely with major economic repercussions for the kingdom.

After it is over, armies may recover by resting, healing their wounded and recruiting new members from locals or reinforcements. Armies and commanders might even add new tactics or boons to their repertoire as well.

 The result is a nice system for simulating armies clashing against each other, though it’s not always viable for every situation, particularly when powerful spellcasters and the like are involved. It is, however, a good way to simulate clashes between tradition armies and the occasional giant monster. Definitely worth having a look at if you plan on any mass engagements in your campaign.

That does it for this week! Tune in next Monday for more!

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Subsystems and You 3: Downtime

It doesn’t get talked about a lot, but it’s not always 24/7 adventuring for your average party. There are times when you’re on the road just traveling to different locations, or just between adventuring jobs and hanging out in a town looking for work, or perhaps managing your own affairs.

Now, normally downtime is pretty simple to manage. You have everyone list what they’re doing on each day, roleplaying significant social interactions, and you know, just skipping through all the boring bits. However, sometimes a character or characters in your party have responsibilities beyond their adventuring life, or dare I say it, the players have an interest in base-building or managing a settlement.

Enter the downtime rules from Ultimate Campaign! With these rules, you have a way to simply manage what everyone is doing, and figure the cost for more long-term projects and resource management.

 The rules themselves are complex, but in summary, the party members have a set of phases and actions during each daily “turn”, as well as the ability to accrue resources such as labor, goods, influence, and magic, using coin or their skills (or that of their cohorts or followers), and then putting them to good use. Obviously, a lot of turns can be spent doing the ordinary things associated with downtime, such as crafting magic items, recovering from injuries, researching spells, which use their normal rules, but take up your actions during that turn.

Of course, you can perform other actions as well, such a spending manpower to police a region, or to build buildings, recruit others, perform heists, and more.

 That being said, adventurers are still adventurers, and that means leaving their interests behind. Without them to manage it, their accrued resources begin to degrade. Thankfully, this can be allieviated somewhat by assigning a manager to maintain their ventures, though they suffer if left too long without the direct management of the owner, and still need to be paid.

 Of course, the big fun here is creating buildings and rooms, which of course cost a certain amount, but also provide various functions, such as a magical lab being able to produce magical capitol and serve as a place for your spellcaster to perform research and craft magic items. Different factors can even reduce the cost of certain structures and features, like converting fertile land into farmland for free, rather than spending labor to clear the land and make it viable.

At the same time, you can also recruit and assemble teams to work for you, man your facilities, and otherwise serve your interests for a fee.

 Of course, even while adventuring, life goes on in whatever holdings the player characters have. As such, this subsystem also has random events that can prove to be blessing or bane, adding an element of uncertainty to the system.

 So the end result is a system that can be used to quantify and organize the various things that a character might do during downtime, complete with a way to make long-term plans and improvements to their non-adventuring lives. If you’re the kind of player that loves designing your own base of operations, this system is absolutely for you! Talk with your GM about possibly including these rules.

[lazzmap]

A bunch of maps & geomorphs I did for PATHFINDER RPG: ULTIMATE CAMPAIGN for Paizo back in 2012...

enjoy!