Let's Talk About Crits, Baby

Once again, I've been noodling about with a bunch of game designs, tackling different ideas and trying to express them through the medium of a TTRPG. A particular theme or style keeps popping up for me, a small interest I've found in anime, especially the wholesome, wacky comedy kind. I've been running an ongoing campaign using Fabula Ultima for some friends on my Discord server, which takes on the anime style from a perspective that mixes trad & indie design philosophies: it's reasonably crunchy, with lots of levelling-up, but it gives the players plenty of narrative authority and they literally draw the map for themselves as they pursue their quests.

My preference is still for very rules-light games though; I'm not a fan of bean counting, min-maxing and tactical combat rounds, so even the lighter version of those presented by Fabula Ultima doesn't quite hit the spot for me. A number of ideas have been stewing about in the back of my head for quite a while and now something is starting to emerge, a simple anime-inspired fantasy game taking notes from KonoSuba, Handyman Saitou in Another World and other tales of misfit adventuring parties. The game I want to make allows the PCs to be screw-ups and oddballs who don't quite fit the mould for a standard fantasy hero: wizards who forget their spells, warriors who enjoy getting hurt a little too much and of course a hero summoned from another world and dropped into this whole mess with no idea of what's going on.

Kono Suba: God's Blessing on This Wonderful World

It's that disparity between the situations the PCs find themselves in and their ability to deal with it that
is the difficult part of the design, because there needs to be a balance between the game mechanics and the comedic story. The lead characters in the sub-genre of 'misfit adventuring party' aren't massively incompetent; in fact, they are often immensely powerful and it's only their personality flaws that hold them back from being the type of heroes that legends are written about. In order to emulate that gulf between reality & expectation, the system has to allow the PCs to make exceptionally powerful moves sometimes whilst also encouraging the players to embrace catastrophic failures.

I latched onto using critical hits & misses for this, something to parallel the regular action checks that could twist the narrative in strange directions at unexpected moments, so let's finally get to the business alluded to in the title of this post and talk about crits.

A Critique of Crits

There are a couple of very popular methods for determining when a roll is a crit, whether hit or miss, either scaled results or dice readings. Scaled results just include crits as the extreme ends of your dice roll, e.g. a 1 on the dice is a critical failure, while a 20 is a critical hit. That means that no matter what your level of skill is, crits are equally likely to turn up for everyone in every roll; Quest is a good modern example of this, where all results exist on a 1-20 scale and everyone has the same chance for every result on every roll.

The other option is to use some kind of dice reading, essentially treating the dice as a kind of oracle to determine whether a crit occurs, independently of what the actual outcome of the roll is. This type of system usually requires at least 2 dice, since the most popular implementation is to look for doubles on your roll; doubles on a failure turns it into a critical miss, while doubles on a success turns it into a critical hit. Both Fabula Ultima and Ironsworn are modern examples of this approach, invoking extra effects that work for or against the player-characters whenever they roll doubles on their dice.

I started my design by thinking of a scale, with every possible outcome assigned to a different range of results on the dice, using a dice pool instead of a single roll to create more of a curve to the results rather than a linear progression from failure to success. Here's what struck me after a playing around with different ways of implementing that idea though: any kind of scale is predictable and it pushes PCs towards certain kinds of behaviour. I was setting the top of the scale to be an overkill-type result, where the PC's abilities got out of hand and they did more than they had intended to, so it had elements of a critical hit & critical miss at the same time. The issue I was having was that it locked the intended & unintended results together, so it was a little too predictable for the wild, often gonzo comedy feel I wanted to capture. A result of 1 was a critical failure, so not only did you not succeed at your roll, but you also suffered some unintended consequences as well. The only way around that was to create a long chain of outcomes, mixing and matching levels of success with unintended consequences along the way, but that still made it predictable and set some results on the scale beyond the reach of some PCs. If you can only roll three six-sided dice on your roll, then you know you aren't getting above 18 and though that can be finessed with skills bonuses, for example, that just has the opposite effect of putting the lowest results off limits.

Feeling Lucky

The other option then was to use the dice as an oracle, finding some other way to read them that's not tied to the result of the roll; given the dice pool mechanic was prefect for the "doubles are crits" rule, this seemed like a no-brainer. That took me right back to the issue with the scaled results though, where it's still the action dice that determine the nature of the unintended consequences: if you fail, the consequences make it worse and if you succeed, the consequences make it better.

Handyman Saitou in Another World

This is the point where I decided to break away from easy, off-the-peg solutions and really ask myself: what do I want this system to do? What kind of results do I want the PCs to get? In order to get that unpredictable, comedy-action style baked in, the players had to be able to get any kind of unintended consequence with any kind of roll. Incompetent characters should still be able to stumble into a serendipitous result, while overpowered heroes ought to be over-reaching themselves with their displays of might and landing the whole party in trouble.

This is where I had an inspiration: if the results and consequences have to be separate, then so do the dice, I was trying to make one set of dice do too many things. By separating results and consequences into two separate rolls, I could have them match up in any way possible, but also, I could make this 'luck' a variable, independent of attributes or skills. This way, a character could have a really powerful ability, balanced out by the fact that it could also cause all kinds of chaotic problems for themselves and their allies. With skill & luck being ranked side by side, players had the choice of playing a character who relied on their proficiency & experience, or one who just got by on dumb luck coming to their rescue. At last, the perfect blend of competence and comedy I was looking for!

This game is still in the very early stages, but now with that basic framework for handing the crits in place, it suggests a lot more ideas for where I want to take it next. The current working title is No-One Wanted to Adventure With Us So We Formed Our Own Party, with a simple character creation system mostly in place, where players can match up their party role (wizard, fighter, etc) with a background template (isekai, fairy, outcast and so on.) I may post more on the development of this or some other half-baked projects, or maybe even some broader TTRPG theories and observations that I want to share.