“Beginner’s Luck” in The Breach

I picked up The Breach a few days ago and finally got a chance to read it a bit in depth. There’s a lot of neat ideas in the game, but the one I think is extremely clever and some way should show up in more games is “Beginner’s Luck”.

The general context of the game is that you are doing missions to explore weird subdimensions and gather data on the things that live there for the short time the dimension remains in existence. The Beginner’s Luck rule is that any character, on their first mission, gets a free reroll of dice, for every roll.

This does a few things which are really smart.

First, it serves as the classic “videogame tutorial”. The first mission, all of the player characters have this advantage so they’re better cushioned against mistakes, which, given a new setting, new system, are things any group might reasonably make.

Second, it means any time a character dies, your new character has this buff for one mission, which means you can push harder than you might have otherwise, and because you now know the way the game works, you can get a little more from it, and perhaps catch up a little if you’ve lost some progress.

I had some discussions recently about how the RPG standard of “your character is weak and vulnerable to danger then becomes heroic” somewhat sets up players to have an inverse difficulty curve; you don’t know the rules, you don’t know the world, you are the least protected by the numbers and mistakes have high costs. In videogames, it’s somewhat of a different take in most cases; your character is weak and limited in options then becomes heroic, but generally you can make several mistakes against the early threats without the costs being very high at all.

Obviously, this exact method of “free rerolls” won’t fit most games but there could certainly be other mechanics that give new players or new characters a little more protection to give new players cushion to experiment and learn the game.

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Designing the game to be learned vs. taught

Over on Twitter there’s a couple of nested conversations going on about the difference between people learning how to play from the text vs. learning from a GM explaing how the game works. As someone who was in elementary school and had to teach myself D&D from the Red Box, I have a lot of both experience and ideas about this.

Learning to play from the book

First, the only games where it can be a fair assumption most or all of your groups will read the rules to learn to play are those 1-4 page RPGs. A trifold brochure game, or something like Lady Blackbird. Every other game, you can assume there is a split between the group.

The first group will read the rules and try to know how the game works. This ranges from “I get the basic mechanics and am fluent” to the player who makes a chart for ideal builds based on math or whatever.

The second group is skimming the book mostly looking for cool ideas to inspire their characters, think about the type of cool things that happen in the game, etc. Functionally what happens in play is that this group is still taught the rules by the GM or players more fluent in the mechanics, anyway.

As a designer, it’s key to recognize you have both types, and often enough, it may just be the GM who read the rules and now has to teach them.

Teaching how to play

Teaching how to play is a different matter altogether. The rules as a text reference may have all the rules for say, magic, in one section. However when you teach the group how magic works, you probably don’t need to explain the WHOLE section – you probably only need a very basic introduction to start it off and to come back and get deeper with it as needed.

The questions in teaching how to play are:

• What order to we introduce concepts?
• How deep do we go into any set of rules vs. put to the side for later?
• How much does anyone need to know about the structure of play and how to use the mechanics to generally TRY to get the outcomes they want? (fluency)

Examples to check out

There’s no one answer, but I think there’s several games that have great examples worth looking at. Probably the most recent, and strongest standout game that teaches the GM how to teach it, is The Green Knight, which I’ve written about recently. Thirsty Sword Lesbians has the hands-down best teaching/reference handout pages I’ve seen so far. It walks you through setting up the game, teaching the basic rules and running a session. These sheets for Primetime Adventures worked great as quicksheets for the rules and as teaching aids. I know they were designed to be cut up into cards but just using the sheets as is worked better for my games. Dogs in the Vineyard had a great idea of putting the relevant mechanics directly on the character sheets and we can see some of the mirrored with the Playbooks in Apocalypse World.

Nowhere near the Same Page

And all of this is before we get to the common issue of “I read part of the rules and assumed the rest of the game works like (other RPG)” which happens quite often. It’s frustrating to design your game having to explicitly communicate where it differs from D&D, but unfortunately it is a common experience that can avoid some of the problems for new groups.

Now mind you, I’m not saying the designer is god in all of this; however, as the designer, you’re charging money to give people your game… and frankly, the RPG space has been full of decades of “well the group (aka THE GM) will figure it out” lazy design which has led to a lot of problems. Being clear about the baseline assumptions for your game make it easier to teach, and, easier to houserule.

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RPG Maps – Cze & Peku

Today I just discovered Cze & Peku’s RPG Maps (Patreon here). They have a deep library of maps. The maps come in gridded and ungridded options, and a ton of variations for each map – day, night, weather options, glowing magical gates, “what if a massacre happened here”, water vs. lava in the same map etc.

If you play DnD or other RPGs, check out our battlemaps here:https://t.co/Mz0HZFyL6e pic.twitter.com/fPpZ1iBdDS

— Cze Lee (@czepeku) January 22, 2022

For $5 you can get access to all the back archives and $5/pack going forward. With something like a dozen versions for almost every map, it’s a great deal if you play map based RPGs.

A short video on the “wacky character”

POCGamer’s video here is a pretty excellent point about the really annoying thing where someone has to play the “wacky weirdo” in contradiction to whatever the mood/genre expectations the campaign has going. Sometimes this is someone who is basically trolling, sometimes it’s someone who is so used to playing railroaded games where the GM doesn’t let you do anything, you have to come up with outlandish rationales to do outlandish things to evade some tiny aspect of the railroad (Abused Gamer Syndrome).

POCGamer’s Patreon is here if you’d like to support their work.