Design Journal: Crescendo and the OSR

 

During my last 4e game (Why We Kept Her) I had a conversation with a friend that was fated to change my RPG experience forever. I had been really happy with the story that had been coming out of that game. It remains one of my favorite campaigns. When I talked to Andy about the game and the story coming from it he remarked that 4e was not a story game. Flabbergasted, I shot back that I was getting quite a good story with that game, thank you very much! Andy's response was that the mechanics of 4e weren't generating the story itself, but that it was simply a combat game that happened to be present while the story was being told.

He then showed me Burning Wheel.

Eight years have passed. I've played the crap out of Burning Wheel. It's been with me through the beginning of my marriage and three children. But I began to notice something odd towards the end of the long campaigns I've done with Burning Wheel. In order to keep with the advancement system of Burning Wheel we had to play a very different game than what was happening organically at the table. The endings of our stories, while they had epic problems to solve, would normally grow quieter, more reflective. One of the games in particular (The Giggling Dark) was almost frustratingly difficult to tell the story that was happening with the mechanics. Its sequel, Autarchy, took the problem and exacerbated it. The game mechanics seemed to want pride of place, something that I don't want to do.

I really didn't know what to make of my experiences. So I kept quiet, observed, and processed.

Eventually I realized I wanted to do the character evolution game my own way, and thus work on Crescendo began. I'd never really designed before; I didn't think I had anything to add to the conversation of game design. Turns out I have a lot to say. Freaking figures. From this sudden realization Crescendo, Shadow, (Lovecraftian horror) and Its Shadow Still Remains (a 4e-inspired adventure game) have emerged. 

I was more or less designing Crescendo via playtesting; iterate a draft in a week, throw it at the players and see if their noses wrinkled. I'd then take it back and work the bits they didn't like, rise and repeat. I've got really good sports for playtesters. What a blessing! The only two sessions I've tested with a group of multiple people  (the game is meant for one to three players, plus GM) didn't go well. One of my players in particular was consistently shafted, in both sessions. I felt terrible of course, and asked what she felt was going wrong.  Keep in mind I'd had a good time playing around with the mechanics and moving the bits around. I could feel I had a blindspot. What Lena said threw me:

"No story happened. I felt like I was playing a board game."

Keep in mind Lena has done a 38 session campaign of Burning Wheel with me. It's the best story I've produced with that game. She may not realize it, but her opinion matters a whole hell of a lot.

And that's when something crucial began to click into place. My game had taken on a quality I'd come to loathe in Burning Wheel: the eating up of story-telling, player creativity, by the mechanics. Play Burning Wheel with all the extras and you'll see it: a group of players wrestling the mechanics into a coherent narrative. And the weird thing was that over the years I'd begun to think of story as something that came about by solely by pushing on the mechanics of a game. That's patently not true, of course. You need players who know what they're doing and who like each other to have a fun experience; mechanics guide generation, they're not the generator of the story itself. I've no idea if that's something other "story" game folks think about, consciously or unconsciously. But I'd realized that I'd been thinking it. And that's just not what I want in an RPG. The game I really wanted wasn't poking at the mechanics and watching the dominoes fall. I wanted folks to be interacting with each other in the shared world they'd imagined and only have the mechanics kick in where there "should" be uncertainty, and thus conflict. And yes, eventually that means dominoes, but that's to get you into an unexpected spot, not an end in itself.

Something was buzzing in the back of my head; it popped into my head to look over Principia Apocrypha, one of the seminal works describing the OSR.  Most of the principles I wanted in Crescendo, as it turns out, are OSR principles. And the concepts that are a little iffy (high lethality) actually work, if you get a little creative (if not outright esoteric).

Let me explain really quickly what Crescendo's setup currently is. The default is to develop one character per player over the course of a 30+ session game, pitting a character's Arcana, Tenets, and Traits against the Setting's Movements.

Players craft three Tenets, which are beliefs that the player wants to have Conflicts about. They're generally short ethical statements, or statements about a character or organization. Make a Tenet about things you want to make trouble about.

"Death before dishonor. (St. George) d6/6."

"Grieving doesn't get things done. (Rahab) d4/2."

"My sister is a goody two shoes. (Lilith) D4/1."

When you change the story meaningfully in acting on your Tenet you get a metacurrency called Fortune, which lowers the difficulty of challenges. When you spend Fortune one of the Immortals your GM drew up does something to help you. Or it could just be some random happenstance of chance. It's up to the GM, but Fortune expenditure can be as subtle or outrageous as the GM likes. 

There's a second major element to characters: Traits. Traits are what you want to be a sticking point in the narrative; you want them to gum up the works. Traits don't have to be bad, or evil. On the contrary, Traits can be things about the character that are good, but inconvenient. Traits are summed up as one or two words.

"Jaded"

"Brave"

"Congenial"

You get two Traits at the beginning of the game and can have as many as four. If you use Traits to further the story you get Dynamis, which allows you to reroll your dice. Traits are also used to recover the health of your Tenets, keeping the character from making hard (and almost never good) decisions.

Finally, there's Movements. These are the three things going on in the setting right now, with timers attached to them that give you a general idea of their urgency. These are simple statements that show the end result intended.

"The people will rebel against the Duke.  Rahab d20"

"The Duke will find the Holy Grail.  St. George d20"

"The Mayor frames the Duke for his own misdeeds. Lilith d12" 

Players, by interacting with these Movements and either helping or hindering them, get Persona, which allows you to increase the step of the dice you're using to roll.

All these metacurrencies, once spent, become XP. XP may be spent on improving your character, but it's really expensive and can only happen on certain times. XP may always be spent on contacts and relationships (making them findable without trouble), as well as property and equipment, converting the XP into currency.

"But wait," you may say, "My sessions can go without a dice roll, at times. I like it that way!"

That's okay. At the end of each session all unspent metacurrency can be converted to XP. But it doesn't transfer back, so be careful what you wish for!

This is the general framework I am attaching to the Principia Apocrypha. Exploration and investment in the world are rewarded, you can get your XP through careful planning, you're rewarded for interacting with things you care about, and the world is unfolded as you go along.

The biggest similarly between OSR games and Crescendo is the philosophy of rolling. In a standard "story" game rolling is an opportunity to push the story in a new direction. It's not a conflict, but seeing where the story may go. I've never agreed with this mentality. That's not a comment on that philosophy, per se. Just that I'm not happy doing it. Picking up the dice has always been a tedious thing to me, no matter how many cool things can happen as a result. So Crescendo will be a more happily antagonistic philosophy. Cool stuff will still happen, failing forward is still a thing and all that, but the dice are always stacked against you and the consequences for failure always lead to hard decisions. So make good plans. You'll get rewarded either way, regardless of whether you're rolling or not!

One of the coolest things about Basic DnD is the recognition that advancement should be based upon something connected to the world; in the case of a lot of OSRs, that's gold for XP. Because of its roots in Burning Wheel Crescendo has a really enjoyable reward system already: set agenda, go for agenda, get meta currency, which lets you fudge rolls in your favor. Meta currency then becomes XP. I have no wish to change that system, I find it one of the killer apps of the game.  But spending XP on Stats and Skills I've always found to be odd; there's not a whole lot of plain ole steady progression in most fantasy stories. So I restricted advancing those two things to specific times of personal growth, and made it stupidly expensive. But you can always spend XP on contacts, relationships, items, and property. Having the aforementioned four then lowers the cost of Stats and Skills, particularly relationships and property. So if you really invest in the world you get more rewarded in the long term! The more you're a part of the setting the more powerful you can become, as you hit personal milestones.

But what about lethality? Well this is where I get into my esoteric ranting. Those who like it may find it surprising in a good way. Those who don't will accuse me of sophistry. In the medieval era death was considered another name for change. In fact the prerequisite for changing was thought to be mortality. If you were immortal you could not change.  Change is a form of death; something in you dies and something new replaces it. So does the lethality inherent in the OSR show up here? No, but there is a constant change in the character, of a substantial nature. Characters will evolve and shift over time, in fundamental ways. And you don't necessarily control when that happens or even what that may look like, at least fully. The game is quite lethal, in its own way. But instead of dying you find that your are not really as dedicated to your causes as you'd like; things you think you believe in can die on the vine unexpectedly, forcing you into hard decisions that will have an impact that you don't expect, and for much longer than you had the Tenet.

So you're trying as hard as you can not to get forced into a rolling, because if you do your character will do probably do things that aren't just unexpected, but downright distressing. Something definitely can die as you play Crescendo, and its ephemeral nature makes the death of these things you thought you believed in almost more upsetting than losing a character. Who your character was is permanently in the rear mirror, waving as your character becomes something new, something strange. Smart play, however, will reward you and help you get where you want to go, all without rolling the dice. 

Does that make it an OSR game?

I don't know. I think the labels story-game and OSR are a bit strange. There's some philosophical differences, sure, but I find it telling that the big story-game umbrella, PBTA, is much closer to OSR design principles than either camp would care to admit. I'm also painfully aware that anyone can grab a bottle of piss and call it Granny's Peach Tea.  They may actually be right, depending upon the granny and the company who came to call.

Are there RPGs that are actually Granny's piss? Besides, y'know, FATAL? Inquiring minds. Point is, anyone can claim anything. Doesn't make it true. So I suppose I won't be making the claim that Crescendo is an OSR game. I doubt most OSR players would recognize it as such and if you're tasting piss no one should be telling you it's actually tea. There's definitely some sophistry in doing that.

But I will swear up and down that the Principia Apocrypha is a good chunk of the framework of Crescendo. The fact that I'm adapting it to my game on purpose is as certain as those federally required list of ingredients that have to be on the back of peach tea bottles.

"Was made with a healthy consciousness of The Principia Apocrypha."

I mean, at that point if you decide the ingredient's piss (nevermind Granny's) you can't blame the label. I hope.

Want to see what Crescendo is all about? Head over to the Crescendo Discord! The alpha launches in January of 2022!