I’m running the 3rd scenario of my Streets of Avalon campaign, The Whispers of Erlig, and I’m starting to notice just a few things that I want to potentially shift or update with the game. The NPC stats are Attack, Dodge, Physical, Mental. I like that there’s an Attack because PCs have Fight. Physical and Mental are great delineations for dual stat stuff. I’m thinking about getting rid of Dodge and just making the tag system more relevant. I already have tags providing NPCs a +2 to target numbers for the PCs to roll against, remember this is a player facing game. The NPCs also have abilities they can use. The tag system is also just an easy way to provide leverage for passive abilities.
Let’s say you have a wraith which has the tags ectoplasmic, light sensitive, flickering, and jealous spirit along with an Attack of 10, a Physical of 8, and a Mental of 11. Then I let the GMs just decide how those tags apply to those stats.
I know it’s putting a lot of creative effort on the GM to make those decisions in the moment but in the game i recently ran I just decided that the wraiths would take double harm from magical light attacks, half harm from non magical attacks, and normal harm from magical attacks that weren’t light or weapons and attacks that were covered in light, like a weapon with the light spell on it or a torch. I also decided that I would use the flickering to add a +2 to the TN for Physical checks to avoid attacks and for touch attacks to deal harm with their shadow hands.
Now someone else might decide that the tags mean something different. Light sensitive means any action that deals with a wraith within bright light gains advantage but any weapon that strikes them is covered in ectoplasm gaining the tag slick. When the wraiths move they also flicker meaning they can teleport move through people and don’t provoke opportunity attacks and can move through solid objects. Maybe they even ignore armor so the damage reduction from armor doesn’t help.
The jealous spirit could mean they’re jealous of the living being or jealous for some other reason, like being bound to the tomb when other spirits are allowed to pass on.
No Conclusion Yet
I’m not sure if this is a better way than I had before with more written out abilities but I think it plays to the idea of being a game that has structure enough but is also very flexible on the GM side, requiring rules knowledge but not an overwhelming about and it’s more about creative flexibility. That’s only my first issue. The next one, which I’ll chat about next time, is NPCs acting, especially when they’re acting against other NPCs. I’m not sure I like the rule I have for that.