So, in a previous post I described the use of magic as having three parts: raise the energy, directing it, and dismissing it.

One thing about the three part process is that I’ve had it in my mind—especially since realizing yesterday that there’s no reason not to let quality levels stack—that different things would give bonuses to different parts of the process. So you could be someone who can raise magic at the drop of a hat but isn’t so good at directing it, or someone who’s a pro at directing it but can’t always get it to go.

Today, as I was writing out the description for the personal quality of Fury and the things that fall within its scope, it occurred to me that it could be applied to raising certain types of magic, such as Pyromancy. I started to think about how to quantify exactly what falls under Fury, and whether other qualities should have similar notes, like Tranquility for Hydromancy.

And then I realized that I had an opportunity here both for another way of customizing characters and a way of making the three-step magic system more interesting.

To wit: make it so that instead of raising magic having anything to do with how powerful/skilled you are at magic, and instead tie it to a personal quality, of your choice.

Do you raise magic through sheer force of Presence or Willpower? Elaborate hand gestures (Dexterity)? Is it connected to your Faith? Your Knowledge of lost arts? Your Intuition of other realms? Your Perception of the natural world?

Some people reading along at home but not reading and digesting every game design post I make are going, “Well, everyone will just pick their best stat.”

And sure they will. But that misses the point that these aren’t stats, they’re qualities a character either has in heroic proportion or doesn’t. A newly created character has usually one or at best two of them, and if you’re also wielding magic, it’s going to be one. Since your magic-raising attribute is always going to be at the same level no matter what you pick, you have no reason not to pick something that makes a pleasing combination for you or fits your character concept: Fury and Pyromancy. Tranquility and Hydromancy. Intimidation and Necromancy. Charm or Deception and Summoning. Dexterity and Conjuring. Or whatever fits your character concept.

People who followed the circa 2013 development version (which had a true attribute system) might remember that I toyed with the idea of substituting other specific attributes for the Magic attribute in a similar fashion, though that was tying specific attributes to specific forms of magic.

The best part of this is it can be used to inform the next step in magic use, by helping inform what exactly happens if you badly botch the control: your rage runs uncheck, your calm is disturbed, the spirits you’ve coerced rebel, et cetera. It could also have other wrinkles, as a character who uses Dexterity would have to have their hands free to raise magic effectively

I’m not 100% sure how dismissal will work, in terms of whether it will be a function of your magic-raising quality, the magic quality you’re using itself, or both. Actually, both might be the way to go, as that would make dismissal by default the easiest part to do (because an improvement to either of the preceding steps would improve it)… which, I don’t know if I’d call that realistic, inasmuch as the concept applies, but in terms of magic remaining a viable game option, I feel like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice scenario has got to be one of the rarer failure states. Even allowing that the guidelines as written call for un-dismissed magic to lash out once before dispersing into the environment most of the time, if every time you used magic to do something, something bad happened immediately afterwards, how often would you do magic? There’s “magic always a price” and then there’s “the universe clearly doesn’t want you to do this thing”.

Actually, now that I’ve thought about it, I think the raising quality—which I will now call the control quality—will be part of the whole process.

To raise magic, you use the control quality; e.g., Dexterity.

Once the magic is present, you use the power quality (e.g., Aeromancy) to make it do things.

Note that “control” refers to control over the magic itself, not the precision with which the magic performs the duties you direct it to. That’s still a function of power. Power is your ability to accomplish your will through magic; control is your ability to keep the magic from doing anything else.

Each time that you do something significant with the magic or suffer an attack or something that might disrupt your concentration, you use the control quality to keep a rein on the magic. Failure doesn’t mean the magic runs rampant, just that it does something you didn’t count on.

With this added complication, I think I’m going to do away with the idea of a dismissal roll in general cases… it’ll only be a thing if you’ve 1) previously lost control of your magic and 2) didn’t let the magic go immediately after the loss of control. The difficulty of the dismissal roll will be based on the number of control slips you had, which will also be the number of rampaging “things” the magic will do on its way out of the world.

In addition to making magic interesting and counteracting its basic “do anything” nature with added danger of complications, this also prevents any character from being *just* a wizard of any description. They’ll all have some other defining trait that is integral to their character concept. It also distinguishes between power and control (an important distinction to me) without having to monopolize a magic-using character’s resources by taking up two-thirds of the initial slots, insofar as any personal quality stands on its own as a useful adventuring asset apart from magic. If your control comes from Willpower, you’ll have all the other benefits of willpower. If your control comes from Knowledge, you’ll still have approximate knowledge of many things.

Perhaps most interesting is the ability to instantly “flavor” magic as divine rather than arcane by attaching it to a personal quality like honor, faith, or sanctity.

If there’s any design goal I have a hard time sticking to, it’s the desire to keep things simple. I’m too much in love with intricacy as an ideal, and I have such a good head for complex systems that I have a hard time realizing when I’ve crossed the line from “elegant simplicity” to “Wile E. Coyote style schematics”.

The current core mechanic of AWW in a nutshell is: when you try to do something that requires a roll, you figure out which of your qualities covers it and roll a number of additional dice equal to its level. Simple, right? Higher level equals appreciably higher chance of success without changing the range of target numbers/difficulties you can interact with.

But in the interest of keeping things on an even keel, I’ve been working with the idea that you can only have one quality applied to a problem at a time. If you have similar/overlapping qualities (like the profession/skill set quality Expert Treasure Hunter and the personal attribute quality Dexterity), you pick the one that has the higher level.

My thinking was that this would help encourage players to diversify their abilities more (in the sense of not always looking for the qualities that could cover the same thing) and also keep the failure rate at a level where it still has some significance, by cutting down on mammoth dice pools.

But at the same time I have kept thinking, “But surely you should have some advantage to being a more dexterous-than-usual thief treasure hunter,” and so, accordingly, I have been working out different mechanisms for synergy bonuses and things, all of which have the common feature of changing the core mechanic away from “one fairly simple rule for just about everything with very little to remember”.

So then I started thinking about things from a different angle.

First, I considered what the system I’m designing is supposed to do, vs. what it would reward.

If you can only apply your *best* quality for a certain action, this actually motivates you to *not* diversify your abilities… every time you have a choice between adding another quality or taking a level of an existing one, the mechanically superior choice is to take a level of the existing one.

More, only allowing you to use a single quality the idea that your qualities are not just discrete special abilities but integral components that blend together to create your character. If you have Dexterity, Expert Treasure Hunter, and Perception as your three starting qualities, the “pick your best one” leaves being dexterous and perceptive off to the side of being good at collecting valuable things that don’t belong to you.

Allowing you to combine Perception and ETH when you’re searching for traps or hidden compartments and Dexterity and ETH when you’re trying to disarm said traps or open said compartments allows them to all work together. You’re better at spotting non-treasure-hunting related things than the average person, but noticeably better than that at spotting the stuff you’re trained to spot. This makes your Perception different in focus than someone with, say, Ranger and Perception.

But what about the game balance concern? Doesn’t adding more dice to the pool quickly make failure negligible even at the maximum possible difficulty of 6 (1/6 success rate with 1 die)?

I actually sat down and did the math. If you have a pool of 4 dice (1 by default, plus 1 for each of 3 qualities), you’ll still fail just under 50% of the time at maximum difficulty. Since average difficulty (4) has a 50% failure rate for a character of no particular ability, that works out pretty slick.

You’d have to get a grand total of 17 dice for the failure rate to fall below 5%, which is what “automatic fail on 1” establishes as the lowest possible failure chance in d20-type systems.

And if too-low failure rates were a problem at higher levels, it wouldn’t really matter if players were getting their dice from one outrageously high quality or from multitudes. Any dice cap rule could easily apply regardless of the source.

Plus, no matter how low the failure rate gets, the whole point of the fate system is to add a random element of “wildness” that is not affected by skill or level. The idea of “even if you do everything right, things can still go against you” is present by the fate system, which makes even automatic success not that big a deal.

The other area where I’ve been having to fight my tendency towards feature creep/system bloat is the definition of the qualities. Again, the idea is that qualities, rather than being special abilities or collections of special abilities, are just a description of the quality’s “scope”, the “this is what this is about, these are the kinds of things it’s good for, you might use it for this”, with actual rules being very thin on the ground.

The problem I run into is I think about “extra stuff” that might be useful to a character with that quality and being tempted to put it in as a special ability. For a while I was trying to put one limited-use special ability on each quality, because some of them seemed to be super crying out for such a thing and so the balanced thing to do would be to give all of them one.

This actually steps on more than one of my design guidelines, though.

First, limited use special abilities should be an optional layer of complexity. No character has them if the player doesn’t want them, and you never have more than you want. Tying every quality to a limited use ability means you have a minimum of three of them at chargen, and they just accumulate from there irrespective of whether you want them.

Second, it means that unless you’ve got a mind for rules, you absolutely need to have more on your character sheet than the name of the Quality. Don’t get me wrong, I expect people to put some shorthand on some of them, particularly if the name is unfamiliar or used in an unfamiliar context, but an actual special ability? With mechanics to remember, even fairly abstract ones? And a limited number of uses to keep track of?

(The actual limited use ability mechanic the game uses is called Gimmicks, and they are equivalent in character resource terms to a character piece that gives a smaller static benefit. If you like resource management and having “big guns” to pull out when the going gets tough, you can use them. But you don’t have to.)

So, previous Largely Finished But Unworkable Iteration of A Wilder World represented the concept usually referred to as race in fantasy RPGs by the use of Folk Qualities, which were the same as any other character-defining Character Quality (the basic building block of character concept in AWW) in complexity and impact, just with some special rules regarding things like prerequisites. The basic rule was that you had to take one Folk Quality, but you could take more than one.

There were a few problems with this.

First, there was the exceptions. Some Character Qualities weren’t quite folk types, but could take the place of one: Automaton, Undead, etc. You could have those alongside a Folk Quality to be something a zombie elf or a steam-driven dwarf, but you could also *just* be an Automaton or an Undead. The reason they weren’t just Folk Qualities was one part that they didn’t have all the same external pieces to hook into, and one part that there’s a connotation to “Folk Quality” that doesn’t apply if you don’t have a folk.

Second, making folk type occupy the same level of character resource as any other quality and making every character have one means either you reduce the amount of component pieces you have to build your character or you increase the power and complexity of all characters at chargen by the magnitude of one major piece.

Third, this system forced all the myriad different types of people/beings you could play as to be defined at not just the same power level but the same approximate complexity and level. Do you know how hard it is to describe humans and halflings in terms of special abilities that look like a parity choice alongside semi-humanoid snakes and arachnids? It means making the simplest (from a human’s point of view) character types more complicated than they need to be, and trying to make the more complicated (ditto) ones simpler.

The current AWW build has you picking three qualities at level one, with a bit more of a structured approach. The recommendation is you pick one outstanding personal attribute (from a long list… we’re not talking STR/DEX/CON/INT/WIS/CHA but more like Charm, Honor, Fury, Strength, Tranquility, Valor, Perception, Intuition, Valor, Cowardice, Dexterity, Empathy, Presence, Willpower, Ingenuity, Knowledge, and many more) to represent your character’s heroic potential, one character type/skillset quality (with things like Alchemist, Fool, and Scholar alongside the more traditional choices like Bard, Druid, Expert Treasure Hunter, and Warrior) to represent your heroic archetype, and one from any category including those ones, signature gear, magical ability, etc. to represent your heroic edge.

As previously described, those qualities are all less a collection of concrete special abilities and more a descriptive rundown of “So here’s what this makes you good at.”/”Here’s what this lets you do.”

The “Folk Quality” concept does not exist. Instead, separately from your three foundational heroic qualities, you pick one Nature. This includes the standard fantasy folk types and the unique ones created for the A Wilder World setting (including the aforementioned reptilian and arachnid folks), but also the fundamentally different natures, like the undead and mechanical ones.

The only really mechanical list is a list of things that every Nature shares is a list of areas they have advantage and disadvantage in, here meaning a simple +1 or -1 bonus to result checks. Like a Quality’s scope, they may be defined rather loosely.

For instance, Humans have a -1 on perception-and-intuition related tasks compared to others, but a +1 when it comes to adapting to or withstanding environments and enduring pain or physical deprivation. That’s Humanity: a bit dull of senses compared to most beings with similar sensory organs, but can overcome anything and thrive anywhere.

And that’s really all the game needs to say about Humans, because since it’s being written for a presumed audience of human beings, there’s no need to modify your assumptions. With Dwarves, Gnomes, and Pixies, though, there has to be some discussion about stature. For characters of a non-biological and/or non-living nature, the lack of a metabolism and what it means for things like fatigue, hunger, and natural healing must be addressed.

And so on.

We could represent these things in mechanical terms, with statistics and rules that govern the statistics and then special abilities that modify them, but A Wilder World is at its core a storytelling game, even while it eschews a lot of typical narrativist components. Changing your character’s Nature doesn’t change the rules of the game, but the rules of the story.