Building A Leaner RPG Experience

Or the current design pillars for Fables and Tables.

Apart from being the title of this blog, Fables and Tables is the working name I’ve been using for my personal-use tabletop RPG ruleset. Using Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition as a starting point, but unabashedly stealing from 13th Age, FATE, Apocalypse, Savage Worlds, and other games, Fables and Tables is a project that seeks to be all of the following:

• Simple enough to run without having a manual open.

• Intuitive enough to be easy to improvise.

• Flexible enough to be applicable to varied RPG settings.

• Emphasize player character arcs and story over stats and mechanical growth.

These are the objectives that came to mind when I assessed what it is that I like and dislike about Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. The decision to start from the most popular ruleset is also deliberate: even though there are loads of other interesting rulesets out there, patterning mine from the most popular tabletop game of all time makes it familiar to the most number of people from the get-go. Remember: I wasn’t necessarily trying to be original, as I had intended to make this ruleset specifically for personal use.

That said, the current build for the rules can be found HERE.

Note: the layout is from GMBinder.com and every image was stolen from Google. Personal use!

As a ruleset, Fables and Tables pretty much plays exactly like Dungeons & Dragons in that the players resolve actions by rolling a d20 die (20-sided) with bonuses against a static Difficulty that the Game Master (GM) sets. In-game exploration, interacting with NPCs, and tactical turn-based combat all use the same core mechanic. So far, so good, this is basically D&D.

The places where I did change the rules, however, are significant:

The Will
Instead of “hit points”, character well-being is measured in Will, which is a representation of a character’s agency, not meat. When it’s 0, the character is at the mercy of the Game Master, which can still mean dead or unconscious, but may also mean retreat, crippling shame, or other states that effectively take them out of the story. In Fables and Tables, all characters have the same amount of Will.

The Want and Wound
The core progression for characters is not levels in a class but in completing their “Great Want” and “Great Wound” quests. The Great Want and Wound are a character’s ultimate need and deepest trauma respectively, so progressing a character in Fables and Tables requires completing your character’s arc rather than killing a random one hundred wolves for “experience”. This mechanic is a heavily distilled version of Campbell’s Hero’s Journey.

Plot Armor
By completing character arc milestones, characters gain Plot Armor instead of levels. Plot Armor represents a character’s increasing importance to the story where no Plot Armor means they’re just another face in the world, but having high Plot Armor means they are one of the legendary main characters in the story. Plot Armor makes characters harder to remove from the story, which is, well, how plot armor usually functions.

Apart from these major systems, I also implemented a few other rules simplifications:

• Reduced the 6 primary attributes down to 4: Strength, Agility, Instinct, and Intellect.

• Used new damage math that draws from the stat rolled rather than from an arbitrary separate set of “damage dice”.

• Reworked the idea of “saves”, “AC”, “proficiencies”, and “skills”.

• And so on.

There are actually a lot of changes now that I think about it, though I still wouldn’t call the ruleset original since I’ve just been stealing good ideas from other games. It does, however, at the very least fit my GMing style like a glove.

I’ve so far run a 13-session campaign, at least five one-shots, and two ongoing campaigns (one at 22 sessions, another at 12 sessions) with this ruleset, at various stages of its development. At the very least it works. At the very least it runs.

If I’m being honest, it’s not quite where I want it yet because it still at times feels too much like just a lean version of D&D rather than a true creative-writing-inspired ruleset like I want it to be.

Still, this is the result of almost four years now of tinkering and thinking deeply about player experience and even a little bit about the philosophy of cooperative storytelling itself. There’s something that I’m trying to say through this ruleset, and I just haven’t perfected yet the way that I’m trying to say it.

For now, however, I’ll suffice with linking the manual and laying out the overview of its mechanics here. Do check it out if you’re curious.

The book itself is too derivative to be publishable so for now, I’m content with discussing each mechanic just as a meditation on game design.

Until I write again.