Variant Environmental Effects and Enabling Game Designs

The 5150 forums on extreme environments

For those who have followed my work, it's no secret that I absolutely adore the hybrid RPG/wargame lines of Two Hour Wargames, in particular 5150, their game line of science fiction shenanigans which range from extremely small fire teams of Marines boarding and taking out ships all the way up to Galactic navies maneuvering against one another.

I've even created an entire website (which needs to be updated) of things I and others have written to support the 5150 mechanics and setting. Feel free to check it out and enjoy the contents.

I woke up today to flip through my feeds and had the great pleasure of seeing a post to the THW forums which tickled the back of my brain. The kind of thing which milked my creative juice gland. There's no reason not to share it more broadly and even expand upon it.

The Inspiration

Hi All

During combat in a hostile environment, any hit on a figure in an environment suit must make a Roll vs REP prior to rolling on the relevant Damage Table (Ignore if wearing BTA). If the figure passes the Initial Roll vs REP, make the Damage Table roll as usual. If it fails the Initial roll vs REP, the figure has succumbed to the hostile environment and is dead.

added complication and might prove too lethal in game terms - particularly for lower REP figures

-- tonicnh @ THW Forums

The Reply

I think I'll use this point to sort of leverage into a general criticism of the idea – not the execution, because given your premise, many of these flow logically.

But ultimately – if the environment is so hostile and the suits that infantry wear are so fragile that even the slightest glancing blow is likely to end in their immediate death, you won't find infantry in that environment. No sensible being would be outside of a vehicle-class life-support system. It might be some sort of tank, or a flyer, or battle armor – but survivability that doesn't immediately kill the infantryman is a prime component of putting infantry anywhere.

There are some ways to do that, of course.

You can presume that the technology of the infantry suit means that it automatically seals itself on a modular basis in order to protect the infantryman's torso and head. Mechanically this might be reflected in a lower threshold for OOF (Editor's note: For those not versed in 5150 terminology, OOF is "Out of the Fight") results but without increasing OD (EN: Likewise, OD is "Obviously Dead") results.

Extremely hostile environments are a great excuse to go with a vehicle-focused force and letting the effects of that trickle down into game play. If you want to retain the idea that infantry is extremely squishy but still want to bring infantry into play, a greater focus on armored transports which insert infantry into buildings and features which themselves act as resistance against the environment and allow play-as-normal is certainly a good option. A group of Marines holding on for dear life as they wait for their drop pod to touchdown next to the facility they need to secure and needing to make a short but dangerous dash across territory where any attack could be lethal definitely provides a sense of drama.

I'm a great proponent of asking a really simple question when proposing new game mechanics, not just to other people but to myself: "sure, it's cool, but does it make the game better?"

To me, "better" generally involves adding more flexibility and not reducing variance, at least without introducing more opportunities in the process. Making things more lethal without actually providing more interesting things you can do as a result never really struck me as a good move.

It might be more effective to go through and list a number of types of hostile environment, assume that 95% of the normal mechanics apply (because the technology, in some way, counters the additional threat), but the environment itself enables using some additional options that change the experience.

• For example, low gravity environments – yes, you might need to make a Rep check to not go falling down when you Fast Move, but you also can Fast Move with a 2X multiplier. If you move further than 8 inches, you're also assumed to be higher than a single story and trigger In Sight Tests from elements whose line of sight was only blocked by a single floor obstacle.

• In heavy gravity environments, Fast Moves might be cut in half across the board and projectile-based weaponry gets limited to a maximum range of 24 inches. On the other hand, because of the servo assistance necessary to even move around in the environment, melee attacks are particularly damaging and receive a +2 to damage tests.

• Heavily corrosive atmospheres? Visibility is horrible; treat it as day for night when it comes to range during the day and half that at night. Vehicles have a particularly bad time and treat any Tests for damage or malfunction with a -1 malus. On the upside (depending on which end you're standing on), any kind of explosive/shrapnel damage erodes coatings which normally resist corrosion, giving them a +1 on damage tests.[/li

And so on, and so on.

If you define things like this, you provide the opportunity for players to get creative, to get Intel and make decisions about how they want to respond to the problem.

• Maybe you absolutely want to take a heavy infantry force to the corrosive planet because you know your tanks and aircraft are going to break down more often, and you choose the platoon grenade launcher teams or rocket launcher teams as organic support, because those are guaranteed to do more damage.

• On a heavy gravity planet, you know your enemy is going to be as hampered as you are when it comes to mobility, so maybe you decide to focus on heavy tanks which are already slow but don't lose a whole lot in that environment. Maybe you change the strategy up and take your high-speed, lightweight skirmish forces, gambling that you can outmaneuver your enemy and leverage the flanks in ways they won't be able to.

More decisions, more flexibility, more options. Those of the sorts of things that I think are really important when you start thinking about ways to add mechanics to differentiate different environments.

Enabling mechanics are ultimately more effective and better designed

Por people new to game design or who grew up in the early days, simulation (EN: A full discussion of GNS Theory might be something I pursue another day, but today is not that day) is one of the watchwords of how they think of design. They think of design as a mechanism for simulating an environment and play should then proceed from players reacting to that overall simulated environment. There doesn't need to be a reason "why that needs to be done," it's enough that the environment as a whole doesn't fully simulate the stage on which they imagine action is being played out.

Wargames are prone to this kind of mechanical metastasis as their editions roll forward. There is always some new detail that can be integrated mechanically and so mechanics pile up and grow more interactions in more complex ways until either there comes a grand unifying edition where everything gets garbage collected and re-compacted down into a more essential set – or publication ceases as everything collapses under its own mechanical mass.

Role-playing games are not free of this trend, either. Just look at Dungeons & Dragons in particular. You see several mechanical boom and bust cycles between basic D&D and 5th Edition.

Almost all homebrew mechanical additions to games are of this nature, adding ever more specific mechanics to model a certain situation – generally detrimentally for the mechanical success of the players.

But it doesn't have to be so.

The secret is to change the focus of what you think you're simulating. Instead of focusing on the front-end of the user experience, the environment that they react to and can only react to, refocus on the backend of the user experience.

• What does this let the player do?
• How does this complicate the decision-making of the player?
• How does this introduce more options, potentially ones the player hasn't been exposed to before?

In most cases, this just requires reformulating the basic idea because what you really want is that player experience expansion. It's what you wanted the whole time.

You don't want extreme environment planets to restrict players who are using individual characters and not vehicles to only being able to play if they are (in the context of 5150) wearing BTA – Better Than Armor hardsuits, especially if that limitation is going to be in place for longer than just a one-off or short arc experience. For the same reason, you don't want to introduce a magic-hostile swamp which makes casting magic impossible and destroys the pluses on magical gear if your D&D group likes playing mages and collecting magical gear. You might be able to make it fun as a one-off – maybe – but it's not something that you want to introduce is a long-term event because it actively reduces decision-making and options.

We play games to get to do things. When the game tells us we can't do things, we stop playing.

I wrote about examples of how it might be useful to introduce player-forward thinking on reimagining extreme environments in sci-fi settings. Rather than cutting off choices, I emphasize different choices.

How might I tackle the anti-magic swamp problem in D&D?

I want to introduce a long-term anti-magic environment. I like swamps. How can I make this interesting to everyone?

Maybe instead of a strict anti-magic effect, we get an erosive anti-magic effect. Damaging magic effects are suppressed.

• Maybe they do 1d4 less damage per level of the caster.
• Maybe they have a range decrease but remain just as damaging.
• Maybe you can only affect half the volume, which might actually make that fireball spell more effective in close quarter battles.
• Maybe magical gear has its effect reduced by -1 malus during the day and -2 at night.

All right, those are negative effects that aren't absolute. Players can plan around them. But we need some positive effects. Sorcerers and wizards don't want to be completely useless; that's just killing their fun. Warriors with expensive magical gear don't want to trade out all of their personally acquired fun-making time to no result.

So what can be enhanced?

• Maybe spells with water and health effects actually have a bonus, either in
  • damage,
  • or range,
  • or volume (perhaps the most fun answer) when evoked.
• Maybe you can mitigate the effect of the anti-magic field if you, as the player, narrate some other negative swamp-related environmental effect instead which makes things more interesting for everyone (and I admit, this is my favorite potential mechanism I'm going to suggest; "I cast Choking Mist, but as the toxic fumes rise from the water, the vegetation of the swamp grows, feeding upon it and slows me for one movement for every turn the mist is present!").

Think about how you can imagine players making new and interesting decisions and having new and interesting experiences at the table. Think about how you will be having new and interesting experiences at the table. What kind of experiences do you want to have? Build mechanics which aim at those experiences.

• Remember how much you hate being frustrated.
• Remember how much you hate being told "you don't get to play today."
• Remember how much you dislike having sunk personal emotional investment and personal time into creating a character you want to play just to be told "you can't play that way" without also being offered "but this other thing over here is quite fun too and I'd like to see you do it."

Think of mechanical construction in your games as present to enable your players and yourself, not to disable them. Do that and you'll have a generally more successful table and a generally more successful experience.

That's what we want.

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