Denizen! The Magonian Edition: Design Goals

What Is a Denizen?

When people hear the word “denizen” they sometimes think “monster”. That’s how it’s often used in fantasy adventure games, and I like that the word carries this connotation. But my use of the term in Denizen! refers to an older definition, that of a foreigner or visitor, one with specific rights.

The world of Denizen! is a harsh place. Regular people don’t travel. They generally stick around the area in which they were brought up and stay inside the walls of their home or settlement after nightfall. It is the responsibility of the lord, or the town council, or whoever holds the privilege of power, to keep them safe. These are the citizens.

The denizens are those willing to forsake that promise of security in return for the freedom to go out into the dark night and down into the dark places, to travel to foreign lands if need be, to gain fame and fortune for themselves, and hopefully to make the land a little safer for others in the process.

And, speaking of freedom...

For the players, meaningful options are key.

I have three primary design goals for Denizen!. The first is to give players plenty of meaningful options, and that starts with character creation.

Like many roleplaying games, Denizen! uses the six primary abilities; STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS, and CHA; in player character creation and scores them similarly to convention, from 2 to 20. But, rather than distil these scores into fixed modifiers to a d20 roll, the die used for a test is sized by the tested ability. Other factors, such as skill levels and situational factors, still act as modifiers to the roll. This is referred to as a step-die or dice-chain mechanic and, and has a profound effect on skill tests, the base mechanic of the game.

Tests are for challenging situations, not mundane actions. Probability of success for a low or non-skilled individual should vary dramatically based on natural ability, which is what those six ability scores are meant to represent.

In Denizen!, when an ability score of an unskilled character is tested, the lowest scores have effectively no chance of success, modest scores have little, but the highest scores enjoy better than even odds for success.

By raising the level in the tested skill, the character receives a bonus to the skill test roll, which benefits lower ability scores proportionally more. As a skill reaches maximum level, the advantage of higher ability scores drops close to nil.

The following table of success probabilities by skill level and ability score for a standard difficulty task shows what I mean. At level 0, the difference in chance of success between an attribute core of 10 and one of 20 is 45%. By level 4 it’s only 25%. At level 8, it’s just 5%.

This provides a player a clear sense of their new PC's role in an adventuring party. However, it is a role determined by the distribution of ability scores, which is very granular, rather than race and class selection, which is inherently rigid. It also allows characters to largely overcome lack of natural ability with adequate experience.

Conversely, in roleplaying games that use one die for all skill tests, often a d20, and reduce the effect of an ability skill to a bonus, the difference in the chance of success between the strongest and weakest character is the same regardless of skill advancement.

The following chart shows success probabilities for a medium difficulty task based on ability score and proficiency bonus (analogous to skill levels in Denizen!) in the current edition of the most popular d20 based roleplaying game. The bonuses based on ability score range are in square brackets.

At low levels, differences in ability scores are less emphasized, making extraordinary abilities feel... more ordinary. Furthermore, the fixed differences frustrate players as levels increase. For example, when a player's master burglar fails roughly a third of their attempts to pick standard locks due to a modest score in the relevant attribute, it can feel rather unsatisfactory, arguably even unrealistic.

Another area with many options is gear selection. There’s a decently long list of weapons, most of which have characteristics that give significant advantage or disadvantage in various situations. There are also firearms, elixirs, and other “alchemical” devices that grant capabilities and effects typically associated with spellcasting to any who can get their hands on them.

Likewise, specific rules are provided for a wide range of actions, all of which are available to any character regardless of skill or other ability. A case can be made for leaving these out, the “rulings over rules” philosophy of game design. Though, I don’t necessarily think rules for specific cases violate that principle. GMs are still welcome to ignore or modify any rule as they see fit.

My view is that having stated rules for specific situations makes a GM’s job easier. Without them, the GM would have to create them when needed. And, even in the simplest ruleset, that’s not always easy, which brings me to my second major design goal, to make the role of GM easier to play.

A game that’s easy to run is fun to run.

Besides including rules for many specific actions, one way I try to help GMs is by making skill check roles solely player-facing. To have the players do all the rolling for actions takes a major task off the GM’s list of responsibilities and thus frees up more time for tracking things such as stamina points and time but also to describe the scene, think about the monster’s next move, and in general just be creative.

Another assist to GMs is the monster stats themselves. The monster stats in some games, and I won’t name names here, are extremely complex. Some have many dozens of datapoints, often several of which must be referenced for any single interaction. It can be overwhelming for gameplay and presents an excessive amount of work for GMs who want to create their own monsters for a custom adventure.

And that’s a good segue to my final major design goal, compatibility with Fighting Fantasy adventure material.

There’s no place like Titan.

The monster stat blocks for Advanced Fighting Fantasy and its derivatives, like Troika!, are super simple to review during play and to create from scratch. Most importantly, though, they provide compatibility to my favourite sources of adventure materials, the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks (really, the Sorcery! series in particular) and the sourcebooks for the Titan game world.

They’re just the right amount of grimdark cut with some levity and, at times, complete gonzo elements. They’re sometimes serious, but never take themselves too seriously, and always fun. And, thanks to Troika!, there’s even more material and of a far greater variety being produced.

It is really just a stroke of luck that the game mechanic that I love so much just happens to mesh so well with Fighting Fantasy. I should mention here that the mechanic is an adaptation of the core mechanic from the brilliant Kids on Bikes roleplaying game by Hunters Entertainment.

The following chart shows the chances of success for skill levels 3 to 11+ for standard difficulty skill tests in AFF2e (Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2e) and Troika! mapped to the success chances in Denizen!, stepping from skill level 0/ability score 4 to skill level 8+/ability score 20.  

There’s enough variation in all three character creation systems to make an apples to apples comparison a little harder than this table implies. But, generally speaking, Denizen! PCs should expect similar if slightly lower success rates at comparable stages in their development. They can trek through the same adventure. They perhaps just need to be a bit more careful when doing so.

And, while not at all a design goal, I should also mention that this compatibility is the reason for the U.K. English spelling conventions used, probably inconsistently, but throughout Denizen!. I’m from Michigan, not the U.K.

This practice started with “armour” but only where it was used as a game term. I realized that was kind of maddening and changed the spelling of all uses of the word. That seemed strange to do in isolation. So, I realized I had to make a decision on which standard to follow.

I am a terrible speller and blame at least some of my failings to reading a lot of U.K. sourced novels and games when growing up. If young people anywhere are to play Denizen!, because of the compatibility with Fighting Fantasy, my assumption is that most of them will live in the U.K. So, I thought I should use the standard of spelling that was least likely to give them trouble later in life.

But, if you do see any inconsistencies or mistakes in spelling, or with anything in Denizen! for that matter, please feel welcome to let me know. 

Best regards and happy gaming,

James Giltner