#ironclaw

Sorry it's been so long since I last did a post in this series, but I've finally got the time and energy now. So, now that we've got the basics of how skills work, let's cover the other half of species and careers: Gifts. ...Actually, first off, let's cover Species and Careers.

Ironclaw Gushing, Part IV.5: Species and Career

Two of the first things you'll do when following the outline of character creation, after selecting your traits ("ability scores"), is selecting your species and career. There's over three dozen species provided in just the core book, and that might seem like an overwhelming number to choose from right at the start, if you're comparing this to most other fantasy RPGs, and thinking about what that means in terms of reading through and understanding the abilities that each one provides, but in Ironclaw species are actually quite simple.

Each species is composed of just a few elements with consistent parts that make it very easy to compare and contrast. Habitat gives a type of terrain that you get to add your Species die to when relevant to a check (checks to Climb a tree in a Forest, for example, or Survival checks to find your way in the Mountains), and likewise, Senses lists which types of Perception checks you can add your Species die to. Diet is mostly fluff, but Cycle tells you when your Respite Gifts refresh (at the start of Night, Day, or at each Twilight), and of course, Weapons tells you which natural weapons your species has, or which unarmed attacks (like Kick) that everyone has access to, but you get to add your species die to. And finally, there are three skills that you get to add your species die to under all circumstances, and three Gifts that you get for free.

Careers are built in a similar way, all consisting of three skills you get your Career die added to, and three more Gifts you get for free. Additionally, each career has a set of Trappings which is essentially your starting equipment.

Right, Career and Species done. Onto explaining Gifts.

Ironclaw Gushing, Part IV: Gifts (for real now)

As you see, Gifts are basically what make up the things your character can do that make them distinct from everyone else with the same traits and skills. They're what make a Lion not a Rhinoceros, and an Apothecary not an Artist. They cover all kinds of things from Brawling Fighter (which lets you Parry using Brawling (unarmed) attacks) to Night Vision, and from having a talent at Fast-Talk to being a member of the Nobility. Each can have a variety of functions from giving you an extra d12 on certain checks to changing how you interact with certain rules, and while several offer passive benefits that are always accessible, many require time to refresh.

The main categories of these are: Battle Gifts, which refresh at the start of battle, and can be refreshed again during battle by spending an action; Respite Gifts which refresh at the start of your species' Cycle (see above); Chapter Gifts which refresh at the start of a new chapter (typically the start of each session); and Influence Gifts which basically refresh when the GM says so, but no sooner than after a full in-game day. Additionally, there are a variety of Gifts that refresh under other conditions that the Gift will specify like Pacifist which will only refresh after 24 hours of not committing violence, or Honor which will only refresh after you've dealt with whatever caused you dishonor.

In addition to the three Gifts you get from each of your Species and Career, all players begin with a couple of specific Gifts that set them apart from others (most notably Combat Save which lets you avoid dying in combat once per Cycle), and three additional Gifts of your choice. Admittedly, this part can be the most daunting for first time players making their first character because this is where all the complexity saved from Species and Career choices winds up going. There are dozens upon dozens of Gifts and they can all do wildly different things, so you can't simply skim over them the way you can Species and Career.

My recommendation for first time players is to pick a second Career that you also like or that fits your character concept, and just nab its three Gifts, too. If your Career choice gives you a Keystone Gift (like Fencing, Literacy, or Veteran), then you might consider looking over the additional Gifts that those each grant access to. And of course if you're planning to make a spellcaster, know that all spells are each their own Gift, too, and so they can make for an easy choice or two for your starting Gifts.

On that note, I like how the use and distribution of Gifts this way makes for a fairly natural encouragement to focus on either spellcasting or combat, rather than trying to dabble in both, but without categorically barring people from trying to gish. You certainly can play a gish build if you want, but it'll require substantial investment and making some tough calls like whether to wear armour for extra protection (which can be very important, as we'll learn in the combat sections!), or robes to recharge your spells in combat faster.

And speaking of combat, that's where we'll pick up next time!

Back to Part III

Bonus Vocab Section for You Younguns

So, if you've tried out a number of TTRPGs, you might have noticed that assisting others on a skill check is one of those things that can be surprisingly difficult for a game to model in a way that is both 1) naturalistic and intuitive, and 2) "balanced" and not liable to utterly break the whole system without a bunch of arbitrary rules controlling who can help and how.

For example, say you need to lift a big, heavy rock in D&D. That's a Strength check. You want some help lifting it? Cool, you get advantage/+2 on the check. Oh, everyone in the party wants to help? ...Yeah sorry, no change. To be fair, you don't want someone to be able to just get a +8 on every check just because there's 6 people in the party, not to mention however many hirelings you can afford. Otherwise, Sun Wukong would easily be able to get out from under the Buddha's hand-mountain long before Tripitaka came along just by calling on all his monkey buddies.

This is a long one, so gonna put a cut here.

This time, we're talking about the basic conflict resolution mechanics: rolling dice. What I find so neat about this is that Ironclaw doesn't really do much of anything here that I haven't seen before... it's in how it combines these things that has me so starstruck.

To start with, your stats are represented by different sizes of dice from d4 to d12. Higher stat means bigger dice, and you're trying to roll above a certain number to get a success, much like the familiar D&D d20 skill check, just with different numbers (difficulty 3 is the rough equivalent of DC 10, for example). It combines this with a dice pool system: when you're rolling a check, you'll typically take the dice from whatever skill and whatever core trait (attribute/ability score) is appropriate and roll them together, then see if the single highest die beat the target number.

First, a quick digression on the framing of needing to beat the difficulty number, not merely meet it. A "difficulty 3" check has a 50% chance success on a d6, the die size that can be presumed as an "average" stat (analogous to 10 and 11 in an attribute in D&D, and how having such a score likewise gives you a 50% chance of success with a DC 10). It could have been termed a "difficulty 4" with ties winning with the same result, however I think it makes things much clearer and intuitive that a hypothetical "difficulty 0" task would be one that requires no roll (since even a 1 beats it), while a "difficulty 1" would still call for a roll. And the smaller target numbers means you're much more likely to run into 1 and 0 when trying to set a task's difficulty on-the-fly than you are with a game that has 10 as the "typical" target number.

All right, so this now gives us some frame of reference for the dice sizes: a d4 has a 25% chance of succeeding at a typically challenging task, a d6 has a 50% chance of success, and a d12 has a 75% chance of success. And when you take into account the fact that you roll multiple dice (perhaps your Mind trait's d4 along with your Academics skill's d6 when trying to remember some historical fact, for example), this can create much more complex probability distributions (if the previously mentioned roll were against a difficulty 3, for example, it would have a 62.5% chance of success).

Now, in addition to having variable target numbers, Ironclaw also supports counting multiple successes. There doesn't seem to be anything inherent in the rules to getting multiple successes (so no RAW equivalent to a "natural 20" or "critical success"), but the rules do talk about how some tasks may require multiple successes, and that for these tasks, you can count all dice that roll higher than the difficulty number as additional successess - in fact, this is how Damage works, but we'll get to that later. In my own upcoming game, I may experiment with something like "if you roll twice the number of successes (or perhaps double the difficulty number) required for a task, then that can count as a critical success", but I'm not currently confident how well that would work in practice... This may just have to be a system where you're content without having critical successes.

But next we have to talk about Botches, Ironclaw's version of the "fumble" or "crit fail". If your highest roll on a check is a 1, then you've Botched the task. This can have a variety of effects depending on the task being rolled for, some explicitly outlined in the rules, some just suggested. What makes this interesting to me, though, is how it interacts with the combination of dice size and dice pool: rolling a single d12 on a difficulty 3 task gives you a 75% at success, but an 8.3% chance of botching. In contrast, rolling 2d4 on that same task would instead give you only a 43.75% chance to succeed, but also only a 6.25% chance to botch! I like how this can map onto the idea of someone relying just natural talent versus someone without great talent, but a solid grasp of the fundamentals - they aren't as capable of producing great outcomes, but they're at least less likely to make a rookie mistake. And just... how many games are actually capable of making this distinction? And to think it just emerges out of a simple dice pool mechanic simply by using varying dice sizes? I haven't been able to shut up about the cleverness of this one feature for a full week now.

So yeah, in summation: if a task is harder to perform, give it a higher difficulty. If two tasks require similar levels of skill, but one simply takes longer, requires more concentration, or just has more ways to go wrong, give it a higher quota of successes that need to be met. If your character has natural talent at a thing, pump the size of their dice. If they're not that good at it, but simply aren't likely to outright fuck up, focus more on getting additional dice instead.

Last note: doing things by rote. This is Ironclaw's version of "taking 10" and essentially what you do is assume all the dice you could've rolled on the check rolled max, and then count the number of successes that would be and divide it in half. I don't wanna balloon this post too much, but suffice to say that I like how this system makes it so that you do need some amount of training in a skill in order to do it by rote (since the halving of successes means that you can't rely on your trait alone), but that anyone with that training can accomplish typical tasks so long as they aren't rushed (since even a d4 is a success against the default difficulty 3).

All right, so that's the basics of skill checks. Next time I'm gonna rave about how this is the only system to naturalistically model how Assistance works.