The whole run of Titanic: The Musical seemed to be under a curse: when it ran in Washington, D.C., the iceberg prop went out of control and flattened the diva Beryl Starsland in the middle of “I Will Always Love You.” When it actually ran on Broadway a year later, the roof of the theater collapsed, killing most of the cast. Given how bad Titanic: The Musical was, however, it may have been a mercy in disguise.

In any case, both of these tragic locations became the focus for hauntings. The Broadway theater’s mess was cleaned up by the original NY Ghostbuster team during the “Return of Gozer” incident; the Golden Swan theater in Washington, D.C., haunted by Beryl Starsland, remained quiet and unused for many years, until finally the D.C. Ghostbusters were called in to clean it up.

In both incidents, the GBI teams reported being attacked by “operatic ghosts,” accompanied by an overwhelmingly loud ghostly accompaniment of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” which seemed to arise spontaneously out of the theatrical environment itself rather than being tied specifically to Titanic: The Musical (which had no valkyries in it, thankfully).

Valkyrie by =SilenceV on deviantART

♠ Opera Ghost (Valkyrie)

Creature: Phantasm
Attributes: Agility d6-1, Smarts d4, Spirit d8, Strength d8-1, Vigor d6
Skills: Fighting d8-1, Intimidation d6, Notice d8, Stealth d8-1, Throwing d6-1
Pace: 5 (+1d10 fly), Parry: 7, Toughness: 9 (+3 armor), Charisma: 0
———————————–
Gear: Longsword d8-1 (Str+d8), Thrown Objects d6-1 (Str+d4, 3/6/12), Plate Corselet (+3), Medium Shield (+2, Parry+1)
———————————–
Special Abilities:
Ethereal: Immune to mundane physical attacks; Only seen if desired
Fear: Enemies roll Guts check against horrific manifestation

Text by John “The Gneech” Robey. Artwork by Sahar. Ghostbusters copyright Sony Pictures and used for fan purposes only. Stat block created by Hero Lab® (Registered Trademarks of LWD Technology, Inc. Free download at http://www.wolflair.com). Savage Worlds is Copyright © 2004-2012 by Pinnacle Entertainment Group. All rights reserved.

At AnthroCon, Matt Sowers handed me a small booklet that said in big letters, No Room For Pictures Role Playing Game Rules (Beta Copy). This, he informed me, was his attempt to meet the challenge of one of the designers at Steve Jackson Games “to present a fully playable game system, with a working rule set and enough examples to generate a complete role playing game in under 32 pages.” Matt wanted my input on his entry based on my frequent nattering here about my tabletop RPGs as well as my experience (however brief and long ago) in professional game design.

In an effort to be worthy of his trust on the matter, I’ve decided to give as detailed an answer as I can, having looked through No Room For Pictures (but not actually having tried running it). The short answer is, NRFP is not a game system I would be likely to use, partially due to systemic flaws, but mostly because there are so many other systems that already do everything it does, and some of them do it better. But there’s a longer answer as well.

I should point out, there are plenty of games on the market that already rise admirably to the SJG challenge. Savage Worlds, for instance, can be summarized in completely playable form with something like 16 pages, and is famous for its scenarios being one double-sided page or shorter. (It’s also supposedly brilliant at handling mass battles, but that requires another ten pages or so.) Savage Worlds works so well in this space, in fact, that any attempt to fill the same slot is going to have a really high bar to reach. The West End Games “Universal How-Much” (UHM System) created for Ghostbusters, that eventually evolved into the famous and well-liked d6 System, can be completely summarized and playable in something like 10 pages. There’s no shortage of rules-lite systems out there.

That said, what are the specific things about No Room For Pictures that would make me send it back to the drawing board? We’ll start with the core mechanics.

d20 Dice Pools

First off, NRFP is a “dice pool” game, and the dice used are d20s. The core mechanic is to roll a number of d20s based on your stats or skills and beat a difficulty based on the situation, starting at 10 and being modified by circumstances, then count your successes to determine how well you do at the given task.

This starts off hitting what I freely admit is a personal prejudice: I just don’t like dice pool mechanics, particularly with a sliding difficulty scale. My experience is that they tend to add a lot of math at the table and produce wild “always succeed or always fail” results. There’s always that one person at the table who can’t remember from round to round how many dice they’re supposed to roll for any given thing, and the GM has to learn what all the “standard modifiers” are. Add to that opposed dice pools, which NRFP uses for combat, and you’ve got tons of dice being rolled all over the place all the time, quickly escalating into a giant math-y mess.

The only way to minimize the piles of numbers being thrown around is by using small dice, probably d6’s or d10’s, because the math can be done quickly, but NRFP chooses a d20, I’m guessing largely because White Wolf kinda snagged the d10 already and everybody else was using d6’s. Unfortunately, d20 is pretty much the worst feasible choice. Although there is very little “mathematically” different between rolling d6 and trying to beat a 4, versus rolling d20 and trying to beat a 14, it’s still psychologically harder to grok quickly.

Combat is the biggest offender here. The attacker rolls a pool against a difficulty equal to the target’s defense score; the target then “can choose to dodge” (but I see no reason why they wouldn’t always do so), which is rolling a pool against a difficulty of 10+(the number of dice in the attacker’s pool). The likelihood of successfully dodging is low-to-nil most of the time, but the hit point pool is so low that anything to mitigate damage is worth trying… even if it bogs combat down. This might be fixed by having dodge become its own separate action, sacrificing a combatant’s turn, or possibly by having people split their combat pool into “attack dice” and “defend dice” or something– but right now the system more or less encourages just standing there and trading blows.

Healing also seems to be quite harsh, particularly for a game that has such rock-’em sock-’em examples. Health itself is a flat hit point total with no penalties for being injured, but you only regain 1 hp/week (with a typical hp total somewhere in the 4-8 range)… so one fight could easily put the kibosh on a whole party. That’s great for, say, Lovecraftian horror, but not so hot for kung-fu action. Some kind of distinction between “combat hits” and “longterm injury” or options for different genres might not be amiss.

Skills, Character Customization, Weird Talents

This part of NRFP is seriously under-developed. There is a framework for skills and a few samples in place, but no real skill list. The few skills presented have fairly arbitrary costs and and pre-requisites, and there’s no guidance on how the would-be GM should assign these other than a vague “more specialized skills cost less but have more pre-reqs.”

As for customization and/or weird talents, there ain’t none. It looks like they were intended— some of the sample foes have spells for instance, but there’s no description anywhere of what those spells are or how they work. “Fireball (5)” is presumably an attack spell with a 5d20 dice pool. But what is “Bellow (8)”? A damage spell? Deafening? Inspire/Intimidate? No idea. Extrapolating from what’s here, I’m guessing that weird talents (such as spells) would be bought as Resources, the same way money is.

The Cumulative Effect

Consider the provided example of picking a locked door:

Our hero, Bao Sing, has been locked in a storage room after being knocked on the head. He needs to get out, because anyone who wants Bao locked up isn’t someone Bao wants to meet.

Trying to be sneaky, Bao tries to pick the lock on the door. He, for some reason, has a set of lock picks, but no real skill in using them. On top of that, it’s a pretty good lock.

Bao needs to roll an unopposed test to pick the lock. Due to the fact that he’s defaulting to his Speed score, the GM decides that Bao’s penalty is +6, and the quality of the lock adds two more to his penalty.

So Bao is rolling his base Speed (4) against 17. 10 (Base) +6 (Unskilled) +2 (Lock Quality) -1 (Lockpicks).

Needless to say, he fails with no successes. So he’ll go for the noisy method, and kick his way out.

Let’s take it apart piece by piece:

• Why is he defaulting to his Speed score? There’s no “Lockpick” skill defined. One could convincingly argue that lockpicking is about Smarts instead of just nimble fingers. Presumably it’s a GM judgement call.
• Lacking a skill already means you don’t get to add dice to your pool with a task; presumably the additional difficulty is prevent players who just have ridiculously high stats from facerolling over every obstacle anyhow. But the suggested penalty range (up to +10) is crazy huge. I would propose instead that instead of modifying the difficulty number, being untrained should set a cap on the dice pool you can use for that task (say, 2d20 or the relevant stat, whichever is lower).
• Why does having a set of lockpicks reduce the difficulty of this task? I mean, shouldn’t it instead simply be that if you don’t have lockpicks (or something that can act as lockpicks), you can’t pick the lock? I could see having a really nice set of lockpicks providing a bonus, but I would suggest it came in the form of +1d20 to the pool (effectively making you more skilled) rather than modifying the difficulty number.
• Imagine for a moment that Bao Sing was skilled at this task… say he had Lockpicking (1). Suddenly he’s rolling 5d20 against a difficulty of 11– for what is supposed to a “pretty good lock.” I don’t have the math chops to work it all out off the top of my head, but even with 1d20, a difficulty of 11 is a 45% chance of success. What are the chances when you flip 5 coins that at least one will be heads?

These are the kinds of messes you let yourself in for with a dice pool mechanic. If you were set on it, tho, I’d alter it thus:

1. Use a standard difficulty, which should be fairly high. Say, 15. Someone with 1d20 in their dice pool for a task would only have a 25% chance of success there.
2. Make being unskilled at a task put a cap on the maximum dice pool you can use for that task as the default (say, half your relevant attribute). I’m a fairly brainy guy, but I have no idea how to pick locks. But being a fairly brainy guy, I could probably figure it out with time.
3. Have some skills default to the value of the relevant attribute. I’m thinking things like “Brawl” and “Drive” here, which most people have a passable knowledge. Have other skills completely closed to anyone untrained (e.g., computer programming).
4. Have beneficial conditions add dice to the pool. A really nice lockpick set gives you +1d20. A diagram of the specific lock you’re trying to pick gives you +3d20, etc.
5. Have penalties come in the form of required number of successes. Easy task: 1 success. Moderate task: 2 successes, and so on. “A pretty good lock” might require 6+ successes, but with the mitigating factor being that you can try more than once and add your successes over time. (Or something similar.)

A Solution In Search of a Problem

But honestly, and I don’t want this to sound harsh ’cause Matt’s a cool guy and I don’t want to just dump on his project, I think it would be better to chuck the current setup all together and look for some other route. The gaming industry has dozens of perfectly feasible rules systems that can do this basic sort of resolution-based narrative. “Roll stat beat difficulty” is where tabletop RPGs have been for 20+ years now, and it’s a pretty mature concept. NRFP’s most fundamental flaw is that it’s re-inventing the wheel, when what Matt should be doing is trying to create wings.

Take a look at some of the past decade’s big new concepts. Gumshoe threw away the whole idea of rating your character’s Strength, Health, Height, Weight, Turn-Ons and instead uses your character’s drives (i.e., their motivations) as the engine of their success or failure. Dread is a very cool horror game that resolves everything by playing Jenga(!)– “Want to fail at the stated task? That’s free. Want to succeed? Pull a tile from the Jenga tower. If the Jenga tower collapses, your character dies horribly.”

To create something cool and exciting, I would suggest Matt come up with some specific problem that he wants to solve, and then create a game that solves that problem, rather than just making a different way to solve the problems of 20 years ago. Gumshoe came about because Robin Laws wanted to run mystery scenarios that wouldn’t get stymied by a missed Search check. Dread came about because the creators wanted to add real suspense into their horror game. Savage Worlds was written because the creators wanted a game that was “Fast! Furious! and Fun!” and could handle enormous combats quickly while still supporting roleplaying. The only problem NRFP solves right now, is fitting under 32 pages.

-The Gneech

PS: In Matt’s defense, I got a kick out of the sample scenario provided. Who doesn’t love demon apes? You should totally write that up as a Savage Worlds one-sheet.

When the Metro Authority called in the D.C. Ghostbusters to report a “dragon” was chewing up the rails between Roslyn and Foggy Bottom, in the deepest part of the tunnels under the Potomac River, the Gang in Grey had no idea what they were going to find down there… and once they did find it, they still had no idea what it was!

Turns out it was an electrophagic byakhoid, leaked into our dimension from the world/plane/whatever the group refers to as “Saturn,” during the incident of black slime portals opening up in the apartment of artist Klaus Furuhobendamengal, creating a lair for itself where it could feed off of the electric generators used to run the Metro trains. The byakhoid was chewing on the third rail so it could feed off of the powerful electric shocks.

Byakhee by ~christopherburdett on deviantART

♠ Byakhoid, Electrophagic

Unclassified (Non-Spectral) Transdimensional Servitor Creature
Attributes: Agility d8, Smarts d6, Spirit d6, Strength d12, Vigor d8
Skills: Fighting d6, Notice d6, Psionics (Arcane) d6, Stealth d6
Pace: 4/16; Flight 16″ (Climb 4″), Parry: 5, Toughness: 10(2), Charisma: 0
———————————————————————-
Special Abilities:
Arcane Psionics: Gain the Psionics arcane background
Impr Frenzy: Attack twice with no penalty on Fighting rolls
Claws: (Str+d4)
Electrophagic: This creature feeds on electricity. On any turn this creature is hit by an electrical or quasi-electrical attack (including proton packs), it gains the Regeneration (Fast) ability and 2 Power Points, which disappear at the end of its turn. (This only happens once per turn; additional hits are not cumulative.)
Fear -3: Enemies roll Guts check with Fear rating as modifier
Natural Armor: +2
Size +2: Adjustment to Toughness based on creature’s mass
Star Travel: This creature can fly between the stars.
———————————————————————-
Arcane Powers (10 Power Points):
Blast: Targets in Medium Blast Template take 2d6 damage; Double points adds +d6 damage OR Large Burst
Bolt: Single bolt 2d6 damage; Up to 3 bolts at 1pt per bolt; 2pts does one 3d6 bolt
Damage Field: Anyone touching target takes 2d6 damage, 2d8 damage on a Raise

Text by John “The Gneech” Robey. Artwork by Christopher Burdett. Ghostbusters copyright Sony Pictures and used for fan purposes only. Stat block created by Hero Lab® (Registered Trademarks of LWD Technology, Inc. Free download at http://www.wolflair.com). Savage Worlds is Copyright © 2004-2012 by Pinnacle Entertainment Group. All rights reserved.

So I’ve decided to give Savage Worlds a bash for the next session (at least) of my Ghostbusters campaign, so see how we all like it. I’ve translated all the PCs from the UHM system (hardly an exact process) and started writing up a few critters for practice. I’m also writing up a rules summary doc for my players, with modifications for the setting.

I took some inspiration from Graywolf’s “Savage Ghostbusters”, but actually ended up using the gear stats from the Horror Companion (I love that SW has official stats for proton packs and ghost traps), with my own house rules for the application of psychomagnetheric slime. It’s very much a work in progress, as I get the hang for how SW actually behaves in play. I’ve got as good a grasp as I can get on the rules just from reading, but how a game reads and how it behaves at the table are usually two very different things.

One thing I’m undecided on, is the use of miniatures. Savage Worlds, for all its rules-liteness, is written with the assumption that you’ll be using minis, and while I like using miniatures for my Pathfinder game, I’m not sure I really want to be pulling out the mat and figs for busting spooks. Ghostbusters (when done right, anyway) alternates back and forth between freewheeling and terrifying, neither of which are really well served by counting squares; on the other hand, one of the fun things about Ghostbusters is how busting spooks is “just a job,” like being a plumber (or possibly an exterminator), and I can see how having the miniatures could make it feel more like blue-collarey work. (“Yo, Iggy, ya got yerself a nasty free-floating vapor at about ten yards, hit that sucker up with a capture stream and it’s Miller Time.”)

The fact that there aren’t easily-convertible Ghostbusters miniatures doesn’t help, but isn’t really that big a factor– I could easily make Cardboard Heroes-style figs if I wanted to. There have also been some really nice custom minis made, but that’s a bit of a stretch for my sculpting chops and would take forever.

I’ll poll my players on the topic (HEY PLAYERS: Weigh in on this! …That was easy.) and see what they have to say. I’ve certainly got plenty of monsters I could use as spook figs.

-The Gneech

Slimer, a.k.a. the Onionhead, a.k.a. the Sedgewick Spud, is a fairly baseline Class V Free-Roaming Vapor, believed to be a “remnant,” i.e., an ectoplasmic “echo” of a living person, rather than the actual spirit of that person. In Slimer’s particular case, it is speculated that he is the remnant of a well-known television personality who died of a drug overdose while staying in the Sedgewick Hotel. The television personality’s inexhaustible appetite for food, drink, and other earthly pleasures, combined with the highly PKE-charged architecture of the Sedgewick hotel, caused this spook to manifest with an ironically insatiable gluttony. For all of Slimer’s desire to consume all food, drink, candy, and so forth, it merely passes right through him and just ends up on the floor in a disgusting mess.

As spooks go, Slimer is fairly harmless, but that’s mostly a factor of his essentially benevolent nature. Barely even sentient, Slimer tends to be clueless and whimsical, with a cowardly streak– if he were more viciously inclined, he would be capable of being hazardous. As it is, he generally just trashes the place and covers everything with slime in the process.

♠ Slimer

Type V Full-Roaming Vapor

---

Creature: Phantasm
Attributes: Agility d6, Smarts d4, Spirit d8, Strength d6, Vigor d6
Skills: Fighting d6, Intimidation d6, Notice d6, Stealth d8, Throwing d6
Pace: 8/10, Parry: 5, Toughness: 5, Charisma: -2
Gear: Thrown Objects d6 (Str+d4, 3/6/12), Slime d8 (Str+slime effect)

---

Special Abilities:
Quirk (Ghostly Gluttony)
Ugly
Ghostly Powers
Ethereal: Immune to mundane physical attacks; Only seen if desired
Fear: Enemies roll Guts check at +0
Flight (Ghostly): Spooks float around.
Ghostly Focus: Ghost may recover from incapacitated
Slime: Cover target in sticky slime

---

Arcane Powers (10 pp)
Entangle (slime): Restrained target suffers -2 Pace and skills linked to Agi and Str; Break free with Str or Agi; Single target costs 2 points, Medium Burst Template costs 4
Speed (panic): Doubles target’s Pace; Running is free with raise
Telekinesis (ghostly): Move single target weighing 10 lbs times Spirit die type (50 lbs with raise); Weapons use arcane skill and Spirit; Drop does Spirit+d6 damage

Text and artwork by John “The Gneech” Robey. “Slimer” and Ghostbusters copyright Sony Pictures and used for fan purposes only. “The Onionhead Ghost” originally created by Dan Akroyd. Stat block created by Hero Lab® (Registered Trademarks of LWD Technology, Inc. Free download at http://www.wolflair.com). Some inspiration drawn from “Savage Ghostbusters” by T. Jordan “Greywolf” Peacock. Savage Worlds is Copyright © 2004-2012 by Pinnacle Entertainment Group. All rights reserved.

So in happier thoughts, I’ve been contemplating what I want to do with my Ghostbusters campaign. Not so much plot-wise, I’ve got that worked out for now, but just in terms of game mechanics. The old WEG Ghostbusters Universal How-Much (UHM) system (which later evolved into the d6 System they used for Star Wars et al.) is certainly fast and light, but I dunno, it just feels lacking somehow. I mean, it would be serious overkill to use something as gamey as d20 for a comedy-horror campaign, but I often find myself wishing for something with just a little more structure than the “Throw ALL the Brownie Points at it!” UHM system.

So I’m looking at three basic options, and tossing them out here for interested parties to throw in their own $0.02 if they so desire. Input welcome and desired!

BRP/5 — a.k.a. “Call of Cthulhu on a d20”

I’ve tinkered around before with a homebrew version of BRP (i.e., the system used for Call of Cthulhu), which runs off a d20 rather than d% just to keep the math simpler. So for example, if your CoC character has 55% in a skill, the BRP/5 version would have “+11” with that skill, with the idea being that you roll and try to beat a 20.

The advantage of BRP is that it’s fairly fast and flexible, but still is a granular enough system to feel like it has some meat to it. The disadvantage in this particular case is that I’d have to do all the system converting, which is something I enjoy tinkering around with but will definitely take some time.

Savage Worlds

One strong contender that I’m looking at is Savage Worlds. Billed as “Fast! Furious! and Fun!” Savage Worlds has a lot of fans among people who like generic systems but don’t like the mathiness of GURPS or HERO. I’ve never actually played it before, but I do own a copy of the “Explorer’s Edition” and have poked around with it a little. The basic rule seems to be that you have Stats/Skills represented by a d4, d6, d8, d10, or d12, and you need to beat a 4 to succeed. Combat is a “Fighting” or “Shooting” skill check, followed by rolling damage and comparing it to a target’s toughness– beat it and they take a wound, fail and nothing happens. It also has a built-in “Wild Die” mechanic that could easily be remapped to the Ghost Die, which is one of my favorite mechanics of the UHM system.

Seems pretty straightforward; the hard part would be getting used to all the nomenclature (“raises” for “criticals,” “aces” for “rolling the max,” etc.) and system quirks (drawing playing cards for initiative, for instance). The most complex part of the system appears to be the actual character creation rules, which are a point-based system that changes the cost of things based on prerequisites and such. Doing it on paper would probably give me a headache, but it’s easy enough to do with Hero Labs.

Savage Worlds has the advantage of already having been written and there being resources for it out there, while still being a fast-moving rules-lite system (at least, once we get used to it) that’s still a bit more robust than the UHM system. The disadvantage, of course, is that it’s a new system we’ve never played before and have no idea what it’ll actually be like in play. Of course, we could always just try it for a few sessions and see what we think.

Option Three: If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It

Of course, the UHM system does work well enough and there’s little compelling reason we couldn’t just stick with it other than my never-ending desire to tinker with things. Not knowing my players’ opinions on the subject, it’s hard to say (hence this post). If they are attached to the UHM system (or just loathe to learn a new one), it’s certainly still an option on the boards.

Any thoughts on the subject?

-The Gneech