User:Bill/Malifaux Roleplaying

Introduction

On this page, I will compile my notes on the conversion of Malifaux to a roleplaying game. Malifaux and all affiliated properties are copyright Wyrd Miniatures. No challenge to Wyrd's rights is intended.

Malifaux is a skirmish wargame produced by Wyrd Miniatures that features a unique blend of steam punk, gothic horror, spaghetti western, and Hong Kong action movie. The genre bending nature of the game lends it an air of anything being possible, making it especially attractive for a roleplaying game.

Malifaux also utilizes a seductively fun and simple card based resolution system. One that will be easy to adapt for more variable use in the roleplaying environment. It is my opinion that most of any RPG's page count is made up of the combat system and that skirmish based wargames, with their emphasis on individual model performance, fill that role well.

The Core Mechanic

Malifaux uses a simple mechanic of adding a model's relavent stat to the face value of a card drawn from a 54 card deck of playing cards, comparing the total to a target number or contesting another player's total.

The drawing of a card is referred to as a "flip". A flip may be modified in a few ways. A flip may have a finite bonus or penalty applied to its stats or a specific action. The flip may also be modified by a positive or negative "twist of fate". In both cases one to three more cards will be flipped in addition to the normal card; in the case of a positive twist the player may choose to use any one of the cards, but in the case of a negative twist the player must use the lowest value shown.

Both of these elements are common to dice-based resolution systems. Where Malifaux deviates and really makes the cards work is that every player also has a hand of cards that he or she may substitute for any flip that is not desirable; an action referred to as "cheating fate". The exception being that a player may not cheat fate on a flip that has a negative twist.

The final element of the resolution mechanic is the use of Soulstone. In the setting, Soulstone is a precious arcane resource that enables powerful sorcerers to enhance their mystical abilities even further. In actual play any model with the Use Soulstone ability may spend them like a D20 action point to enhance a positive or neutral flip or accomplish other feats. When enhancing the flip, a Soulstone is used and an additional card is flipped. However, instead of replacing the previous card, this card's face value is added to the total. Only one Soulstone per resolution may be used in this fashion.

Combined, these elements make the resolution of actions in the wargame fast paced and exciting; both highly desirable traits in an RPG. As far as I can tell, the core mechanic should require very little modification for use outside of combat and the wargame's rules seem like they will serve well to manage most combat situations.

Stats

The wargame's stats are adequate to manage combat, including morale and mental attacks. While it will limit nuance somewhat, I do not intend to substantially modify these statistics for two reasons. First, I prefer a higher degree of abstraction. I think it emphasizes imaginative roleplay and makes character generation faster. Second, it enables the players to quickly and easily translate their characters for use in the wargame. While the second is not one of my primary goals, and I expect there to be no simple way to calculate a soulstone cost or effective cache, I think it a desirable goal.

The game defines characters with seven stats:

Wk/Chg

Walk/Charge is a character's movement stat. For normal-sized characters, this defaults to 4/6; measured in inches for the wargame. Each inch works out to approximately three feet and a character may move up to its walk for one action point and charge for two. Charging provides a bonus to damage if the character is able to make a melée attack at the end of its move.

Ht

Height defines a character's size and is mostly important for determining line of sight and cover in the wargame. As this is mostly cosmetic for an RPG it will default to two for adult humans. Player characters may be as small as size one, but seldom larger than two. Characters with a height of three or greater will have an extended melée range and may have enhanced combat abilities.

Wp

Willpower measures a character's ability to resist mental influence and withstand morale checks. For purposes of this RPG it will do about the same thing. There is no default value for this stat, but five is typical.

Ca

Casting is used in the wargame to cast spells and nothing more. For purposes of this RPG, Casting will represent a character's intellect and be used to resolve both mental tasks and social ones. Noncombative Talents will be used to enhance characters' abilities in any specific area, rather than replacing this stat with extra ones. Most characters have a Ca of 4.

Df

Defense is a character's ability to evade melée and ranged attacks. Characters that are better at evading a subclass of attacks represent this through Talents. For purposes of this RPG, Df will represent a character's base agility, which will mostly be used to resolve physical actions. Df is typically 5, but can vary dramatically depending on a character's size and competence.

Wd

Wounds measures a character's capacity to absorb damage. The stat needs no modification for use in this RPG. Wd is highly variable. Six or seven is fairly typical for normal sized humans, with as many as twelve for Master grade characters. I am considering Wd to be a composite value derived from a character's physical durability and the mystical forces fortifying its body. This means that despite their physical frailty characters that are more in tune with the magic of Malifaux are more durable. Talents like Hard to Wound, Hard to Kill, and Regeneration can further modify a character's ability to resist damage.

Cb

Combat is a highly variable stat in the wargame associated with each melée and ranged attack that a character has at its disposal. This is a little problematic for purposes of an RPG. The only indication of what the base value of a character's Cb stat should be is the default Bash attack that any character may use, Cb3. With few exceptions, all characters in the wargame include some sort of alternate melée attack with a much greater Cb value. To address this, I'll make my first significant deviation from the wargame. Instead of defaulting all characters to Cb3, I will use a character's Df as the base value for its Cb, then modify that value with bonuses and penalties from the weapon and Talents. This necessitates the addition of Talents to the game like (Weapon) Training and Bare Knuckle Brawler; which would be consolidated into an attack profile when using the character in the wargame.

Other Problems

A primary problem with adapting the above directly for use in a role playing game is that the game lacks any indication of a character's strength. For the time being, as with the default Cb rating discussed above, I'll default the physicality of the characters with the Df stat and modify it with non combative Talents.

Suits

Tying the core mechanic and the stats to the powers possessed by each character, Malifaux uses the suits of the cards to add another layer of complexity to the resolution system. Many abilities, triggers, and spells require a specific suit or suits to be present in the final total of the flip. This has the effect of reducing the odds of success dramatically without cheating fate. It can be somewhat mitigated by including one or more suits in a character's stats. For example, a character may activate a power that does not require any particular suit will be successful as long as the player can flip a card with a face value high enough to meet the challenge. If the ability requires one suit, the character can fullfil this requirement either by flipping a card with that suit on it or by having the suit included in the appropriate stat. When an ability or spell requires two suits to be present in the total, it essentially requires that one of the suits be attached to the stat.

While not made explicit in the text of the wargame, the mechanics seem to imply that the association of a suit to a stat or type of attack represents a supernatural enhancement or some form of extraordinary training. Similarly from the suits' associations with factions I see the implication of broad areas of influence which may be used as a guide to the creation of new powers.

Rams	Hearts	The Guild	Direct attacks, force, control
Crows	Spades	Ressurectionists	Death & decay
Masks	Diamonds	Neverborn	Illusions, mind control, primal power
Tomes	Clubs	Arcanists	Knowledge, magic, enhancement

Session Notes

I am not the sort to plan and plan until a project becomes stale. While I have begun cataloging Talents, Spells, and weapons from the wargame and assigning point values to them based on rarity and overall game impact, I have taken advantage of a couple willing guinea pigs to start building some characters.

Tentative Random Character Generation v1

I'm not usually a fan of random character generation, but until I've made some decisions regarding the relative value of stats any arbitrary method of determining them is valid.

For fun, I dealt each volunteer a hand of six cards then laid out five cards; one for each stat except Wk/Chg and Ht. At the time I was opting to replace Cb with a physical power stat. I used half the face value of the card, rounded up, as the value of the stat in the order that the cards were dealt. The players then replaced low value cards with ones from their hands. This worked out fairly well and gave the characters an average to high spread of abilities.

The approach is somewhat limited in that the highest value possible is seven, which while fine for other stats is not necessarily enough for Wd, and it doesn't assign any suits. I didn't address the Wd issue, but I had the volunteers choose one suit to assign to one stat and I gave them an additional one for each joker that they were dealt. This potentially gives them up to three suits, though in practice only two of the four characters had two stats with an associated suit and the other two only one. I don't think that's an issue because, in book one, very few characters have more than two stats with a suit associated with them and even some of the masters only have a single stat with a suit; not counting attacks. And I'm not counting attacks because I want to attribute those suit associations with magical weapons or a Talent that would be consolidated into the attack profile in the wargame. For the test characters, we didn't get to that portion.

I handled Talents and Spells for each character by allowing the players to select from the list of common abilities and triggers, then describe what the character could do. Based on the abilities presented in book one I filled in the blanks as far as number of action points something would cost, what suits would be required to successfully activate a power, and the casting challenge, resist and range for spells.

The permissive tone of the setting brought out a pretty fair amount of creativity in my players. Volunteer one created two characters. The first was an undead neverborn based on the concept of a fallen angel. This one didn't work too well due to the wound issue. The player relied heavily on a high defense and ended up crushed by an attack from a Flesh Construct. With a better idea of how the mechanics of the game work, he opted to make something new rather than revise his fallen angel. Character two was a stone themed construct specialist, which performed much better. This also brought up the question of how constructs should be handled. In the brief encounter I ran before we had to cut the session short, the character engaged in some social interrogation as well as combat.

To deal with the construct question, which came up again when discussing character options with another player later, I've ruled that large constructs which cannot be summoned in the game will be handled as Spells with time requirements that are in excess of what is available in the fast-paced environment of the battlefield. In my opinion this takes into account both the printed abilities of Masters in the first book as well as the fluff, which features an ice golem rising from a snowbank at Rasputina's command before a battle with Seamus. These Spells will likely have a significant raw material requirement and possibly a Soulstone requirement as well for the most powerful ones.

Altogether, I highly enjoy this cooperative freeform style of character generation. It really opens up the creative possibilities of the game, but it has two problems. First, there is not even an attempt at the pretense of balance between characters. While I can try to control the direction that the players develop their characters so that they do not dramatically overshadow the other characters, I won't really be able to tell how good the custom abilities are until they're in use. Second, it absolutely requires a highly experienced referee to pull off and therefor isn't suitable for a final product that can be shared with other folks interested in a Malifaux RPG. I'll continue to develop the random stat system along side the point based system though, it's just fun.