Fueled by Blood! Going Diceless and Embracing Narrative Play

Earlier this week I touched on some major changes to Fueled by Blood!, and throughout this week I've made and settled upon more. While this post is not a changelog, it is going to be dedicated to explaining the reasoning behind and the implications of the more major changes to this game. 

If you're unfamiliar, Fueled by Blood! is a character action TTRPG about cybernetic super soldiers who fight eldritch monstrosities---you can think of it as Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance + Doom (2016) + Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. It's about combos and knowledge checks, over the top abilities, and larger than life characters.

Before I delve into this post, here are the rules I'll be referencing, and here is the Discord server for FbB!. The discord is small, but I'm on at some point every day. If you ever have questions, want to join playtests, or want to see the design process live, you can join me over there.

GOING DICELESS AND LOSING THE CRM

Possibly the smallest change with the largest impact has been going diceless. From the very beginning, one of Fueled by Blood!'s design strategies has been to make "Player skill equal Striker power:" the goal is to reward skill more than luck, and to make the player's growing skill in the game (possibly) their primary means of vertical progression.

With those statements in mind, going diceless makes sense. It's something I had considered before but never committed to because I was a.) afraid that going diceless would be a negative for my target audience due to a lack of familiarity, and b.) worried that designing a diceless game would be significantly harder than designing one that heavily utilizes dice.

Watching Gila RPGs design Lumen 2.0 showed me that both of my worries were unfounded, though the second worry shouldn't be waved away so quickly. While I don't think that designing for diceless play is necessarily more difficult, it does come with difficulties and implications. The two biggest so far are that failure doesn't come from chance so it must come from somewhere else, and that variety has to be introduced somewhere new because unpredictable dice results are no longer supplying it.

Typically, I've seen designers answer the above problems by introducing limited resources that you spend to take actions. Failure comes from mismanagement, while variety comes from the effects of the resources or the ability to spend other, more limited resources to effect what ever kind of resolution system is being used.

My answer has been to instead lean harder into the existing game elements, so defending yourself is harder and monsters are more dangerous, and to remove the core resolution system. 

I'll delve more into the latter in a moment, but the reasoning was that introducing possibly 3 new resources the way Gila RPGs does would be too many for Fueled by Blood!, and it wouldn't fit given that the game isn't about resource management---it revolves around learning about and then conquering enemies and problems as they come your way. So, I decided to lean into what it's about and make the enemies hurt more, ask you to learn more about them, and to alter your tools slightly so that you're rewarded more for taking risks and punished harder for not paying attention. 

You weren't learning anything when using the previous core resolution system, and while I tried to implement a bit of skill based play into by having you pick between buffs or more successes, it just seemed unnecessary. Choosing the right buff for the situation was fun, but it didn't need to be tied to that. Other changes meant the CRM couldn't be used outside of combat and challenges. It had no purpose, so it's been cut.

EMBRACING NARRATIVE PLAY

Now the game doesn't use dice, it has no CRM, and the players aren't managing resources to determine the success of individual actions. That begs the question "what does play look like outside of combat then?" Well, it's really fucking different now. 

Previously, any actions would have been handled either by the CRM (for small action chains like climbing a cliff) or by the Challenges system (for group activities like tracking a Starspawn). After 3 tests now, however, I've found out that those systems felt like bad fits. The theming of each individual check and Challenge needed to be just right for them to not break immersion and destroy a couple of design strategies for both the Strikers and the Director, so I've gotten rid of them and instead embraced the idea of more freeform play.

Players instead enter exploration mode, where Strikers can do anything that it seems they should reasonably be capable of doing. They play with the world, following Points of Interest (codified nodes from The Alexandrian's node based adventure design), and pick up collectibles by using the narrative permissions of their Cyber Systems, which grant small chunks of EXP. When something dangerous or risky occurs, a cutscene or combat is called for. 

Cutscenes have effectively taken up the mechanical space that Challenges previously held, but are vastly more streamlined. A set of threats and stakes are given, then each Striker has 1 action to try to solve them and set up narrative or mechanical edges for themselves with. Cyber System narrative permissions grant edges at no cost here. Any unsolved problems have consequences that carry over into the narrative or into the next combat.

These changes do come with a couple of possible issues, though. The big one is that they rely on the group agreeing to what a Striker can do. While I can solve this problem with a couple of pages on what a Striker is capable of in exploration mode's complete chapter, it's still going to cause hiccups during play. The second, slightly smaller, one is that it removes a system which did reward player skill in the game. That, unfortunately, is a cost that's going to have to be paid to keep the game moving quicker and more easily---though it is worth noting that it didn't remove player skill entirely from the moments these systems now cover.

Where the CRM and Challenge systems reward player skill in regards to the game's rules, exploration mode and cutscenes favor a more OSR style of skill, where treating the game world like a real world and cleverly using your abilities within it is rewarded.

REFOCUSING ON STRATEGIES

In the process of making the above changes, determining how much I wanted skill to be the game's focus and what kinds of skill I wanted to reward, I went back to Fueled by Blood!'s design strategies a few times to really nail down what the game needs. Lot's of small changes have stemmed from that and been built up into a couple of overhauls beyond what I've listed above. 

• I've changed weapons to be more in line with Doom's so that each weapon has a unique effect that it applies to attacks made with it, but also gains a unique Weapon Action (like a secondary fire) later. 
• Bosses have been altered to act more like MGR:R and Sekiro bosses, so they're like puzzles you have to piece together before they suddenly shift and the battle changes. 
• Minions are more like Doom's, each presenting a unique problem solved with incredible violence. 
• Combats have take notes from Lancer and I've built in objectives beyond just killing.
• I've set 2 important design rules: that abilities cannot make knowledge checks easier, and that hostiles cannot be made less cool to fight.

This collection of simple changes will, I think, have an impact greater than the sum of its parts. The chief reasoning behind them was that the Strikers mostly felt right, but little pieces of them felt off---there was too much vertical progression in some of their tools, and they were too unreliable---and hostiles were just too easy to make boring as hell. Though they do change combat overall to be far more tactical, I think clever ability designs will keep the game highly interactive and focused on off-turn actions, keeping that character action feel.

While the game has changed pretty dramatically, and will likely continue to do so in the future, I think that these changes have brought the game closer to fulfilling its design strategies.