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  • Skills: Evaluation

    I group XWN skills into three general tiers. Skill value changes depending on the game. For example, Fix is generally a very broad, useful skill in Stars, but its equivalent Craft from Worlds is less necessary. Something like Heal might seem useful, but is immediately outclassed if anyone has any magical healing, except in Stars where you need it to apply various medicines. Settings, playstyles, GM tendencies, and a host of other factors, can all make these skills change importance.

    Tier 1: Profession Skills

    Administer, Know, Perform, Pray, Trade, Work

    These skills tend to be among the rarest used in actual play. While they are important for a character’s day-to-day life, as they usually represent some sort of job, they’re not often exciting for adventuring. Some classes might use these skills for Effort, and they might feel important for a character’s background, but they tend to be rather low value in general.

    Tier 2: Concept Skills

    Connect, Craft, Exert, Lead, Heal, Pilot, Sneak, Survive, Talk, Wrangle

    The majority of skills live here. Depending on a lot of different things, they may move up or down a category, but in general, these are skills that entire character concepts can be based on. If a player is investing a lot in one of these skills, they should probably have some challenges that use them. Likewise, it can be extremely frustrating for a group if one of these skills is absolutely needed but no one bothered to invest in it.

    Tier 3: Essential Skills

    Blast, Melee, Notice, Shoot

    While you don’t need every combat skill, you likely need at least a minor investment in a combat skill. While technically possible to get by with Swarm Attacks and quirky behavior, most players will want to be able to hit things. And Notice is just generally useful. It is maybe the only skill useful in every classic “pillar” of gameplay (combat, exploration, social). Which asks the question if it is too useful, and should be split up somehow. But I’m trying to keep scope creep out of this project, and rebalancing the entire XWN core is outside what I’m aiming for.

    Next, I’ll try to explain Backgrounds, and why I’m not a huge fan of them as presented.

  • Skills: New Options

    In XWN games, the skill list is one of the most important parts. It sets the vibes for the entire game. With only about 25-30 base skills available, and characters having limited skill points to spend, what those skills are and what they cover matter a lot.

    When debating what skills to have in a Western Without Numbers game, there were a few things I wanted to do for sure. The most important was a skill for gun, explosives, and general gunpowder shenanigans. Most XWN games have the Shoot skill, which covers everything from guns to bows to cannons to Death Star lasers. This mostly works in those games because the exceptions to the norm are not very common.

    If you’re playing fantasy, most of your Shoot weapons are bows, crossbows, and the like. On the rare chance you find some sort of sci-fi laser gun, it’s not worth having a skill solely for that. Likewise in a science fiction game, most Shoot will be done with guns, and you just kind of handwave it if you want to shoot a bow and arrow for some reason.

    As originally designed, my Frontier game was meant to be able to run games in the 18th and 19th centuries. So while guns were on the rise and bows were on the way out, there was more mix than usual. Then when we get to later in the 1800’s and we have cannons and dynamite and things of that nature, the Shoot skill just seems to cover too much for my liking.

    Enter the Blast skill. Blast covers all gunpowder-related activities. Both Blast and Shoot can be used for firing guns, but Blast is exclusive for explosives and artillery. This allows a lot of character concepts to be able to use guns, a core component in a Western, while not allowing someone to be equally as skilled with a bow as they are with a gatling gun.

    The other new skill is Create. Weird Science is a common fantasy western trope, but I’ve gone back and forth on how to include it. When settling on running a Deadlands campaign, it felt necessary for it to be there as a main option, though nothing except the Mad Scientist Edge gives it for free. But still, if a character wants to be good at using “New Science” devices, the skill is there to invest in.

    Finally, the last major skill change is folding Punch into the Melee skill. Blast creates another combat skill, and Punch has always felt a little redundant anyways. There are reasonable concerns about combining the skills, mostly dealing with grappling, but in this game about guns and magic, I don’t think it will come up enough to have a skill tax.

    Next, I’ll try to explain my overly convoluted way to evaluate how useful skills are.

  • Introduction: Setting and System

    The greatest question I always have as a gamemaster is “What’s next?” There are so many systems I want to run, so many settings I want to play in, and so much of my own stuff I want to try. Narrowing the options down, while keeping in mind the preferences for my group of players, is always a hard task.

    But it’s one that must be done. So when our Stars Without Number space adventure came to its end, polls were conducted and questions were asked, and we narrowed it down to alt-history fantasy western, or as it’s more usually known, the “Weird West.” And while I would be happy to run most any game, I’d be lying if I said this sort of thing wasn’t right up my alley.

    There are more options to this rather limited genre than you might think. Several worthy weird west games were released over the past few years alone. But for most of us in the TTRPG space, I think one name springs immediately to mind.

    Deadlands

    First published in 1996, Deadlands was emblematic of its time. Its rules are overly complicated, it deals heavily in meta-plots, it has some uncomfortable stereotypes. It’s also completely awesome. What other game out there is teaming card-playing mages with steampunk scientists, fire and brimstone preachers with agents in black dusters, all to fight some of the greatest Evils imagined?

    Deadlands was one of the first RPG’s I really got into when I started branching out from D&D. It’s been something I’ve wanted to run for a long time. But it was going to need some tweaks. The original setting has some unfortunate parts that have not aged well. Some Lost Cause narratives, some casually racist stereotypes, these things just don’t fly with me or my players. The newest edition eliminates some of these, but I admit I prefer the overall tone of the original. Since each new edition advances the timeline by several years, the vibes of the first and second edition, when the magic and tech is still fairly new, just feel better to me. So my goal has been to combine the best of both, along with my own concepts.

    One of the convenient things I don’t want to mess with is, because there’s 30 year’s worth of material, nearly everywhere has something written about it. This provides a nice base that I can then change around at my leisure. But if a player asks “What’s going on in Wichita,” I at least have a general idea.

    The next question was, how was I going to run it?

    X Without Number

    The Without Number games, by Kevin Crawford, have become my go to TTRPG. They hit the perfect middle ground of old-school sensibilities and modern design. They’re easy to GM for but provide players enough complexity to stay engaged (without being overwhelming). Ever since I read and then ran Worlds Without Number, I’ve been a big fan.

    There are two other things going for XWN that makes it the system to pick. First, I had already done a “Frontiers Without Number” western hack, or at least most of one. Hacking/adapting games is something I often do for fun. It’s enjoyable to find the things that fit, the things that need to be changed, and the things that need to be discarded entirely.

    Secondly, Ashes Without Number was released, and its default setting is the Albuquerque Death Zone, a Fallout New Vegas-inspired post-apocalyptic wasteland. And while it doesn’t entirely fit what I’m going for, the proof of concept that this could work is there.

    So that’s where I’m at. I started this, I guess you can call it a “developer’s blog,” in order to share bits and pieces of this project as I work on it. Quite a bit is done already, so asking people to read through 60 plus pages or a dozen Google documents for feedback is a bit much. I’ll start sharing things here instead. The game starts sometime next year (depending on how the holidays go), so I got about a month to get things to a playable state.