Herding Dice

If you are going out to buy the latest edition of the Engine magazine #3 you will find articles about a small experiment in the AGE families of systems. This new one is called SAGE and stands for "simple adventure game engine". The fastest way to get to the parts and existing AGE enthusiast is to flip to the last article which is a conversion guide between AGE and SAGE. Here are some of the main conversions you might be interested and some of the critiques I have for the developers choices. Bonds Instead of Relationships, Class Theme, and Specializations The new element in SAGE "bonds". It uses the same mechanics as seen in FAGE 2e Modern AGE with ranks and wordy themes. I think the developers liked that it represented a small boost of resources that can be spent to improve outcome. What bonds are in SAGE do are basically an additional pool of fortune points. Each bond has a rank and number. You can spend a bond point to create a fortune point to be added back to yo...

Armor plays a large part in the Adventure Game Engine in the pacing problems. Not only are there large health pools and large chances to miss with defense but there can be hefty armor values to chew through as well. Looking at existing published adversaries armor the median armor is 3 which blocks the average 1d6 attack. Here are the basic number equivalencies useful for armor: 1 AR prevents 1 HP of damage during an attack action 2 HP is healed or damaged per 1TN of action, so 2 AR also equals 1 TN 1 TN is equal to 1 SP Armor is essentially a counter to a stat increase for the attacker. The value is more difficult to calculate with rolled damage with it's average value versus a die roll being slightly less than its paper value. This is because with high enough armor much of a die roll is too small to be fully utilized. As such it's not as helpful to balance against the roll portion and instead balance against the ability score progression. The armor progression is where we will...

Advanced tests are not advanced enough. The best case is that there are a few rules of thumb in the rule book but they do not take into account a number of critical factors. First factor is the absence of "difficulty" related to the target number and only relying on threshold to convey loose adjective of difficulty. "Average" and "Formidable" are not sufficient and instead target numbers and number or rolls or rounds needs to be established. Second factor is the suggestion that for each roll in an advanced test that you can design about 3 degrees of success. This is inaccurate as explained in a previous blog post - adventure-game-engine-stunt-die-and-advanced-tests . Due to the correlation between overall success and the stunt die you get smaller average successes with easy tests and larger average successes with hard tests. This is offset a bit as the hard tests fail more often. However the rules prescribe the number 3 regardless of target number. A TN 9 ...

In  start-of-new-action-model-for-age-in.html  we have TN = 6 + Value/2 as method for balancing a target number and the value (or MP) of a spell or action. How can we use that in redesigning advanced tests? An advanced test in AGE is when the results of more than one roll added together in a sequence. These are used when a test maybe taken over a period of time. Something like scaling a mountain may be implemented as several tests rather than just one but harder test. The current rules use the stunt die as the value you are adding together. A single 1d6 has a value of 3.5, but is that more like damage or more like increment TN? I think it better fits the TN description. Additionally if you think about the the lower bound of TN 6, adding the stunt die basically gets you to the standard TN 10 action anyway. Let's use the definition that for an advanced test you are adding the stunt die and getting sum of those particular TNs. That leave a 2d6 base die plus 1d6 stunt die. Thinkin...

 The following are equivalent and can be used to convert between each other. 1 MP (mana point) 2 SP (stunt point) 2 TN (target number) (Note: this is used incrementally and is not the base) 4 HP (health point) 1 minor action 0.5 major action 10 yards (measure of distance) All of those equivalencies can be worked out using basic action and stunts. 1 MP = 2 SP, from Skillful Casting stunt 2 SP = 2 TN, from Powerful Casting stunt 2 SP = 4 HP, from Healing Power stunt 0.5 major action = 2 TN, from Defend major action 1 minor action = 0.5 major action, comparing move versus run 1 minor action = 10 yards, using move with zero stats or ancestry is 10 1 major action = TN 10 at 2 MP using Healing Touch (2MP) which is 2d6 1 major action = 4SP, from Healing Touch being average 7HP which divided by two and rounded up for SP cost is 3.5 => 4SP 1 minor action = 2SP, from 1 minor action = 0.5 major action The minor action here is a little stronger than many of the minors actions in the rules. ...

 I have taken a data approach to reverse engineering the AGE action model in two articles so far: https://herdingdice.blogspot.com/2023/07/decoding-mp-from-spell-descriptions.html https://herdingdice.blogspot.com/2023/07/decoding-age-action-economy.html I learned some valuable lessons but afterwards I wasn't happy with the formulas fundamentally.  Why is the TN base a 9? Why use an MP to TN ratio of 3.5 to 2, or 1.75 to 1? TLDR; Summary 2HP = 1SP added to the equivalency formulas. This will keep the Mighty Blow stunt at a cost of 2SP, but will reduce Lethal Blow stunt to 4SP and allow a new stunt, let's call it Crushing Blow, at a cost of 6SP Using TN 10/2MP/2d6 basic spell we can count backwards to find a new base TN for a spell. This turns out to be TN 6 since you take away 4 TN = 4SP = 2MP worth of value The Reasoning  My solution ended up questioning the usefulness of MP as a resource. I have been looking into Fortune in Fantasy AGE and it as a resource matches 1 to 1...

We now have a number of clues to start understanding the AGE system and go beyond "major" and "minor" actions. In the current rules it is not clear how much value these provide as you could go from "Charge" which adds a +1 on a potential 3d6 attack to "Heal" which is baseline 1d6 value. Clues MP to SP to 1d6 Relationship As discovered in https://herdingdice.blogspot.com/2023/07/decoding-mp-from-spell-descriptions.html we can safely say that 1MP equals 1d6 value as well as 2SP equals 1MP. The spells descriptions and basic combat/spell stunts lead us to that conclusion. Given those measurements a "Melee Attack" major action can range from all the different melee weapons so from 1d6-1 to 3d6. This would be equivalent to about 1 to 3 MP or 2 to 6 SP. Move/Run In the blog post we also determined that 1MP equals 10 yards of movement. This matches the move action and thus we can say a minor action would be equal to 1MP or 2SP. Looking at r...

I took another try at figuring a formula for spells in Fantasy AGE with the release of the second edition. Recently I came to a new idea (to me) that there might be a linear relationship between TN and MP and not TN times MP equals Value. This allowed me to start from the beginning again with this analysis as the former model requires more advanced math and never scaled the way leveling does. Calculating TN from MP The above chart plots all 161 spells in the Fantasy AGE 2nd edition rule book. What is new to me is that I used to plot this with reversed axes and the line of best fit never interpreted favorably. If we flip the axes so MP is the input variable and TN is the output, it works much better for me. So with some round numbers I think a good way to summarize a suggested AGE TN is the following: Target Number = 0.5 * MP + 9 The factor of 0.5 is supported by the stunt point cost of "Skillful Casting" which is 2 points per MP reduction, as well as the 1 stunt point cost pe...

Although related to stunt points, the stunt die is the base of that system. Stunt points could be seen as stunt die doubles, which implies there could be stunt die triple perhaps theoretically. We will stick to stunt die and how it works with advanced tests. Stunt Die Fundamentals Here is the a graph of average stunt die result as compared to different TN values. The stunt die has the counter-intuitive pattern of higher results being more likely with success which is a result of that higher number contributing more significantly to the success itself  As the TN increases the overall average goes down, but the stunt die result on a success goes up. That's the un-intuitive part. Some key data from those curves are the TN 11 values. TN 11 Overall Average - 2.15 TN 11 Success Average - 4.31 With those values we can start looking at pacing for advanced tests which take the sum of stunt die results over a number of rolls. Advanced Tests These type of tests represent longer tests over tim...

Use this chart to convert between Dungeon and Dragons ability modifiers and AGE ability scores. Since each system uses different dice and those dice affect tests we need to compare then with their change to succeed. You can see that the 50% lines up with both systems with TN11 which is why I centered the table that way. Both raw D20 and 3d6 rolls are included as that is the base comparison. Then we can calculated the modifiers for each: DnD is "=ROUNDDOWN(F5/2,0)-5" AGE is ""=G5-11" The mapping between the two systems isn't a one to one relationship because DnD has extra rows as compared to AGE. We need to look up both directions matching against the percentage to get the best results going both ways. You can see it does matter that DnD does a divide by two as there are several rolls that match better with the lower versus the higher. The only massaging needed is to round the AGE% to the nearest multiple of 5 percent. This is done since 95.4% and 4.6% are c...

The hallmark of an Adventure Game Engine system is the stunt die. AGE uses three six-sided dice where one is different and called the stunt die. It's most famous use is as a "critical roll" tool where if doubles are rolled the action gets points to spend that turn on some extra bonuses (like more damage, or a utility action). Most interesting about the stunt points are how it's numbers are a little un-intuitive. Stunt Points If you roll doubles and the ability test is a success, you will generate stunt points for that turn and be able to spend them to further augment that action. Here are some important facts about generating stunt points" A TN 11 ability test on average will general 1.004 stunt points (over successes and fails) assuming no bonuses. A higher outcome on the ability test usually mean lower than average number of stunt points. This is because the two non-stunt die are likely a better result which lets the stunt die have more options. If you. Low suc...

At the moment in Fantasy AGE the cost of improving ability scores and focuses is very simple and does not factor in the relationship in the AGE ability tests. Ability advancements affect all relevant focuses and focus only affect themselves. It would be nice if the was a cost formula took that into consideration. Naive option A first option is to value an ability advancement compared to all the focuses in under that ability. However the cost for various abilities would be different. A willpower advancement would only cost 4 (since there are 4 focuses) and intelligence advancements would cost 19 or more (depending on arcana in the setting) since there are so many under that category. Using this method does seem absurd give that discrepancy. Pay for Everything  A second option is that you only consider the focuses that the character knows. Let's start of simply with saying a focus is the base statistic since it's specific. Those increases will cost one advancement. Let's expl...

Determining starting ability scores is step two of the Fantasy AGE character creation process. The core rules list a few options and I have a couple of suggestions myself. Class Selection While selecting your character's class is technically the fifth step you should pick it as part of the step one character concept. You don't need to make any decisions with in the class but you may need to be aware of the classes primary and secondary abilities in order to make informed decisions when determining starting ability scores. Rolling Ability Scores In first edition this was suggested method but offers the least amount of control over your characters ability scores. Go through the list of ability scores alphabetically and assign the result of a 3d6 roll from the starting ability table. Arranging Ability Scores This method still requires rolling dice but you assign which result is matched to an ability. This way you can at least put the highest scores on your primary abilities for yo...

The second edition of Fantasy AGE is now available! I got the pdf as I was a play tester and I was granted access to a preview pdf two weeks before release. I have high expectations with this edition as a chance to revisit old mechanics and add improvements from the other books. In this post I will go through at a very high level pointing out what is new or different to the first edition in each of the book's chapters. https://greenroninstore.com/collections/frontpage/products/fantasy-age-core-rulebook-pdf I hope you enjoy this review and let me know if you have any thoughts on Fantasy AGE subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/FantasyAGE Chapter 0 - Introduction Very similar in topics Summary of change from first to second edition Removed mention of Titansgrave (RIP) Chapter 1 - Character Creation Determining Abilities - a few differences in what is recommended 2nd edition recommends starting with 13 advancements and allocating them as you wish to your ability scores as fits your char...

I got into TTRPGs with the 2015 release of Fantasy AGE TTRPG and I have been writing small blog posts every since. The second edition of Fantasy AGE comes almost eight years after the first edition (2015 - 2023). That summer was my first foray into this style of TTRPG. First with the Youtube broadcast of Titansgrave that coincided with the first year of Critical Role. I found Fantasy AGE much more approachable than Dungeon of Dragons, maybe because it was new and only had one resource. One aspect for sure is the stunt system which is much more nuanced than a nat 20. Needless to say I have stayed around for many extra books and other AGE systems. I have high expectations with this edition as a chance to revisit old mechanics and add improvements from the other books. And so with a second edition rule book I decided on moving my writing to a new platform. My old content can be found on Tumblr ( https://www.tumblr.com/herdingdice ) and I will be re-writing some of the good content from th...